Friday, August 13, 2010

 Tea Party candidate Marg Baker says immigrants should be sent to 1940s style "camps' (video) 


 Tea Party candidate Marg Baker says immigrants should be sent to 1940s style "camps' (video) 

- Sounds fascist to me too.

 Drug Industry Weighs Allegiance 


 Drug Industry Weighs Allegiance 

- It's all about lobbies. They rule Washington.

Scientists long-range forecast: much more of the same; a century of heat, fires, floods

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/08/13/scientists-long-range-forecast-century-heat-fires-floods/

Details on stabbing suspect's capture

http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/08/13/michigan.serial.stabbing.arrest/

- If he had been Arab there would have been media outrage, especially from Fox

 Disappointing data darken economic outlook 


 Disappointing data darken economic outlook 

Transcript: 'Morning Joe' (8-12-10)

Full transcript. Excerpt below:

SCARBOROUGH: By the way, this will shock you, Barnicle. Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize winner, "New York Times" columnist weighed in on this last night and he described, this is going to shock you. He described Robert Gibbs actions as, quote, "stupid."

BARNICLE: I`ve never heard him say that word about anything or anyone that`s so unlike Professor Krugman.

SCARBOROUGH: I scanned it and say where he is going to say stupid, stupid, stupid. It was the fifth paragraph.

BARNICLE: Stupid, scan the page and it pops up.

JANSING: Which roughly describes apparently how most of America feels about every single person in Washington.

SCARBOROUGH: The polls yesterday that came out.

JANSING: Unbelievable. I don`t remember anything like this. The new NBC News/"Wall Street Journal" polls showing things, let`s say, not looking good for the president, for Republicans, for Democrats, Congress as a whole.

When asked as a country is better off since Barack Obama became president, just 31 percent thought the country is faring better and 68 percent said it was worse off or the same.

When asked what issues the president has fallen short on the top answers were reducing government spending, cutting the budget deficit, the economy.

Americans were split on Obama`s overall job performance, 47 percent approving and 48 percent disapproving. The Democratic Party also hit a record high in their negative ratings, 44 percent to 33 percent positive.

It`s even worse for the Republicans, 46 percent of the country has a negative view of the GOP, 24 percent a positive view. As for the job Congress is doing, an overwhelming majority, 72 percent disapproved, only 21 percent say Congress is doing a good job.

SCARBOROUGH: Chris, I don`t know where to start, Halpern and I were talking about this yesterday. Willie, usually it`s a zero sum game. If you have the party in power, the Republicans are in the White House.

Their approval ratings go down, Democrat numbers go up. But the Democratic Party`s numbers have gone down and the Republican Party`s numbers have gone down even more.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It`s a messed up scale where both sides are going down. The question is what does that mean for the presumption that Democrats are going to get wiped out in the fall? If the Republicans are as unpopular as they are, what does that mean for the elections?

SCARBOROUGH: That`s the big question, and, Mike, that`s is what we are trying to figure out and nobody knows because this is unchartered territory.

Halpern here yesterday was saying they could lose 50, 55 seats. If so, right now, according to the American people, Republicans would be beating something with nothing.

Transcript: 'Countdown' (8-12-10)

Olbermann destroy's Gingrich's argument on unemployed insurance being for lazy people:

OLBERMANN: But now, as we mentioned, Republicans have targeted one individual American who`s struggling to make ends meet and held him up as part of the problem. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich writing yesterday, quote, "The extension of unemployment benefits has given people a perverse incentive to stay on unemployment rather than accept a job."

He continued "`The Wall Street Journal` quotes an engineer who admits he turned down more than a dozen offers because the salary would have been less than he made on welfare. This story encapsulates the problem of the long-term unemployed, the depth and length of this recession is at risk of creating a permanent pool of unemployed Americans who get so used to being unproductive that they are willing to accept welfare indefinitely instead of taking a job."

The man who turned down those offers will tell his own side of the story in just a minute and the reasons for turning down a job are not always as simple as Mr. Gingrich is.

"The Journal" interviewed Rick Helliwell about his company`s difficulty finding people, quote, "The jobs require a little more than a high school diploma and fluency in English. They include free accommodation of medical care and starting pay of about $30,000 a year. Mr. Helliwell speculates that Americans might be hesitant to move to Dubai where the jobs are based."

Speculates -- you might add other possible reasons for giving up a job, such as -- saving the country, or because Republicans thought you unfit to work.

This as "The New York Times" reports that yet another Republican politician, South Carolina`s Governor Mark Sanford, has been approved by the Department of Labor to accept stimulus money targeted to expanding that state`s unemployment benefits -- an expansion Governor Sanford once predicted would cause tax increases, but which now appears to have embraced wholeheartedly -- he now appears to have done so -- signing the bill two months ago, expanding those unemployment benefits for his state to the tune of $98 million.

Governor Sanford joining the ranks of other Republican governors who once denounced such stimulus spending before they embraced it, such as Dave Heineman of Nebraska and Georgia`s Sonny Perdue.

But despite the rush of Republicans to embrace the stimulus, most of America seems to have forgotten that it was their party, not President Obama`s, that bailed out Wall Street banks. A new poll finding that more Americans, 47 percent, think President Obama signed the Troubled Asset Relief Program, TARP, into law, only 34 percent know it was actually, shh, President Bush who did it.

And now, as promised, COUNTDOWN exclusive, the man singled out by former Speaker Gingrich, because he in Gingrich`s words, admits he turned down more than a dozen offers because the salary would have been less than he made on welfare, Mike Hatchell joining us from his home in Lumberton, North Carolina, along with his wife, Sara.

Pentagon Cautions WikiLeaks Over 'New Documents'

Pentagon Cautions WikiLeaks Over 'New Documents'

The Pentagon has told WikiLeaks it would be the "height of irresponsibility" if it went through with a new threat to publish outstanding documents it had on the Afghan war.

Amid news reports that WikiLeaks plans to soon release about 15,000 documents it had held back last month, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell repeated a U.S. demand for the whistleblower site to expunge all classified material from the Internet and return the material it had to the U.S. government.

Refunds of campaign donations up 70%

Refunds of campaign donations up 70%

Video: Dr. Laura Apologizes for Using N-word

"Talk radio host Dr. Laura Schlessinger has issued an apology for saying the N-word several times during an on-air conversation with a caller this week."

Hispanic Voters Must Be the “Professional Left” Too

From FireDogLake:

When White House press secretary Robert Gibbs excoriated government critics (“the professional left”) for being ungrateful SOB’s considering all that this administration has done for them, he wasn’t acting as a lone wolf. It’s a refrain that has oft been uttered by this White House, from Rahm Emanuel’s “f*#@ing r&#tards” to “top Obama advisors” who vent to Politico about an “elite group of commentators on the left.”

Roger Simon defends Gibbs this morning, and I have no doubt he’s right when he says he believes “the president agrees with Gibbs and was neither angered nor disappointed by Gibbs’s statements, which came not in the heat of his daily briefing but in the cool of his West Wing office.“

But with the public’s approval ratings of Congress at near-historic lows and not budging, it’s hard to see how this could be the fault of a couple of bloggers nobody has heard of. More likely, it’s the result of constituencies who aren’t happy with symbolic gestures while the government’s priority is to battle for the dollars of big corporate donors.

According to Gallup, Obama’s approval ratings among Hispanics has dropped 20 points this year. They note that “the two major drops in Hispanics’ approval of Obama this year — in February and May — coincide with two periods when the president was under fire for not doing enough to promote comprehensive immigration reform in Congress.”