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Obama Admin Reworked Solyndra Loan To Favor Donor By MATTHEW DALY The Associated Press WASHINGTON — The Obama administration restructured a half-billion dollar federal loan to a troubled solar energy company in such a way that private investors — including a fundraiser for President Barack Obama — moved ahead of taxpayers for repayment in case of a default, government records show. Newly released emails show that the Obama administration was worried about the financial health of a troubled solar energy company even as officials publicly declared the company in good shape. An email from a White House budget official to...

According to data just released by the U.S. Census this morning, in 2010, the median income earned by an individual American was $26,197, or rather, 50% of Americans earned more than that amount and 50% earned less than that amount. The average (or mean) income was $38,337. We've presented the cumulative distribution of the total money income earned by individuals in the United States in the chart below: So what percentile does your income place you on that chart? Well, wonder no more! Our latest tool will tell you exactly where you rank among all Americans, or rather, the 211,492,000...

Obama called for $50 billion more in infrastructure spending to rebuild roads, railways and runways -- a proposal that GOP leaders immediately cast as dead-on-arrival. Obama will also pitch a $100 billion proposal Wednesday to increase and make permanent research and development tax credits for businesses. Obama is expected to ask lawmakers to close tax breaks for oil and gas companies and multinational corporations to pay for the plan. The administration is also urging the Senate to pass the small business bill that calls for about $12 billion in tax breaks and a $30 billion fund to help unfreeze lending....

EXCERPT FROM FORBES MAGAZINE: She says she never wanted to make the ad - which was prompted by questions about a statement she had made on a late-night talk show years earlier - and was surprised when it showed up on the Internet. She blames an insistent media consultant but also her own inability to put her foot down. "It was a wrong-headed move, made for all the wrong reasons, but it was mine," O'Donnell writes in "Troublemaker: Let's Do What It Takes to Make America Great Again." The book is scheduled to go on sale Aug. 16. The Associated...

Exxon Mobil Corp. has made one of the largest oil and gas finds in the Gulf of Mexico in a decade, the company announced today. The oil major said it made two oil discoveries and a natural gas discovery in its Keathley Canyon blocks, including an oil discovery in the company’s first exploration well since last year’s moratorium on deep-water drilling. Exxon expects the combined finds to yield more than 700 million barrels of oil equivalent. More than 85 percent would be oil, the company said. Drilling early in 2010 turned up oil and natural gas at the well 250...

It seemed an innocuous, catch-up phone call. Last year Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, the pseudonym for a Pakistani known to U.S. intelligence as the main courier for Osama bin Laden, took a call from an old friend. Where have you been? inquired the friend. We’ve missed you. What’s going on in your life? And what are you doing now?

Jama'a al-Islamiya leader Omar Abdel Rahman, who is being held in a prison in North Carolina, US, in a 15-minute telephone conversation with his wife Aisha said “the Egyptian revolution achieved the impossible.” His son Mohamed said an officer from the prison called Abdel Rahman’s home on the landline first to make sure that his wife was there, and that her voice matched the registered "voiceprint." He added that a recorded message from the prison’s phone said the line would be cut immediately if any person other than Aisha talked on the phone. He also said that his father was...

The big news today is that the $38.5 billion in budget cuts announced with such fanfare on Friday night mostly aren’t real. A good deal of it involves money from previous years and previous budgets that hasn’t actually been spent. As the AP puts it, the budget deal is financed with a lot of one-time savings and cuts that officially ‘score’ as savings to pay for spending elsewhere, -snip- The total amount actually cut appears to be somewhere between $8 and $14 billion. The politics here are very complicated now. On the one hand, polls suggest the public is overwhelmingly...

. In an interview last night on Fox News, Gov Palin stated that the Paul Ryan budget was a good start. She thanked him for having the political courage to bring the budget issues to the debate. However, she went further than any other potential POTUS candidate in calling for more and quicker cuts than even Paul Ryan's budget. In one interview, Gov Palin has positioned herself has the most fiscal conservative of the possible candidates. Her leaving her state with $12 billion surplus lends even more weight to her argument. The massive surplus in AK that Gov Palin left...

President Obama formally launched his re-election campaign Monday, urging grass-roots supporters central to his first White House run to mobilize again to protect the change he's brought over the past two years. The official start of his second White House bid comes 20 months before the November 2012 election. "We've always known that lasting change wouldn't come quickly or easily. It never does," the Democrat said in an e-mail to

Here are the official numbers from Publisher’s Weekly (h/t cuatrocinco45): Nonfiction 1. Decision Points. George W. Bush. Crown (11/10) 2,653,565 2. Broke: The Plan to Restore Our Trust, Truth, and Treasure. Glenn Beck. Threshold Editions (10/10) *860,0002 3. Women Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything. Geneen Roth. Scribner (3/10) *850,000 4. Life. Keith Richards with James Fox. Little, Brown (10/10) 811,596 5. America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag. Sarah Palin. HarperCollins (11/10) 797,955 6. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents Earth (The Book): A Visitor’s Guide to the Human Race. Jon Stewart. Grand...

Organized labor vs. Tea Parties By Henry LambMarch 21, 2011 Governor Scott Walker and the Wisconsin legislature kicked a rattlesnake when they significantly reduced the power of the state's public employee labor unions. Labor unions across the country have declared war on Republicans, even threatening death, and the Tea Parties that support them. A battle between organized labor and the Tea Parties is decidedly a one-sided battle. Organized labor receives regular income from every member, often deducted by the employer and paid directly to the labor union. National Education Association attorney, Bob Chanin says: "The NEA and its affiliates are...

Obama's Approval Rating Dropped in All 50 States in 2010 Washington, DC -- A new Gallup polling analysis finds pro-abortion President Barack Obama saw his approval rating drop in all 50 states in 2010 -- in what could be an indicator of a weakened position heading into his 2012 re-election campaign. http://www.lifenews.com/2011/02/23/obamas-approval-rating-dropped-in-all-50-states-in-2010/

Bolivia blames capitalism Mexico: Bolivian President Evo Morales said capitalism was responsible for climate change in his speech at the Climate Change Summit Thursday and he insisted on the need for the developed countries to make new commitments to reduce their greenhouse effect gas emissions. “We are sometimes debating only the effects of global warming, and not the causes, and we should be responsible and debate those causes,” said the Bolivian President in the high level segment of the 16th Climatic Change Summit in Cancun. Morales recalled the responsibility of the Governments so that key decisions are adopted to face...

The results of the CPAC straw poll of presidential candidates are in, and the winner is Ron Paul, with 30% of the vote. Mitt Romney was the runner-up with 23%, and all other candidates tied with about 6% each. 84% of the voters identified themselves as fiscal conservatives, placing their highest priority on economic growth and restraining the growth of government.

As the cliche goes, there are no coincidences in politics. Obama fundraiser group Code Pink just happened to have arrived in Cairo last week for the group’s ninth visit there in two years as part of its campaign to undermine the Mubarak government and help Hamas, the terrorist group that controls Gaza. Code Pink and the media are trying to portray the leftist group's 'sudden' appearance in Cairo Wednesday as an act of courageous support for a democratic revolution. Nothing could be further from the truth.Code Pink protests the Mubarak government in Tahrir Square, Cairo, Egypt. February 2, 2011. Code...

<p>The U.S. economy accelerated in the fourth quarter, the Commerce Department reported Friday. Real gross domestic product rose at a 3.2% annualized rate in the fourth quarter, up from a 2.6% rate in the third quarter. The gain was slightly below expectations.</p>

School Salary Database Reveals What Ohio Educators Earned In 2010By Patrick Preston Published: January 18, 2011 COLUMBUS, Ohio - An updated salary database allows Ohioans to search the salaries of administrators and teachers in Ohio's 613 public school districts. The Buckeye Institute, a conservative think tank based in Columbus, received the data from the Ohio Department of Education showing 1,800 public school employees made more than $100,000 in 2010. In the Columbus City School District, 78 employees earned more than six figures in 2010. Superintendent Gene Harris topped the list in Columbus with a salary of $185,912. The head of...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Last year tied for the warmest since data started in 1880, capping a decade of record high temperatures that shows mankind's greenhouse gas emissions are heating the planet, two U.S. agencies said. Global surface temperatures in 2010 were 1.12 degrees Fahrenheit (0.62 Celsius) above the 20th century average, tying the record set in 2005, the National Climatic Data Center at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said on Wednesday. "These results show that the climate is continuing to show the influence of greenhouse gases. It's showing evidence of warming," David Easterling, the chief of the scientific services...

Ron Brownstein has a piece in National Journal about voters' "white flight" from the Democratic Party during the midterms that is bound to get a lot of attention: By any standard, white voters' rejection of Democrats in November's elections was daunting and even historic. Fully 60 percent of whites nationwide backed Republican candidates for the House of Representatives; only 37 percent supported Democrats, according to the National Election Poll exit poll conducted by Edison Research. Not even in Republicans' 1994 congressional landslide did they win that high a percentage of the white vote. If you're curious as to why we...