P.M. Headlines
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Labels: Listening to Now
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The U.S. government posted an unexpectedly large budget surplus in June, a further sign of the rapid improvement in public finances that has taken the heat off Congress to find savings and raise the nation’s borrowing limit.
Rising tax revenue, public spending cuts and big payments to the Treasury from government-backed mortgage companies helped the government take in $117 billion more last month than it paid out, the U.S. Treasury said on Thursday.
Analysts polled by Reuters had expected a surplus of $39.5 billion.
June’s surplus was the largest on record for that month.
The introductory spot features average supporters touting Pallone's work on health care and environmental issues, while the congressman elaborates on his own policy efforts.
Booker's opponents believe characterizing him as a political celebrity concerned more with his political future than work for his constituents could help cut into his commanding lead of the Democratic primary field in the polls.
Labels: New Jersey, U.S. Senate
Labels: conservatism, Dean Baker, farming, Food Stamps, government spending, poverty, Republicans, U.S. House of Representatives
Microsoft has collaborated closely with US intelligence services to allow users' communications to be intercepted, including helping the National Security Agency to circumvent the company's own encryption, according to top-secret documents obtained by the Guardian.
The files provided by Edward Snowden illustrate the scale of co-operation between Silicon Valley and the intelligence agencies over the last three years. They also shed new light on the workings of the top-secret Prism program, which was disclosed by the Guardian and the Washington Post last month.
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Microsoft's latest marketing campaign, launched in April, emphasizes its commitment to privacy with the slogan: "Your privacy is our priority."
Similarly, Skype's privacy policy states: "Skype is committed to respecting your privacy and the confidentiality of your personal data, traffic data and communications content."
But internal NSA newsletters, marked top secret, suggest the co-operation between the intelligence community and the companies is deep and ongoing.
Labels: companies, domestic surveillance, Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, Microsoft, NSA, Skype, surveillance state
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You can just kill the baby, or the fetus, however you want to describe it, any time you want for any reason, you know, women's health, that's any reason at all.
Lyin' Bill: In New York here, there's a proposal, "I don't want any limitations on anything!" It’s crazy.
Powers: The current status quo in Texas that these people are fighting for, who are fighting the bill, is to be able to abort your baby up until the third trimester.
Lyin' Bill: Yeah! For any reason! Women's health! "Hey! Look I sprained my hand!"
Powers: "Yeah. For any reason. For any reason. Yeah."
Labels: abortion, Bill O'Reilly, Fox News, women's health
The U.S. military has erected a 64,000-square-foot headquarters building on the dusty moonscape of southwestern Afghanistan that comes with all the tools to wage a modern war. A vast operations center with tiered seating. A briefing theater. Spacious offices. Fancy chairs. Powerful air conditioning.
Everything, that is, except troops.
The windowless, two-story structure, which is larger than a football field, was completed this year at a cost of $34 million. But the military has no plans to ever use it.
Labels: Afghanistan, U.S. military
Researchers from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, funded by ice2sea, a European Union project, tackled the question of how both processes will evolve and interact in the future.
This was done with a computer model, which projects the future ice sheet evolution with high accuracy using the latest available techniques and input data.
They devised a method to generalize projections made in earlier research which concerned just four of Greenland's outlet glaciers. By doing so they could apply the earlier findings to all calving glaciers around the Greenland ice sheet.
Their results indicate a total sea-level contribution from the Greenland ice sheet for an average warming scenario after 100 and 200 years of 7 and 21 cm, respectively.
So: GOP phone home! Your missing white voters have been found, and it turns out they weren't really missing. They were simply sitting out a relatively low turnout election along with a large number of their minority counterparts. They may be back next time if it's a higher turnout election—but then again so will a lot of minority voters. Bottom line: your demographic dilemma remains the same. The mix of voters is changing fast to your disadvantage and there is no cavalry of white voters waiting in the wings to rescue you.
Labels: A.M. Headlines
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Labels: Behind the Ad, New Jersey, U.S. Senate
Labels: Anthony Weiner, Bill Clinton, Democratic Party, Democrats, Eliot Spitzer, New York City, Republicans, scandals, sex scandals, Wall Street
The deep connection between the Pauls and the neo-Confederate movement doesn't discredit their ideas, but it’s also not just an indiscretion. It's a reflection of the fact that white supremacy is a much more important historical constituency for anti-government ideas than libertarians like to admit.
Labels: Libertarianism, libertarians, racism, Rand Paul, Republicans, Ron Paul
I've considered it because people have requested me considering it. But I’m still waiting to see what the lineup will be and hoping that... there will be some new blood, new energy, not just kind of picking from the same old politicians in the state.
Labels: 2014 elections, Alaska, Republicans, Sarah Palin, Sean Hannity
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While the initial reports about the IRS targeting looked pretty bad, suggesting that agents singled out tax-exempt applications for Tea Party and conservative groups for extra scrutiny, the media badly bungled the controversy when supposedly sober journalists like Bob Woodward and Chuck Todd jumped to conclusions and assumed the worst from day one. Instead of doing more reporting to discover the true nature and context of the IRS targeting, or at least waiting for their colleagues to do some, the supposedly liberal mainstream press let their eagerness to show they could be just as tough on a Democratic White House as a Republican one get ahead of the facts. We expect politicians to stretch reality to fit a narrative, but the press should be better.
And they would have gotten away with it, too, had their narrative had the benefit of being true. But now, almost two months later, we know that in fact the IRS targeted lots of different kinds of groups, not just conservative ones; that the only organizations whose tax-exempt statuses were actually denied were progressive ones; that many of the targeted conservative groups legitimately crossed the line; that the IG’s report was limited to only Tea Party groups at congressional Republicans’ request; and that the White House was in no way involved in the targeting and didn’t even know about it until shortly before the public did.
In short, the entire scandal narrative was a fiction. But it had real consequences, effectively derailing Obama’s agenda not long after a resounding reelection, costing several people their careers, and distracting and misinforming the public. It’s not that nothing went wrong at the IRS, but that the transgression merited nowhere near the media response it earned. But instead of acknowledging its error or correcting the record, the mainstream political press has simply moved on to the next game.
Great to see the surveillance state apologists of the left turn their head-up-the-ass venom on #Snowden and @ggreenwald again.
— Michael Stickings (@mjwstickings) July 1, 2013
I am mystified by the "privacy moderate" who yearns for a debate about the surveillance state without anyone being so transgressive as to leak the information without which there would be no debate.
Labels: Barack Obama, Conor Friedersdorf, domestic surveillance, drone war, East Germany, privacy, surveillance state, U.S. national security
Labels: Anthony Bourdain, Boston Marathon bombing, CNN, news media, television
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Labels: Republican hypocrisy
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[A]fter the convention, the campaign would commission a song, "Kennedy, Kennedy" with a jumpy mix of graphics and still photos used as a television commercial [which] sought to convey through its lyrics the idea of Kennedy as old enough to be seasoned and experienced but young enough to innovate policy with new ideas. [T]he chorus of alternating men and women had the distinctive sound of popular television commercials from the 1950s making it sound a bit dated next to the new version of the Sinatra hit.
Labels: Presidential Campaign Songs
Labels: Afghan War, media, Zimmerman trial
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Labels: Rand Paul, Tennessee, U.S. Senate
Labels: Debra Milke, justice
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