Measure Heads To White House For Obama Signature

A $51 billion aid package for Hurricane Sandy victims easily passed the Senate on Monday, after the failure of a Republican amendment to require the relief be offset by cuts to other federal spending.

The long-delayed bill, coming three months after Sandy battered the Northeast, now goes to President Barack Obama, who is expected to quickly sign it into law.

The final tally, 62-36, was light on Republican support, with more than three-quarters of GOP senators voting against the full package. The amendment to require spending cuts offset the disaster relief funding, which was proposed by Sen. Mike Lee, was voted down along similar lines. GOP senators backed the Lee amendment by a wide majority, although several leading Republicans, including Sen. John McCain, joined Democrats to defeat it.

Northeast lawmakers blasted the amendment, noting that dozens of other disaster relief bills had passed in recent years without mandating cuts elsewhere in the federal budget.Learn how an embedded microprocessor in a smart card can authenticate your computer usage and data.

"There's no reason why we should treat this disaster, this emergency, this horror, any differently than we have past disasters," said Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand.

Sen. Barbara Mikulski, chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, accused conservative backers of the amendment of hypocrisy, noting that Republicans had voted for hundreds of billions of dollars in spending on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars without regard for its impact on the deficit.

Supporters of the amendment disagreed, saying that massive federal deficits urgently required a new approach to disaster relief.

"We've got a trillion-dollar budget deficit," said Sen. Pat Toomey. "We're just adding another $60 billion right on top of that."

Sandy ranks among the most destructive storms in U.S. history. New York and New Jersey, which took the worst hits,If we don't carry the bobblehead you want we can make a personalized bobbleheads for you! suffered more than $70 billion in damage, according to state estimates. The $51 billion package contains billions for a federal program providing cash grants to disaster victims and roughly $33 billion for long-term reconstruction of battered coastal areas.

The Senate passed a $60 billion aid package for Sandy victims back in mid-December, but House Republicans failed to bring that bill up for a vote before the end of the last session of Congress. That failure drew the wrath of Northeast Republicans like New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who said House GOP leaders had allowed the aid bill to fall victim to "toxic" internal politics.

In January, House Speaker John Boehner brought a new $51 billion relief package to the floor,Welcome to www.drycabinets.net! where it passed with combination of Democratic and Republican votes. But more than two-thirds of the House Republican caucus voted against the full Sandy package.

A previous bill providing $9 billion to replenish the federal government's flood insurance fund passed the House and Senate and was signed into law by Obama in early January.

Unconquered Sun is a manufacturer of lightweight photovoltaic panels, located in Windsor, Ontario. In the past the company focused on residential and commercial rooftops, but it has recently turned to developing lightweight panels for golf carts. Sean Moore, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Unconquered Sun, sees a huge market in solar-powered golf carts, in part due to the new sustainability policies of golf associations but also because they make so much sense for golf course management. According to Unconquered Sun, golf courses with solar powered fleets reduce their consumption from the electric grid by 50 to 75% and can save $374 in operational costs per cart per year based on a fleet size of 80 vehicles. Additionally, the solar carts don’t pollute and provide a monitoring system so golf course management can see where any golf cart is at any given time.

Designing solar panels for golf carts is really no different than putting it on the roof of a house, according to Moore. But what is different is that they are higher wattage. At 275 Watts the challenge has been in charging the battery bank. To do so, the company developed a new induction technique that takes 31 volts on the panel and pumps it up to 56. Ultimately the solar panels are providing a continuous flow of energy or about 7 to 8 amps all day “except when your foot is on the pedal,Service Report a problem with a street light.” Moore added.

The panel design is very similar to that which would go on a house, except that the solar panel is the roof of a golf cart. It’s basically polycrystalline cells strung together in series, Moore said, but the geometry is a little different. And because the panel is actually the roof of the golf cart, some customized materials were required. To adhere the solar panel to the golf cart frame,I thought it would be fun to show you the inspiration behind the broken china-mosaics. they use a special double-coated black foam tape manufactured by FLEXcon.