DebateGate

Expensive massages, top shelf vodka and five-star hotels: First Lady accused of spending $10m in public money on her vacations

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2029615/Michelle-Obama-accused-spending-10m-public-money-vacations.html#ixzz1VycHmDGo

This is what happens to Marxists & Socialist countries!

http://www.cnbc.com/id/44208257

Standard & Poor's on Friday downgraded Venezuela's credit ratings as it implemented a new methodology more heavily focused on political risk—a key weakness in the oil-producing country.

S&P cut Venezuela's long-term sovereign rating to B-plus from BB-minus. The outlook on the new rating is stable. The agency's new methodology was published on June 30, a little more than a month before it invoked political concerns to downgrade U.S. credit ratings.

Political risk has been a constant issue in Venezuela, where change in economic rules and nationalization of companies are common. Uncertainty about the health of President Hugo Chavez, who had surgery in Cuba earlier this summer to remove a cancerous tumor followed by chemotherapy treatment, has added to those risks, S&P said in a statement.

"In our opinion, changing and arbitrary laws, price and exchange controls, and other distorting and unpredictable economic measures have undermined private-sector investment and hurt productivity, weakening Venezuela's domestic economy," S&P analyst Roberto Sifon Arevalo wrote in a report.

Venezuela's vast oil and gas reserves "somewhat" offset the policy uncertainty, S&P said. The country posts steady current account surpluses which, combined with strict capital controls, result in positive net asset positions.

However, S&P expressed concern about the actual level of Venezuela's gold and foreign exchange reserves after reports that the country plans to repatriate them.

"When you have the reserves held abroad, you do have some level of confidence," Arevalo told Reuters in an interview. "That is not going to be the case anymore. They are going to be held at the central bank domestically, then you fall in the same circle of lack of transparency that everything else has in Venezuela."

If things keep going downhill for Obama; I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that he won't run in 2012.

Yup, his ego is so large that if he smells defeat in 2012 he will come up with an excuse not to run.

Obama to lay out Jobs Plan, after vacation

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Seeking to jolt the economy, President Barack Obama will propose new ideas to create jobs and help the struggling poor and middle class in a major speech after Labor Day. And then he will try to seize political advantage by spending the fall pressuring Congress to act on his plan.

Obama's plan is likely to contain a mix of tax cuts, jobs-boosting construction projects and steps to help the long-term unemployed, a senior administration official told The Associated Press. The official emphasized that Obama's proposals would be fresh ones, not a rehash of plans he has pitched for many weeks and still supports, like his idea of an "infrastructure bank" to finance construction jobs.

On a related front, Obama will also present a specific plan to cut the staggering national debt and to pay for the cost of his new short-term economic ideas. His version will challenge the new "supercommittee" of Congress to go beyond its goal of $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction.

Confirming the deficit-reduction part of his plan directly, Obama told a rural town hall crowd in Illinois on Wednesday: "I don't think it's good enough for us to just do it part way. If we're going to do it, let's go ahead and fix it."

Obama's major economic speech will come right after the Sept. 5 Labor Day holiday. Republicans were underwhelmed.

Brendan Buck, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, said via Twitter that Obama could scrap the speech and just hand over a detailed plan to Congress. "Seriously, just drop it in the mail. Podium not required," Buck's tweet said.

Obama will seek to use his economic proposals as leverage against Republicans in Congress, hoping to show a nation disgusted with gridlock that he is the one trying to get results. Obama's re-election campaign and the White House are also sure to use any specific ideas from the president as a way to blunt attacks from the Republicans hoping to run against him in next year's presidential election.

Already, Obama has been previewing his line of attack.

"My attitude is, get it done," he said in one Iowa town hall on Monday. "And if they (lawmakers) don't get it done, then we'll be running against a Congress that's not doing anything for the American people, and the choice will be very stark and will be very clear."

In Illinois on Wednesday, Obama is likely to touch on his economic plans during the final leg of a campaign-themed Midwest bus tour.

Republican White House contender Mitt Romney, campaigning in New Hampshire, needled Obama for showing up with too little and too late on the economy.

"But we appreciate the fact that he's going to devote some time to it," Romney said. "Not just going to be on the bus tour, not just going to be vacationing in Martha's Vineyard, but giving some thought to the American people."

Meanwhile, Boehner and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor prodded Obama to work with them. In an opinion piece published in USA Today, they focused on cutting taxes, easing regulations and finding new energy sources, and said GOP jobs bills now languish in the Democratic-led Senate.

White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer confirmed that Obama would release a package of economic initiatives and push Congress to act on them in early September.

The official who disclosed details on Obama's jobs and deficit plans spoke on condition of anonymity because Obama has not yet disclosed them. No final decisions on the economic package have been made.

Seeking re-election in a dispiriting economic time for the nation, Obama's rollout plan allows him to come into September swinging after one of the roughest periods of his presidency.

The economy has improved from the deep recession Obama inherited, but growth and hopes have stalled.

The unemployment rate is at 9.1 percent. No president in recent history has been re-elected with a jobless rate nearly that high.

Obama's economic team has been hashing out the new package since he and Congress struck a last-minute debt deal in late July to prevent a debilitating government default.

As president, Obama is under unparalleled pressure to start showing more economic progress. His own job is expected to depend on it.

Nearly 14 million people are unemployed. Many millions more have given up looking for jobs or haven't found a way to move from part-time to full-time work.

The administration official would not offer details about the tax cuts Obama is likely to propose for the middle class.

They are expected to be separate from the extension of the payroll tax cut for employees that Obama has lobbied for by the day. Obama also has promoted a familiar list of other ideas, including patent reform and three major trade deals. And he has pushed for longer benefits for the chronically unemployed.

As for debt reduction, Obama is trying to have some say over the highly influential committee charged with recommending major changes fast.

That 12-person panel of Republicans and Democrats will start work in September on coming up with - by Nov. 23 - $1.5 trillion in savings over the coming decades. If not, or if Congress fails to approve the committee's plans, automatic spending cuts that both parties oppose would kick in across the government.

Obama's plan will be bigger.

By how much isn't clear, but he has already envisioned $4 trillion in cuts over a slightly longer period of time.

He pressed again Wednesday for a package that reduces the deficit by raising taxes on wealthier people, not just by cutting spending. He said he was concerned that Boehner has already said the members he appointed to the special debt-cutting committee won't consider raise taxes.

"Everything's going to be on the table," Obama insisted, although he has little say over whether Congress goes that route.

© 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Learn more about our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_OBAMA_JOBS?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2011-08-17-07-07-10

In an op-ed article in the New York Times, Robert D. Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard, and David E. Campbell, a political scientist at Notre Dame, say they have collected data indicating that the tea party is "less popular than much maligned groups like 'atheists' and 'Muslims.'"

But Campbell says the tea party was really an afterthought in their research.

"We didn't go into this study to look at the tea party," Campbell said in an interview with The Ticket.

The professors were following up on research they conducted in 2006 and 2007 for their book "American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us" and decided to add the tea party and atheists to their list of survey queries. By going back to many of the same respondents, the professors gleaned several interesting facts about the tea party.

One of their more surprising findings, Campbell concedes, (and one drawing national attention) is that the tea party drew a lower approval rating than Muslims and atheists. That put the tea party below 23 other entries--including Barack Obama, Sarah Palin, Republicans and Democrats--that the professors included on their survey of "a representative sample of 3,000 Americans."

By examining which respondents became supporters of the tea party, Campbell and Putnam's survey "casts doubt on the tea party's 'origin story,' " they write in the Times.

Early tea partiers were described as "nonpartisan political neophytes," Campbell and Putnam write, but their findings showed that tea partiers were "highly partisan Republicans" who were more likely than others to have contacted government officials.

"They are overwhelmingly white, but even compared to other white Republicans, they had a low regard for immigrants and blacks long before Barack Obama was president, and they still do," they went on.

In addition to being socially conservative, the study found  a close tie between religion and the tea party, whose supporters seek out "deeply religious" elected officials.

"This helps to explain why candidates like Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry are just as much about the public presentation of themselves as religious people as fiscal conservatives," Campbell told The Ticket.

Campbell said Tuesday that he does not regard his research as politically motivated.  "I don't have a particular dog in this or any other political fight," he said.

"We actually didn't go into this study primarily to look at the tea party," he told the Ticket. "The primary purpose of the study is to update what we learned about religion in America."

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/survey-surprising-finding-tea-party-less-popular-atheists-160220531.html

http://www.komonews.com/news/local/127844048.html

Last year, Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn announced the city had won a coveted $20 million federal grant to invest in weatherization. The unglamorous work of insulating crawl spaces and attics had emerged as a silver bullet in a bleak economy – able to create jobs and shrink carbon footprint – and the announcement came with great fanfare.

McGinn had joined Vice President Joe Biden in the White House to make it. It came on the eve of Earth Day. It had heady goals: creating 2,000 living-wage jobs in Seattle and retrofitting 2,000 homes in poorer neighborhoods.

But more than a year later, Seattle's numbers are lackluster. As of last week, only three homes had been retrofitted and just 14 new jobs have emerged from the program. Many of the jobs are administrative, and not the entry-level pathways once dreamed of for low-income workers. Some people wonder if the original goals are now achievable.

"The jobs haven't surfaced yet," said Michael Woo, director of Got Green, a Seattle community organizing group focused on the environment and social justice.

"It's been a very slow and tedious process. It's almost painful, the number of meetings people have gone to. Those are the people who got jobs. There's been no real investment for the broader public."

'Who's got the money'


http://www.bostonherald.com/business/technology/general/view.bg?articleid=1358998&pos=breaking

Evergreen Solar Inc., the Massachusetts clean-energy company that received millions in state subsidies from the Patrick administration for an ill-fated Bay State factory, has filed for bankruptcy, listing $485.6 million in debt.

Evergreen, which closed its taxpayer-supported Devens factory in March and cut 800 jobs, has been trying to rework its debt for months. The cash-strapped company announced today has sought a reorganization in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware and reached a deal with certain note holders to restructure its debt and auction off assets.

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/obama-touts-battery-powered-cars-michiga

President Barack Obama on Thursday toured a vehicle battery plant in Michigan, touting his administration’s focus on green technology and jobs, at a corporation where federal money authorized by the economic stimulus law that Obama signed at the beginning of his presidency had created "green" jobs at a cost of about $2 million in federal subsidies per job.

http://news.yahoo.com/photos/navy-seals-killed-in-helicopter-crash-1313105950-slideshow/undated-image-provided-u-navy-shows-special-warfare-photo-213539129.html

Obama Social Security Number to become issue in 2012 race?

Read more: Obama Social Security Number to become issue in 2012 race? http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=332041#ixzz1UmSNc3wH