Oh Yeah, The Housing Crisis

I guess the Obama administration is trying to keep the momentum from its health care ‘victory’ going. This morning, it announced new initiatives to help troubled homeowners, with the goal (hope?) of easing the foreclosure crisis that has impacted millions of Americans. There are a few things being proposed, but the three major points seem [...]

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Update #2! Richard Shelby Responds: ‘Barack Obama Loves The Terrorists, That’s Why’

JESUS H. CHRIST: Alabama Senator Richard Shelby’s office has finally confirmed to TPMDC that Shelby has in fact placed a hold on the President’s nominees because “blah blah blah … national security concerns … blah blah blah.” Those gosh darn terrorists are always ruining things for Americans, aren’t they? His spokesperson had this to say: [...]

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ABOUT TIME: President Obama has announced the federal government will end its 22 year-long ban on travel and immigration to the U.S. by people who are HIV-positive. “We are one of only a dozen countries that still bar people with HIV from entering our own country,” Obama said. “If we want to be the global [...]

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Too Big To Fail

Congress and the Obama administration are trying to sort out how to reign in institutions that are so big the government has no choice but to rescue them when they get in financial trouble (think AIG). They plan to introduce legislation this week that would make it easier for the government to seize control of [...]

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Dick Cheney Would Have Soooo Bombed Iran That One Time (All The Time)

HERE’S YOUR ‘NO SHIT, SHERLOCK’ QUOTE FOR THE WEEK: “I was probably a bigger advocate of military action than any of my colleagues,” Cheney told Fox News Sunday. Haha, noooo, you, really? Anyway, yeah, Dick Cheney wanted to kill Iran fer good because they have a nuclear weapons program, just like we do! The nerve [...]

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Invasive Travel Searches To Continue

A policy disclosed by the Department of Homeland Security yesterday ratified and expanded the Bush administration’s procedures by which travelers’ laptops, cell phones, iPods, cameras and other digital devices can be searched and seized when they cross a U.S. border – without any suspicion of wrongdoing whatsoever. Which basically translates to some jackass in the [...]

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Discarding the Public Option

John Nichols over at The Nation gravely sums up the lie that’s currently being passed as health care reform: …he president’s [healthcare] initiative looks a lot like a bailout for the insurance industry –in stark contrast to the a single-payer reform that would replace industry profiteering with a not-for-profit system like Medicare. Without a public [...]

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Obama Uses Stimulus Money to Shape Education Strategy

The Obama administration is employing billions of dollars of economic stimulus money to persuade states to rewrite education laws to open the door to more charter schools and expand the use of student test scores for judging teachers. [NY Times] Is anyone else extremely put off by the administration’s willingness to expand the role of [...]

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The Impending Social Security Crisis

While overhauling health care is foremost on everyone’s minds nowadays, an even more daunting challenge awaits us in the near future: how to fund Social Security to keep it from burying the nation into deeper debt. Social Security works by taking contributions from today’s workers and using them to pay old-age benefits promised to retirees. [...]

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White House Admits Working With Drug Companies To Restrain Their Costs

Following pressure by industry lobbyists, White House officials on Wednesday explicitly affirmed the Obama administration still stood by its behind-the-scenes deal with drug makers to block any Congressional effort to extract cost savings from them beyond an already agreed-upon $80 billion. An odd and possibly embarrassing assurance to make, considering just this week the House [...]

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Mortgage Companies Forgo 2008 Economic Meltdown Lessons To Make A Profit (What Else, Really?)

Poised to roll out its $75 billion program to prevent foreclosures, the Obama administration this week summoned mortgage company executives to Washington to demand they move faster to lower payments for homeowners sliding toward foreclosure. Just for good measure, Treasury officials also called on companies to hire and train more people to expedite the relief [...]

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The Government Will Soon Regulate Our Snacking and Nap Times, Because Democrats Are a Bunch of Communist Pansies

Why do Democrats Hate Our Freedoms? • Lawmakers are trying to curb TeeVee commercials for prescription drugs aimed at curing people of preposterous maladies like deficient eyelashes, restless leg syndrome, and male urinary urgency, that may cause obscene side effects like four-hour erections. (Because honestly, wouldn’t a four-hour erection cause urinary urgency and restless leg [...]

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Today’s Headlines: FEMA Trailers Make Homelessness Seem … Not So Bad

• Years of state and federal neglect have hobbled the nation’s unemployment system, leaving millions of needy people (roughly 40% of claimants) waiting for months for their checks. The number of jobless Americans seeking aid has doubled during the recession, while state funds have depleted, resulting in 16 states borrowing billions to pay out claims [...]

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A Rose by Any Other Name…

The problem with government, and more specifically power, is that once attained, parties that were previously on opposite ends of the spectrum will, to a certain degree, conflate certain aims and unfortunately perpetuate some of the worst policies and abuses of their predecessors. It’s only fair (albeit disappointing) for the Obama administration to do the [...]

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