You can call this a shameless plug if you want, but I find it to be very amusing.
The Obama Campaign is now offering up their limited edition Made in the USA mug in exchange for a $20 donation to the campaign to re-elect President Obama.
The amusing part is the mug has the president's birth certificate imprinted on the side.
You can't say he doesn't have a sense of humor. All of the Wingnuts who were hoping to find the president's birth certificate can now obtain one for just $20.
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According to 2010 census data, one in five American children now live in poverty. The child poverty rate rose by one million between 2009 and 2010.
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This isn't exactly shocking, in fact it was all too predictable, but it turns out the Republicans on the Super Committee aren't even trying to work with Democrats or even meet the goals set forth when the Super Committee was formed.
Having concluded that the parties could not agree on a far-reaching plan to raise taxes and restrain social spending, Republican members of the supercommittee worked with House Speaker John A. Boehner to develop with a smaller "Plan B" that would stop far short of the panel's goal of $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction over the next decade.
Instead, Republicans proposed to achieve $640 billion in savings, primarily through cuts to domestic agency budgets, a pay freeze and bigger pension contributions for federal workers, cuts in farm subsidies and an array of other spending cuts and revenue raisers.
The offer, delivered Thursday to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, included no cuts to the Pentagon and just one small tax increase, focused on owners of corporate jets, failing two key tests for Democratic negotiators.
The "one small tax increase" included alongside the $640 billion in spending cuts only accounts for $3 billion.
The Republicans also proposed the sale of federally owned land and frequencies to increase revenue, but the sale of those frequencies has already been planned by the Obama Administration and the FCC, and the sale of federally owned land would require reversing a law already passed congress to purchase $3 billion of land each year for the next 30 years.
If the Republicans are willing to dial back the requirements of the Super Committee and propose less cuts than the $1.2 trillion originally targeted, then surely they would be willing to eliminate the triggers entirely. Either eliminating the triggers or passing the buck to the next congress was, as I predicted, the goal of the Democrats all along. And the Democrats, for their part, are openly mocking this latest proposal from the GOP with the deadline for an agreement only four days away.
President Obama claims that he will not accept a bill that fails to meet the goals agreed to during the debt-ceiling showdown, but I'm not entirely convinced he isn't bluffing. After all, as long as this Super Committee charade continues, the American people continue to witness the intransigence of the GOP.
Allowing the triggers to become law and re-writing them during the next session of congress before they take effect in 2013 may be the best scenario for both sides, which also makes it the most likely scenario.
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Scahill: Journalist Sam Husseini was suspended from The National Press Club for asking a Saudi Prince a tough question. His punishment indicates precisely what is wrong with journalism in this country.
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Andrew Sullivan on the police brutality on display at UC Davis:
Whatever it is on the campus at UC Davis, it is not a democracy. It's a police state. For helmeted cops to be openly pepper-spraying unarmed peacefully demonstrating students at a fucking campus is not American. The over-reaction, the lack of professionalism, the random sadism of this boggles the mind.
These kids are harming no-one and exercising a core First Amendment right. The only response to this, to my mind, is to return to that spot in massive numbers and maintain a rigorous nonviolence in defense not just of their cause, but of the First Amendment itself: a sit-in, in other words, in defense of the First Amendment.
You can forgive, but hold accountable, officers who make mistakes in the heat of the moment. But taking glee in spraying pepper spray in the faces of unarmed students is an ugly, ugly event.
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So, it appears that Newt Gingrich has been taking millions of dollars from the health-care industry in support of "Obamacare"-type insurance proposals.
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Nothing wrong with this that deregulation and tax cuts can't fix:
When the Census Bureau this month released a new measure of poverty, meant to better count disposable income, it began altering the portrait of national need. Perhaps the most startling differences between the old measure and the new involves data the government has not yet published, showing 51 million people with incomes less than 50 percent above the poverty line. That number of Americans is 76 percent higher than the official account, published in September. All told, that places 100 million people — one in three Americans — either in poverty or in the fretful zone just above it.
After a lost decade of flat wages and the worst downturn since the Great Depression, the findings can be thought of as putting numbers to the bleak national mood — quantifying the expressions of unease erupting in protests and political swings. They convey levels of economic stress sharply felt but until now hard to measure.
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Saddam Hussein gassed his people, too.
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