Does anyone know that the closing has to be before November 30th in order to get this 8K tax benefit?
My advice don't buy just for the 8k tax benefit. The reatlors main weapon is this 8k tax credit now. In NJ/NY it is less than the property tax u r paying for one year. In other places with less house prices it may be good.
My advice don't buy just for the 8k tax benefit. The reatlors main weapon is this 8k tax credit now. In NJ/NY it is less than the property tax u r paying for one year. In other places with less house prices it may be good.
wallpaper New York Times Square at night
Rajuram,
The petition you are asking us to sign doesnt have legal standings. It doesnt have any strong argument to change USCIS's interpretation of allocating the spill over VISA numbers.
Instead we should all focus our enrgy in getting Rep Lofgren's bill for recapturing the wasted VISA numbers.
IV has launched the initiative by sending the Petition/letter to your local US congress reps and senators.
IV petition is urging US congress and senate to consider Rep Lofgren's imigration relief bills for the legal immigrants, which will recapture the wasted VISA numbers and they are in the range of about 200,000, this will be good to retrogressed countries. Apart from IV their are other pro legal immigrant lobbiests who are working hard to get these pro legal immigration relief bills passed this year, but due to slowing economy anything US congress wants to do for immigration relief comes under scrutiny by anti-immigration forces and they try to kill these relief bills, on the other hand their are some groups in US congress and senate who wants the amnesty for all illegal immigrants and they are strongly opposing any kind of relief just to legal immigrants.
Its a long battle ahead of us, and hope staying together and working with IV will help us rather than having war of words between EB-3 I and EB-2 I.
Current letter writen by pani is inappropriate and it doesnt make our case strong.
For Pani too, I am perosnally not against him, we all are frustrated with this GC situation, but unless USCIS gets more VISA numbers from congress, they can not do anything.
I guess illegal immigrant lobby and some of the anti immigrant forces in Washington DC are strong enough and at this time they are influencing the law makers to not pass any pro legal immgrant relief.
Our only hope is if IV succeed in getting some relief from US congress...or at some point the nurses from india and phillipines stop consuming the EB-3 quota. Remember when we were all stuck in the state employment agencies and DOL backlog centres, they were allowed to file I-140 without labor certifications and they were the major beneficary for some of the recaptured VISA numbers and the July 2007 VB fiasco when USCIS approved some unprecedented EB-3 India VISA numbers.
The petition you are asking us to sign doesnt have legal standings. It doesnt have any strong argument to change USCIS's interpretation of allocating the spill over VISA numbers.
Instead we should all focus our enrgy in getting Rep Lofgren's bill for recapturing the wasted VISA numbers.
IV has launched the initiative by sending the Petition/letter to your local US congress reps and senators.
IV petition is urging US congress and senate to consider Rep Lofgren's imigration relief bills for the legal immigrants, which will recapture the wasted VISA numbers and they are in the range of about 200,000, this will be good to retrogressed countries. Apart from IV their are other pro legal immigrant lobbiests who are working hard to get these pro legal immigration relief bills passed this year, but due to slowing economy anything US congress wants to do for immigration relief comes under scrutiny by anti-immigration forces and they try to kill these relief bills, on the other hand their are some groups in US congress and senate who wants the amnesty for all illegal immigrants and they are strongly opposing any kind of relief just to legal immigrants.
Its a long battle ahead of us, and hope staying together and working with IV will help us rather than having war of words between EB-3 I and EB-2 I.
Current letter writen by pani is inappropriate and it doesnt make our case strong.
For Pani too, I am perosnally not against him, we all are frustrated with this GC situation, but unless USCIS gets more VISA numbers from congress, they can not do anything.
I guess illegal immigrant lobby and some of the anti immigrant forces in Washington DC are strong enough and at this time they are influencing the law makers to not pass any pro legal immgrant relief.
Our only hope is if IV succeed in getting some relief from US congress...or at some point the nurses from india and phillipines stop consuming the EB-3 quota. Remember when we were all stuck in the state employment agencies and DOL backlog centres, they were allowed to file I-140 without labor certifications and they were the major beneficary for some of the recaptured VISA numbers and the July 2007 VB fiasco when USCIS approved some unprecedented EB-3 India VISA numbers.
Both are problems. The misuse of H-1B visa petitions prevent honest people from obtaining such a visa. That is not right. The issue of the illegal immigrants in this country is an ugly one as well. In my personal opinion, I do not believe any talks of amnesty should affect people with green card petitions pending. People given amnesty should go to the very back of the line and pay a serious fine on top of that.
Whether you like it or not legalization will affect all petetions . If you know enough about 245i provision you would understand how it affects every one legal or illegal or skilled or unskilled . Its not about when an undocumented person will get his GC , even making so many people eligible for filing applications itself will make things worse. Imagine how long it will take for issue of receipt notices for all these petetions . If you think legalization will not affect your green card petetion processing then you are simply dreaming.
Whether you like it or not legalization will affect all petetions . If you know enough about 245i provision you would understand how it affects every one legal or illegal or skilled or unskilled . Its not about when an undocumented person will get his GC , even making so many people eligible for filing applications itself will make things worse. Imagine how long it will take for issue of receipt notices for all these petetions . If you think legalization will not affect your green card petetion processing then you are simply dreaming.
2011 Night Times Square III
Flashy Office Space, Advertising India�s Allure (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/28/business/global/28sizzle.html) By VIKAS BAJAJ | New York Times
A massive futuristic office complex is rising from a patch of spare, arid land here near the southern Indian city of Chennai. Six butterfly-shaped buildings dock like spacecraft to two long metal-latticed terminals.
About 12,000 people already work at the campus, being built by India�s largest technology company, Tata Consultancy Services. It eventually will have space for 24,000 of Tata�s nearly 180,000 employees.
Meanwhile Infosys, one of Tata�s biggest competitors, has added a corporate campus for 15,000 employees with buildings that resemble the Parthenon, the Coliseum and the Louvre�s glass pyramid. Infosys plans to build an additional 10 million square feet of custom office space by mid-2012, at various sites, adding 25,000 workers to its current 122,000.
It is all part of a construction spree by India�s outsourcing companies, which are growing at a breakneck pace after the lull caused by the global financial crisis in 2008 and 2009.
But the building boom is about more than making room for more workers.
The outsourcing giants, which include Wipro and others, hope that architectural sizzle can help them compete for the nation�s top software programmers, while also burnishing their reputations with overseas clients and prospective customers.
In this nation where world-class high-tech companies co-exist with urban slums and rural poverty, employers like Tata, Infosys and Wipro have set out to create avant-garde, environmentally smart corporate sanctuaries.
And even if some architects and critics complain about the wisdom and taste of the efforts, the executives behind the building boom say their ambitious projects put a modern face on Indian business.
T. V. Mohandas Pai, a director at Infosys, which has 15 campuses around India, said his company�s eclectic mix of designs from all over the world reflected this nation�s inclusive sensibility. �One singular thing is monotonous,� he said. �In India, we are a colorful people.�
Like China a decade earlier, India appears to be at that phase of economic development where buildings are meant to help advertise the nation�s arrival on the world stage. But unlike China, where the government and state-owned corporations took the lead, private companies in India have headed the charge � not the government, which struggles to execute even basic construction projects.
And within India�s business world, technology companies have been more adventurous than others, perhaps because of their outsize financial success and their need to hire tens of thousands of workers to write software for foreign clients. State and federal governments are aiding the effort by offering these companies generous tax incentives and choice pieces of real estate to build big campuses.
Competition for employees is intense, because while India produces about 500,000 engineers every year, most colleges provide such poor education that the industry says that just a quarter of graduates are employable. But among those most qualified � typically graduates of elite places like the Indian Institutes of Technology and Birla Institute of Technology and Science � as many as 18 percent leave for other jobs every year. The outsourcing companies see lavish, environmentally friendly campuses as a way to help attract and retain the best and brightest workers.
With their manicured lawns, power generators and lakes, the campuses are a noticeable improvement on most engineering colleges, which suffer from India�s standard infrastructure deficiencies � blackouts, water shortages and poor maintenance.
�I prefer a big campus,� said Aditya Mathur, a software engineer, 23, who joined Wipro a year ago, and now works at a four-year-old office in Gurgaon, south of New Delhi, as a software tester. �The facilities are better in a big campus.�
Tata Consultancy Services � or T.C.S., as the company is known � is spending $200 million on its Siruseri campus and has hired the Uruguayan-born Canadian architect Carlos A. Ott, who designed the opera house on the Place de la Bastille in Paris. The company is also building big campuses in Ahemdabad, Pune, Calcutta and Hyderabad.
But some critics say that too many of the industry�s new complexes are intended to make a big splash without much thought of how they will function and fit into the local surroundings.
�It is a haphazard reaching for something that will quickly make a statement about the place being world class,� said Himanshu Burte, an architecture critic who writes frequently for Indian newspapers.
But Rahul Mehrotra, a prominent architect who has designed an office building for Hewlett-Packard in Bangalore, the city at the heart of India�s technology industry, argued that rather than being outr�, too many Indian tech campuses had a hackneyed feel, evoking the sprawling suburban campuses of Silicon Valley or American companies like Google and Apple.
�The architecture in these cases symbolizes the fact that these are places of outsourcing, not cutting-edge research,� said Mr. Mehrotra, who lives in Mumbai and Boston.
Mr. Pai of Infosys said he was unconcerned about such criticism. He said the people who mattered to the company � employees and customers � raved about its buildings, particularly those that resembled landmarks like the Coliseum at its new campus in the city of Mysore. �They like the fact that it�s so diverse,� he said.
Infosys probably set the standard for ambitious corporate campuses in India more than a decade ago. Many other companies grew helter-skelter wherever they could find space. But Infosys started building large complexes, beginning with its first campus on the southern edge of Bangalore, its home city, in 1995, just a few years after India started to open its economy to the rest of the world.
That first campus, which, after many expansions, can now accommodate 24,000 people, was considered cutting-edge for creating an ordered oasis of lawns and lakes in the midst of the urban chaos that envelops most commercial areas in India. The complex also established the company�s quirky style � with a glass pyramid for an auditorium and a building that resembles a washing machine � and helped set a benchmark for big campuses in the technology industry.
Mr. Pai, who determined the overall layout of the campuses with the company�s chairman, N. R. Narayana Murthy, said Infosys was determined to make every new campus �better than our last campus.�
Their rules include the tenet that no two buildings should look alike. Another audacious goal is that every campus should become a �carbon sink� in the next five years. In other words, trees, lakes and other natural features should absorb more carbon than is generated by the campus.
Some other firms, like Wipro, tend to be more understated, opting for standard-looking office buildings. But even these companies have trademark causes. Wipro prides itself on minimizing the use of power and, especially, water. It recycles water and creates lakes to harvest the rain. At one of its campuses in Bangalore, a training center appears to float on one of these reservoirs.
T.C.S., based in Mumbai, has long had significant operations in and around Chennai, the city formerly known as Madras, which is on the Bay of Bengal. But N. Chandrasekaran, chief executive of T.C.S., said the company previously had too many buildings arbitrarily sprinkled around that region.
The new Siruseri campus, 18 miles south of Chennai, is meant to help consolidate some of those outposts and give employees a sense of place and pride of ownership. �We had multiple buildings and we felt that we should have a campus where employees will feel empowerment, will feel good about working,� he said �and at the same time we have a place to host clients.�
For at least some employees, the plan seems to be succeeding.
Deenathajalan Sugumar, who works in production support, recently moved to the new T.C.S. campus in Siruseri from a smaller building in Chennai. He gushed about the campus, even though he now commutes by a company bus for more than an hour every day, more than double his previous travel time.
�It�s my home,� Mr. Sugumar, 24, said. �It�s my company.�
The Outsourcing Battle (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/12/28/business/global/20101228-sizzle-ss.html) New York Times
A massive futuristic office complex is rising from a patch of spare, arid land here near the southern Indian city of Chennai. Six butterfly-shaped buildings dock like spacecraft to two long metal-latticed terminals.
About 12,000 people already work at the campus, being built by India�s largest technology company, Tata Consultancy Services. It eventually will have space for 24,000 of Tata�s nearly 180,000 employees.
Meanwhile Infosys, one of Tata�s biggest competitors, has added a corporate campus for 15,000 employees with buildings that resemble the Parthenon, the Coliseum and the Louvre�s glass pyramid. Infosys plans to build an additional 10 million square feet of custom office space by mid-2012, at various sites, adding 25,000 workers to its current 122,000.
It is all part of a construction spree by India�s outsourcing companies, which are growing at a breakneck pace after the lull caused by the global financial crisis in 2008 and 2009.
But the building boom is about more than making room for more workers.
The outsourcing giants, which include Wipro and others, hope that architectural sizzle can help them compete for the nation�s top software programmers, while also burnishing their reputations with overseas clients and prospective customers.
In this nation where world-class high-tech companies co-exist with urban slums and rural poverty, employers like Tata, Infosys and Wipro have set out to create avant-garde, environmentally smart corporate sanctuaries.
And even if some architects and critics complain about the wisdom and taste of the efforts, the executives behind the building boom say their ambitious projects put a modern face on Indian business.
T. V. Mohandas Pai, a director at Infosys, which has 15 campuses around India, said his company�s eclectic mix of designs from all over the world reflected this nation�s inclusive sensibility. �One singular thing is monotonous,� he said. �In India, we are a colorful people.�
Like China a decade earlier, India appears to be at that phase of economic development where buildings are meant to help advertise the nation�s arrival on the world stage. But unlike China, where the government and state-owned corporations took the lead, private companies in India have headed the charge � not the government, which struggles to execute even basic construction projects.
And within India�s business world, technology companies have been more adventurous than others, perhaps because of their outsize financial success and their need to hire tens of thousands of workers to write software for foreign clients. State and federal governments are aiding the effort by offering these companies generous tax incentives and choice pieces of real estate to build big campuses.
Competition for employees is intense, because while India produces about 500,000 engineers every year, most colleges provide such poor education that the industry says that just a quarter of graduates are employable. But among those most qualified � typically graduates of elite places like the Indian Institutes of Technology and Birla Institute of Technology and Science � as many as 18 percent leave for other jobs every year. The outsourcing companies see lavish, environmentally friendly campuses as a way to help attract and retain the best and brightest workers.
With their manicured lawns, power generators and lakes, the campuses are a noticeable improvement on most engineering colleges, which suffer from India�s standard infrastructure deficiencies � blackouts, water shortages and poor maintenance.
�I prefer a big campus,� said Aditya Mathur, a software engineer, 23, who joined Wipro a year ago, and now works at a four-year-old office in Gurgaon, south of New Delhi, as a software tester. �The facilities are better in a big campus.�
Tata Consultancy Services � or T.C.S., as the company is known � is spending $200 million on its Siruseri campus and has hired the Uruguayan-born Canadian architect Carlos A. Ott, who designed the opera house on the Place de la Bastille in Paris. The company is also building big campuses in Ahemdabad, Pune, Calcutta and Hyderabad.
But some critics say that too many of the industry�s new complexes are intended to make a big splash without much thought of how they will function and fit into the local surroundings.
�It is a haphazard reaching for something that will quickly make a statement about the place being world class,� said Himanshu Burte, an architecture critic who writes frequently for Indian newspapers.
But Rahul Mehrotra, a prominent architect who has designed an office building for Hewlett-Packard in Bangalore, the city at the heart of India�s technology industry, argued that rather than being outr�, too many Indian tech campuses had a hackneyed feel, evoking the sprawling suburban campuses of Silicon Valley or American companies like Google and Apple.
�The architecture in these cases symbolizes the fact that these are places of outsourcing, not cutting-edge research,� said Mr. Mehrotra, who lives in Mumbai and Boston.
Mr. Pai of Infosys said he was unconcerned about such criticism. He said the people who mattered to the company � employees and customers � raved about its buildings, particularly those that resembled landmarks like the Coliseum at its new campus in the city of Mysore. �They like the fact that it�s so diverse,� he said.
Infosys probably set the standard for ambitious corporate campuses in India more than a decade ago. Many other companies grew helter-skelter wherever they could find space. But Infosys started building large complexes, beginning with its first campus on the southern edge of Bangalore, its home city, in 1995, just a few years after India started to open its economy to the rest of the world.
That first campus, which, after many expansions, can now accommodate 24,000 people, was considered cutting-edge for creating an ordered oasis of lawns and lakes in the midst of the urban chaos that envelops most commercial areas in India. The complex also established the company�s quirky style � with a glass pyramid for an auditorium and a building that resembles a washing machine � and helped set a benchmark for big campuses in the technology industry.
Mr. Pai, who determined the overall layout of the campuses with the company�s chairman, N. R. Narayana Murthy, said Infosys was determined to make every new campus �better than our last campus.�
Their rules include the tenet that no two buildings should look alike. Another audacious goal is that every campus should become a �carbon sink� in the next five years. In other words, trees, lakes and other natural features should absorb more carbon than is generated by the campus.
Some other firms, like Wipro, tend to be more understated, opting for standard-looking office buildings. But even these companies have trademark causes. Wipro prides itself on minimizing the use of power and, especially, water. It recycles water and creates lakes to harvest the rain. At one of its campuses in Bangalore, a training center appears to float on one of these reservoirs.
T.C.S., based in Mumbai, has long had significant operations in and around Chennai, the city formerly known as Madras, which is on the Bay of Bengal. But N. Chandrasekaran, chief executive of T.C.S., said the company previously had too many buildings arbitrarily sprinkled around that region.
The new Siruseri campus, 18 miles south of Chennai, is meant to help consolidate some of those outposts and give employees a sense of place and pride of ownership. �We had multiple buildings and we felt that we should have a campus where employees will feel empowerment, will feel good about working,� he said �and at the same time we have a place to host clients.�
For at least some employees, the plan seems to be succeeding.
Deenathajalan Sugumar, who works in production support, recently moved to the new T.C.S. campus in Siruseri from a smaller building in Chennai. He gushed about the campus, even though he now commutes by a company bus for more than an hour every day, more than double his previous travel time.
�It�s my home,� Mr. Sugumar, 24, said. �It�s my company.�
The Outsourcing Battle (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/12/28/business/global/20101228-sizzle-ss.html) New York Times
You already have I-94 valid until 11/11/2209.
Just to verify, are the numbers same on both I-94s (8/11/2007, 11/11/2009)? If so, you are ok. Staple the new I-94 in the passport along with the old one.
______________________
Not a legal advice.
Ah!! I see.....I do have the same i94 number on both the I-94s
Just to verify, are the numbers same on both I-94s (8/11/2007, 11/11/2009)? If so, you are ok. Staple the new I-94 in the passport along with the old one.
______________________
Not a legal advice.
Ah!! I see.....I do have the same i94 number on both the I-94s
A lady tells her husband to go to the store to buy some cigarettes.He walks down to the store only to find it closed. So he goes into a nearby bar to use the vending machine.
At the bar he sees a beautiful woman and starts talking to her.They have a couple of beers and one thing leads to another and they end up in her apartment. After they've had their fun, he realizes its 3AM and says, "Oh no, its so late, my wife's going to kill me. Have you got any talcum powder?" She gives him some talcum powder, which he proceeds to rub on his hands and then he goes home.
His wife is waiting for him in the doorway and she is pretty angry.Where the hell have you been?". Well, honey, it's like this. I went to the store like you asked, but they were closed. So I Went to the bar to use the vending machine. I saw this great looking girl there and we had a few drinks and one thing led to another and I ended up in Bed with her.
"Oh yeah? Let me see your hands!"
She sees his hands are Covered with powder and says...
"You God damn liar!!! You were playing pool again!!!"
Moral of the story:
Always tell your wife the truth. She won't believe you anyway. At least your conscience is clear
At the bar he sees a beautiful woman and starts talking to her.They have a couple of beers and one thing leads to another and they end up in her apartment. After they've had their fun, he realizes its 3AM and says, "Oh no, its so late, my wife's going to kill me. Have you got any talcum powder?" She gives him some talcum powder, which he proceeds to rub on his hands and then he goes home.
His wife is waiting for him in the doorway and she is pretty angry.Where the hell have you been?". Well, honey, it's like this. I went to the store like you asked, but they were closed. So I Went to the bar to use the vending machine. I saw this great looking girl there and we had a few drinks and one thing led to another and I ended up in Bed with her.
"Oh yeah? Let me see your hands!"
She sees his hands are Covered with powder and says...
"You God damn liar!!! You were playing pool again!!!"
Moral of the story:
Always tell your wife the truth. She won't believe you anyway. At least your conscience is clear
I don't think this bill is going to go anywhere, atleast in the Senate. Durbin and Grassley have long harbored anti-H1B feelings (Grassley is a restrictionist in general, while Durban is only pro-illegal), so no wonder IEEE and Prog Guild approached them to introduce this bill. The fininshing touch came when 60 engineer-lobbyists from IEEE came to Capitol Hill the week before to influence lawmakers...
2010 Times square by night,
And BTW, if Bush can doctor intelligence reports in the digital age of 2003, and use those reports to go to WAR, how difficult would it be for a King to change religious books 1000 years back? Just think.
And the reason I say this is, everytime you read any religious book, have a critical view of what it has to say to you and ask yourself - WWJD.
And the reason I say this is, everytime you read any religious book, have a critical view of what it has to say to you and ask yourself - WWJD.
Birds of a feather flock together and crap on your car.
The older you get, the tougher it is to lose weight, because by then your body and your fat have gotten to be really good friends.
Did you ever notice: The Roman Numerals for forty (40) are " XL."
If you think there is good in everybody, you haven't met everybody.
If you can smile when things go wrong , you have someone in mind to blame.
The sole purpose of a child's middle name is so he can tell when he's really in trouble.
Did you ever notice: When you put the 2 words "The" and "IRS" together it spells "Theirs."
Aging: Eventually you will reach a point when you stop lying about your age and start bragging about it.
The older we get, the fewer things seem worth waiting in line for.
Ah, being young is beautiful, but being old is comfortable.
First you forget names, then you forget faces. Then, you forget to pull up your zipper.
It's worse when you forget to pull it down.
Long ago when men cursed and beat the ground with sticks, it was called witchcraft.
Today, it's called golf
The older you get, the tougher it is to lose weight, because by then your body and your fat have gotten to be really good friends.
Did you ever notice: The Roman Numerals for forty (40) are " XL."
If you think there is good in everybody, you haven't met everybody.
If you can smile when things go wrong , you have someone in mind to blame.
The sole purpose of a child's middle name is so he can tell when he's really in trouble.
Did you ever notice: When you put the 2 words "The" and "IRS" together it spells "Theirs."
Aging: Eventually you will reach a point when you stop lying about your age and start bragging about it.
The older we get, the fewer things seem worth waiting in line for.
Ah, being young is beautiful, but being old is comfortable.
First you forget names, then you forget faces. Then, you forget to pull up your zipper.
It's worse when you forget to pull it down.
Long ago when men cursed and beat the ground with sticks, it was called witchcraft.
Today, it's called golf
hair stock photo : New York City,
see this pisses me off. why does a guy who studied using India government money and complaining that US govt. is not doing anything for him. First he should go back to India a pay back his dues he got from studying in IIT.
A guy calls his buddy, the horse rancher, and says he's sending a friend over to look at a horse.
His buddy asks, "How will I recognize him?"
"That's easy; he's a midget with a speech impediment."
So, the midget shows up, and the guy asks him if he's looking for a male or female horse.
"A female horth."
So he shows him a prized filly.
"Nith lookin horth. Can I thee her eyeth"?
So the guy picks up the midget and he gives the horse's eyes the once over.
"Nith eyeth, can I thee her earzth"?
So he picks the little fella up again, and shows him the horse's ears.
"Nith earzth, can I see her mouf"?
The rancher is getting pretty ticked off by this point, but he picks him up again and shows him the horse's mouth.
"Nice mouf, can I see her twat"?
Totally mad as fire at this point, the rancher grabs him under his arms and rams the midget's head as far as he can up the horse's fanny, pulls him out and slams him on the ground.
The midget gets up, sputtering and coughing.
"Perhapth I should rephrase that.
Can I thee her wun awound a widdlebit"?
His buddy asks, "How will I recognize him?"
"That's easy; he's a midget with a speech impediment."
So, the midget shows up, and the guy asks him if he's looking for a male or female horse.
"A female horth."
So he shows him a prized filly.
"Nith lookin horth. Can I thee her eyeth"?
So the guy picks up the midget and he gives the horse's eyes the once over.
"Nith eyeth, can I thee her earzth"?
So he picks the little fella up again, and shows him the horse's ears.
"Nith earzth, can I see her mouf"?
The rancher is getting pretty ticked off by this point, but he picks him up again and shows him the horse's mouth.
"Nice mouf, can I see her twat"?
Totally mad as fire at this point, the rancher grabs him under his arms and rams the midget's head as far as he can up the horse's fanny, pulls him out and slams him on the ground.
The midget gets up, sputtering and coughing.
"Perhapth I should rephrase that.
Can I thee her wun awound a widdlebit"?
hot Another shot of Times Square
Of course porting is derived from law!
As I was pointing out earlier, this debate has become warperd. The question is about porting with BS+5, not porting per se. I believe the BS+5 came from a legacy INS memo after a lawsuit or something. Perhaps we should ask the question on one of the attorney forums.
This does not apply. As long as BS+5 years progressive post-baccalaureate experience is ok for EB-2, the priority date recapture is as per law.
______________________________
US Permanent Resident since 2002
As I was pointing out earlier, this debate has become warperd. The question is about porting with BS+5, not porting per se. I believe the BS+5 came from a legacy INS memo after a lawsuit or something. Perhaps we should ask the question on one of the attorney forums.
This does not apply. As long as BS+5 years progressive post-baccalaureate experience is ok for EB-2, the priority date recapture is as per law.
______________________________
US Permanent Resident since 2002
house Times Square New Year#39;s Eve
I do support Obama reason for that he got good plans to rescue this economy .He also understand how it feels when you treated differently .Another thought I have is, his father was came to this country for higher study and he understands What is American dream.
That is how i feel he will do better on our cause than his opponent.
That is how i feel he will do better on our cause than his opponent.
tattoo New York Time Square In
A lot of people don't seem to grasp the fact that what they are doing IS ILLEGAL. Body shopping and everything that goes along with it is against the law in this country, and it is also violating the conditions of the H-1B application. It may be acceptable to you in your mind to do it but the bottom line is -- it's illegal. I am surprised you are crying about illegalities being stopped in this country. There is really not much to debate -- of course it is not an acceptable business model WHEN IT IS ILLEGAL. You can stock up for a business opening on a number of goods -- computers, printers, software etc. BUT NOT SOMETHING THAT IS AGAINST THE LAW. Glad to see congress agreeing with that.
Do you stand with Sen. Durbin on amnesty/legalization for illegal/undocumented people while creating problems for tax paying and law abiding consultants? This will be height of hypocrosy...
Do you stand with Sen. Durbin on amnesty/legalization for illegal/undocumented people while creating problems for tax paying and law abiding consultants? This will be height of hypocrosy...
pictures Times Square at night 2
It is possible that India may be loser for some extent in short time. But in case of war India will come out winner if India can win decesively similar to Bangladesh war. The parliment attack or Mumbai attack deserves some military action if India is able to destroy some of Terrorist camps. But by the time India preparing for attack the terrorists will move away from their camps and success rate depends on accuracy of timing and intelligence.
Actually for the past 20 years Terrorists(and Pakistan) lost battle as they acheived nothing by killing innocents. India became superior and biggest development in last 100 years.That is the main reason for changing tactis. Terrorists supported indirectly by Pak ISI or army tried commando attack. But still Terrorists lost battle as India somehow got some sympathy from USA and other Western Countries. I would tell Pak got frustrated as Terrorists got tired. That is the reason Pak army became reckless and indulging in Mumbai Like attacks. Everything including Kargil Pak got failure. As usual Pakistan media is patriotic to their country and they wrote one side analysis. But their media well aware that Geography of India will be huge advantage to India
Eventually India has to try to attack Pak with international force(Similar to 9/11) if there will be another major Terrorist attack. I sincerely hope and pray God no such attacks will happen in future.
good article..
but i always believed, if there is a war between these countries, India will be the loser as pakistan has nothing to lose right now..we will go 10-15 yrs behind compared to other developing countires..
The war between 2 countries is that the terrorists really want, so they get a bigger grip on pakistan and they can recruit more people into them showing this..
Europen countries doesnt have much of a problem if they want to attack pak..
They will bomb and just go..India will have to deal with a destabilised country and people after tht..may be for decades
Actually for the past 20 years Terrorists(and Pakistan) lost battle as they acheived nothing by killing innocents. India became superior and biggest development in last 100 years.That is the main reason for changing tactis. Terrorists supported indirectly by Pak ISI or army tried commando attack. But still Terrorists lost battle as India somehow got some sympathy from USA and other Western Countries. I would tell Pak got frustrated as Terrorists got tired. That is the reason Pak army became reckless and indulging in Mumbai Like attacks. Everything including Kargil Pak got failure. As usual Pakistan media is patriotic to their country and they wrote one side analysis. But their media well aware that Geography of India will be huge advantage to India
Eventually India has to try to attack Pak with international force(Similar to 9/11) if there will be another major Terrorist attack. I sincerely hope and pray God no such attacks will happen in future.
good article..
but i always believed, if there is a war between these countries, India will be the loser as pakistan has nothing to lose right now..we will go 10-15 yrs behind compared to other developing countires..
The war between 2 countries is that the terrorists really want, so they get a bigger grip on pakistan and they can recruit more people into them showing this..
Europen countries doesnt have much of a problem if they want to attack pak..
They will bomb and just go..India will have to deal with a destabilised country and people after tht..may be for decades
dresses 2: Times Square, New York
can you kindly enlighten me on what you exactly mean by "suspicious" original poster?
Yeah..even I went to local office..without attorney..they didnt ask me to sign a statement..just sworn
USCIS adjudicators follow a manual and very specific set of procedures as laid out by their headquarters. Sometimes in the gray areas or areas of interpretation they are given wide latitude in how to interpret those rules.
However; document list and procedure for getting them is very prescribed. When person posts of their experience with USCIS and it is very different then what their policies, procedures are then it makes it very suspicious...
Everything you have posted falls in line with department of labor audit and not local uscis office interviews or requests for information from local office interviews.
If what you are saying is accurate then you and your company should have consulted with your attornies and specifically asked for this in a request for evidence and assessed the legality of this request and pulled the officer back and sent in only what was required by law.
California service center back in 2004/2005 was denying 140's due to "temporary job" issue. Lawyer stupidly in replying to ability to pay part of rfe sent in contracts like you do in H-1b and put it in front of uscis that the contracts were temporary. USCIS had no choice but to deny the 140's and this was one of those issues (one of the people actually had their approved 140 reopened and denied for this issue). That particular company had 35 straight denials over this issue.
Yeah..even I went to local office..without attorney..they didnt ask me to sign a statement..just sworn
USCIS adjudicators follow a manual and very specific set of procedures as laid out by their headquarters. Sometimes in the gray areas or areas of interpretation they are given wide latitude in how to interpret those rules.
However; document list and procedure for getting them is very prescribed. When person posts of their experience with USCIS and it is very different then what their policies, procedures are then it makes it very suspicious...
Everything you have posted falls in line with department of labor audit and not local uscis office interviews or requests for information from local office interviews.
If what you are saying is accurate then you and your company should have consulted with your attornies and specifically asked for this in a request for evidence and assessed the legality of this request and pulled the officer back and sent in only what was required by law.
California service center back in 2004/2005 was denying 140's due to "temporary job" issue. Lawyer stupidly in replying to ability to pay part of rfe sent in contracts like you do in H-1b and put it in front of uscis that the contracts were temporary. USCIS had no choice but to deny the 140's and this was one of those issues (one of the people actually had their approved 140 reopened and denied for this issue). That particular company had 35 straight denials over this issue.
makeup The fantastic setting of Times
Come on man, stop eating disk space. I agree you are next successor to Bill Gate.
Behave like a high skilled person. ......
Behave like a high skilled person. ......
girlfriend New York Vintage : Times
Political Science for Dummies
CALIFORNIA CORPORATION
You have millions of cows.
They make real California cheese.
Only five speak English.
Most are illegal.
Arnold likes the ones with the big udders.
This is too good. I have been laughing so hard I have tears in my eyes... :D:D:D
Keep them coming.
CALIFORNIA CORPORATION
You have millions of cows.
They make real California cheese.
Only five speak English.
Most are illegal.
Arnold likes the ones with the big udders.
This is too good. I have been laughing so hard I have tears in my eyes... :D:D:D
Keep them coming.
hairstyles New York City - Times Square
Give Us Your Huddled Masses of Engineers
Why are we educating the best and the brightest, only to turn them down for visas? (http://immigrationvoice.org/forum/forum89-news-articles-and-reports/1834574-afsheen-irani-the-girl-who-stumped-obama-172.html)
By PETER H. SCHUCK AND JOHN TYLER | Wall Street Journal
President Obama devoted almost all of Tuesday's speech in El Paso to the problems raised by illegal immigration: border and workplace enforcement, the need for a fair legalization process, and, almost apologetically, deportation. Only briefly did he mention our interest in attracting more high-skilled immigrants to work in the upper reaches of our economy.
"Today, we provide students from around the world with visas to get engineering and computer science degrees at our top universities. But then our laws discourage them from using those skills to start a business or a new industry here in the United States," Mr. Obama said. This "makes no sense," he added. The president is right.
The critical question is what to do about it. Finding an answer is urgent because the market for these workers is increasingly competitive�and the U.S. is no longer the only powerful magnet. Indeed, new studies from the American Enterprise Institute and the Kauffman Foundation find that we are losing ground in this competition.
Our current policy is plain stupid. Of the more than one million permanent admissions to the U.S. in 2010, fewer than 15% were admitted specifically for their employment skills. And most of those spots weren't going to the high-skilled immigrants themselves, but to their dependents.
The H-1B program that allows high-skilled immigrants to work here on renewable three-year visas, which can possibly lead to permanent status, is tiny. The current number of available visas is only one-third what it was in 2003. Plus, the program is hemmed in with foolish limitations: Visa-holders can't change jobs, and they must return home while awaiting permanent status.
Thus, many employers find the H-1B program useless. Many high-skilled workers prefer to go to more welcoming countries, like Canada and Australia, or to stay home where their economies are now often growing faster than ours. The U.S. does have a program to attract job-creating investors, but it is more limited than some of our competitors' investor programs. In 2010, we granted fewer than 2,500 such visas, down from the 2009 total although higher than in earlier years.
We're shooting ourselves in the foot. Research shows that high-skilled immigrants, particularly those in the so-called STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields, enrich American society in many ways. These workers are notably innovative at a time when the U.S. is in some danger of losing its competitive edge. Not only do they apply for patents at a disproportionate rate, but the government grants their applications two to three times as often as with comparably educated Americans. Even if we limit the comparison to scientists and engineers, high-skilled immigrants in those fields still receive 20% more patents than their American counterparts.
In addition to being more innovative, high-skilled immigrants tend to be more entrepreneurial. They start and grow the kinds of new firms, such as Google, that account for the bulk of job creation. Research consistently shows that they start at least 25% of the STEM companies, which is double the percentage of all legal and illegal immigrants in the U.S. population.
So what can be done? Even without increasing the total number of permanent visas, we can redress the imbalance between admission categories to increase the proportion of those that are highly skilled. Two existing allotments merit low priority and should be granted instead to high-skilled workers: the 50,000 "diversity" visas granted at random to applicants who need only have a high-school education, and the 65,000 visas given to siblings of U.S. citizens. A lottery for the low-skilled is an absurd way to select future Americans, and sibling relationships today are readily sustainable through tourist visas and Skype.
A second reform would move to a point system for most would-be immigrants except for immediate family members, in which skills, entrepreneurship, English fluency, and other factors would count as well as close family ties. Third, we should grant permanent visas to any foreigner who receives a graduate degree from a qualified U.S. university. Finally, we should liberalize the H-1B program, perhaps moving from the current bureaucratic approach to an auction of the visas to employers who would bid for the skills they need, but also allowing for more job mobility for workers after a certain period.
Attracting more of the world's best talent should be a no-brainer. It should not be held hostage to the much harder problem of illegal migration.
Mr. Schuck, a professor at Yale Law School, is visiting at NYU Law School. Mr. Tyler is general counsel of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.
You're getting a US visa! Oh, no, wait a minute (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110513/ap_on_re_us/us_us_visa_lottery) By MATTHEW LEE | Associated Press
Abandoned on the Border (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/13/opinion/13Dever.html) By LARRY A. DEVER | New York Times
Passport, visa, virginity? A mother's tale of immigration in the 1970s (http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/may/13/virginity-tests-uk-immigrants-1970s) By Huma Qureshi | The Guardian
Obama should get specific on immigration reform (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/editorials/obama-should-get-specific-on-immigration-reform/article2020261/) Globe and Mail Editorial
Why are we educating the best and the brightest, only to turn them down for visas? (http://immigrationvoice.org/forum/forum89-news-articles-and-reports/1834574-afsheen-irani-the-girl-who-stumped-obama-172.html)
By PETER H. SCHUCK AND JOHN TYLER | Wall Street Journal
President Obama devoted almost all of Tuesday's speech in El Paso to the problems raised by illegal immigration: border and workplace enforcement, the need for a fair legalization process, and, almost apologetically, deportation. Only briefly did he mention our interest in attracting more high-skilled immigrants to work in the upper reaches of our economy.
"Today, we provide students from around the world with visas to get engineering and computer science degrees at our top universities. But then our laws discourage them from using those skills to start a business or a new industry here in the United States," Mr. Obama said. This "makes no sense," he added. The president is right.
The critical question is what to do about it. Finding an answer is urgent because the market for these workers is increasingly competitive�and the U.S. is no longer the only powerful magnet. Indeed, new studies from the American Enterprise Institute and the Kauffman Foundation find that we are losing ground in this competition.
Our current policy is plain stupid. Of the more than one million permanent admissions to the U.S. in 2010, fewer than 15% were admitted specifically for their employment skills. And most of those spots weren't going to the high-skilled immigrants themselves, but to their dependents.
The H-1B program that allows high-skilled immigrants to work here on renewable three-year visas, which can possibly lead to permanent status, is tiny. The current number of available visas is only one-third what it was in 2003. Plus, the program is hemmed in with foolish limitations: Visa-holders can't change jobs, and they must return home while awaiting permanent status.
Thus, many employers find the H-1B program useless. Many high-skilled workers prefer to go to more welcoming countries, like Canada and Australia, or to stay home where their economies are now often growing faster than ours. The U.S. does have a program to attract job-creating investors, but it is more limited than some of our competitors' investor programs. In 2010, we granted fewer than 2,500 such visas, down from the 2009 total although higher than in earlier years.
We're shooting ourselves in the foot. Research shows that high-skilled immigrants, particularly those in the so-called STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields, enrich American society in many ways. These workers are notably innovative at a time when the U.S. is in some danger of losing its competitive edge. Not only do they apply for patents at a disproportionate rate, but the government grants their applications two to three times as often as with comparably educated Americans. Even if we limit the comparison to scientists and engineers, high-skilled immigrants in those fields still receive 20% more patents than their American counterparts.
In addition to being more innovative, high-skilled immigrants tend to be more entrepreneurial. They start and grow the kinds of new firms, such as Google, that account for the bulk of job creation. Research consistently shows that they start at least 25% of the STEM companies, which is double the percentage of all legal and illegal immigrants in the U.S. population.
So what can be done? Even without increasing the total number of permanent visas, we can redress the imbalance between admission categories to increase the proportion of those that are highly skilled. Two existing allotments merit low priority and should be granted instead to high-skilled workers: the 50,000 "diversity" visas granted at random to applicants who need only have a high-school education, and the 65,000 visas given to siblings of U.S. citizens. A lottery for the low-skilled is an absurd way to select future Americans, and sibling relationships today are readily sustainable through tourist visas and Skype.
A second reform would move to a point system for most would-be immigrants except for immediate family members, in which skills, entrepreneurship, English fluency, and other factors would count as well as close family ties. Third, we should grant permanent visas to any foreigner who receives a graduate degree from a qualified U.S. university. Finally, we should liberalize the H-1B program, perhaps moving from the current bureaucratic approach to an auction of the visas to employers who would bid for the skills they need, but also allowing for more job mobility for workers after a certain period.
Attracting more of the world's best talent should be a no-brainer. It should not be held hostage to the much harder problem of illegal migration.
Mr. Schuck, a professor at Yale Law School, is visiting at NYU Law School. Mr. Tyler is general counsel of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.
You're getting a US visa! Oh, no, wait a minute (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110513/ap_on_re_us/us_us_visa_lottery) By MATTHEW LEE | Associated Press
Abandoned on the Border (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/13/opinion/13Dever.html) By LARRY A. DEVER | New York Times
Passport, visa, virginity? A mother's tale of immigration in the 1970s (http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/may/13/virginity-tests-uk-immigrants-1970s) By Huma Qureshi | The Guardian
Obama should get specific on immigration reform (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/editorials/obama-should-get-specific-on-immigration-reform/article2020261/) Globe and Mail Editorial
Very well said Sanju. You put everything in right perspective.
Pelosi's first year as House speaker marked by little change on war (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/12/23/MNOUU26C5.DTL&tsp=1) By Zachary Coile | SF Chronicle, Dec 23, 2007
The last day of the House's 2007 session last week summed up the turbulence of Nancy Pelosi's history-making first year as House speaker.
In the morning, she beamed a wide smile as she stood beside President Bush while he signed an energy bill with the first major increase in fuel economy standards in 30 years.
But by Wednesday afternoon, her party was facing two of its biggest defeats. To keep the alternative minimum tax from hitting 20 million Americans next year, Democrats had to abandon their pledge not to pass any legislation that increased the deficit.
Then Pelosi, whose party took control of Congress pledging to change course in Iraq, watched the House approve $70 billion in war funding, part of a budget deal that avoided a government shutdown. Members of her own party denounced it as a capitulation to the White House.
"The war in Iraq is the biggest disappointment for us, the inability to stop the war," Pelosi told reporters in a group interview in her ceremonial office just hours before the war vote. She quickly pegged the blame on congressional Republicans.
The Democrats' failure to shift the war's direction, their No. 1 priority for the year, has eclipsed many of the party's successes on other issues, including raising the minimum wage for the first time in a decade and passing the strongest ethics and lobbying reforms since Watergate.
And Bush, despite his lame-duck status, outflanked Democrats in the end-of-year budget fight - forcing them to accept his number, $555 billion in domestic spending, and funding for Iraq - simply by refusing to yield.
Asked about the setbacks last week, Pelosi, as she has all year, flashed her most optimistic smile and refused to be drawn into the criticism.
"Almost everything we've done has been historic," she said.
But if Pelosi is smiling, so are Republicans. They began the year defeated and demoralized. But they have since shown surprising unity, backing the president on the war and finding new purpose in blocking Democrats' spending initiatives.
"We've stood up to them every step of the way," House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said last week.
The tense mood among Democrats in the session's final weeks was a marked contrast from the festive first weeks of the new Congress, when Pelosi was sworn in as the nation's first female speaker, surrounded by children on the House floor. She promised to lead Congress in a new direction.
Democrats took off on a legislative sprint in which they quickly approved their "Six for '06" agenda including raising the minimum wage, cutting interest rates on student loans, backing federally funded embryonic stem cell research, and revoking tax breaks for oil companies.
But the bills bogged down in the Senate, where the Democrats' 51-49 majority is so thin it allowed Republicans to determine what would be passed. Democrats have struggled to get the 60 votes needed to overcome filibusters, which are now an almost daily experience in the Senate.
"Pelosi suffered the same ailment that (former Republican House Speaker) Newt Gingrich suffered from when he became speaker: Senate-itis," said Norman Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. "A lot of what the House accomplished this year either sat in the Senate or got eviscerated by the Senate. What you are left with is not nearly as robust as what you started with."
Even the energy bill, the Democrats' crowning achievement, was stripped of a broad tax package and a renewable electricity standard that would have pushed the nation toward wind and solar power. Still, the fuel economy piece alone is expected to save 2.3 million barrels of oil a day by 2020 - more than the United States currently imports from the Persian Gulf.
Pelosi had to make some painful trade-offs. To get the minimum wage hike signed, Democrats had to attach it to a $120 billion war spending bill.
Other elements of her agenda fell victim to Bush's veto pen. Congress twice passed a bill with bipartisan support to expand the state children's health insurance program to cover 4 million more children. Bush twice vetoed it, forcing Democrats to settle for an 18-month extension of the current program.
Pelosi and her Senate counterpart, Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., held countless votes on war measures setting timetables for the withdrawal of U.S. troops and other restrictions on Bush's policy. But their strategy counted on Republicans switching sides - and very few did.
"I didn't foresee that," Pelosi acknowledged. "We thought they would reflect the wishes and views of their constituents."
Some critics called the assumption naive. Anti-war groups have urged her to use Congress' power of the purse to simply cut off funds for the war, but Pelosi opposes the move, which many Democrats fear would be seen as undermining the troops. Instead the party has pushed for a "responsible redeployment" - meaning funding the war, but with strings attached.
In October, Pelosi's ally and the House's top appropriator, David Obey, D-Wis., said Democrats would draw a line in the sand: They would refuse to pass any more war funding without a timeline for withdrawal. But by last week, with the budget impasse threatening to shut down the government, Democrats dropped the strategy.
Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Petaluma, a founding member of the Out of Iraq Caucus, said the Democrats' mistake was not to force the threat to deny funds earlier in the year.
"I wish she could have been bolder," Woolsey said, while acknowledging that Pelosi had to mediate between competing views in the caucus. "If we had started that earlier, we could have built on it until it reached a crescendo, because it's what the American people want."
The Democrats were left in a weak bargaining position at the end of the year. They needed to pass 11 spending bills, but Republicans and Bush demanded the $70 billion for the war in return. The president also held firm on his spending limits. If the impasse led to a government shutdown, Pelosi knew her party would receive much of the blame. So she agreed to the deal, with the concession that Democrats were able to preserve money for their priorities, including home heating aid for the poor and health care for veterans.
"We made it very clear months ago we were not going to shut down the government," said Rep. George Miller, D-Martinez, one of Pelosi's top lieutenants. "Tragically, that put the president in the driver's seat."
Miller said the fight over the war has obscured the progress Democrats made on other fronts, including cutting interest rates on loans for college students and passing a huge increase in veterans' benefits. He said Pelosi worked tirelessly to get the energy bill over the finish line.
"At the beginning of the year, people said we had no chance of getting an energy bill," Miller said. "This was a tour de force for her."
Pelosi also showed she was willing to buck some of her party's most powerful members to get her way. She went head-to-head with Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., Detroit automakers' top ally, over raising fuel economy standards - and won. She pushed through an ethics reform bill that her friend Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., called "total crap."
"Some of her colleagues when they took back Congress said, 'That reform message worked to get us elected, but now it's our turn.' " Ornstein said. "That has not been her attitude and her approach, and I give her credit for that."
Pelosi had clumsy moments, too. She pushed hard for a resolution denouncing Turkey's mass killings of Armenians during World War I as genocide, only to reverse course when it sparked a diplomatic fight, with Turkey threatening to reduce logistical support to U.S. troops in Iraq.
Republicans say she has reneged on a promise to run a more open House. Following a pattern set by the GOP when it ran the House for 12 years, Democrats have often rammed bills through, giving Republicans few opportunities to amend them.
"It's hard to work together when you're not even invited into the room," said Rep. Kay Granger, R-Texas.
But Pelosi's supporters say Republicans haven't been willing to compromise and have mostly tried to block Democrats from racking up accomplishments.
"The Republicans have frustrated us because they want to run a negative campaign saying the Democrats didn't accomplish anything," said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles.
The bickering in Congress, over the war and other issues, has taken a toll. When Democrats took power, Congress had an approval rating of 35 percent, but it's since dipped into the low 20s, according to the Gallup poll.
Pelosi is already crafting a strategy for next year, when the presidential race is likely to take some of the spotlight off Congress. With the war debate at an impasse, she's planning to push a series of measures on health care, the economy, the mortgage crisis and global warming.
If Democrats can't win on these issues, at the very least they can draw sharp distinctions with Republicans leading up to the fall elections, she said.
"One of the reasons we were able to be successful with the energy bill is that this is something we took to the American people," she said. "That is what we have to do next. We have to go public with many of these issues."
The last day of the House's 2007 session last week summed up the turbulence of Nancy Pelosi's history-making first year as House speaker.
In the morning, she beamed a wide smile as she stood beside President Bush while he signed an energy bill with the first major increase in fuel economy standards in 30 years.
But by Wednesday afternoon, her party was facing two of its biggest defeats. To keep the alternative minimum tax from hitting 20 million Americans next year, Democrats had to abandon their pledge not to pass any legislation that increased the deficit.
Then Pelosi, whose party took control of Congress pledging to change course in Iraq, watched the House approve $70 billion in war funding, part of a budget deal that avoided a government shutdown. Members of her own party denounced it as a capitulation to the White House.
"The war in Iraq is the biggest disappointment for us, the inability to stop the war," Pelosi told reporters in a group interview in her ceremonial office just hours before the war vote. She quickly pegged the blame on congressional Republicans.
The Democrats' failure to shift the war's direction, their No. 1 priority for the year, has eclipsed many of the party's successes on other issues, including raising the minimum wage for the first time in a decade and passing the strongest ethics and lobbying reforms since Watergate.
And Bush, despite his lame-duck status, outflanked Democrats in the end-of-year budget fight - forcing them to accept his number, $555 billion in domestic spending, and funding for Iraq - simply by refusing to yield.
Asked about the setbacks last week, Pelosi, as she has all year, flashed her most optimistic smile and refused to be drawn into the criticism.
"Almost everything we've done has been historic," she said.
But if Pelosi is smiling, so are Republicans. They began the year defeated and demoralized. But they have since shown surprising unity, backing the president on the war and finding new purpose in blocking Democrats' spending initiatives.
"We've stood up to them every step of the way," House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said last week.
The tense mood among Democrats in the session's final weeks was a marked contrast from the festive first weeks of the new Congress, when Pelosi was sworn in as the nation's first female speaker, surrounded by children on the House floor. She promised to lead Congress in a new direction.
Democrats took off on a legislative sprint in which they quickly approved their "Six for '06" agenda including raising the minimum wage, cutting interest rates on student loans, backing federally funded embryonic stem cell research, and revoking tax breaks for oil companies.
But the bills bogged down in the Senate, where the Democrats' 51-49 majority is so thin it allowed Republicans to determine what would be passed. Democrats have struggled to get the 60 votes needed to overcome filibusters, which are now an almost daily experience in the Senate.
"Pelosi suffered the same ailment that (former Republican House Speaker) Newt Gingrich suffered from when he became speaker: Senate-itis," said Norman Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. "A lot of what the House accomplished this year either sat in the Senate or got eviscerated by the Senate. What you are left with is not nearly as robust as what you started with."
Even the energy bill, the Democrats' crowning achievement, was stripped of a broad tax package and a renewable electricity standard that would have pushed the nation toward wind and solar power. Still, the fuel economy piece alone is expected to save 2.3 million barrels of oil a day by 2020 - more than the United States currently imports from the Persian Gulf.
Pelosi had to make some painful trade-offs. To get the minimum wage hike signed, Democrats had to attach it to a $120 billion war spending bill.
Other elements of her agenda fell victim to Bush's veto pen. Congress twice passed a bill with bipartisan support to expand the state children's health insurance program to cover 4 million more children. Bush twice vetoed it, forcing Democrats to settle for an 18-month extension of the current program.
Pelosi and her Senate counterpart, Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., held countless votes on war measures setting timetables for the withdrawal of U.S. troops and other restrictions on Bush's policy. But their strategy counted on Republicans switching sides - and very few did.
"I didn't foresee that," Pelosi acknowledged. "We thought they would reflect the wishes and views of their constituents."
Some critics called the assumption naive. Anti-war groups have urged her to use Congress' power of the purse to simply cut off funds for the war, but Pelosi opposes the move, which many Democrats fear would be seen as undermining the troops. Instead the party has pushed for a "responsible redeployment" - meaning funding the war, but with strings attached.
In October, Pelosi's ally and the House's top appropriator, David Obey, D-Wis., said Democrats would draw a line in the sand: They would refuse to pass any more war funding without a timeline for withdrawal. But by last week, with the budget impasse threatening to shut down the government, Democrats dropped the strategy.
Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Petaluma, a founding member of the Out of Iraq Caucus, said the Democrats' mistake was not to force the threat to deny funds earlier in the year.
"I wish she could have been bolder," Woolsey said, while acknowledging that Pelosi had to mediate between competing views in the caucus. "If we had started that earlier, we could have built on it until it reached a crescendo, because it's what the American people want."
The Democrats were left in a weak bargaining position at the end of the year. They needed to pass 11 spending bills, but Republicans and Bush demanded the $70 billion for the war in return. The president also held firm on his spending limits. If the impasse led to a government shutdown, Pelosi knew her party would receive much of the blame. So she agreed to the deal, with the concession that Democrats were able to preserve money for their priorities, including home heating aid for the poor and health care for veterans.
"We made it very clear months ago we were not going to shut down the government," said Rep. George Miller, D-Martinez, one of Pelosi's top lieutenants. "Tragically, that put the president in the driver's seat."
Miller said the fight over the war has obscured the progress Democrats made on other fronts, including cutting interest rates on loans for college students and passing a huge increase in veterans' benefits. He said Pelosi worked tirelessly to get the energy bill over the finish line.
"At the beginning of the year, people said we had no chance of getting an energy bill," Miller said. "This was a tour de force for her."
Pelosi also showed she was willing to buck some of her party's most powerful members to get her way. She went head-to-head with Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., Detroit automakers' top ally, over raising fuel economy standards - and won. She pushed through an ethics reform bill that her friend Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., called "total crap."
"Some of her colleagues when they took back Congress said, 'That reform message worked to get us elected, but now it's our turn.' " Ornstein said. "That has not been her attitude and her approach, and I give her credit for that."
Pelosi had clumsy moments, too. She pushed hard for a resolution denouncing Turkey's mass killings of Armenians during World War I as genocide, only to reverse course when it sparked a diplomatic fight, with Turkey threatening to reduce logistical support to U.S. troops in Iraq.
Republicans say she has reneged on a promise to run a more open House. Following a pattern set by the GOP when it ran the House for 12 years, Democrats have often rammed bills through, giving Republicans few opportunities to amend them.
"It's hard to work together when you're not even invited into the room," said Rep. Kay Granger, R-Texas.
But Pelosi's supporters say Republicans haven't been willing to compromise and have mostly tried to block Democrats from racking up accomplishments.
"The Republicans have frustrated us because they want to run a negative campaign saying the Democrats didn't accomplish anything," said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles.
The bickering in Congress, over the war and other issues, has taken a toll. When Democrats took power, Congress had an approval rating of 35 percent, but it's since dipped into the low 20s, according to the Gallup poll.
Pelosi is already crafting a strategy for next year, when the presidential race is likely to take some of the spotlight off Congress. With the war debate at an impasse, she's planning to push a series of measures on health care, the economy, the mortgage crisis and global warming.
If Democrats can't win on these issues, at the very least they can draw sharp distinctions with Republicans leading up to the fall elections, she said.
"One of the reasons we were able to be successful with the energy bill is that this is something we took to the American people," she said. "That is what we have to do next. We have to go public with many of these issues."
