The Washington Times, the only messiah-owned newspaper with the courage to hire a pro-slavery editor, reports that Barack "Erik Gruber" Obama is one cheap bastard:
During his first nine months in office, President Obama has quietly rewarded scores of top Democratic donors with VIP access to the White House, private briefings with administration advisers and invitations to important speeches and town-hall meetings.
Invitations to important speeches and town-hall meetings? What a piker. My president, George Walker Bush, gave big donors a more memorable experience. He put them on nuclear submarines and sent them out to sink Japanese fishing boats. By God, if you were like Helen Culver and contributed a load of money to W, you got to play Red October for a day. That's a hell of a lot better use of time than spending 45 minutes listening to Obama talk about health care or some such shit.
The NYTimes says that the recession is over because the Q3 numbers show that the Gross Domestic Product increased by 3.5%!
And later on, pesky things like unemployment are mentioned, and oh, that 3.5 percent might be related to the Cash for Clunkers (now expired) and an $8,000 federal tax credit for first-time homebuyers (soon to expire?) might have something to do with it.
So what does it all mean? If the government spends piles of money that it doesn't have, and if the dollar is also depressed enough to make international export attractive (of items we no longer make), then we basically don't need 20% of the active workforce to have the jobs they don't have! But other than that! Wheeeeeeeee!
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Futures lost, love vanished
Of Obama's pre-dawn visit to Dover Air Force Base, Robert Gibbs said he was "overwhelmed" by "the genuine anguish" he saw in families' faces. What did he expect to see? Obama said it was "a sobering reminder" of sacrifices he thinks about "each and every day." He damn well better. With his decision on troops looming, let's hope he also hears the growing chorus of those who say Afghanistan cannot be "won." And let him read the scathing, heartfelt resignation letter of Matthew Hoh.
On his loss of faith in "the strategic purposes of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan": "The dead return only in bodily form to be received by families who must be reassured their dead have sacrificed for a purpose worthy of futures lost, love vanished, and promised dreams unkept. I have lost confidence such assurances can be made."
The Rude Pundit weighs in as well:
"...Or, to put it simply, the images of Obama at Dover show a young president nutting up to all responsibilities he has been given. That's called, you know, leadership."
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Demolishing hope for peace: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/10/29-2
"Consider the source of the most recent attention-getting lies – those who would sell their body for money reflect a desperate need for attention and are likely to say and do anything for even more attention." – Miss Wasilla, Alaska 1984, Sarah Palin.
Palin was reacting to ex-future-son-in-law Levi Johnston's assertion that, "There are some things that I have that are huge," by which the recently contracted Playgirl centerfold meant not what you're thinking, but rather that he knows facts about Sarah Palin that would hurt her politically.
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Scarecrow at Firedoglake explains:
CBO estimated that a Public Option available only to the uninsured, self-insured and small businesses (less than 20 employees) would have saved the federal budget $110 billion over ten years, if the PO paid health care providers at Medicare rates plus 5 percent. The savings would be only $25 billion if the PO were required to negotiate rates with providers. If Congress chooses negotiated rates, it raises budget costs by $85 billion for the limited access exchanges.These saving would have arisen because with lower prices for public option insurance, and pressure on private insurers to lower their premiums or lose market share, there would have been less need for federal subsidies to achieve the same level of "affordability." So the switch from Medicare+5% rates to negotiated rates means that premiums for everyone in the exchanges, both public and private plans, will be higher, whether you get a subsidy or not, and on top of that we'll need $85 billion more in subsidies.
SNIP
In other words, if the fiscal-deficit scolds were genuinely serious about reducing the cost of the reform bill, they would expand eligibility to public health care to a lot more people and forget about shielding private insurers from competition.
But then they'd be accused of creating a powerful argument for Medicare for all, and we can't have that. Because as Joe Lieberman reminds us, those government entitlement programs just increase the deficits - uh, except when they lower them.
Read the whole thing.
And always remember that when Blue Dogs like Benny Boy Chandler talk about "fiscal responsibility," they're really talking about enriching their corporate donors at the expense of working families.
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h/t Dick
So scientology gets nailed for fraud ...and the Catholic and Mormon Churches continue to skate?
Justice is indeed blind.
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