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Politics : Mainstream Politics and Economics -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (39358)	2/21/2013 10:19:24 AM
From: Brumar89	3 Recommendations Respond to of 85487

MSNBC, Colbert, Maher, Stewart are indeed hard core leftists. We know how well they'd run things. There are plenty of Democratic disaster areas around. It's a shame liberals escape them after they create them.

To: koan who wrote (39358)	2/21/2013 10:51:32 AM
From: longnshort	2 Recommendations Respond to of 85487

mark Levin ??if he lived in Calif and only had 1/2 a brain like gov moonbeam said all califs did, he still would have more brains than all those libs you just posted combined. Mark Levin is just over your head, he's just to smart for you

To: koan who wrote (39358)	2/21/2013 11:07:08 AM
From: longnshort	1 Recommendation Respond to of 85487

Pig Maher: Herman Cain ‘likes working with Fox team, particularly some of them fine-ass white women’ Predictably, Obama’s million dollar man Bill Maher just couldn’t resist cracking a disgusting racial joke about Herman Cain joining Fox News as a contributor. What, were the “Uncle Tom” slurs already played out? Anyone dislikes Obama, they're called "racist" on your show. You use a straight-up black stereotype about Cain, and it's OK. http://twitchy.com/2013/02/21/pig-maher-herman-cain-likes-working-with-fox-team-particularly-some-of-them-fine-ass-white-women/?utm_source=autotweet&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=twitter

To: koan who wrote (39358)

2/21/2013 11:40:25 AM

From: longnshort

1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 85487

Portland to cut down giant sequoia at park

PORTLAND -- Neighbors in Portland's St. Johns area have been battling a city plan to cut down a decades-old tree in Pier Park.

The tree at the center of the controversy is a giant sequoia that stands about 120 feet tall and measures 18 feet around. It's one of a couple dozen giant sequoias in Pier Park, but the only one on the chopping block.

Park visitors have already pinned up a little memorial on the tree’s trunk asking the city to reconsider. The problem is that the tree sits in the way of a major project, according to Portland Parks and Recreation officials.

The city is building a ten-mile long pedestrian and bike trail called the North Portland Greenway. Once completed, the trail will connect North Portland to downtown. Plans call for a bridge to be built over a set of railroad tracks, and according to the city, that sequoia tree is in the way.

Park visitors want the city to build around the tree instead of taking it down.

“If I come here tomorrow morning and that tree isn't there, I’m going to cry," said Chris Fountain, one of a number of neighbors fighting to save it. "It means a lot to me.”

The city said it looked at several alternatives. In the end, however, city officials felt that removing this one tree was the best option.

“The only way to do this trail, which is going to be a valuable connector for the city going forward, is to take care of this tree instead of several other ones in its place,” said Mark Ross with Portland Parks and Recreation.

The city, in turn, said it will plant seven giant sequoias, along with dozens of other trees, on the other side of the bridge as part of the North Portland Greenway project.

It also said all the wood from the giant sequoia will be re-purposed and used in a nature play area in Westmoreland Park.

If the project stays on schedule, the tree will be cut down on Thursday.

To: koan who wrote (39358)	2/21/2013 11:55:19 AM
From: Broken_Clock	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 85487

Published on Thursday, February 21, 2013 by Common Dreams Obama Maneuvers to Keep Kill List Memos Permanently Secret Inside deal-making looks to truimph over transparency, despite declarations that White House would keep Congress 'fully informed' - Jon Queally, staff writer Referring to the administration's ongoing targeted assassination program in his State of the Union address recently, President Obama said—despite the statement's glaring inaccuracy—that his executive branch, throughout the development and execution of the "kill list" program, had "kept Congress fully informed of our efforts.” New reporting by the New York Times on Thursday, however, reveals the effort now underway to keep Congress—not to mention the public—permanently uninformed about the nature and content of several still secret memos used by the president to justify the targeted killing of foreign and US citizens it suspects of terrorist activities. Leading up to the confirmation hearings for the president's nominee to lead the CIA John Brennan—the chief architect of the 'kill list' and Obama's top counterterrorism adviser—members of Congress, most notably Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), demanded more detailed information about the legal framework used to appropriate such extreme executive authority. Subsequently, after the controversy mounted during dramatic protests during Brennan's testimony, members of the Senate Intelligence Oversight Committee put a hold on the confirmation, demanding more information on the killing program and requesting access to the undisclosed legal memos. But now, the Times reports: Rather than agreeing to some Democratic senators’ demands for full access to the classified legal memos on the targeted killing program, Obama administration officials are negotiating with Republicans to provide more information on the lethal attack last year on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, according to three Congressional staff members. The strategy is intended to produce a bipartisan majority vote for Mr. Brennan in the Senate Intelligence Committee without giving its members seven additional legal opinions on targeted killing sought by senators and while protecting what the White House views as the confidentiality of the Justice Department’s legal advice to the president. It would allow Mr. Brennan’s nomination to go to the Senate floor even if one or two Democrats vote no to protest the refusal to share more legal memos. Despite ongoign concerns from Sen. Wyden and others, reporting by the Times found broad consensus that Brennan would ultimately be confirmed. Whether that's a political inevitability at this point or not, human rights groups and advocates of international law were not so easily swayed. “We have this drone war, and the American public has no idea what the rules are, and Congress doesn’t know much more,” said Virginia E. Sloan, president of the Constitution Project told the Times. Obama's assurances in televised speeches or privately given to Congress, she added, “are absolutely no substitute for having the actual memos in hand.”

To: koan who wrote (39358)	2/21/2013 12:02:43 PM
From: Broken_Clock	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 85487

Published on Thursday, February 21, 2013 by OtherWords Middle-of-the-Road Obama and Presidential Distortion The message we've been hearing from the mainstream media about Obama's push for a renewed brand of liberalism is flagrantly false. by Peter Hart Here’s a thought: Maybe, just maybe, Barack Obama isn’t a socialist. I know, if you’ve tuned into even a little bit of right-wing talk radio, or watched some Fox News shows over the past four years, this might come as a surprise. Obama, in the imagination of so many of his right-wing opponents, is a debt-loving, big-spending, Wall Street-bashing enemy of the free market. A popular far-right documentary spun out a theory that Obama’s second term would finally reveal his plan to undermine American power. It treated this plot as a tragedy, but it’s actually a comedy. After all, what’s the reality of Obama’s political agenda? The far right believes it’s socialism, sure. But the message we’ve been hearing from the mainstream media — that Obama is pushing a renewed brand of liberalism — is flagrantly false in many ways. Right after his second inaugural address, conservatives fumed that we were seeing the “real” Obama — a radical left-wing ideologue. The message from the “objective” media was not as strident, of course, but sounded similar notes. “Obama Offers Liberal Vision,” saidThe New York Times. He declared an “ambitious liberal agenda,” said CBS. After Obama’s State of the Union address, one veteran CNN pundit called it an “audacious speech,” one that saw Obama touting “old-fashioned liberalism” and big government. But let’s consider reality for a moment. The highest-profile clash raging in Washington is over Obama’s selection of a Republican senator as his Pentagon chief. He’s nominated a Treasury secretary who was making big bucks on Wall Street at the height of the financial meltdown. His nominee to head up the Securities & Exchange Commission spent the past decade as a lawyer defending the banks she’ll now be keeping an eye on. If Obama is intent on carrying out his secret socialist agenda — or even a muscular liberal one — he has a funny way of showing it. But what about all that big government spending? If you listen to the White House, they’re often proudest of the spending cuts they’ve embraced. Yes, government spending spiked due to the economic catastrophe that began in 2008, but since then it’s been falling, as a share of the economy and relative to the size of the population. Federal government spending is rising at the slowest pace since the Eisenhower administration. To many of Obama’s critics on the left, the government should be spending more to help boost employment because cutting government spending just makes things worse. (This is precisely what is happening across Europe.) What’s Obama’s bold liberal vision we hear about in the papers? It’s not as daring as the papers and the pundits would have you think. There’s a middle-of-the-road proposal on immigration. His rhetoric on climate change is overshadowed by the way he cheers for natural gas fracking. Yes, Obama is proposing a modest increase in the minimum wage to $9 per hour. But that’s actually 50 cents lower than the proposal he made 5 years ago. So why all the media misperceptions? One explanation is that ultra-conservatives have whipped their powerful media machine into a frenzy over Obama’s supposed radicalism. That message spills over into the larger media discussion, where “Obama is some kind of socialist” gets to be one side of a falsely “balanced” two-sided debate. Another explanation: A truly progressive agenda to address the problems America faces right now — such as taxing Wall Street speculation, embracing a serious climate policy, and supporting vigorous jobs programs — would threaten the upper-crust interests that corporate media and the political system serve to protect. Casting Obama’s mostly middle-of-the-road vision as unusually progressive helps to narrow the political debate. It’s keeping many truly progressive ideas off the table.

To: koan who wrote (39358)	2/22/2013 10:21:10 AM
From: Brumar89	3 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 85487

MSNBC showed us liberals knew what teabagging was before everyone else and that liberals giggle like little sissy girls when talking about it.