Political News Bits of the Day

Discussing all things political in NW Arkansas and beyond.
tmiller51
Posts: 211
Joined: Sat Jan 05, 2008 11:12 pm
Designate the number of cents in half a dollar: 0
Location: Houston, TX

Re: Political News Bits of the Day

Post by tmiller51 »

To be fair about #3, a lot of banking deregulation was done under Clinton.
User avatar
Dardedar
Site Admin
Posts: 8191
Joined: Thu Jan 19, 2006 9:18 pm
Designate the number of cents in half a dollar: 0
Location: Fayetteville
Contact:

Re: Political News Bits of the Day

Post by Dardedar »

George W. Bush Let Terrorists Behind Christmas Bombing Out Of Gitmo

"Brian Ross of ABC News reports that two of the four men behind the plot to blow up a U.S. airliner on Christmas Day were actually prisoners of the United States and that, under the leadership of President George W. Bush, were released into a Saudi art rehabilitation program.

According to Defense Department records, Muhamad Attik al-Harbi (now known as Muhamad al-Awfi) and Said Ali Shari were released from detention at Guantanamo Bay in 2007 despite allegations of material support for military operations in Afghanistan. Naturally, they were never tried on those charges and al-Awfi reportedly was refused access to his own passport to refute allegations made against him. Shari was reportedly killed in an airstrike on Christmas Eve, and is suspected in the murder of 6 Christian missionaries in Yemen.

Both the families of al-Awfi and Shari attribute their radicalization to their years in detention at Guantanamo Bay."

Oops!
User avatar
Dardedar
Site Admin
Posts: 8191
Joined: Thu Jan 19, 2006 9:18 pm
Designate the number of cents in half a dollar: 0
Location: Fayetteville
Contact:

Re: Political News Bits of the Day

Post by Dardedar »

Some have been making the point that a majority is against the current health care bill. The following, from 538, puts this into perspective:

In Polls, Much Opposition to Health Care Plan Is From Left

It turns out that a significant minority of about 25 percent of the people who opposed the plan -- or about 12 of the overall sample -- did so from the left; they thought the plan didn't go far enough.

Image

One way to look at this: 43 percent of people favor health care reform, whereas 38 percent oppose it (20 percent are undecided). But the actual plan under consideration gets numbers that are more or less the reverse of that -- 34 percent in favor, 46 percent opposed -- because a significant number of people think the plan doesn't go far enough.

...the conventional wisdom -- and certainly my assumption -- has been that people oppose the plan because it's too liberal. In fact, some of the opposition seems to stem from the fact that the plan is not liberal enough. This would help to explain, for example, why polls show majorities (sometimes fairly sizable ones) in favor of the public option, but also pluralities or majorities opposed to the overall plan."

Link

DAR
Interesting. If you add the left side together (31+12) and split the undecideds down the middle (+10), you get 53% of the population wanting this bill or something to the left of it. This leaves 48% on the other side, a slight minority, not wanting this bill or wanting something to the right of it.

D.
User avatar
Dardedar
Site Admin
Posts: 8191
Joined: Thu Jan 19, 2006 9:18 pm
Designate the number of cents in half a dollar: 0
Location: Fayetteville
Contact:

Re: Political News Bits of the Day

Post by Dardedar »

From the Arkansas Times:

****
Worsts get the best of us
Rain, snakes and baggers, ’09

Longtime followers of the Best & Worst of Arkansas might notice that there are considerably more worsts than bests in the 2009 installment.

That's a departure for this feature, which had its debut more than 30 years ago. In the 20-plus years that I've been putting it together, I've tried to balance the bests and worsts, usually alternating them, first one then the other, a best for every worst, a worst for every best.

See the list here

Don't miss this, the list is quite amazing. For instance, number one:

Worst refreshments

"A daycare operator at Scott, thinking it was Kool-Aid, served poisonous blue windshield-wiper fluid to 10 children, age 2 to 7, in March. They all survived. The day-care didn't."
User avatar
Doug
Posts: 3388
Joined: Sat Jan 21, 2006 10:05 pm
Designate the number of cents in half a dollar: 0
Location: Fayetteville, AR
Contact:

Re: Political News Bits of the Day

Post by Doug »

Darrel wrote:Don't miss this, the list is quite amazing.
DOUG
I read it. It was amazing. Now I am convinced that Arkansas is pretty worthless. A police officer can shoot someone in the back in the middle of court proceedings, unprovoked, and not get charged?
"We could have done something important Max. We could have fought child abuse or Republicans!" --Oona Hart (played by Victoria Foyt), in the 1995 movie "Last Summer in the Hamptons."
User avatar
Dardedar
Site Admin
Posts: 8191
Joined: Thu Jan 19, 2006 9:18 pm
Designate the number of cents in half a dollar: 0
Location: Fayetteville
Contact:

Re: Political News Bits of the Day

Post by Dardedar »

Bachmann Hypocrisy

Michele Bachmann has become well known for her anti-government tea-bagger antics, protesting health care reform and every other government “handout” as socialism. What her followers probably don’t know is that Rep. Bachmann is, to use that anti-government slur, something of a welfare queen. That’s right, the anti-government insurrectionist has taken more than a quarter-million dollars in government handouts...
Bachmann has an inner Marxist that is perfectly at ease with profiting from taxpayer largesse. According to the organization’s records, Bachmann’s family farm received $251,973 in federal subsidies between 1995 and 2006."

Link
User avatar
Doug
Posts: 3388
Joined: Sat Jan 21, 2006 10:05 pm
Designate the number of cents in half a dollar: 0
Location: Fayetteville, AR
Contact:

Re: Political News Bits of the Day

Post by Doug »

DOUG
I consulted the Fayetteville Freethinker amateur snake expert, Attny. Greg Klebanoff about the "Best and Worst" mention of a timber rattlesnake in Stuttgart, Arkansas. The article had said that the snake was as long and as round as the average utility pole and could swallow grown peccaries. Greg said the size reported was impossible. A Google search turned up a debunk of this snake story.

Here.

It includes a picture.

Image
Utility poles in Stuttgart must be rather small...

Oh, and it's not a timber rattlesnake after all.
"We could have done something important Max. We could have fought child abuse or Republicans!" --Oona Hart (played by Victoria Foyt), in the 1995 movie "Last Summer in the Hamptons."
User avatar
kwlyon
Posts: 526
Joined: Mon Mar 16, 2009 9:59 pm

Re: Political News Bits of the Day

Post by kwlyon »

No it is not...and I would like to know how such a beautiful animal got dead. You know you can call one of us and we will come remove and transport these animals. Or just call the local animal control.

...never-mind. Apparently animal control will shoot them as well! Guess you gotta do what you gotta do....I'm just a bleeding heart snake lover:)
User avatar
Dardedar
Site Admin
Posts: 8191
Joined: Thu Jan 19, 2006 9:18 pm
Designate the number of cents in half a dollar: 0
Location: Fayetteville
Contact:

Re: Political News Bits of the Day

Post by Dardedar »

Lost decade for U.S. economy, workers

"For most of the past 70 years, the U.S. economy has grown at a steady clip, generating perpetually higher incomes and wealth for American households. But since 2000, the story is starkly different.

The past decade was the worst for the U.S. economy in modern times, a sharp reversal from a long period of prosperity that is leading economists and policymakers to fundamentally rethink the underpinnings of the nation's growth.

It was, according to a wide range of data, a lost decade for American workers. The decade began in a moment of triumphalism -- there was a current of thought among economists in 1999 that recessions were a thing of the past. By the end, there were two, bookends to a debt-driven expansion that was neither robust nor sustainable.

There has been zero net job creation since December 1999. No previous decade going back to the 1940s had job growth of less than 20 percent. Economic output rose at its slowest rate of any decade since the 1930s as well."

Wash Post

Image
User avatar
Doug
Posts: 3388
Joined: Sat Jan 21, 2006 10:05 pm
Designate the number of cents in half a dollar: 0
Location: Fayetteville, AR
Contact:

Re: Political News Bits of the Day

Post by Doug »

kwlyon wrote: No it is not...and I would like to know how such a beautiful animal got dead. You know you can call one of us and we will come remove and transport these animals. Or just call the local animal control.
DOUG
Just for the record, "us" is not The Fayetteville Freethinkers. If you call me to remove a snake, you're out of luck.
kwlyon wrote:...never-mind. Apparently animal control will shoot them as well! Guess you gotta do what you gotta do....I'm just a bleeding heart snake lover:)
DOUG
You need to get together with the FF Snake Consultant.

P.S. Don't call me about spiders either!
"We could have done something important Max. We could have fought child abuse or Republicans!" --Oona Hart (played by Victoria Foyt), in the 1995 movie "Last Summer in the Hamptons."
User avatar
Dardedar
Site Admin
Posts: 8191
Joined: Thu Jan 19, 2006 9:18 pm
Designate the number of cents in half a dollar: 0
Location: Fayetteville
Contact:

Re: Political News Bits of the Day

Post by Dardedar »

Blame Canada

Excerpt:

"The Yes Men's stunt drew attention to the chasm between Canada's climate policies and those environmentalists wish it would adopt. Back when Canada was governed by the Liberal Party, it ratified the Kyoto Protocol and agreed to cut emissions by 6 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. But since the election of Prime Minister Stephen Harper in 2006, his conservative government has walked back from that commitment, arguing that those cuts are unattainable. Canada's emissions have also risen sharply since then—largely due to its increased production of oil in the tar sands of Alberta. Now Harper's government wants to do away with the Kyoto Protocol altogether. At Copenhagen, Canada has only offered a scaled-back proposal to cut emissions 3 percent below 1990 levels.

At last year's climate summit, Canada was voted the Fossil of the Year—an award handed out by Climate Action Network International to the conference's most obstructive country. So far, Canada is on track for a repeat victory—in the daily "fossil" awards at Copenhagen, it has landed in the top three six times. George Monbiot recently wrote that Canada is now to climate as Japan is to whaling. And on Monday, Canada took the second to last place on the Climate Protection Index, a project ranking major polluters on their efforts to curb emissions. Only Saudi Arabia scored lower on the list.

And Canada is about to become even more unpopular. On Tuesday, leaked documents from the Harper administration indicated that the nation is considering even weaker emission reduction targets for fossil fuel industries."

Mother Jones
User avatar
kwlyon
Posts: 526
Joined: Mon Mar 16, 2009 9:59 pm

Re: Political News Bits of the Day

Post by kwlyon »

Doug wrote: P.S. Don't call me about spiders either!
Screw the spiders...
Doug wrote:Just for the record, "us" is not The Fayetteville Freethinkers. If you call me to remove a snake, you're out of luck.
No...I meant a quacky bleeding heart animal worshiper which can be found on almost any university. Just look for the guy in your neighborhood who has creatures in his home "god" never intended as pets;)
User avatar
Dardedar
Site Admin
Posts: 8191
Joined: Thu Jan 19, 2006 9:18 pm
Designate the number of cents in half a dollar: 0
Location: Fayetteville
Contact:

Re: Political News Bits of the Day

Post by Dardedar »

Rush Limbaugh the New Poster Child for Blue State Health Care

Limbaugh predictably touted his emergency hospitalization as proof of an unrivaled American health care system which needs no reform:

"I don't think there's one thing wrong with the American health care system," Limbaugh said. "I got no special treatment other than what anybody else that would have called 911 and had been brought in with the same kinds of symptoms."

No different than virtually all Hawaiians, that is.

As the New York Times detailed in October ("In Hawaii's Health System, Lessons for Lawmakers"), Hawaii consistently outperforms almost every other state for health care access, quality and costs. While only about 10% of non-elderly adults are without health insurance in there, Hawaii's premiums and Medicare costs per beneficiary are the lowest in the nation. The Times explained a major reason why:

Since 1974, Hawaii has required all employers to provide relatively generous health care benefits to any employee who works 20 hours a week or more. If health care legislation passes in Congress, the rest of the country may barely catch up.

Hawaii can be found atop the Commonwealth Fund's scorecard of state health care performance. After finishing first in its 2007 assessment, the Commonwealth Fund ranked Barack Obama's birthplace #2 across 30-plus indicators of health care access, cost containment, quality, equity and prevention.

Along with other recent studies, the Commonwealth Fund also confirmed what by now is a truism of the politics of American health care: health care is worst precisely where Republicans poll best.

Crooks & Liars
User avatar
Dardedar
Site Admin
Posts: 8191
Joined: Thu Jan 19, 2006 9:18 pm
Designate the number of cents in half a dollar: 0
Location: Fayetteville
Contact:

Re: Political News Bits of the Day

Post by Dardedar »

Obama Appoints Transgender Woman To Commerce Post

President Obama has appointed Amanda Simpson, a transgender woman, to be the Senior Technical Adviser to the Commerce Department.

Huff Po

Image
User avatar
Dardedar
Site Admin
Posts: 8191
Joined: Thu Jan 19, 2006 9:18 pm
Designate the number of cents in half a dollar: 0
Location: Fayetteville
Contact:

Re: Political News Bits of the Day

Post by Dardedar »

Anti-Gay Evangelicals Attempt To Distance Themselves From Ugandan Anti-Gay Bill They Inspired

Ten months ago, three American evangelicals trooped off to Uganda and, using the power of their words, helped convince officials there to create the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009, that would make it illegal -- and punishable by death -- to be gay.

But for his part, Don Schmierer says he feels "duped," and that he had "no idea some Ugandans were contemplating the death penalty for homosexuality" and that "some of the nicest people I have ever met are gay people."

Yes, surprise, surprise: you go off to Uganda to talk about how "the gay movement is an evil institution" and how they have an agenda of "defeat[ing] the marriage-based society" and somehow, people take this to mean that homosexuals should be killed or something. How terrible that things like this get misconstrued. Right, Scott Lively, who said this on his website?
On the positive side, my host and ministry partner in Kampala, Stephen Langa, was overjoyed with the results of our efforts and predicted confidently that the coming weeks would see significant improvement in the moral climate of the nation, and a massive increase in pro-family activism in every social sphere. He said that a respected observer of society in Kampala had told him that our campaign was like a nuclear bomb against the "gay" agenda in Uganda. I pray that this, and the predictions, are true.
LINK
User avatar
kwlyon
Posts: 526
Joined: Mon Mar 16, 2009 9:59 pm

Re: Political News Bits of the Day

Post by kwlyon »

Darrel wrote:Obama Appoints Transgender Woman To Commerce Post

President Obama has appointed Amanda Simpson, a transgender woman, to be the Senior Technical Adviser to the Commerce Department.

Huff Po

Image
Holy rusted metal batman! My first thought was, "She's kinda pretty"....I feel dirty:)....but she is kinda pretty.
User avatar
kwlyon
Posts: 526
Joined: Mon Mar 16, 2009 9:59 pm

Re: Political News Bits of the Day

Post by kwlyon »

A Giant Douche wrote: On the positive side, my host and ministry partner in Kampala, Stephen Langa, was overjoyed with the results of our efforts and predicted confidently that the coming weeks would see significant improvement in the moral climate of the nation, and a massive increase in pro-family activism in every social sphere. He said that a respected observer of society in Kampala had told him that our campaign was like a nuclear bomb against the "gay" agenda in Uganda. I pray that this, and the predictions, are true.
Wow...it is bad enough that they won't shut up in their own home. Going to other countries and hampering their social development is beyond vulgar.

On a non-related note, I feel strangely compelled to go listen to Aerosmith....
User avatar
Doug
Posts: 3388
Joined: Sat Jan 21, 2006 10:05 pm
Designate the number of cents in half a dollar: 0
Location: Fayetteville, AR
Contact:

Re: Political News Bits of the Day

Post by Doug »

See here.

The idiot birthers are angry at Glen Beck and FAUX NEWS in general for dropping the no-birth-certificate issue.
On Jan 4th, 2010 at 9am I have thousands of patriots that are demanding Beck answer why this matter is being banned from his show and Fox news entirely.
This makes the birthers look so stupid it may be a liberal gag...

UPDATE:
No, it's no gag. But Beck is considering blaming Obama:
Fox News infotainer Glenn Beck returned to the airwaves this new year, outlining his own twisted spin on Birtherism. While Beck acknowledged that the whole notion of a concerted effort decades ago to plant fake Barack Obama birth records is "a little unlikely," he nevertheless wondered aloud on his radio show whether or not the left was actually behind the rise of Birtherism -- thus trading one unlikely conspiracy theory for an even more unlikely one.
Beck said:
But instead of being coy with the seminar callers or with you, I'm just going to expose the game that is going on. Today there is a concerted effort on all radio stations to get Birthers on the air. I have to tell you, are you working for the Barack Obama administration? I mean, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
See here.
"We could have done something important Max. We could have fought child abuse or Republicans!" --Oona Hart (played by Victoria Foyt), in the 1995 movie "Last Summer in the Hamptons."
User avatar
Dardedar
Site Admin
Posts: 8191
Joined: Thu Jan 19, 2006 9:18 pm
Designate the number of cents in half a dollar: 0
Location: Fayetteville
Contact:

Re: Political News Bits of the Day

Post by Dardedar »

Just how bad, how dishonest is the information rightwingers get from their FOX?

***
Sean Hannity keeps claiming that 2009 was the "coldest year on record." He did it again... on Monday night.

It's not the first time. It is, in fact, the fourth time he has made this claim in recent weeks, or one like it (at first he claimed it was the "ninth coldest year on record" -- the guy can't even lie consistently).

As Media Matters notes, Hannity's not even close -- in fact, 2009 was one of the warmest years on record:
NOAA: 2009 year-to-date global temperatures tied "as fifth warmest January-through-October period." NOAA's National Climatic Data Center stated in its October Global Analysis that "[f]or the year to date, the global combined land and ocean surface temperature of 14.7 °C (58.4 °F) tied with 2007 as the fifth-warmest January-through-October period on record."

Met Office: 2009 will be one of top five warmest years globally. The BBC reported on November 24 that "[t]his year will be one of the top five warmest years globally since records began 150 years ago, according to figures compiled by the Met Office." The BBC further reported that "[o]ther sources say it could even be the third warmest."
Crooks and Liars
User avatar
Dardedar
Site Admin
Posts: 8191
Joined: Thu Jan 19, 2006 9:18 pm
Designate the number of cents in half a dollar: 0
Location: Fayetteville
Contact:

Re: Political News Bits of the Day

Post by Dardedar »

Lieberman is going to get his...
81% of Democrats now disapprove of Lieberman's job performance with only 14% approving, and he's not real popular with Republicans who disapprove of him by a 48/39 margin or with independents who do so by a 61/32 spread either. It all adds up to a 25% approval rating with 67% of his constituents giving him bad marks.

Lieberman managed to antagonize both sides with his actions during the health care debate. Among voters who support the health care bill 87% disapprove of how Lieberman handled it with only 10% supporting it. But by voting for the final product after getting it watered down he also managed to earn the unhappiness of constituents opposed to the bill, 52% of whom say they disapprove of what Lieberman did to 33% in support.

Overall just 19% of voters in the state say they like what Lieberman did on the issue with 68% opposed.
Public Policy Polling
Post Reply