Newgie
Newgie is about delivering the news that people are interested in most. Historically people have had to rely on media providers to not only deliver quality news stories but also to determine which stories are newsworthy enough to merit front-page status. Newgie uses the attention given to each news story by its readers to determine which stories are the most “newsy”. News still comes from the same reputable news sources that people are accustomed to using, but rather than viewing news as pre-packaged by the media, Newgie users view their news based on its “newsiness”, as determined by their peers.
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STATEMENT OF ROBERT GREENSTEIN, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, CENTER ON BUDGET AND POLICY PRIORITIES, IN RESPONSE TO ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE 2006 DEFICIT FIGURE
“The announcement seems like good news, but it’s more of a temporary blip than real progress. The improvement in the deficit may not extend even beyond this year, and the long-term outlook remains bleak. Despite Administration assertions, the evidence indicates this temporary improvement has little to do with a tax-cut driven surge in revenues or the economy. Revenues always grow and deficits always decline in economic recoveries. What stands out is that both revenue growth and the economy have performed markedly worse in the current recovery than in average recoveries of modern times. In addition, the tax cuts of recent years are a key factor behind our long-term deficit problems, which now appear worse than they did a few years ago. Sadly, the claims of budgetary success are Orwellian.”
See:
http://www.cbpp.org/10-11-06bud-stmt.htm
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Drudge misrepresented as “sweetheart land deal” a business transaction by Sen. Reid, described in an article by AP’s Solomon
A Drudge Report headline, which linked to an Associated Press article by John Solomon and Kathleen Hennessey, misrepresented a business transaction involving Sen. Harry Reid as a “sweetheart land deal.” Rush Limbaugh read the AP report on his radio program, praising Solomon as “an AP writer that I have trusted. John Solomon’s stuff is good.” However, as Media Matters for America has documented, Solomon has a history of misleading reporting on Senate Democrats.
Read more
http://mediamatters.org/items/dailyemail/200610120001?src=other
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Former head of President Bush’s Office of Faith Based Initiatives admit that Republicans are just taking evangelical Christians for a ride.
Karl Rove refers to evangelical leaders as “the nuts”.
At:
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/15228489/
From: Poacnewsletter
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ZIGGING AND ZAGGING ON CUTTING AND RUNNING
by Sheldon Rampton
The Bush administration’s use of the term “cut and run” to caricature opponents of the war in Iraq is yet another example of the attention that America’s war party pays to rhetorical repetition and linguistic framing at the expense of realistic discourse and analysis. Bush himself has taken to using this catchprase repeatedly. At a recent speech in Birmingham, Alabama, he declared that “The party of FDR, the party of Harry Truman, has become the party of cut-and-run.” He repeated the charge a few days later, at a political fundraising breakfast for California Congressman Richard Pombo. “The Democrats are the party of cut and run,” he said. “Ours is a party that has got a clear vision and says we will give our commanders and troops the support necessary to achieve that victory in Iraq.”
For the rest of this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/5098
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North Korea Nuclear Test
NORMAN SOLOMON, norman@accuracy.org,
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1009-36.htm
Executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, Solomon is the author of “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death” and has written extensively on nuclear issues since the 1970s.
In a piece titled “Welcome to the Nuclear Club,” he wrote today: “For more than 50 years, Washington has preached the global virtues of ‘peaceful’ nuclear power reactors — while denying their huge inherent dangers and their crucial role in proliferating nuclear weaponry. …
“Running parallel to the mendacious career of the ‘peaceful atom,’ U.S. foreign policy has hit new lows during the last several years. The invasion of Iraq, on the pretext of non-existent WMDs, sent a powerful message. If the U.S. government was inclined to launch an attack before a country had the capability to generate a mushroom cloud, then the country would be protected from such attack by developing nuclear weapons as soon as possible.”
From: Institute for Public Accuracy
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Newt Gingrich, Cheerleading for Wal-Mart
by Tula Connell, Oct 6, 2006
Is it any surprise that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R), who resigned from lack of support within his own party in 1998 and sought drastic cuts in fundamental federal education and social programs, comes to the defense of Wal-Mart?
Surfacing Wednesday on American Public Media’s “Marketplace,” Gingrich made clear to host Scott Jagow he supports the Wal-Mart corporate-first model as a replacement for a federal government whose mission is to serve the people.
Gingrich offers up the usual argument for Wal-Mart: It offers consumers low-cost goods. But at what price?
Four members of the Waltons, the family behind Wal-Mart, last month were ranked by Forbes as among the nation’s 10 wealthiest people in the nation, with a combined net worth of more than $72 billion. Less than two weeks after the Walton Four saw their mugs highlighted on the Forbes website, reports emerged that Wal-Mart plans to cap wages, use more part-time workers and schedule more workers on nights and weekends—all to save money for a company with gross annual sales of more than $250 billion and an annual profit of more than $10 billion.
Said Gingrich:
The fact is, Wal-Mart improves the quality of life for 180 million Americans each week at lower cost. Free choice and free markets help consumers and Wal-Mart proves it.
Unless you’re a consumer who also works at Wal-Mart. The average two-person family (one parent and one child) needed $27,948 to meet basic needs in 2005, well above what Wal-Mart reports that its average full-time associate earns. Wal-Mart claimed that its average associate earned $9.68 an hour in 2005. That would make the average associate’s annual wages $17,114, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s “Basic Family Budget Calculator.”
Back to Gingrich:
…
Complete article at:
http://blog.aflcio.org/2006/10/06/newt-gingrich-cheerleading-for-wal-mart/
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VA Takes Nine Months to Locate Data on Disability Claims by Veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars
Report Indicates that 1 in 4 Veterans of the Global War on Terrorism Claim Disabilities
For more information contact:
Meredith Fuchs/Catherine Nielsen – 202/994-7000
At:
Washington, DC, October 10, 2006 – One in four veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars are filing disability claims, according to records released by the U.S. Department of Veterans’ Affairs (VA) under the Freedom of Information Act after nine months of denying their existence and posted today on the National Security Archive Web site.
The VA responded to the Archive’s original January 2006 FOIA request for documents about the number of disability benefits claims filed by veterans from the current war in Iraq by claiming that no documents existed, apparently because the reports concern the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) rather than being limited to the Iraq War. Notably, one of the reports indicates that GWOT is the “military name for the current wars in and around Afghanistan and Iraq.” A similar report was released in December 2005 detailing Gulf War veterans’ benefit activity. An updated copy of this report was released in March 2006.
Only after the Archive administratively appealed the VA’s “no documents” claims and advised the VA that it was prepared to file a lawsuit did the agency manage to locate the records. One is a January 30, 2006, document: “Compensation and Pension Benefit Activity Among 464,144 Veterans Deployed to the Global War on Terror.” It reports that more than 150,000 deployed Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan) and Operation Iraqi Freedom (Iraq) veterans, out of more than 560,000 veterans of the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), filed disability compensation and pension benefits claims with the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA). The other is a July 20, 2006, document: “Compensation and Pension Benefit Activity Among Veterans of the Global War on Terrorism.”
Veterans’ groups have criticized the VA for using emergency appropriations to fund veterans’ benefits rather than realistically planning and budgeting for the veterans’ needs. According to Veterans for America, the newly released data suggests official estimates dramatically understate the future cost of the current Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. If the current trend continues, then VA could receive as many as 400,000 disability claims from the 1.6 million deployed active duty and reserve service members in the Global War on Terrorism. Jonathan Powers, Associate Director of Veterans for America and an Iraq War veteran, warned, “VA already has a backlog, and the claims process is only going to get worse unless VA takes action now. VA has no plan or funding to process and pay existing and future claims to ensure our veterans promptly receive the disability benefits and healthcare care they earned.”
In its most recent FOIA Annual Report, the VA purported to process 1.9 million FOIA requests during FY 2005, with a median processing time of 11 days. Meredith Fuchs, the Archive’s General Counsel, expressed dismay at how the FOIA request was handled: “For the agency to take nine months to ‘find’ information that is of clear current public interest in the context of the ongoing Global War on Terrorism is astounding. It is one thing for VA to be reluctant to deliver bad news, but another thing entirely to deny the existence of the information.”
These documents were posted today on the Web site of the National Security Archive.
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Borowitz Report – Proliferation Shocker
Mel Gibson Acquires Nuclear Weapon
Malibu Nuke Test Raises Proliferation Fears
The elite club of nuclear powers gained a new member today as the actor Mel Gibson conducted what he called a successful nuclear test in Malibu, California.
With all eyes on North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il and his nuclear ambitions in recent days, the international community was stunned to learn that the controversial Australian actor had been quietly developing a nuclear weapon of his own.
But after digging a massive hole in the beach at Malibu and then detonating the nuclear device underground, Mr. Gibson held a press conference to say that he had initiated a nuclear program to guarantee his own security.
“There are a lot of people out to get me, and I think you know who they are,” Mr. Gibson said.
Moments after the actor’s announcement, the Malibu nuclear blast became the topic of heated debate in the United Nations, drawing strong words of condemnation from Danny Gillerman, Israel’s ambassador to the U.N.
“Iran getting a nuclear weapon was one thing, but this Mel Gibson business will not be tolerated,” he said.
Davis Logsdon, director of the Nuclear Proliferation Institute at the University of Minnesota, said that Mr. Gibson’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon casts “an ominous cloud” over the prospects for world peace.
“The fact that Mel Gibson now has a nuke is going to inspire other angry celebrities to acquire nukes of their own,” Mr. Logsdon said. “Is the world really prepared to see nuclear weapons in the hands of Star Jones, or Liza Minnelli?”
Elsewhere, Jennifer Aniston says that she and Vince Vaughn have not broken up, according to a story published today in “Yeah, Right” magazine.
http://www.borowitzreport.com/
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three to see
David Horsey: r u still my guy?
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/dayart/20061013/Cartoon20061013.gif
Dwayne Booth, Mr. Fish: don’t make the mistake
http://www.cagle.com/working/061010/booth.jpg
Dan Wasserman: no matter vat, don’t appear veak
http://cache.boston.com/bonzai-fba/Globe_Graphic/2006/10/12/1160700192_9107.gif
