Obama’s new mortgage aid plan erases 10% of homeowners’ original debt
The Obama administration is trying to jump-start its sputtering attempts to tackle the foreclosure crisis with an effort to assist homeowners who owe more on their properties than their homes are worth. Starting Tuesday, the Federal Housing Administration will permit lenders to give these borrowers refinanced loans backed by...
Obama Calls for $50 Billion Public Works Plan
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and MARY WILLIAMS WALSH MILWAUKEE — President Obama, looking to stimulate a sluggish economy and create jobs, called Monday for Congress to approve major upgrades to the nation’s roads, rail lines and runways — part of a six-year plan that would cost tens of billions of dollars and create a government-run...
No recession here: Election spending sets records
Turns out politics, for all its focus on the gloomy economy, is a recession-proof industry. This year’s volatile election is bursting with money, setting fundraising and spending records in a high-stakes struggle for control of Congress amid looser but still fuzzy campaign finance rules. Based on the latest financial reports,...
Republican operative recruits ‘street people’ as Green Party candidates
By John Byrne Remember 2000? That’s when Ralph Nader’s Green Party candidacy in Florida helped abet a presidential coup for then-governor George W. Bush. 2000, meet 2010. A Republican political operative in Arizona has taken the third-party to the third degree: he’s now recruiting candidates to run on the...
Republican wave building toward November’s elections
By STEVEN THOMMA – McClatchy Newspapers Two years into the age of Obama, America may be about to change course. The hope and optimism that President Barack Obama stoked into Democratic control of Washington two years ago has faded. Instead, voters are anxious about the economy. They’re worried about jobs and...
Obama’s reverting to rhetoric now that he has lost his mojo
By L. IAN MACDONALD In Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay The American President, Michael Douglas tells Annette Bening in the Oval Office that the White House is “the single greatest home-court advantage in the modern world.” Just so -it is the symbolic centre of an American president’s power. For that reason,...
Army ‘birther’ loses ruling on evidence
FORT MEADE, Md. — An Army judge ruled Thursday that proof of President Barack Obama’s eligibility to be president isn’t relevant to the defense of an Army doctor accused of failing to obey a lawful order. Lt. Col. Terrence Lakin has been charged with disobeying orders after failing to show up for duty in Afghanistan...
Lobbyists Tie Brewer Administration To Private Prisons
PHOENIX, Ariz. — Gov. Jan Brewer took center stage last Tuesday night after she officially clenched the Republican nomination. Standing just behind her was a man most Arizonans would not recognize. He’s Chuck Coughlin, Brewer’s campaign chairman, policy adviser and a lobbyist for the largest private prison company...
Lawmakers’ Use of Travel Stipends Probed
By BRODY MULLINS And JOHN D. MCKINNON Congressional investigators are questioning a half-dozen lawmakers for possibly misspending government funds meant to pay for overseas travel, according to people familiar with the matter. The investigation follows a Wall Street Journal article in March that said lawmakers had used daily...
Is the tea party becoming the new Grand Old Party?
WASHINGTON — Is the tea party the new Republican Party? The grass-roots network of fed-up conservative-libertarian voters displayed its power in its biggest triumph of the election year: the toppling of Sen. Lisa Murkowski in Alaska’s GOP primary. Political novice Joe Miller is the fifth tea party insurgent to win...
Murkowski concedes Alaska Senate race
ANCHORAGE — Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski was booted from office in the Republican primary Tuesday by a little-known conservative lawyer backed by former governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, in arguably America’s biggest political upset of the year. Joe Miller, backed by Palin and the ultraconservative...
Pawlenty directs state to decline health reform
CHICAGO — Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty directed state agencies on Tuesday to decline all discretionary participation in federal healthcare reform, throwing up roadblocks to President Barack Obama’s goal of providing health insurance to all Americans. “Obamacare is an intrusion by the federal government into...
The White House vanity makeover won’t fix Barack Obama’s decaying presidency
By Nile Gardiner While British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne frets over spending £148 on a fish and chips lunch with the Governor of the Bank of England, Barack Obama has no qualms about requesting an expensive revamp of the Oval Office when the US federal deficit is approaching a staggering $1.3 trillion and unemployment...
The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party
By FRANK RICH ANOTHER weekend, another grass-roots demonstration starring Real Americans who are mad as hell and want to take back their country from you-know-who. Last Sunday the site was Lower Manhattan, where they jeered the “ground zero mosque.” This weekend, the scene shifted to Washington, where the avatars of oppressed...
Congress may sneak through Internet ‘kill switch’ in defense bill
By Daniel Tencer A federal cybersecurity bill that critics say creates a presidential “kill switch” for the Internet could be added on to a defense spending bill and passed without much debate, technology news sources report. Sen. Thomas Carper (D-DE), one of the sponsors of the Protecting Cyberspace as a National...
Ground Zero Muslim center may get public financing
(Reuters) – The Muslim center planned near the site of the World Trade Center attack could qualify for tax-free financing, a spokesman for City Comptroller John Liu said on Friday, and Liu is willing to consider approving the public subsidy. The Democratic comptroller’s spokesman, Scott Sieber, said Liu supported...
The Kochtopus
cryptogon.com Polemical essays can be worth reading, as long as one understands that the author’s goal is to push his or her rat poison, by showing you how bad that rat poison is. With this caveat in mind, you’re all set to feast on the tidy reality offered by a strongly polemical piece. I learned more about the Koch syndicate...
Opinion: USA a failed state? It may be closer than you think
Paul Wallis There’s only one common factor in the failure of great nations: Mismanagement. The USA is heading down a well traveled road to its own Armageddon. Rome, China, Russia, the British Empire and others have all been there before. The Caligula- like state of the US as a corporate entity is hardly a secret. Caligula...
48% Say Obama’s Views Are Extreme
Forty-eight percent (48%) of U.S. voters now regard President Obama’s political views as extreme. Forty-two percent (42%) place his views in the mainstream, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. By comparison, 51% see the views of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as mainstream. Thirty-five percent...
