The increasing likelihood of a new Federal Reserve effort to boost the economy has some Republicans questioning whether the central bank is trying to help President Obama win reelection.
Congressional Republicans, wary of the Fed's recent efforts to stimulate the recovery, said Wednesday that the its political independence could be jeopardized if officials embark on another round of stimulus so close to Election Day.
"I am shocked, just shocked, that politics are going on in this city!" Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) said sarcastically.
Ok, so let's see if we can get all this stuff to make any sense at all. Before the fed considered stimulus, the GOP consensus was that stimulus spending didn't work and was a huge failure. Now, stimulus is the fed improving the economy to get Obama re-elected. So the stimulus works until it doesn't and an improving economy is good until it's not.
Nope, can't get it to make any damn sense at all.
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There's a good reason this country is polarized.
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Why are churches training paramilitary militias?
The Southern Poverty Law Center has information about Steve Klein, a spokesman for Nakoula (the Coptic Christian who made the anti-Muslim film) who has appeared on network television several times in the last two days.
Klein is a FORMER MARINE and longtime RELIGIOUS RIGHT ACTIVIST WHO HAS HELPED TRAIN PARAMILITARY MILITIAS AT A CALIFORNIA CHURCH. It described Klein as founder of Courageous Christians United, which conducts protests outside abortion clinics, Mormon temples and mosques. It quoted Klein as saying he believes that California is riddled with Muslim Brotherhood sleeper cells ''who are awaiting the trigger date and will begin randomly killing as many of us as they can.'' Klein told the AP he vowed to help make the movie but warned the filmmaker that ''you're going to be the next Theo van Gogh.'' Van Gogh was a Dutch filmmaker killed by a Muslim extremist in 2004 after making a film that was perceived as insulting to Islam. ''We went into this knowing this was probably going to happen,'' Klein said.
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Two GOP Senators yesterday introduced a bill than would ban military bases from hosting same-sex weddings.
U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe hasn't given up his resistance to the acceptance of gays and lesbians in the military or same-sex marriage. On Tuesday, Inhofe and fellow Republican Roger Wicker of Mississippi introduced a measure that would ban same-sex marriages on military bases and protect military chaplains from "pressure" to perform such ceremonies. The two senators described the Military Religious Freedom Act as an effort to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act, known as DOMA, on the Defense Department in the wake of the December 2010 repeal of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy, which ended the official ban on gay men and lesbians serving openly in the military. "President Obama and his administration are dismissing their responsibility to uphold the law of the land by unilaterally deeming DOMA unworthy of enforcement," Inhofe said.
Military chaplains, of course, are already completely free to refuse to perform any ceremony for any reason.
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The Romney campaign has escalated their attacks on President Obama following the murder of four Americans, including the ambassador, in Libya. In an interview with the Washington Post, Mitt Romney's top foreign policy adviser pinned the blame for the attacks squarely on Obama and flatly claimed they would not have happened if Romney had been president:
Advisers to Mitt Romney on Thursday defended his sharp criticism of President Obama and said that the deadly protests sweeping the Middle East would not have happened if the Republican nominee were president.
"There's a pretty compelling story that if you had a President Romney, you'd be in a different situation," Richard Williamson, a top Romney foreign policy adviser, said in an interview. "For the first time since Jimmy Carter, we've had an American ambassador assassinated."
Previously, Romney, his campaign and the Republican Party accused Obama of "sympathizing" with the terrorists who killed Americans in the hours after the attack. The accusation quickly recieved widespread, bipartisan condemnation. Romney then repeated the charge.
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Mitt Romney's chief energy adviser Harold Hamm testified before congress today and argued in favor continued tax subsidies for oil by complaining about his company's stratospheric tax rate. But according to Citizens for Tax Justice, Hamm's company has paid as little as 0.1 percent in 2009.
via ThinkProgress
In his prepared testimony, Hamm defends tax breaks by pointing to his own company, saying, "Continental's effective tax rate is 38%!" But according to Citizens for Tax Justice, Continental paid an average 2.2 percent tax rate, or $40 million, over five years.
Hamm claims a higher tax rate by including deferred taxes the company hasn't paid. It's a popular tactic, used by oil companies and the American Petroleum Institute. CTJ shows that Continental Resources has paid federal income taxes as low as 0.1 percent in the last five years.
Taxed enough already!
Again — who are the real welfare queens in this country? Poor Americans who can't even afford to eat three meals per day or executives living in subsidized largess?
And Mitt Romney wants to cut their taxes even further while maintaining subsidies. Why does Mitt Romney want to weaken welfare requirements for corporations?
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After spending Tuesday and Wednesday feverishly blaming Obama for opening the doors of our embassies to al Qaeda and offering them lemonade and cookies with their jihad, Mitt Romney is now advancing his prescription for the world's ills, which is a healthy dose of Vitamin Mitt.
"There's a pretty compelling story that if you had a President Romney, you'd be in a different situation," Romney adviser Richard Williamson told the Washington Post. "For the first time since Jimmy Carter, we've had an American ambassador assassinated."
And what is that compelling case, Mr. Williamson? READ MORE »
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The first eight months of 2012 have been the warmest of any year on record in the contiguous United States, and this has been the third-hottest summer since record-keeping began in 1895, the U.S. National Climate Data Center said on Monday.
Each of the last 15 months has seen above-average temperatures, something that has never happened before in the 117 years of the U.S. record, said Jake Crouch, a climate scientist at the data center.
Winter, spring and summer 2012 have all been among the top-five hottest for their respective seasons, Crouch said by telephone, and that too is unique in the U.S. record. There has never been a warmer September-through-August period than in 2011-2012, he said.
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