Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Pelosi open to second stimulus............
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Tuesday she is open to introducing a second stimulus bill, but it's too early to determine the size of such a package and the timing on another major economic measure. “We have to keep the door open to see how it goes,” Pelosi told reporters Tuesday following a House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee hearing on the economy. But Pelosi said she wanted to give the $787 billion stimulus package passed last month time to work before she starts making promises on a second stimulus. Pelosi also accused the Washington media and cable news establishment of taking an overly critical approach toward the first stimulus — and expecting too much too soon....Link
Senate passes $410 billion spending bill.......
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A spending bill that funds the U.S. government for the rest of the budget year passed the Senate on Tuesday despite complaints about nearly $8 billion in what critics called "pork-barrel" projects. Senators voted 62-35 to cut off debate on the $410 billion measure and passed it on a voice vote immediately afterward. The omnibus spending bill includes more than 8,000 congressional "earmarks," which total almost $8 billion. The earmarks have caused critics to question President Obama's pledge to end wasteful spending, but Obama administration officials said the bill is a holdover from the previous Congress. "It is in America's best interest to close the book on the last administration and let the new one hit the ground running," said Sen. Daniel Inouye, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee....Link
John Yoo is sorry for nothing...............
March 10, 2009 | You have to give John Yoo credit for chutzpah. The disgraced author of the so-called torture memo was back in the news last week, when the Obama administration released seven more secret opinions, all but one written in whole or in part by Yoo and fellow Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) lawyer Jay Bybee, arguing that the Bush administration had the right to override the Constitution as long as it claimed to be fighting a "war on terror." Professor Yoo, who I am embarrassed to say holds a tenured position at the law school of my alma mater, the University of California at Berkeley, was already known as the official who provided a legal fig leaf behind which the Bush administration tortured inmates at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. His legal misdeeds are widely known, but now they have been exposed chapter and verse. Among the new memos is one written in 2001, in which Yoo and co-author Robert J. Delahunty advised the U.S. that the Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids the Army to be used for law enforcement, and the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, do not apply to domestic military operations undertaken during a "war on terror."....Link
Can Obama Keep Moderate Dems in...............
First there was last winter's $168 billion economic stimulus package, followed by a $300 billion fund in June to help distressed mortgage holders. Then came $350 billion for the banks (and a little of that for the car companies), another $350 billion for the banks, $787 billion in economic stimulus and $410 billion in an earmark-packed spending package for fiscal 2009 that Congress passed on Tuesday. Dizzy? A little nauseous? So are the moderate Democrats in Congress who are usually the gatekeepers of the federal piggy bank — the same fiscal conservatives who helped lead the bipartisan coalition in the Senate that held up and scaled down the Administration's stimulus plan....Link
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Monday, March 9, 2009
Republicans = Democrats.....................
WASHINGTON — Strip away the political finger pointing over President Obama's proposed budget and the fight boils down to a clash of values. Both major parties are really for big government — just big in different places. Republicans say they're outraged that Obama would "borrow and spend" his way to a new behemoth government. But they borrowed and spent their way through the '80s and the current decade. And they love big government — when it's at the Pentagon. Democrats from Obama on down insist that they don't like big government, that they're just forced into a temporary spending spree by the recession. But Democrats love big government as well, when it's for social programs such as universal health care. "The basic difference between Democrats and Republicans in recent decades is which aspect of government spending they prefer," said Steven Schier, a political scientist at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn. "With the Republicans, it's defense. With the Democrats, it's education, environment, health care etc. That's been the major difference between the two parties going back to Reagan."
The numbers tell the tale....Link
The numbers tell the tale....Link
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
