I’m still working on the numbers, but I’ve gotten a fair number of requests for comment on the Senate version of the stimulus.
The short answer: to appease the centrists, a plan that was already too small and too focused on ineffective tax cuts has been made significantly smaller, and even more focused on tax cuts..........
Yemeni security officials say the country has released 170 suspected al-Qaida members from custody, less than two weeks after the terror group announced that Yemen has become a base for its regional activities.
The officials say the suspects were freed Friday and Saturday after signing pledges not to engage in terrorism.
~ * ~
Yemen says it also expects most of the 100 Yemenis still held in the American prison camp at Guantanamo to be sent home after U.S. President Barack Obama ordered the prison shut.
Protestors dressed as clowns joke in front of a police line during a demonstration against the 45th Conference on security policy and the NATO in front of the town hall downtown Munich
~watch the video~
seriously
Federal prosecutors continue to investigate decades-old allegations that Chicago police routinely tortured murder suspects…
Let me give you an example…
TomS
U.S. military planners have drawn up three options to allow President Barack Obama to withdraw U.S. combat troops from Iraq, with senior commanders favoring the slowest of the three, officials said on Saturday.
The timelines under discussion are 16 months, proposed by Obama as a centerpiece of his presidential campaign, 19 months and 23 months, the officials said.
“The focus of the effort is on those three options,” said a U.S. official familiar with the process.
He promises one thing and gives you three!
just for listening
If it lasts forever, hope I’m the first to die
*faints*
...for a little “A"-Train.
Thought I might share the ride.
Ellington
Oscar Peterson
Brubeck
Ella
US President Barack Obama made a foray late Friday into Washington’s cultural scene, taking the first family to a performance of one of America’s premier dance companies.
After a grueling week which saw top aides withdrawing their nominations and setbacks in his efforts to forge bipartisan comity in Washington, the president and his family briefly abandoned the White House for an evening at the Kennedy Center, the US capital city’s palace to the performance arts.
The Obamas took in a 50th anniversary performance by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, a predominantly African-American dance troupe which performs works rooted in the black experience.
The president, first lady Michelle Obama, and daughters Sasha and Malia smiled and waved to the crowd as they received a rapturous ovation from audience members before the start of the performance....
~ * ~
After being holed up in the White Houseworkingon a economic stimulus plan which has advancedplotting the demise of the US this past week......
~ Next weekend he is scheduled to spend Valentine’s Day Weekend in Chicago, according to White House spokesman Robert Gibbs.
“The only plans I know of is, I’m sure the president and the first lady will go out for Valentine’s Day,” he said.
As a longstanding disaster rent subsidy ends this month, thousands of families might be unable to pay their March rent.
Among them is a nursing assistant from Algiers who just got laid off, a Gentilly homeowner who works with the homeless and now fears he could join their ranks, and a disabled St. Bernard Parish man who worked with oil for decades until the fumes scrambled his nervous system.
The federal Disaster Housing Assistance Program, known as DHAP, will no longer pay rent for nearly 15,000 New Orleans-area households and thousands of other families displaced by Katrina, including more than 5,000 in the Houston area. ”We don’t know what we’re going to do. I guess we’re going to have to become a burden to our children, “ said Charles Ricord, the disabled man from St. Bernard.
On the Bush administration’s last day, federal housing officials refused to continue the program. The Louisiana Recovery Authority and Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., are pushing for a one-year extension, arguing that New Orleans still faces an acute affordable-housing shortage and that thousands of Louisiana homeowners still await Road Home money..............
If ANYone wants to give me any shit for my complete and total disgust with the “people” of New Orleans I give you one personal example…
One. year..... from the total devastation of a home AND business to this.
Without Sean Penn’s help.
Has anybody read the new book by James Delingpole, Welcome to Obamaland: I Have Seen Your Future and It Doesn’t Work?
I heard a snipped of this Brit on Dennis Miller’s radio show; and he sounded conservative, insightful, clever, and funny.
On the eve of Barack Obama’s inauguration, James Delingpole says that the President-elect is horribly reminiscent of Tony Blair in 1997. He may be a fantastic guy, and look great, but he will bring a ragbag of scuzzballs, communists and eco-loons to power with him,
Before I get my hopes up, I’d like to hear somebody’s experienced words.
The other night I dreamt of Barack Obama. He was taking a shower right when I needed to get into the bathroom to shave my legs, and then he was being yelled at by my husband, Max, for smoking in the house. It was not clear whether Max was feeling protective of the president’s health or jealous because of the cigarette.
The other day a friend of mine confided that in the weeks leading up to the election, the Obamas’ apparent joy as a couple had made her just miserable. Their marriage looked so much happier than hers. Their life seemed so perfect. “I was at a place where I was tempted daily to throttle my husband,” she said. “This coincided with Michelle saying the most beautiful things about Barack. Each time I heard her speak about him I got tears in my eyes — because I felt so far away from that kind of bliss in my own life and perhaps even more, because I was so moved by her expressions of devotion to him. And unlike previous presidential couples, they are our age, have children the same age and (just imagine the stress of daily life on the campaign) by all accounts should have been fighting even more than we were.”
As we all know, in journalism, two anecdotes are just one short of a national trend. I figured that my friend and I couldn’t possibly be the only ones dreaming, brooding or otherwise obsessing about the Obamas. Were other people, I wondered, being possessed by our new first family? ............
of surprise to no one and of interest to even fewer
President Obama’s economic recovery package will actually hurt the economy more in the long run than if he were to do nothing, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday.
Thanks.
Yet ∏eh ∅ne [Big Fat Baby Made Outta Gravy(BFBMOG)] insists that he must have his way. Against all sensible, rational advice and in the face of bands of screaming wraiths demanding their little pet projects and skim-offs be funded with Baloney Bucks. A 12 point drop in approval rating is gonna be a fond memory of good times, JugEars. And welcome to ‘em.
webmaster
Wanna know what pork stimulus projects are going on in your area?
Congress and the President are getting ready to spend billions of dollars to try to stimulate the economy. As a result, the U.S. Conference of Mayors has responded by releasing a list of “shovel-ready” projects in cities around the country that the mayors would like to see funded. President Obama, however, has promised to spend stimulus dollars only on critical projects.
“What we need to do is examine what are the projects where we’re going to get the most bang for the buck [and] how are we going to make sure taxpayers are protected,” he has said. “You know, the days of just pork coming out of Congress as a strategy, those days are over.”
StimulusWatch.org was built to to help the new administration keep its pledge and to hold public officials to account. We do this by allowing you, citizens around the country with local knowledge about the proposed projects in your city, to find, discuss and rate those projects.
I’ll get the shovel…
The Democratic-led Senate on Friday reached a deal on a $780 billion stimulus package to stem a deepening recession, a potentially big win for President Barack Obama but undercut by his inability to draw much Republican support.
Democrats said the vote on the measure, closely watched internationally as a sign of U.S. commitment to act fast to help revive the world economy, could come later on Friday, although Republican could try to delay it by a few days.
With the United States in the grip of the worst economic crisis in more than 70 years—a report on Friday showed nearly 600,000 jobs were lost in December—Obama has demanded that a bill be put on his desk by February 16.
After five days of negotiations Democrats agreed to more than $150 billion in cuts to their original $937 billion proposal to trim what critics, most of them Republicans, called billions of dollars in unwarranted spending.
”We’ve got a deal,” Senator Sherrod Brown declared after a meeting with fellow Democrats on a compromise drafted by a group of moderate lawmakers from both parties.
Ailing Sen. Ted Kennedy, the Democratic senator who has been absent from the Senate since collapsing on Inauguration Day, is expected to be present for the vote, sources said.
....and senators who are voting who were appointed as opposed to elected.........
President Barack Obama plans to make his first trip to the presidential retreat at Camp David this weekend.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs says Obama and his family will spend Saturday night in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains. It will be Obama’s first trip to the country estate as president.
Then it’s two getaways back to Illinois next week...........
21 Jan 2009 US President Barack Obama issued the first executive orders of his presidency, focusing on White House ethics and transparency.......
Throw a trillion dollars up in the air, and let God figure out how to spend it wisely.
~vid~
Let’s see if I have this straight.
Congress is gonna pass out other people’s money (actually, money borrowed from other people’s unborn kids), but Congress promises to punish the middlemen when they screw up… whatever the heck that means.
(The market used to punish screw-ups, except it didn’t require stealing the money up front.)
Okay, now I’m pissed.
These people are totally frakking incompetent.
