Elena LaVictoire's Bookmarks tagged politics →  View Popular

WASHINGTON (Reuters) –
The top Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday got into a public dispute with the CIA over what she knew about harsh interrogation techniques in 2002, in the latest twist in a Washington political furor.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, responding to a CIA report that said she had been briefed on interrogation methods that she now condemns but did not at the time, accused the CIA of not telling the truth at a dramatic Capitol Hill news conference.

"The CIA was misleading the Congress," Pelosi said.

The Department of Homeland Security is warning law enforcement officials about a rise in "rightwing extremist activity," saying the economic recession, the election of America's first black president and the return of a few disgruntled war veterans could swell the ranks of white-power militias.

A footnote attached to the report by the Homeland Security Office of Intelligence and Analysis defines "rightwing extremism in the United States" as including not just racist or hate groups, but also groups that reject federal authority in favor of state or local authority.

"It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single-issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration," the warning says.

It says the federal government "will be working with its state and local partners over the next several months" to gather information on "rightwing extremist activity in the United States."

"It's imperative, it's essential that the person who represents us to the Holy See be a person who has pro-life values. I hope the President doesn't make that mistake," he told the Boston Herald. "She said she was pro-choice. I don't assume she's going to change that, which is problematic."

The White House refused to comment.

By Mike McGraw | Kansas City Star

Call it a condom conundrum.

At a time when the federal government is spending billions of stimulus dollars to stem the tide of U.S. layoffs, should that same government put even more Americans out of work by buying cheaper foreign products?

In this case, Chinese condoms.

That's the dilemma for the folks at the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has distributed an estimated 10 billion U.S.-made AIDS-preventing condoms in poor countries around the world.

But not anymore.

In a move expected to cost 300 American jobs, the government is switching to cheaper off-shore condoms, including some made in China.

The switch comes despite implied assurances over the years that the agency would continue to buy American whenever possible

They may need a support group before the month is out. They could gather in New York or Washington where many victims reside. The meetings would start: “I’m Maureen [or David]. I’m a duped Barack voter. And I’m mad.”

The ranks indeed are filling with the disaffected and the disappointed — Chris Buckley, Maureen Dowd, David Brooks, David Gergen, and even that gynecological sleuth and blogger Andrew Sullivan. And then there is the very angry Marty Peretz. Their complaints are varied but expressed with equal amounts of remorse and bitterness. They all have been done wrong by Barack.

WASHINGTON -- Forget the pork. Forget the waste. Forget the 8,570 earmarks in a bill supported by a president who poses as the scourge of earmarks. Forget the "$2 trillion dollars in savings" that "we have already identified," $1.6 trillion of which President Obama's budget director later admits is the "savings" of not continuing the surge in Iraq until 2019 -- 11 years after George Bush ended it, and eight years after even Bush would have had us out of Iraq completely.

Forget all of this. This is run-of-the-mill budget trickery. True, Obama's tricks come festooned with strings of zeros tacked onto the end. But that's a matter of scale, not principle.

The logic of Obama's address to Congress went like this:

"Our economy did not fall into decline overnight," he averred. Indeed, it all began before the housing crisis. What did we do wrong? We are paying for past sins in three principal areas: energy, health care, and education -- importing too much oil and not finding new sources of energy (as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer Continental Shelf?), not reforming health care, and tolerating too many bad schools.

The "day of reckoning" has now arrived. And because "it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we'll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament," Obama has come to redeem us with his far-seeing program of universal, heavily nationalized health care; a cap-and-trade tax on energy; and a major federalization of education with universal access to college as the goal.

Amazing. As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession, this is perhaps the greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the American people.

prosperity.

These fixes
are based on the false belief that the free-market economy has failed.
But it is not the market that has failed. It is intervention into
the market that has failed. The Federal Reserve and its manipulation
of money and interest rates have failed. None of this can be blamed
on the free market, but that isn’t stopping newspaper columnists
from doing so anyway.

Keynesian
so-called economists, led by Paul Krugman, are vainly reaching into
their usual bag of tricks to try to solve the problems of intervention
with more intervention, and nothing is working. But they are persistent.
They’ll keep scrounging around in that bag all throughout the Obama
administration. The slump will continue, since none of these tricks
has the slightest thing to do with the underlying problems in the
economy. All we’ll have to show for them is an empty Keynesian bag
and lot more unpayable debt.

Meanwhile,
who’s being ignored during this crisis? The free-market economists
of the Austrian School of economic thought, the very people who
predicted not only the Great Depression, but also the calamity we’re
dealing with today. The good news is that Austrian School economists
are gaining more acceptance every day, and have a greater chance
of influencing our future than they’ve had for a long time. I’m
told that Google searches for "Austrian economics" are
off the charts.