GOP Folds On Unemployment Benefits Fight: 14-Week Extension Passes
The GOP called for the check Wednesday night, having had enough of the fight over an extension of unemployment benefits that the party had held up for several weeks.While the Senate was stuck in parliamentary limbo, some 200,000 people actively looking for work lost their unemployment benefits.
The bill extends unemployment benefits for an additional [...]
‘Daily Show’ Investigates Bush’s Motivational Speaking Career (VIDEO)
Do you need some motivation to get your career on track? George W. Bush can help! He can tell you all the ways he worked his way up from nothing to attend the finest universities and go on to become commander-in-chief. Oh, that’s not true you say? He grew up in a powerful and connected [...]
Progressives Want Rahm Unleashed In Favor Of The Public Option
Members of the progressive lobby are calling on White House Chief Of Staff Rahm Emanuel put some of his legendary pressure on Congress to pass the public option.
The NAACP, the Campaign For America’s Future and MoveOn.org dispatched a letter to Emanuel’s office today asking backup in the fight for a public option. From the letter, [...]
CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names
Across the country, last weekend there were anti-war demonstrations, modest in turnout, but hopefully a warning to Obama that war without end or reason in Afghanistan, plus 40,000 more troops to Kabul, is not why people voted for him.
I spoke at our own little rally in my local town of Eureka, California. My neighbor Ellen [...]
A great nation deserves the truth: Rape is now a pre-existing condition
Seriously.
Turner had let the men buy her drinks at a bar in Fort Lauderdale. The next thing she knew, she said, she was lying on a roadside with cuts and bruises that indicated she had been raped. She never developed an HIV infection. But months later, when she lost her health insurance and sought new [...]
The Urgent Need to Demilitarize the National Security State
The national security policy inherited by President Barack Obama has been increasingly militarized over the past two decades despite the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the demise of the Warsaw Pact, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war.
The president has addressed the problem incrementally, reducing growth in spending in [...]
Can Progressives and Conservatives Agree on Health Care Reform?
That is the big question everyone is wondering about these days. Most of the traditional media is drooling over the idea of a train wreck, hyping the disagreements and hoping for failure. But the disagreements are also quite real and quite significant. Conservative Democrats don’t want a public option, progressives are insisting on [...]
Economic Outrage du Jour: AIG
Remember those big bonuses at AIG that President Obama called an “outrage” last March? The ones that recipients said they would pay part of back? Well, surprise, surprise, they’ve so far reneged on paying back every dollar they said they would. According to The Wall Street Journal:
The U.S. pay czar is clashing with American International [...]
How Iranian nukes would reshape the Middle East
Even after U.S. diplomats met with their Iranian counterparts last week in Geneva, it’s unclear what the White House’s next move is, beyond more talks at the end of the month. While President Obama had promised to “do everything that’s required to prevent” Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons, the fact that “engagement” has given way [...]
A Jobless Recovery – Shamus Cooke
After the recent unemployment numbers were announced, smug politicians promising economic recovery stuttered a bit. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Mainstream economists were predicting a smooth upswing in employment, but in September 263,000 more jobs were lost, 62,000 more than August.
Obama reacted predictably to the surprise. He first pointed out that “employment is [...]
