Both houses of the U.S. Congress passed on Thursday a series of sanctions against Iran, aimed at forcing Tehran to abandon its nuclear ambitions, which is now awaiting the signature of President Barack Obama to take effect.

The Senate by 99 votes to none against, gave the green light Thursday to the first bill negotiated between the two chambers. The House of Representatives then adopted the text by 408 votes against eight.

This new set of constraints, particularly for the energy sector in Iran, should complement the text adopted at the UN two weeks ago and that set by the European Union.

But the choice of Europeans and Americans to go further than the UN has been criticized by Moscow, while Russian President Dmitry Medvedev was on a full visit to Washington on Thursday .

“Our goal is to target Iran where it hurts most,” said the Majority Leader Harry Reid, Democrat of the Senate, shortly before the vote.

Republican Senator John McCain said that the text should “force companies in the world to make a choice: do you work with Iran, or do you work with the United States?”. “The two are not compatible,” he insisted.

Although with the general approbation on this text, several elected officials have expressed concern over the ability of the president to waive sanctions. “This text is in fact a half measure, half a bill, as 50% depends on whom? From the desire of President Obama to implement the sanctions quickly,” said Republican Representative Scott Garrett.

The text strengthens a law already in force, adding a range of new economic sanctions to try to persuade Iran to abandon its nuclear program.

Rep. Joe Wilson, who has certainly taken a massive amount of heat from Congress and the left, was the victim of a time wasting official House Resolution that rebuked his actions for calling President Obama a liar last week in a Presidential address to a joint session of Congress. For the record, Rep. Wilson called and expressed sincere apology right after the incident, with Pres. Obama forgiving his actions.

Now, in the middle of perhaps one of the most important and controversial times in political history (health care reform), the same Congress that can’t agree on ANYTHING, takes taxpayer time out of their day to draft and pass a formal resolution admonishing Rep. Wilson for his remark. The resolution was passed overwhelmingly by House Democrats, however, there were 7 Republican reps that also voted yes on the resolution.

Here are the Benedict Arnolds listed below (including one from Wilson’s home state of South Carolina!):

Joseph Cao (La.)
Jo Ann Emerson (Mo.)
Jeff Flake (Ariz.)
Bob Inglis (S.C.)
Walter Jones (N.C.)
Tom Petri (Wis.)
Dana Rohrabacher (Calif.)

Why they voted against their own team in a time like this, when republicans/conservatives really need to pull together to prevent government takeover of everything, is beyond us. Perhaps with the flurry of emails they’ll receive (yes, their names are linked to their contact page, so email them!), they’ll release statements if they want any chance of being re-elected next time.

Politico posted an updated version of what House Rules Committee Chairwoman Louise Slaughter (D-NY) sent out after the formal admonishing of Rep. Joe Wilson. Go here to see it.

Another interesting tidbit is that Rep. Barney Frank voted “present” (which means he didn’t vote yes or no) for the resolution because “I think it’s bad precedent to put us in charge of deciding whether people act like jerks,” Frank said. “I don’t have time to monitor everyone’s civility.”

Well said, Mr. Frank. (never thought I would ever say that)

Bottom Line

Rep. Joe Wilson isn’t a criminal, and while he should obey the rules like everyone else in the chamber, it was obviously a heated, passionate expression of his disgust with the current health care reform being pitched by the POTUS, and he made all the right PR moves by apologizing after the event. For the House to waste EVEN MORE of taxpayer money to pass a formal resolution like this, well, it’s embarrassing and wasteful to say the least. On the other hand, it show how scared they are, and with the ACORN investigations and everything else, liberals have ABSOLUTELY nothing to pick on except this.

Be sure to email or contact the Republican Reps. listed above (again, their names are linked to their contact page) and ask them why the voted against one of their own. What reason could they possibly have? Even if they’re not your district, you should contact at least one of them anyway…the more pressure applied, the more we learn.

To support Joe Wilson, here is his website.

After the highly popular Rep. from South Carolina, Joe Wilson, voiced his opinion to the POTUS on Wednesday night, he’s been a victim of relentless social media attack (mostly found on social networking and micro-blogging sites like Facebook and Twitter), but still managed to raise over $1 million dollars from his supporters mainly due to having the testicular fortitude to stand up for what he believes in.

Apparently, publicly bashing him wasn’t enough for his critics. Joe Wilson’s people have confirmed that his website (JoeWilsonForCongress.com) has been the victim of a DD0S style of attack – essentially where hackers utilize a network of phantom computers to continually flood Wilson’s campaign website with data requests, eventually overloading the site and temporarily shutting it down.

The story broke on FoxNews.com, and quoted one of their sources as saying:

“These tactics create such a huge surge,” said a Wilson campaign source. “We’ve had to fight this off in hand-to-hand combat, blocking this malicious traffic.”

This shouldn’t come as a big surprise, though. With the amount of people that despise Wilson’s actions during the joint session of Congress Wednesday, there were bound to be a few people that thought they could hinder his fund-raising efforts by attacking his site. At the time of this writing, the website seemed to be fully operational.

Mashable reports that Piryx, a non-partisan political fund-raising online company, wrote via email:

Yesterday (Friday) around 3:12pm CST we noticed the bandwidth spike on the downstream connections to Piryx.com server collocation facility. Our bandwidth and packet rate threshold monitors went off and we saw both traditional DOS bandwidth based attacks as well as very high packet rate, low bandwidth ICMP floods all destined for our IP address.

…At this point we have spent 40+ man hours, with 10 external techs fully monopolized in researching and mitigating this attack.

To give a sense of scale, the attacks were sending us 500+ Mbps of traffic, which would run about $147,500 per month in bandwidth overages.

The source and originator of the illegal attacks is not yet known. Updates will be posted as more is discovered.

Not long after the “You Lie!” remark during President Obama’s speech on health care reform in front of a joint session of Congress, as well as living rooms across the nation, Joe Wilson has sustained a massive liberal political attack for his actions.

It should be noted that Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina immediately apologized to the President, and was forgiven. Surely, anyone with common sense could understand that during times of intense emotion (especially when you’re truly passionate about a subject) and with such a wild-frenzy of a topic, a slip-up like his isn’t really isn’t a big deal, and again, was already forgiven by the President.

Here’s the deal, though. Conservatives were riding high for days and rubbing the Van Jones resignation in liberal faces for days following his (Van Jones) resignation. Liberals didn’t like that one bit,  and had a hard time defending against it. When Rep. Wilson made his minor mistake the other night, the libs jumped all over the chance to return the favor (even though it’s not remotely similar). Wilson has been under social attack since the incident, and it doesn’t appear that it’s letting up anytime soon. The worst part is – his political hometown opponent is raising tons of cash, primarily out of spite from the whacky left.

He needs your help!

To support Rep. Joe Wilson in his fight against health care reform, visit his page here. You’ll see a nice HD video of him making his case against health care reform, and asking for your help. Without guys like Joe Wilson leading the charge against the lies that the left want you to believe, you can bet that anti-health care reform will be lost in quick fashion. Afterall, the Democratic Congress already has a leg-up on the competition.

You can Twitter Joe Wilson here, and please use the hashtag #standwithjoe to spread the message.

If you’re not able to access his site, you can watch the video below:

Thinking that they would sneak it through without anyone noticing, back in July, the left-wing members of Congress thought they had an easy sell with their various version of the proposed health care reform bill.

The public went nuts, and rightfully so.

Then came July 31st, and it was time for recess.

Now today, September 8th, after literally thousands of town-hall meetings, extreme amounts of press coverage, and internal conflict, Congress will reconvene and jump into the pilot’s seat once again in an effort to get the proverbial ball rolling before Obama steps up to the plate Wednesday night, hoping to hit a grand slam with America.

Here’s a status update of what’s currently going on inside Congress:

1. Republicans are almost unanimously against pretty much anything the left drafts up that has any remote hint of a public option.

2. Pelosi and Hoyer are having a hard time deciding which caucus bloc to side with, as it will inevitably create conflict with the other ones.

3. Liberals, who have strength in numbers in the House, say that without a public option in the bill, we might as well not even have reform.

4. More than 60 House democrats, last month, sent a letter to Pelosi vowing with certainty to vote down any bill that doesn’t have a public option.

5. Obama has been playing the same record for a month now, saying the same thing over and over. Rep. Brad Miller (D-NC) summed it up nicely with the following quote, “”President Obama needs to start talking about what’s in the bill, not what’s not in the bill. Whenever I see him on TV, he’s talking about what’s not in the bill.”

6. A large number of dems don’t want the House to do anything until they have a good idea of what will happen in the Senate.

There’s a lot more going on, but the above points are ones I thought were interesting. Some are saying that the September 9th speech that Obama will deliver in front of a joint session of Congress will be the most important speech of his career. I think many will agree with that. Again, if he wants ANY job security, I hope he has some different talking points up his sleeve, because we’re TIRED of the same old “broken record” blah blah blib blab.

Perhaps instead of trying to rush and blind-side America with a multi-trillion dollar health care reform bill, we can focus on bringing the economy back to a level playing field. We’re close, according to many analysts, but throw several more trillion dollars on the tab, and we’re going to paying through the nose for some time to come.

What are your thoughts? What do you expect out of the big speech Wednesday? What would you like to hear?