The suburban Los Angeles Democrat made the $150,000 loan in 1998, when she was first elected to the U.S House of Representatives. Through Dec. 31, her campaign committee has used donations to pay Napolitano $221,780 of interest while reducing the principal by just $64,727, a review of her FEC filings shows. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601070&sid=aUZXCuqGb_Lw&refer=home
Another argument in favor of term limits.
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Senior executives at some of Wall Street's biggest firms were convinced Bernie Madoff was a fraud as early as 2005 - yet none alerted authorities: http://www.nypost.com/seven/02152009/news/regionalnews/madoff_wall_of_silence_155259.htm
Well at least keeping their pieholes shut didn't cost anything like $50 billion. Oh wait.
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Change we can believe in: Continued cronyism
The brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, is being considered for the position Tom Daschle bowed out of. http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2009/02/dr_ezekiel_emanuel_rahms_broth.html
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Awesome! A US drone kills another in Pakistan: http://news.antiwar.com/2009/02/14/us-drone-strike-kills-at-least-30-in-south-waziristan/
And over in Afghanistan, NATO's senior military commander Gen. John Craddock does not understand why NATO should bother with the need to establish that any given drug dealer is associated with the Taliban. He believes that we should just shoot them all without proof in yet another example of how the United States has emerged as a perceived enemy to the rule of law.
Craddock's proposal is an example of the effect of eight years of Bush policies where such "shoot-first-and-let-God-sort-them-out" approaches were viewed as perfectly legitimate. It also shows that the Obama Administration will have to look closely at the people, like Craddock, who were promoted during these years.
Story here.
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This stuff is starting to scare me
The pace of global warming is likely to be much faster than recent predictions, because industrial greenhouse gas emissions have increased more quickly than expected and higher temperatures are triggering self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms in global ecosystems, scientists said Saturday.
Unexpectedly large amounts of carbon dioxide are being released into the atmosphere as the result of "feedback loops" that are speeding up natural processes. Prominent among these, evidence indicates, is a cycle in which higher temperatures are beginning to melt the arctic permafrost, which could release hundreds of billions of tons of carbon and methane into the atmosphere, said several scientists on a panel at the meeting.
The permafrost holds 1 trillion tons of carbon, and as much as 10 percent of that could be released this century, Field said. Melting permafrost also releases methane, which is 25 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
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Benjamin Button's outlook was grim: an entire lifetime of negative growth.
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Ballet clip featuring a one-legged performer: Apostropher
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Public service announcement: If you're in Singapore, don't take the counterfeit Viagra branded "Santi Bovine Penis Erecting Capsule": http://www.ukmedix.com/impotence/singapore_report_on_illegal_impotence_meds_shows_4_dead_and_3_in_comas4452.cfm
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How cruel is this?
For years gay and lesbian couples have complained about being denied access to loved ones in hospitals. Now, a lawsuit has been filed in Miami in which Janice Langbehn alleges that she was prevented from being with her partner of 18 years, Lisa Marie Pond, 39, as she died at Jackson Memorial Hospital after a brain aneurysm. The reason for the denial was never made clear to her.
Pond suffered a brain aneurysm in February 2007 and fell into a coma. She said that the hospital would not allow her or their three children to see Pond.
She alleges negligence in forcing her and the children to sit for roughly eight hours while Pond allegedly died alone. She says that she supplied a health care directive form and a power of attorney document to JMH, but was still denied access. She is suing the hospital, two doctors and a social worker. Story here.
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4,245 soldiers killed in Iraq; 651 in Afghanistan.
Ten contractors and dozens of National Guardsmen — including a dying senior officer — allege that KBR knowingly allowed them to be poisoned by cancer-causing chemicals at a Basra water plant where they were making repairs to keep Iraq's oil fields pumping during the war.- houston chronicle
Time to be awarded another contract! And by all means, let's keep pouring trillions into two failed wars.
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Since the most recent murder of 1,400 people in Gaza (mostly women and children), for the most part, the ceasefire has held. But Israel's PM Ehud Olmert says that the ceasefire will not mean the opening of border crossings into the strip, which Israel has kept closed to all but the bare minimum of humanitarian supplies for several months.
"We will not allow the opening of the crossings to Gaza, to the extent that it will bring back life to normal," Olmert insisted, saying that his government would only consider opening the crossings when captured soldier Gilad Shalit is returned. Negotiations for the release of Shalit are ongoing concurrently with the ceasefire deal, though Hamas has rejected linking the two.
Israel has refused to allow reconstruction materials into the strip, leaving much of the area in ruins.
While reconstruction is not an option for Palestinians, some 1,700 dunams (one dunam equals 4 acres) of land in the northern part of the West Bank were just declared state land last week, paving the way for the West Bank settlement to start the process of seeking government approval to build there!
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It's time for President Obama to be a little less reachy-outy. Who matters more, 3 Republicans or 59% of America? A CBS News/New York Times poll reveals that that whole "America is a 'center right' nation" is just one more example of myth-information.
Via DKos:
The healthcare question reveals that Americans are much more likely to desire government-sponsored health insurance than they did in 1970.
HEALTH INSURANCE: PRIVATE ENTERPRISE VS. GOVERNMENT?
1979
Private Enterprise: 48%
Government - All Problems: 28%
Government - Emergencies: 12%
Don't know: 12%
2009
Private Enterprise: 32% (-16%)
Government - All Problems: 49% (+21%)
Government - Emergencies: 10% (-2%)
Don't know: 9% (-3%)
So there you have it. Private industry loses 16% and a full government healthcare solution gains 21%. A full 37% swing. Take note, Democrats.
Who are these people that "don't know"?
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Paging Attorney General Eric Holder: former Gitmo guard tells all and it's not pretty
It seems like a daily occurrence now: Someone comes forward to share his or her vile revelations about the Bush Crime Family's practice of repeatedly using torture, and then covering it up:
Army Private Brandon Neely served as a prison guard at Guantanamo Bay in the first years the facility was in operation. With the Bush Administration, and thus the threat of retaliation against him now gone, Neely decided to step forward and tell his story. "The stuff I did and the stuff I saw was just wrong," he told the Associated Press. Neely describes the arrival of detainees in full sensory-deprivation garb, he details their sexual abuse by medical personnel, brutal beatings out of frustration, fear, and retribution, the first hunger strike and its causes, torturous shackling, positional torture, interference with religious practices and beliefs, verbal abuse, restriction of recreation, the behavior of mentally ill detainess, an isolation regime that was put in place for child-detainees, and his conversations with prisoners David Hicks and Rhuhel Ahmed.
But we should look forward, not back, according to Team Obama. I'm a big fan, Prez O, but I'm a bigger fan of justice and the Constitution. My hope is that the president is waiting for things like this to turn up so that he can say that, clearly, he would be justified in nailing these thugs.
You can find his entire account here.
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Legislators in California had their Valentine's Day and holiday weekend plans disrupted because they need 3 Republicans to cross over and vote for the governor's new budget, but the girly men wouldn't do it: - h/t Dick: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-02-14-california-furloughs_N.htm?csp=34
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We're all fascists now
Who says wingnuts can't do cutting edge satire? You want proof? Why just sample this tasty dish from Pajama Media's own Michael Ledeen:
What is happening now–and Newsweek [a reference to Newsweek's We're all Socialists Now issue] is honest enough to say so down in the body of the article–is an expansion of the state's role, an increase in public/private joint ventures and partnerships, and much more state regulation of business. Yes, it's very "European," and some of the Europeans even call it "social democracy," but it isn't.It's fascism. Nobody calls it by its proper name, for two basic reasons: first, because "fascism" has long since lost its actual, historical, content; it's been a pure epithet for many decades. Lots of the people writing about current events like what Obama et. al. are doing, and wouldn't want to stigmatize it with that "f" epithet. [...]
Back in the early thirties, before "fascism" became a pure epithet, leading politicians and economists recognized that it might work, and many believed it was urgently required. When Roosevelt was elected in 1932, in fact, Mussolini personally reviewed his book, Looking Forward, and the Duce's bottom line was, "this guy is one of us."
Great, just great stuff. And I have to admit that, much as I have criticized Ledeen in the past, this is just an amazing piece he's written. He's taken this essay to a place in the literary canon few have ever visited, one only the Great Jonah Goldberg with his comic masterpiece "Liberal Fascism" has colonized before.
What? What's that you say? He's dead serious? Come on now. Who could call out both Obama and FDR as fascists in the same article and mean it? Only a dunce of monumental proportions would describe the modern Democratic party as an offshoot of the Nazis or Mussolini's Blackshirts. A dunce -- or a comic genius, that is. Well, I leave it to you to judge which label best fits Michael Ledeen.
Either way, it's funny as hell.
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In case you missed it, Dan Akroyd returns to SNL to mock GOP opposition: http://brilliantatbreakfast.blogspot.com/2009/02/are-you-sure-this-is-just-satire.html
They should have used his OLD character:
"Yeah .... that's right Jane. And here's a real popular toy that the Republicans want to give every American kid - it's called Bag-O-Shit."
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CNN had an exclusive with Walnuts, in which he tries his level best to look concerned for the plight of the average American while he bemoans that gosh, golly gee, the stimulus bill just wasn't bipartisan. That is why, of course, despite his home state of Arizona nearly topping the lists of foreclosures for the country, McCain couldn't bring himself to support the stimulus bill. But what makes his plaintive wailings all that much more amusing is that McCain actually whines about the....wait for it...tax cuts, that he admits have not worked in the past. You know, those tax cuts added to gain bipartisan support? They weren't bipartisan, according to Grumpy McSame.
But the point is, this bill was not bipartisan. It was -- it is incredibly expensive. It has hundreds of billions of dollars in projects which will not yield in jobs. Now, if you think we need to improve education, spend money for it, fine. But this was supposed to be a package that was going to create jobs. A lot of this package will not create jobs. A lot of the tax cuts we've tried before of just giving people some money, it hasn't changed the way that savings have been conducted by Americans. So I'm not happy--and most of us aren't-- at the lack of true bipartisanship in approaching this legislation.
Are you kidding me? The utter hypocrisy is mind-blowing...and yet, McCain has the audacity to sit there with a look of deep regret and sincerity on his face as he spews complete tripe. But host John King is not about to let McCain feel alone in his regret, so he launches what has to be the biggest softball concern troll framing ever:
KING: Let's go to the process a little bit more. It's a thousand pages. It's eight pounds. We had it fedexed out to us. We're contributing to the economy just having it shipped out here. Some of the changes were literally hand-scribbled on the side of the page. This happens all the time, unfortunately…
McCAIN: It's the old business as usual…
KING: Well, if it's the old business as usual, didn't President Obama promise a new way of doing things in Washington? You say it was a terrible start. Are you sitting in your office these days saying, "I told you so"?
This from the man who warned Obama about being too liberal.
Forehead, meet keyboard. What I wouldn't give to see an intellectually honest discussion of the stimulus bill...obviously, it will not be found on King's "State of the Union" show.
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In 1993, former Speaker Newt Gingrich notoriously whipped the House GOP into opposing President Clinton's major initiatives, ranging from the budget to health care reform. The New York Times reports that Gingrich has been advising the GOP leadership to follow the same path with President Obama's agenda:
Rep. Eric Cantor said he had studied Mr. Gingrich's years in power and had been in regular touch with him as he sought to help his party find the right tone and message. Indeed, one of Mr. Gingrich's leading victories in unifying his caucus against Mr. Clinton's package of tax increases to balance the budget in 1993 has been echoed in the events of the last few weeks. "I talk to Newt on a regular basis because he was in the position that we are in: in the extreme minority," he said.
In 1993, speaking about Clinton's budget, Gingrich warned: "I believe this will lead to a recession next year. This is the Democrat machine's recession, and each one of them will be held personally accountable."
I'm glad the mainstream media gives these idiots a platform to spew their lies.
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U.S. Sen. Roland Burris, who repeatedly denied anyone tied to disgraced former Gov. Rod Blagojevich solicited him for cash in exchange for his seat, now acknowledges Blagojevich's brother asked him three times to help with fundraising… In a statement released Saturday, Burris said he didn't disclose the facts because he 'was not given the opportunity to' during the impeachment committee hearing." Uh huh. Chicago Tribune
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Don't be late with a payment
Not content with the billions in bailout cash, credit card companies are raising interest rates: http://www.latimes.com/business/printedition/la-fi-lazarus15-2009feb15,0,6708971.column
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