The deficit for fiscal year 2009, which ended Sept. 30, came in at a record $1.42 trillion, more than triple the record set just last year.
In addition, future deficits are currently projected to total $9.1 trillion in the coming decade.
The US has been warned that its use of drones to target suspected terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan may violate international law.At first I was struck at how this article hardly referenced our current Commander in Chief, but Obama is mentioned in the next-to-last sentence:
UN human rights investigator Philip Alston said the US should explain the legal basis for attacking individuals with the remote-controlled aircraft.
He said the CIA had to show accountability to international laws which ban arbitrary executions.
Drones have killed about 600 people in north-west Pakistan since August 2008.
Mr Alston's warning came as US President Barack Obama reviews US strategy in the Afghan campaign.Which leads me to think that drones may perfectly illustrate Obama's uninspired war-by-proxy strategy in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
As a social conservative in America, you would think that my main issue with feminism would be abortion. However, it is feminism’s deep commitment to socialism that bothers me the most. Feminists believe that to empower women, you need to weaken men. In order to help the poor, you have to take away resources from the rich through taxes, lawsuits, anti-discrimination laws or quotas. Feminists believe that in order to change society, the federal government has to step in and pass a law. It’s as though freedom, wealth and liberty are in limited quantities and must be rationed out to the masses in different levels determined by arbitrary perceptions of discrimination.As I thought about how easy it is to blur party and principles, I was thinking about the perils of sloppy thinking on policy. For example, her last point about the GOP and fiscal conservatism. It is tempting for all of us to put on the ideological cruise control. And thermodynamically speaking it does not work to just rubber stamp the activities of Political Party.
If feminists spent more time trying to alter society’s perceptions instead of bullying people through lawsuits, mandates and laws, I believe that a lot many more Americans would embrace the movement. However, feminists have allowed their cause to be co-opted by the Democratic party in order to maintain political power and relevancy. They’ve sacrificed the “principles” of their movement for short-term gains. Allowing a political party to take o[]ver your movement only weakens it. (Sadly, that comes from watching Republicans all but destroy the fiscal conservatism on the right. )
Dear Ned,
After months of debate, an overwhelming majority of Americans support a "robust public option" similar to Medicare.
And thanks to the heroic efforts of progressive activists, we have almost enough votes in the Senate and House to pass it.
The Democratic majorities in the Senate (60/40) and the House (258/177) are large enough to pass a "public option" even with no Republican support. But a handful of conservative "Democrats" are blocking the will of the Democratic majority.
These conservative "Democrats" refuse to listen to the Democratic voters who elected them. That means it's up to our Democratic leaders - Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and President Obama - to persuade them.
Join the Democratic Donor Strike for a Robust Public Option . . .
As investigators examined a child's body found in a Georgia landfill, they hoped they wouldn't find what they were looking for. But a birthmark and clothing told them that they had, indeed, found 7-year-old Somer Thompson, who disappeared Monday while walking home from school in her Orange Park, Fla., neighborhood.(emphasis added) That is astonishing. 90 people who have committed sexual crimes. How could you not feel under siege, morally speaking, in that neighborhood?
. . . .
[Clay County Sheriff Rick] Beseler said detectives are following up on leads today and trying to finish locating all of the more than 90 sex offenders who live in a three-mile radius around Somer's home.
The parents, Richard and Mayumi Heene, met in a Hollywood acting school . . .If they're guilty of this costly hoax, they are guilty of bad acting on various levels.
Kris Kobach, a law professor at the University of Missouri at Kansas City and an advocate of expanding local immigration efforts, said Arpaio's office — like every other local police agency — can detain people suspected of immigration violations for a day or two until federal authorities come to pick them up.(emphasis added) This is almost humorous, if it wasn't so transparently biased and if its source wasn't so unduly influential at framing public debate. I'll be eager to see future background info on every legal scholar with a Liberal opinion.
In the past, Arpaio could have held such immigrants for longer than two days and conducted investigations of smuggling rings, Kobach said.
'It's really a slight narrowing, but it's not much,' said Kobach, who worked as an immigration law adviser to then-U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft from 2001-2003.
[Al] Sharpton added in a telephone interview that major sports leagues shouldn't welcome owners who are "divisive and incendiary."
"Mr. Obama’s search for a church home has touched off a frenzied competition among ministers of various colors and creeds who are wooing the first family. The president, in turn, has sent emissaries to observe worship services, interview congregants and scrutinize pastors. (His aides even searched YouTube to vet one local minister.)"(emphasis added) And later in the article we read this choice detail:
In January, Mr. Obama prayed at his first Sunday service here at Nineteenth Street Baptist Church, where hundreds of black professionals worship in a gleaming white sanctuary well beyond this city’s corridors of power. (The president took notes.)(emphasis added)
I’ve read some commentary that the Nobel Committee has handed Obama a “poisoned chalice,” because now his freedom of action will be constrained: How can he take military action, when necessary — or persevere in war, when necessary — while holding the title of “peace laureate”? As it happens, this issue arose in Norway, about Norway, long ago. Let me explain.Continue reading about the Nobel Prize's poison chalice history here.
The committee has also been criticized for political bias, especially after it awarded the Nobel to Jimmy Carter in 2002 and Al Gore in 2007 -- moves that were both seen as rebukes to the then U.S. President, George W. Bush.
This is ridiculous -- embarrassing, even. I admire President Obama. I like President Obama. I voted for President Obama. But the peace prize? This is supposed to be for doing, not being -- and it’s no disrespect to the president to suggest he hasn’t done much yet. Certainly not enough to justify the peace prize.
'Extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples?” “[C]aptured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future?” Please. This turns the award into something like pee-wee soccer: everybody wins for trying.
The Senate Finance Committee should sink Obama-Baucuscare and instead craft a patient-friendly, pro-market, limited-government approach to health-care reform. Perhaps some senators cannot fathom the Hippocratic Oath’s key insight: First, do no harm. If that’s Greek to them, here it is in language they understand: First, don’t kill your voters.
When Lennart Nilsson's pictures of developing embryos were published in Life magazine in 1965, they caused a sensation. Within days, the entire print run of eight million had sold out. More than 40 years later, the photographs have lost none of their power.(emphasis added) I agree, and I encourage you to give 'em a look see. ("A Child is Born: Photographs of the foetus developing in the womb," by Lennart Nilsson)
Eight weeks. The rapidly-growing embryo is well protected in the foetal sacWell, in light of Liberal American abortion policy, not really protected.
She told me that she already had four children, was not financially sound, and had to work full time. She then added, "But that's not my baby's fault."(40daysforlife.com)
It all boils down to the fact that Polanski is famous and talented and an Olympian artist, living above the world of mortals. Indeed, if he didn’t rape that girl — and he did — Polanski would still be considered a pig in most normal communities. This is the man who, after all, started dating Nastassja Kinski when she was only 15 and he was in his 40s. His taste for teenage girls is an established fact.
His defenders don’t care. They are above and beyond bourgeois notions of morality, even legality.
And that’s the main reason I am grateful for this controversy. It is a dye marker, “lighting up” a whole archipelago of morally wretched people. With their time, their money, and their craft, these very people routinely lecture America about what is right and wrong. It’s good to know that at the most fundamental level, they have no idea what they’re talking about.
Too often, our elected representatives have spent more time playing partisan politics than supporting our schools, creating jobs, fighting crime, and improving our health. The Tennessee General Assembly is failing to address either the short-term economic crisis or the long-term challenges facing our state.(emphasis mine) Surely Yarbro isn't accusing Doug Henry of this? Yarbro doesn't showcase any Liberal policies on his campaign site, but he is careful to sprinkle the word "Progressive" here and there. No doubt Henry gets under the skin of folks like Chip Forrester. I guess Yarbro wasn't willing to take on Jim Cooper?
