Vote Tally Count Senate NSA Data Spying restrictions voted down

Now isn’t this an upside down world? Left is Right, and Right is Left. Did I think I would be on the side of Progressives? Vote tally at end of post. Earlier post: Former NSA analyst tells Germany that ‘NSA has totalitarian mentality’ Any questions?  Two posts today. Here we go

WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans on Tuesday blocked a sweeping overhaul of the once-secret National Security Agency program that collects records of Americans’ phone calls in bulk.

Democrats and a handful of Republicans who supported the measure failed to secure the 60 votes they needed to take up the legislation. The vote was 58 to 42 for consideration.

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who drafted the bill, blamed what he said was fear-mongering by the bill’s opponents for its defeat. “Fomenting fear stifles serious debate and constructive solutions,” he said. “This nation deserves more than that.”

Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, worked hard to defeat the bill, which had the support of the Obama administration and a coalition of technology companies including Apple, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

The new Congress will also be working against a hard deadline because the legal authority for the data collection will expire next year.

Under the bill, which grew out of the disclosures in June 2013 by Edward J. Snowden, the former intelligence contractor, the N.S.A. would have gotten out of the business of collecting Americans’ phone records.

More over at the NY Times

Here are the individual votes:

For individual votes, click on “Blue Vote Icons” below.

U.S. Senate Roll Call Votes 113^th Congress – 2^nd Session

as compiled through Senate LIS by the Senate Bill Clerk under the direction of the Secretary of the Senate

Vote Summary

Question: On the Cloture Motion (Motion to Invoke Cloture on the Motion to Proceed to S. 2685 )
Vote Number:	282	Vote Date:	November 18, 2014, 07:26 PM
Required For Majority:	3/5	Vote Result:	Cloture Motion Rejected
Measure Number:	S. 2685 (USA FREEDOM Act of 2014 )
Measure Title:	A bill to reform the authorities of the Federal Government to require the production of certain business records, conduct electronic surveillance, use pen registers and trap and trace devices, and use other forms of information gathering for foreign intelligence, counterterrorism, and criminal purposes, and for other purposes.

Vote Counts:	YEAs	58
	NAYs	42

Vote Summary

By Senator Name

By Vote Position

By Home State

Here the filmmaker Laura Poitras profiles William Binney, a 32-year veteran of the National Security Agency who helped design a top-secret program he says is broadly collecting Americans’ personal data.

Keystone Pipeline – We have just been Grubbered

Why they are making the pipeline issue about jobs I have no idea.  It should be framed around the best ways to improve safety.  The oil is going to get there one way or the other. The environmental side is once again misguided. The rail vs pipeline impact weighs to using the pipeline. Add to this the impact on the lack of Rail capacity that is impacting farmers, timber and other commodities and once more we are being “Grubered”. Congrats go out to the Rockefellers, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet as well, who stand to make Millions if not more by supporting Rail as opposed to the pipeline.

Why Do These Train Cars Carrying Oil Keep Blowing Up?

Early on the morning of July 6, 2013, a runaway freight train derailed in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, setting off a series of massive explosions and inundating the town in flaming oil. The inferno destroyed the downtown area; 47 people died.

The 72-car train had been carrying nearly 2 million gallons of crude oil from North Dakota’s Bakken fields. While the recent surge in domestic oil production has raised concerns about fracking, less attention has been paid to the billions of gallons of petroleum crisscrossing the country in “virtual pipelines” running through neighbor­hoods and alongside waterways.
Chicago tonight

H/T: Mother Jones

The vote has election year resonance in the Louisiana Senate race, but for our purposes the pertinent question is: if the pipeline is built, what effect would it have on rail congestion in the northern Plains and Midwest?

Much of that congestion now is due to railroads shipping Bakken crude to terminals on the West Coast and East Coast.

He said, “Once Keystone is built, that will go in pipeline instead of having to run 14 100-car unit trains a day. So you can see it will help reduce congestion on the rails. … We need it so we can move other goods.”

Another Keystone XL supporter, Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., said in a Senate speech last week, “We have a rail crisis. We have been battling now for a long time with the limited capacity in rail and much of the oil moving out is going on rail. That makes it harder for us to get our agricultural commodities to the marketplace….”

He said the building of the Keystone XL would allow about 100,000 barrels a day of Bakken crude to move by pipeline “and therefore not on the rail car. That saves about a unit train a day, which is significant.”
Blogs Roll Call

Side note on Canadian National Railroad (CN) – Bill Gates is their biggest investor.

Warren Buffett’s Burlington Northern Santa Fe LLC is among U.S. and Canadian railroads that stand to benefit from the Obama administration’s decision to reject TransCanada Corp. (TRP)’s Keystone XL oil pipeline permit.
With modest expansion, railroads can handle all new oil produced in western Canada through 2030, according to an analysis of the Keystone proposal by the U.S. State Department. (Chuckle time)!

“Whatever people bring to us, we’re ready to haul,” Krista York-Wooley, a spokeswoman for Burlington Northern, a unit of Buffett’s Omaha, Nebraska-basedBerkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK/A), said in an interview. If Keystone XL “doesn’t happen, we’re here to haul.” From: Bloomberg

The keystone pipeline is actually just one of several oil sands pipelines targeted by the Rockefeller Brother’s Fund. Ezra Levant calls it industrial sabotage and, based on their own Power Point, that certainly seems an apt description. H/T: Heritage  From Rockefeller Fund sabotages Keystone pipeline approval. The Rockefeller Brother’s Fund in a coordinated, 4-year, $28 million dollar campaign was on the march to defeat it.

US billionaire Warren Buffett has appeared singing and playing the ukulele on Chinese state television. The billionaire popped up on CCTV and wished the people of China “a happy new year.” The Lunar New Year of the Dragon begins at midnight on Sunday. “Your country has accomplished amazing things, and the best is yet to come,” Buffett told the broadcaster. The investor is well respected in China for his financial success