This week the President of the United States watched cluelessly while what was already the worst environmental disaster in American history somehow got even worse, winked while a Democratic Congress refused to extend unemployment benefits for millions of desperate citizens, and fired his battlefield commander because of… opinions which the general’s assistants expressed in a bar.
As the Senate scrambles to scale back a $140-billion recession relief bill, the poor, the elderly and the unemployed are bearing the brunt of the squeeze. But NASCAR track developers, movie producers and other special interests are likely to escape unscathed.
In the hunt for ways to cut costs, neither party has proposed curbing the panoply of narrow tax preferences, which Congress has routinely extended each year.
Instead, Senate leaders have proposed a $25 cut in weekly unemployment benefits; temporarily allowed a 21% cut in Medicare fees for doctors; and are planning to withhold or scale back $24 billion in payments many states expected to help pay for Medicaid for the poor.
Tax-breaks for NASCAR developers!
Cuts in Medicaid for the poor!
You gotta love those Democrats!
It’s possible that hydrocarbons are leaking out the bottom or sides of the well. If so, they might erode surrounding sediments and undermine the foundation upon which the 450-ton blowout preventer sits. If such leaks aren’t sealed off in time, the entire structure could topple over. “After that, it goes into the realm of ‘the worst things you can think of,'” writes a commenter on the oil- and energy-focused website The Oil Drum. It was this commenter’s post that has become the subject of wider speculation. “The well may come completely apart as the inner liners fail. There is still a very long drill string in the well that could literally come flying out … at the very least we are stuck with a wide open gusher blowing out 150,000 barrels a day of raw oil or more.”
150,000 barrels per day! That’s 6,000,000 gallons of raw oil per diem! 4 times the Exxon Valdez every week!
And don’t forget that Obama/Salazar went to court to get BP that permit!
It doesn’t really get any worse (for the rest of us) than 60,000,000 gallons of raw oil per day in the Gulf of Mexico, but for Barack Obama…
Because Glenn Greenwald just devoted two long columns to exposing Obama’s bullshit excuses for his do-nothing Presidency.
The White House is intervening at the last minute to come to the defense of multinational corporations in the unfolding conference committee negotiations over Wall Street reform.
A measure that had been generally agreed to by both the House and Senate, which would have affirmed the SEC’s authority to allow investors to have proxy access to the corporate decision-making process, was stripped by the Senate in conference committee votes on Wednesday and Thursday. Five sources with knowledge of the situation said the White House pushed for the measure to be stripped at the behest of the Business Roundtable.
And likewise through a dozen different scenarios Greenwald demonstrates that Obama has tremendous power to impose his own agenda…
But it’s a neocon agenda, and it’s all working beautifully, thank you very much!
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He is a man of limited vision.
He sees his primary responsibility is to maintain and strengthen our corporate-lead way of life, the great mass of American citizens are an afterthought, and probably he feels that most Americans need to feel financial pain for his vision to come to fruition.
Disclaimer: The following is from Wayne Madsen, who rarely (if ever) names his sources.
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Even if I happen to hail from the school of Slave Species of God by Michael Tellinger.
There is also that very creepy reverse speech analysis of Obama rallies and background crowd noises.