● Obama's economic team considering new stimulus package... ● Kabul Bank called on Thursday for intervention by the United States to head off a financial meltdown.... ● Health insurance tax credit likely to affect small part of small-business workforce... ● Mixed reaction to new FEC rules on candidates, interest groups working together... ● Maryland Democrat Sen. Currie indicted on charges of taking bribes... ● Summer of Economic Discontent ... ● CBO Update... ● Obama administration appeals stem cell funding decision despite US Law... ● Gloom for Democrats as they look to November... ● U.S. troop deaths in Afghan war up sharply...
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When the people fear the government, there is tyranny; When the government fears the people, there is liberty.  ~ Thomas Jefferson

 

Entries Tagged as 'Reality Check'

Obama’s economic team considering new stimulus package

September 2nd, 2010 · Deception, Democrats, Money Lost, Obama's Scheme, Selling Out the US, Stimulus, Tax Dollars, Taxes, Terrorism from Within, Treason

White House considering major tax breaks for businesses, sources say

By Lori Montgomery – Thursday, September 2, 2010; 5:33 PM

With the recovery faltering less than two months before the November congressional elections, President Obama’s economic team is considering another big dose of stimulus in the form of tax breaks for businesses – potentially worth hundreds of billions of dollars, according to two people familiar with the talks.

Among the options are a temporary payroll tax holiday and a permanent extension of the research and development tax credit, say people familiar with the talks who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to describe private deliberations.

Permanently extending the research credit would cost roughly $100 billion over the next decade, tax experts said. And depending on its form and duration, a payroll tax holiday could let businesses keep more than $300 billion they would otherwise owe the Treasury.

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Gloom for Democrats as they look to November

September 1st, 2010 · Accountability, Change of Power, Congress, Obama Exposed, Republicans

By Dan Balz Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 31, 2010; 11:39 PM

The Gallup organization dropped a bomb on the political world this week. In shorthand, the pollsters said Monday that if the midterm elections were held now, Republicans would take control of the House – and probably by a comfortable margin.

On Tuesday, James Campbell, a professor of political science at the University of Buffalo, weighed in with a prediction based on his modeling of the political climate. He said that Republicans are poised to gain 51 or 52 House seats, at least 11 more than needed to depose the Democrats.

Election Day is still two months away, but the twin findings added to the fear among Democrats that their House majority – and possibly their Senate majority as well – is in jeopardy.

For decades, Gallup has asked voters the following question: “If the elections for Congress were being held today, which party’s candidate would you vote for in your congressional district?”

This week’s survey produced the largest lead for the Republicans in the history of asking that question: 51 percent to 41 percent. Ninety-six percent of Republicans said they would vote for the GOP candidate, while 88 percent of Democrats said they would support the Democrat. Independents, who helped power Democratic victories in 2006 and 2008, split 48 percent to 31 percent for Republicans.

This measurement (known as the generic ballot question) has sometimes been considered an imperfect or misleading indicator of House election results. Gallup begs to differ. Frank Newport, editor in chief of the Gallup poll, said that Gallup’s final survey of likely voters before Election Day has been an accurate predictor of the two parties’ share of the national vote in House elections. The national vote, in turn, he added, is an excellent predictor of seats won or lost.

Four years ago, when Democrats won control of the House, the final Gallup survey of likely voters gave Democrats an advantage of seven percentage points over Republicans. Their actual share of the national two-party vote was eight points more.

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Obama administration intensifies efforts in Sudan as Mid-Term election nears

August 30th, 2010 · Deception, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Obama's Scheme

By Mary Beth Sheridan – Monday, August 30, 2010

The Obama administration, which came to office promising stronger leadership on Sudan, is now scrambling to salvage a 2005 U.S.-backed peace accord and prevent Africa’s largest nation from sliding back into civil war.

In recent weeks, the administration has doubled its diplomatic presence in South Sudan and dispatched a respected former ambassador to help with negotiations on an independence referendum for the region, which is scheduled for January.

President Obama and his advisers are also mulling over incentives to persuade Sudan’s leadership to cooperate with the referendum, officials say.

Former officials and activist groups worry that the flurry of action may be too little, too late. They say the Obama administration’s efforts over the past year have been hobbled by infighting and a lack of high-level attention.

“President Obama’s approach to Sudan may well lead to his being the one who ‘lost’ Sudan and the opportunities for peace” in the 2005 accord, said Roger Winter, who helped negotiate the deal that ended Sudan’s 21-year civil war. He added, however, that the recently intensified diplomatic effort offers some hope.

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In 2010, Obama’s poll numbers less of an asset for congressional Democrats

August 30th, 2010 · Accountability, Change of Power, Democrats, Dissention, Obama Exposed

By Chris Cillizza Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 30, 2010; 12:18 AM

Two years can change just about everything in politics.

In the 2008 campaign, Democrats running for the Senate did anything – and everything – to associate themselves with then-Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois.

With about two months remaining in the 2010 campaign season, however, Obama’s political fortunes have dipped in a handful of states holding competitive Senate races – complicating the winning math for Democratic candidates already struggling with a pessimistic electorate that remains deeply concerned about the country’s direction.

“In midterm elections, the presidential numbers serve like a weight on scale,” said one senior Democratic consultant who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid about the playing field. “The heavier [or worse] the numbers, the harder it is for any person in the party to get back to even keel.”

Recent polls on Obama conducted for many of the nation’s top Senate races show that those who disapprove of the job the president is doing outweigh those who approve.

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The Death of Conservatism Was Greatly Exaggerated

August 28th, 2010 · Accountability, Change of Power, Deception, Democrats, Dissention, Federal Spending, Government, Government Control, Greed, Money Lost, Non-Transparency, Obama Exposed, Obama's Scheme, Tax Dollars, Taxes

In 2008 liberals proclaimed the collapse of Reaganism. Two years later the idea of limited government is back in vogue.

By Peter Berkowitz

Last August left little doubt that a conservative revival was underway. Constituents packed town-hall meetings across the country to confront Democratic House members and senators ill-prepared to explain why, in the teeth of a historic economic downturn and nearly 10% employment, President Obama and his party were pressing ahead with costly health-care legislation instead of reining in spending, cutting the deficit and spurring economic growth.

Still, whether that revival would have staying power was very much open to question. A year later—and notwithstanding the Democrats’ steadily declining poll numbers and the mounting electoral momentum that could well produce a Republican majority in the House and a substantial swing in the Senate—it still is.

Sustaining the revival depends on the ability of GOP leaders, office-holders and candidates to harness the extraordinary upsurge of popular opposition to Mr. Obama’s aggressive progressivism. Our constitutional tradition provides enduring principles that should guide them.

In late 2008 and early 2009, in the wake of Mr. Obama’s meteoric ascent, the idea that conservatism would enjoy any sort of revival in the summer of 2009 would have seemed to demoralized conservatives too much to hope for. To leading lights on the left, it would have appeared absolutely outlandish.

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Harry Reid weighs in on N.Y. mosque: An attempt to save his job

August 16th, 2010 · Deception, Democrats, Ethics, Federal Spending, Obama's Scheme, Selling Out the US

By Karen Tumulty
Now that President Obama has addressed and amplified the issue, the political debate over the construction of a mosque near Ground Zero is being felt far from Lower Manhattan, in political races across the country.

But candidates could find it difficult to straddle the issue, as Obama did, by expressing their support for religious freedom while refusing to take a stand on the construction of the Islamic center.

The latest to weigh in: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D), who is battling to keep his seat in Nevada.

In a statement issued by his spokesman, Jim Manley, Reid came out against the building of the Islamic center.

“The First Amendment protects freedom of religion,” Manley wrote in an e-mail. “Senator Reid respects that, but thinks that the mosque should be built someplace else.”

He added: “If the Republicans are being sincere, they would help us pass this long overdue bill to help the first responders whose health and livelihoods have been devastated because of their bravery on 9/11, rather than continuing to block this much-needed legislation.”

Reid issued the statement after the campaign of his Republican opponent in the election, Sharron Angle, demanded that he take a position.

“As the Majority Leader, Harry Reid is usually President Obama’s mouthpiece in the U.S. Senate, and yet he remains silent on this issue,” Angle communications director Jarrod Agen said. “Reid has a responsibility to stand up and say no to the mosque at Ground Zero or once again side with President Obama — this time against the families of 9/11 victims. America is waiting.”

By Washington Post Editor | August 16, 2010; 3:20 PM ET

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Democrats uncertain about approach to midterms: Honorably would be Novel!

August 16th, 2010 · Corruption, Deception, Democrats, Ethics, Greed, Selling Out the US, Tax Dollars, Taxes, Terrorism from Within, Unemployment

Reference:  Just some ideas that come to mind

 

By Paul Kane – Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 16, 2010

The Democrats passed the stimulus package. They passed health-care and Wall Street overhauls and revamped the financing system for higher education. Their other main priorities, on immigration and energy, appear to be headed nowhere.

So, what will they do next?

It’s a question that has left congressional Democrats, who have spent the past two years mocking Republicans for lacking an agenda, without a clear plan of their own to promote in the final 80 days of the 2010 campaign.

House Democratic leaders issued lawmakers three sets of talking points that included one package of new legislation, a collection of modest bills designed to revive the manufacturing sector. Senate Democrats have not exactly jumped to embrace those proposals, instead suggesting that between now and Election Day a more detailed agenda might be forthcoming.

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The Blame Bush Strategy Won’t Work: Polls reveal voters are receptive to GOP ideas.

August 12th, 2010 · Accountability, Change of Power, Democrats, Obama Exposed, Obama's Scheme, Selling Out the US

By Karl Rove

To save themselves in the midterm elections, Democrats are counting on selling two themes: The state of the economy is all George W. Bush’s fault, and Republican policies will take us backwards. President Obama relished going to Texas this week to blame his predecessor for the current bad economy.

Nice try, but it won’t work. Don’t take my word. This is what Mr. Obama’s pollster, Joel Benenson, has found. The Benenson Strategy Group wasn’t exactly quite this blunt in its report for the “Third Way,” a centrist Democratic organization. But its data was.

In its poll released in July, Benenson asked, “Generally speaking, who is more responsible for the recent economic recession—President Barack Obama or President George W. Bush?” The answer was Mr. Bush 53%, Mr. Obama 26%, and “Don’t know” 21%.

But answers to important issues like who’s responsible for the recession are rarely binary. Buried in the “Third Way” data was a different answer that went unmentioned in its covering memo. The question of who’s responsible for the recession was asked a second way, with more possible culprits.

Here the biggest blame for the recession went to “big banks and Wall Street” (34%), followed by “American consumers who lived beyond their means” (24%). Thirteen percent blamed Mr. Obama, 20% blamed Mr. Bush, and 9% were still in the “don’t know category.” Put another way, at least 80% didn’t blame Mr. Bush, as Mr. Obama obsessively does.

More importantly, Americans simply won’t fall for Mr. Obama’s claim that if empowered, congressional Republicans would only return to “policies that crashed the economy . . . undercut the middle class . . . [and] mortgaged our future.”

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The Obsolescence of Obama :The magic of 2008 can’t be recreated, and good riddance to it.

August 11th, 2010 · Obama Exposed, Opinion

By Fouad Ajami

Not long ago Barack Obama, for those who were spellbound by him, had the stylishness of JFK and the historic mission of FDR riding to the nation’s rescue. Now it is to Lyndon B. Johnson’s unhappy presidency that Democratic strategist Robert Shrum compares the stewardship of Mr. Obama. Johnson, wrote Mr. Shrum in the Week magazine last month, never “sustained an emotional link with the American people” and chose to escalate a war that “forced his abdication as president.”

A broken link with the public, and a war in Afghanistan he neither embraces and sells to his party nor abandons—this is a time of puzzlement for President Obama. His fall from political grace has been as swift as his rise a handful of years ago. He had been hot political property in 2006 and, of course, in 2008. But now he will campaign for his party’s 2010 candidates from afar, holding fund raisers but not hitting the campaign trail in most of the contested races. Those mass rallies of Obama frenzy are surely of the past.

Senior Economics Writer Steve Moore asks whether the President is finished as an agent of change.

The vaunted Obama economic stimulus, at $862 billion, has failed. The “progressives” want to double down, and were they to have their way, would have pushed for a bigger stimulus still. But the American people are in open rebellion against an economic strategy of public debt, higher taxes and unending deficits. We’re not all Keynesians, it turns out. The panic that propelled Mr. Obama to the presidency has waned. There is deep concern, to be sure. But the Obama strategy has lost the consent of the governed.

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Missouri vote cited as proof that public dislikes health-care overhaul

August 9th, 2010 · Accountability, Change of Power, Dissention, Government, Healthcare, Non-Transparency, Obama Exposed, Politics, States

By Alec MacGillis Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 5, 2010

A day after Missouri voters rejected a key component of the nation’s new health-care overhaul, Republicans seized on the result as conclusive evidence that Americans don’t like the law.

Primary voters in Missouri were the first to vote directly on the law, in a ballot referendum that prohibits the federal government from requiring people to have health insurance. The measure passed 71 percent to 29 percent.

Supporters of the overhaul played down the vote, noting that it has no practical impact and that Tuesday’s electorate was largely Republican. But they conceded that a lack of public support could make it hard to put the law into practice.

Lawmakers in several other states, such as Virginia, have already passed laws rejecting the “individual mandate,” a central feature of the health-care overhaul. The state laws, including Missouri’s, are largely symbolic because they are trumped by federal law.

More consequential are the legal challenges that have been brought by Republican state attorneys general, including a lawsuit by Virginia’s Ken Cuccinelli II. A federal judge ruled Monday that Virginia’s suit can go forward, rejecting arguments from the Obama administration that the state had no standing to sue.

Regardless, Republicans said Wednesday that the vote in Missouri marks a turning point in the health-care debate.

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