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01 Dec 2010 11:10

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Politics: Senate GOP: We’ll block all bills until we extend Bush tax cuts

  • 42 GOP senators will make Lame Duck Congress suck more source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 1 Comment • Permalink

01 Dec 2010 10:39

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Politics: Deficit Panel’s final findings: Mostly the same as the draft

These guys have offered up a plan that, among other things, would cut 200,000 federal jobs and trim defense spending. But will Congress go for it? source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

01 Dec 2010 10:08

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Politics: Arguments for and against extending unemployment again

  • for According to Judy Conti of the National Employment Law Project, an advocacy group, two million people will prematurely lose their unemployment benefits, causing a “ripple effect.”
  • against Matt Mitchell, a senior research fellow at George Mason University, suggests that “Unemployment benefits probably actually increase unemployment,” allowing people to stay unemployed longer. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

01 Dec 2010 09:54

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Politics: Heckuva job: Senate fails to extend unemployment benefits

  • God forbid we actually think ahead … working together and coming up with a common solution. It makes no sense to me.
  • Sen. Scott Brown • Arguing that the Senate missed a golden opportunity to work on an unemployment extension, instead working on other things while a bipartisan opportunity passed them by. Instead, a bill to extend unemployment for some by an entire year was introduced Monday night, which made it hard to draw consensus support, especially since the benefits weren’t paid for. “I’m not sure why it took so long to get to his point while we spent seven days on food safety,” Brown said. “I’m very, very curious to see what’s next.” source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

30 Nov 2010 20:23

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Politics: Obama’s bipartisan deficit panel not currently seeing eye-to-eye

  • 18 number of members of the Obama’s bipartisan deficit panel
  • 14 number of votes the panel needs to send their findings to Congress
  • no they don’t have 14 votes yet, but they hope they will by Friday source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

29 Nov 2010 23:01

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Politics, U.S.: TARP: Not as expensive as we’d thought it was

  • $109
    billlion     estimated losses of the TARP program, as of last March, according to CBO
  • $66 billion that same estimate, revised five months later by CBO
  • $25 billion the most recent estimate of TARP’s losses, as of today  source
Posted by Seth Millstein • 0 Comments • Permalink

29 Nov 2010 20:40

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Politics: George W. Bush invades Facebook; world stops dead in tracks

The two things that define the naughts more than anything else, together at last. Bush openly admitted he was there because he was “trying to sell books.” source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink
 

29 Nov 2010 20:31

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Politics: Could Wikileaks’ collateral damage be Hillary Clinton?

  • She’s become the issue. She’ll never be an effective negotiator with diplomats who refuse to forgive her exuberances, and even foreign diplomats who do forgive her will still regard her as the symbol of an overreaching United States. Diplomacy is about face, and the only way for other nations to save face will be to give them Clinton’s scalp.
  • Slate’s Jack Shafer • Arguing that the Wikileaks report on the diplomatic cables may be enough to do her in as Secretary of State. Why? Because, according to Wikileaks documents, she ordered her diplomats to spy on the people they were talking to. Even if she did nothing illegal, it’s going to be tough for other countries to trust someone they think is spying on them. If it does kill her career as Secretary of State, though, we don’t think it kills her political career. She’s too good to go away that quickly. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

29 Nov 2010 01:30

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Politics: Max Headroom: John McCain all over place with DADT rhetoric

  • Was Obama an inexperienced politician when he said he’d repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t tell”? Well, he ran a better campaign than this dude back in 2008. (Thought we’d forget that, didn’t you?) Anyway, John McCain was on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday trying to explain how the current gays in the military policy makes sense, in a way that’s giving Candy Crowley some real meat to chew upon. Meanwhile, large chunks of Americans think the policy should be repealed. And that includes this guy’s wife.
  • See, I’m not like Obama at all! The storyline we’re expecting to see in the next few months goes like this: Democratic senators, like Claire McCaskill, will be falling over themselves to differentiate themselves from the president. Don’t expect her to have a fat lip from playing basketball anytime soon.
  • Soft Black Friday story ruined It seems like your normal mid-afternoon CNN story that you can completely ignore until around the 45-second mark, when the anti-fur protesters show up. Then it gets interesting. Hey protesters: People who watch CNN in the daytime don’t buy fur; they can’t afford it.
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

28 Nov 2010 11:07

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Politics: On “It Gets Better” and general, non-anti-gay bullying

  • Clip of the day: We mentioned on Tumblr that we were saddened by the story of a 29-year-old Gloucester, Massachusetts man so broken down by high school bullying that he never went to college and lives in fear of conflict. We made the suggestion that there needs to be a more general “It Gets Better” campaign for guys like him, but it appears Washington Post super-blogging policy wonk Ezra Klein beat us to the punch with this well-thought-out piece on how growing older gives you control over your own destiny. Some good debate has come from Klein’s video, too. Good thing he did it, because we don’t have an animation budget to create a clip of Julius talking about how he got bullied when he was in the factory. (Hat tip fuckyeahcoolquotes) source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink
 
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