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The Obama administration proclaimed Recovery Summer on June 17, 2010 to spotlight the imapact President Obama's economic program after passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (or "Stimulus package") by the Democratic controlled 111th Congress in 2009. Vice President Joe Biden was placed in charge of the effort. During Recovery Summer 393,000 jobs were destroyed according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment rose, and economic growth slowed from 5.7% to 1.6%. The number counted by the Department of Labor as unemployed at the start of Recovery Summer was 14,599,000 Americans in July 2010; by September there were 14,767,000...

Federal authorities on Thursday formally charged a Marine reservist in connection with 2010 shootings at the Pentagon and the National Museum of the Marine Corps. According to a criminal complaint, law enforcement officers searched the residence of Yonathan Melaku and found numerous documents concerning bomb-making and explosives. Melaku was arrested last week after he was found trespassing in Arlington National Cemetery before dawn. A car he pointed authorities to set off a bomb scare near the Pentagon. Officials said they seized a digital videotape in Melaku's bedroom desk. According to the criminal complaint, a review of the videotape showed Melaku...

NOTE The following text is a quote: www.number10.gov.uk/news/prime-minister-statement-on-alan-mcmenemy/ Prime Minister's statement on Alan McMenemy Friday 20 January 2012 Prime Minister David Cameron confirmed the British Embassy in Baghdad have received the body of hostage Alan McMenemy. The Prime Minister said: “It is with great sadness that I can confirm that the British Embassy in Baghdad received a body today that has been identified as Alan McMenemy, who was kidnapped in Baghdad in 2007, along with four other men. The bodies of Jason Swindlehurst, Jason Creswell and Alec MacLachlan were returned in 2009. Peter Moore was the only hostage released alive...

The United Nations was paying one of the world’s most notorious terrorist groups after getting “too close” to it, secret documents disclose. The UN World Food Programme (WFP) had to suspend activities in southern Somalia after being manipulated by al-Shabaab, which is linked to al-Qaeda. In a meeting last year with the UN ambassador Susan Rice, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the special representative for Somalia, said the WFP had been withdrawn “because it had become too reliant upon al-Shabaab and its system of pay-offs”. Al-Shabaab, an Islamic group fighting to overthrow the Somalian government, controls much of south and central Somalia and...

The Political Derby Composite Poll is a tool that takes the most recent major polls and weights their results based on poll age, sample type, and margin of error each day using a proprietary formula. Unlike other poll compilations, this is not a simple average. The polls that make up the PD Composite are well-known reputable national polls who sample “likely primary voters” and “registered voters”, as opposed to only “adults, including, but not limited to: NBC News/Wall Street Journal, Pew Research, Quinnipiac University, and Rasmussen Reports... The PD Composite will be updated in a regular post that will run...

Newt Gingrich will bring his surging campaign for the Republican presidential nomination to Bluffton on Tuesday for an outdoor rally. The former U.S. House speaker from Georgia will campaign at the Calhoun Street Promenade in Old Town, said James Epley, the Gingrich campaign’s Beaufort County manager. First, at 12:45 p.m. Tuesday, he will go to a campaign office opening and ribbon cutting ceremony at 6 Promenade St., Suite 1001 B. Then, “from 1 to 2:30 p.m., he’ll be doing an outdoor Town Hall meeting in the Promenade. It’s open to the public,” Epley said. The free event will be in...

The FBI rounded up a network of deep-cover Russian spies last year after the group came close to placing an agent near a Cabinet official in the Obama administration, a senior FBI counterspy said Monday as the bureau released once-secret documents on the case. ...U.S. officials said it was Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Mr. Figliuzzi said in an interview that the FBI decided to end its more than 10-year-long counterspy investigation of the network because of concerns that the spies were “getting very close to their objective.” “These 10 Russian officers were sent to the U.S. on a...

More information on the man who would dethrone Obama in the New Hampshire 2012 primary. The registration deadline ended today, and the field includes 14 candidates on the Democrat side alone. Darcy Richardson wrote a book about the McCarthy campaign which ousted LBJ in 1968, so he's done his homework. Old timers may recall that the Dump-Johnson movement didn't happen by itself, but was an intra-party insurgent movement started in 1967 by attorney Allard K. Lowenstein. With the media consensus trying to force-feed the GOP into accepting Mitt Romney as an opponent to Obama, it's worth looking at other avenues...

Former Florida Republican governor Jeb Bush has said he won’t endorse anyone in the presidential primary. [Snip]... In a rare intervention into electoral politics since his departure from the Florida governorship, he decided that Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s venture into birtherism has gone on long enough. In an exclusive statement to Right Turn, he e-mailed me: “Republican candidates should categorically reject the notion that President Obama was not born in the United States. It is a complete distraction from the failed economic policies of the President.” And that was it. [Snip] At this point, few responsible Republican office-holders dare defend...

And the next President of the United States will be: teleprompter populist extraordinaire, Barack Obama. Should the Republicans nominate one of the three current frontrunners – Mitt Romney, Rick Perry or Michelle Bachmann – Barack “Back-on-track” Obama wins (despite polls showing him with just a 41 percent approval rating) by playing the populist card he’s already begun to deal, forecasts Gerald Celente,Trends Journalpublisher.

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