Paul Krugman puzzles over the surge in public and private deficit-spending and implausibly concludes that, "um, didn’t something…happen around 1980? Can’t quite remember…someone whose name begins with the letter ‘R’?": The turn to budget deficits was a direct result of the new, Irving-Kristol inspired political strategy of pushing tax cuts without worrying about the "accounting deficiencies of government." More here
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Krugman on Obama’s Deficits: Blame Reagan!
The interim president of Honduras, Roberto Micheletti, has received rough treatment from the Obama administration, European Union, and the American media. Manuel Zelaya, the ousted president, was ordered arrested by the country’s supreme court for attempting to violate a constitutional limitation on presidential terms (a Bolivarian lesson learned from his comrade in Caracas), but as the Cato Institute’s Juan Carlos Hildago argued in Forbes , it wasn’t "a coup" and, contra Obama, is wasn’t illegal.
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We Must Destroy Democracy In Order to Save It
The Sun-Sentinel reports : FORT LAUDERDALE – Police will conduct a commercial vehicle checkpoint Tuesday. The checkpoint will be from 7 to 11 a.m. on the 900 block of West State Road 84.
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Checkpoint News You Can Use (in Fort Lauderdale)
As noted in today’s links , film director Roman Polanski was arrested over the weekend in Zurich and is being held in Switzerland pending an extradition request from the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office. In 1978, Polanski pled guilty to unlawful sex with a minor (a 13-year-old girl who he gave drugs and booze to and who testified she had repeatedly said no during the act) and then skipped out of the country before his sentencing. For details and context surrounding the Polansky case, read Bill Wyman’s eviscerating review of the 2008 documentary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired . Wyman argues convincingly that the film whitewashes the details of the rape and is essentially an apologia for the famous director
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Should Roman Polanski Be Held Accountable to His Own Guilty Plea?
Mark Perry at the American Enterprise Institute reins in the time-travelers who think we have to go back to the Great Depression to find economic times as relentlessly awful as today.
Originally posted here:
America Today: Reliving the Nightmare of the 1980s, Not the 1930s
The Department of Health and Human Services orders Humana Corp to stop sending out letters to its members claiming that elements of the current health care reform plan flailing about in Congress could cause them to "lose many of the important benefits and services that make Medicare Advantage plans so valuable," claiming the letters are "misleading and confusing." The Wall Street Journal claims that the Congressional Budget Office should, by those standards, be hit with a similar gag order: On Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office director told Mr. Baucus’s committee that its plan to cut $123 billion from Medicare Advantage—the program that gives almost one-fourth of seniors private health-insurance options—will result in lower benefits and some 2.7 million people losing this coverage. Imagine that.
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"Gag Orders" in the Medicare Debate and "Soft Tyranny"
The Associated Press has an anecdote-based story out about how " Tough political realities quiet youth ‘Obamamania.’ " Sample: "It’s one thing to get excited about a presidential candidate. It’s another thing to become a responsible citizen," says Jennifer Donahue, political director for the New Hampshire Institute Of Politics
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Obama Losing His Cool?
The Associated Press has an anecdote-based story out about how " Tough political realities quiet youth ‘Obamamania.’ " Sample: "It’s one thing to get excited about a presidential candidate. It’s another thing to become a responsible citizen," says Jennifer Donahue, political director for the New Hampshire Institute Of Politics.
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Obama Losing His Cool?
Next week the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to announce whether it will hear a First Amendment challenge to a Colorado law that requires groups to register with the government and reveal their donors if they take positions on ballot measures
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Challenge to Colorado’s Restrictions on Speech About Ballot Initiatives
Celebrities, including funnyman Will Ferrell, have put together a Billionaires for Bush-style fake PSA defending health care executives in a way that I have not heard one single human being in the history of humankind defend health care executives. I made it through 38 seconds before concluding that it could not possibly get funny; maybe someone who watches more will be able to answer whether the actors acknowledge, however satirically, that health insurance executives have been helping craft Obama’s plan . UPDATE : Doesn’t seem to want to load; link here .
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I Guess It’s "Or Die," Then
