For more than two decades, Social Security collected more money in payroll taxes than it paid out in benefits - billions more each year. Not anymore. This year, for the first time since the 1980s, when Congress last overhauled Social Security, the retirement program is projected to pay out more in benefits than it collects in taxes - nearly $29 billion more.
Sounds like a good time to start tapping the nest egg. Too bad the federal government already spent that money over the years on other programs, preferring to borrow from Social Security rather than foreign creditors. In return, the Treasury Department issued a stack of IOUs - in the form of Treasury bonds - which are kept in a nondescript office building just down the street from Parkersburg's municipal offices.
Now the government will have to borrow even more money, much of it abroad, to start paying back the IOUs, and the timing couldn't be worse. The government is projected to post a record $1.5 trillion budget deficit this year, followed by trillion dollar deficits for years to come.
Social Security to start cashing Uncle Sam's IOUs
Priest's victims forced into vow of silence
The leader of the Catholic Church in Ireland resisted calls for his resignation yesterday, despite admitting that he took part in meetings where the victims of a paedophile priest were forced to take a vow of silence.Cardinal Sean Brady, the Primate of All Ireland, has confirmed he was present at a closed canonical tribunal in 1975 when two child victims of Father Brendan Smyth were ordered to sign agreements under oath that they would not discuss what happened to them with anybody other than an approved priest.
There were immediate calls for Cardinal Brady’s resignation. Colm O’Gorman, head of Amnesty Ireland and founder of One in Four, a charity helping victims of sexual abuse, said that the Cardinal’s position was now impossible.
More...
Liberal Americans choke on their pretzels as Karl Rove rewrites history
The book stands accused of being a towering monument to self-denial of what are now seen as self-evident truths. Despite millions of words of newsprint, endless government probes in numerous countries and hours upon hours of TV reports proving the opposite, Rove stands by the idea that President George W Bush invaded Iraq reluctantly. He also denies Bush condoned torture. "He did just the opposite," Rove wrote.
Irish cardinal refuses to quit amid court case over paedophilia 'cover-up'
Ireland's most senior Catholic cleric tonight faced down calls to resign after revealing that he was at a secret tribunal where sex abuse victims were made to take an oath of silence.
Cardinal Sean Brady said that he had attended two meetings in 1975 concerning Father Brendan Smyth, a notorious paedophile, where two of Smyth's victims signed an affidavit promising to discuss their claims only with a specified priest.
Israel's Shadow War against a Nuclear Iran
On January 18, 2007. Ardeshir Hassanpour, a nuclear physicist with extensive knowledge of Iran's nuclear program is found dead in his apartment. Reva Bhalla, a senior analyst with the private intelligence firm Stratfor, believes the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, was behind his assassination.
"Hassanpour was someone that we deemed as critical to the program and would have been a likely target of an intelligence service like the Israeli Mossad," Bhalla said. A month later in February. Ali Reza Asgari, a top general in Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards, disappears while on a trip to Istanbul, Turkey. Some believe that he defected to the United States.
Many WTC Responders Show Early Signs of Heart Problems
Law enforcement officers who worked near ground zero after the World Trade Center attacks seem to show early signs of heart problems at a higher rate than would be expected for their age, a new study suggests.Nearly half of about 1,200 law enforcement workers who went to Mount Sinai Medical Center's program in New York to monitor medical effects from the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack showed some impaired heart function on ultrasound tests. The study was released Saturday at an American College of Cardiology conference.
"This is the first study to suggest a potential link between exposure to ground zero and early preclinical heart abnormalities," said Dr. Lori Croft, who led the work. Inhaling dust particles that can cause lung and heart disease may be to blame, she said.
More...
Novartis drugs fail to help high-risk patients
The Novartis diabetes drug Starlix failed to reduce progression to the disease or cut down on serious heart problems in patients at high risk for both diabetes and heart disease, according to a large study released on Sunday. The 9,306-patient study tested Starlix, known chemically as nateglinide, and the big-selling Novartis blood pressure medicine Diovan.
Diovan, known chemically as valsartan, reduced progression to diabetes by 14 percent compared to a placebo but failed to reduce the risk of serious heart problems, such as heart attack and stroke, according to researchers who presented the data at the American College of Cardiology scientific meeting in Atlanta.
The failure of Starlix to provide benefit to these patients and lack of heart impact by Diovan came as a surprise to researchers.
Clarence Thomas' wife launches 'tea party' group
But Thomas is no ordinary activist. She is the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and she has launched a tea-party-linked group that could test the traditional notions of political impartiality for the court.
In January, Virginia Thomas created Liberty Central Inc., a nonprofit lobbying group whose website will organize activism around a set of conservative "core principles," she said.
The group plans to issue score cards for Congress members and be involved in the November election, although Thomas would not specify how. She said it would accept donations from various sources -- including corporations -- as allowed under campaign finance rules recently loosened by the Supreme Court.
The New Rove-Cheney Assault on Reality
The opening salvo, fired on Fox News during Thanksgiving week, aroused little notice: Dana Perino, the former White House press secretary, declared that “we did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term.” Rudy Giuliani upped the ante on ABC’s “Good Morning America” in January. “We had no domestic attacks under Bush,” he said. “We’ve had one under Obama.” (He apparently meant the Fort Hood shootings.)
Now the revisionist floodgates have opened with the simultaneous arrival of Karl Rove’s memoir and Keep America Safe, a new right-wing noise machine invented by Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz and the inevitable William Kristol. This gang’s rewriting of history knows few bounds.
To hear them tell it, 9/11 was so completely Bill Clinton’s fault that it retroactively happened while he was still in office. The Bush White House is equally blameless for the post-9/11 resurgence of the Taliban, Al Qaeda and Iran. Instead it’s President Obama who is endangering America by coddling terrorists and stopping torture.
Page 806 of 1138
