Saturday, Dec 20th
Last update07:06:22 AM GMT
Political Glance
A Republican plan to sharply cut federal spending this year would destroy 700,000 jobs through 2012, according to an independent economic analysis set for release Monday.
The report, by Moody's Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi, offers fresh ammunition to Democrats seeking block the Republican plan, which would terminate dozens of programs and slash federal appropriations by $61 billion over the next seven months.
Authorities were having difficulty this afternoon as they started clearing thousands of protesters from the Capitol building after two weeks of demonstrations against legislation that would remove collective bargaining for thousands of public employees.
While some people tried this afternoon to get out, others blocked exits on both of the doors. Police, just after 4 p.m., appeared confused about what to do and were trying to diffuse the situation.
The House Republican move to strip federal funds from the nation's most well-known reproductive health care provider as part of its budget last week was the culmination of a multi-year effort that involved parallel action by top Republicans and conservative media operatives playing up the work of a California college student who has been creating surreptitious videos of Planned Parenthood employees for years.
The student, Lila Rose, is the president of an organization called Live Action that pays actors to walk into Planned Parenthood offices with hidden cameras, much as James O'Keefe did to undermine the community-organizing group ACORN. The Live Action stars pretend to be a pimp and a prostitute engaged in human trafficking and looking for birth control, STD testing and abortions.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has been lured into a conversation about his strategy to cripple public employee unions by a prank caller pretending to be a billionaire Republican donor.
Everyone knows that Tea Party revolutionaries fear and hate socialism about as much as the Antichrist. Which is funny, because the Tea Party movement’s dirty little secret is that it owes its existence to the grandaddy of all Antichrists: the godless empire of the USSR.
What few realize is that the secretive oil billionaires of the Koch family, the main supporters of the right-wing groups that orchestrated the Tea Party movement, would not have the means to bankroll their favorite causes had it not been for the pile of money the family made working for the Bolsheviks in the late 1920s and early 1930s, building refineries, training Communist engineers and laying down the foundation of Soviet oil infrastructure.
A leaked manuscript by one of Sarah Palin's closest aides from her time as governor charges that Palin broke state election law in her 2006 gubernatorial campaign and was consumed by petty grievances up until she resigned.
The unpublished book by Frank Bailey was leaked to the media and widely circulated on Friday. The manuscript opens with an account of Palin sending Bailey a message saying "I hate this damn job" shortly before she resigned as Alaska's governor in July 2009, less than three years into her four-year term.
An obscure cybersecurity firm from Sacramento has been swept up in a bizarre scandal involving an affiliated company and an alleged plot to discredit liberal critics of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
As the controversy intensified, the Sacramento company abruptly withdrew from a high-profile cybersecurity convention being held this week at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The conference ends today.
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