C-SPAN Uses Periscope and Facebook Live To Broadcast The House Sit-In (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via The Washington Post: C-SPAN has made history for resorting to Periscope to live stream a sit-in on the House floor. C-SPAN spokesman Howard Mortman said: "This is the first time we've ever shown video from the House floor picked up by a Periscope account." C-SPAN had to rely on Periscope for a direct feed to House proceedings because these proceedings aren't exactly official. The Washington Post reports: "Earlier today, Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) led a sit-in on the House floor to push for action on gun control, following the failure of four gun measures earlier this week in the Senate. According to an official at the House Recording Studio, the cameras that C-SPAN commonly uses to broadcast House business are 'in recess subject to the call of the chair.' No approved video feed, no problem: C-SPAN has been piping in the Periscope feed from Rep. Scott Peters, a California Democrat." The feed hasn't been as reliable as C-SPAN's official House-proceedings feed. "Well, the Periscope video froze up again," said a C-SPAN anchor. And a bit later: "We're still having some issues with that video feed." At around 3:30 p.m., C-SPAN switched to a Facebook feed where viewers could hear and watch Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) rip the "cowards who run this chamber" for failing to turn on the microphones.
Nothing is proceeding. A minority faction of the minority party (Democrats) decided they didn't like the compromise bill, so they shut down the House entirely.
The bipartisan bill that the speaker planned to take to vote would prevent the ~10,00 citizens** and 90,000 foreigners on the terrorism "no-fly"* list from buying firearms without approval, and allow them to appeal the denial in court.
Rather than accomplish SOMETHING that's maybe somewhat reasonable, these 60 or so Democrats decided to shut down Congress until they get their way and ban scary looking guns.
* The "no-fly" list doesn't stop people from flying. It means they can't fly into or out of the country.
** The US has about 300 million citizens, meaning that on in 30,000 is on the list.
The constitution does not grant any rights to the people, the people already had them.
Actually, the National Guard is part of the militia. It is, however, not the entire militia; the rest of the militia is made up of the rest of us.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.