ABC News’ Kirit Radia reports: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lost her cool Monday after a Congolese student, speaking through a translator, asked her what “Mr. Clinton” thought about a Chinese trade deal with the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “You want me to tell you what my husband thinks?” Clinton replied, clearly irked by the thought of being her husband Bill’s spokeswoman.
Think the “banking crisis” is over? Think again as round two hovers just below the surface.
Congressional panel warns that if unemployment remains high and the property market continues to crumble, banks will still incur further losses on bad assets. Toxic assets on the balance sheets of hundreds of American banks remain a “substantial danger” to the financial system and could yet drive institutions to collapse, a congressional watchdog warned on Tuesday in a report urging against any complacency that the banking crisis may be drawing to a close.
President Barack Obama will spend the week trying to convince Americans with health insurance that legislation in Congress would benefit them, holding three town-hall meetings, a venue where Democrats have faced loud complaints. Mr. Obama plans to hold the town-hall meetings Tuesday in Portsmouth, N.H., Friday in Bozeman, Mont., and Saturday in Grand Junction, Colo. A White House official said participants wouldn’t be screened to keep out opponents. [HA HA HA HA…yeah sure opponents to the government takeover of our healthcare system won’t be screened out. You bet….ed]
An Ohio girl ran away to Orlando because she said her family threatened to kill her for converting to Christianity. Rifqa Bary, 17, said she was threatened by her family because she converted from Islam to Christianity. “What did your father say to you?” WFTV reporter Mary Nguyen asked. “He said he would kill me!” replied Bary.
Americans are finally getting a good look at the man in the White House. They’ve been thrilled by his speeches, love his kids and almost desperately want to believe he is who they voted for. It turns out, however, that he simply can’t tolerate disagreement. (SNIP) The administration has moved to discredit those who oppose his health care policies, for example, by labeling them neo-Nazis, right-wing lunatics or witting/unwitting tools of giant insurance companies. “I don’t want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking,” the president told a crowd of supporters in Virginia last week. “I want them to get out of the way.”
U.S. House leaders have dropped plans to spend $550 million in the Air Force budget on passenger jets used by lawmakers and senior government officials, officials said on Monday. The House of Representatives reversed the move to upgrade the executive jet fleet after public criticism, opposition from other lawmakers and the Defense Department had said it did not need more planes that it had requested.
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Westchester County entered into a landmark desegregation agreement on Monday that would compel it to create hundreds of houses and apartments for moderate-income people in overwhelmingly white communities and aggressively market them to nonwhites in Westchester and New York City. (SNIP) “This is consistent with the president’s desire to see a fully integrated society,” said Ron Sims, the deputy secretary of housing and urban development, which helped broker the settlement along with the Justice Department. “Until now, we tended to lay dormant. This is historic, because we are going to hold people’s feet to the fire.”
The little thug behind Obama’s Chicago style intimidation tactics.
Obama’s staff and retreads from the Clinton administration are using Chicago-style intimidation to rescue his extravagant health-care bill from its decline in public opinion polls. A congressional Town Hall meeting on Aug. 6 reminds us of a memorable political moment when Bill Clinton and his chief aides were in Little Rock celebrating his 1992 election. Heady with victory, Chicago staffer Rahm Emanuel demonstrated how he planned to punish political enemies by plunging his steak knife into the table and screaming, “Dead!” as he named each target.
Plot to whack Mexican president thwarted.
Federal police have arrested a drug cartel suspect they believe was behind a plot to kill President Felipe Calderon in retaliation for his crackdown on organized crime, the head of the anti-drug unit said Monday. Government intelligence learned that Dimas Diaz — the alleged financial operator of the Pacific cartel — was behind a threat on Calderon’s life, Ramon Pequeno said. The investigation into Diaz was opened last year after a series of arrests and seizures from the gang, also known as the Sinaloa cartel, police said. But they did not say when Calderon was threatened or how they uncovered the assassination plot.
Mark Steyn untangles the spaghetti.
What’s the end-game here? I suppose it’s conceivable that there are a few remaining suckers out there who still believe Barack Obama is the great post-partisan, fiscally responsible, pragmatic centrist he played so beguilingly just a year ago. The New York Times’ David Brooks stuck it out longer than most: Only a few backs, he was giddy with excitement over the President’s “education” “reforms” (whatever they were). But now he says we’re in “the early stages of the liberal suicide march”. For a famously moderate moderate, Mr Brooks seems to have gone from irrational optimism over the Democrats’ victory to irrational optimism over the Democrats’ impending downfall without the intervening stage of rational pessimism.
No one can say former President Bill Clinton doesn’t know how to throw a birthday party for former President Bill Clinton. Mr. Clinton is in Las Vegas on Monday as one of the marquee speakers at the National Clean Energy Summit, put together by Harry Reid of Nevada, the Senate majority leader. The event has drawn a pretty impressive turn-out, from former Vice President Al Gore to the wealthy oilman T. Boone Pickens.
In dog years the terrier-cross is 182, the equivalent of being born in 1827. He lives in Louisiana in the United States of America. (SNIP) Max, who is greying, has a veterinary birth certificate to prove his age and is awaiting official confirmation from Guinness World Records.
General Motors Corp. said Tuesday its Chevrolet Volt rechargeable electric car should get 230 miles per gallon (98 kilometers per liter) of gasoline in city driving, more than four times the current champion, the Toyota Prius. The Volt is powered by an electric motor and a battery pack with a 40-mile (65-kilometer) range. After that, a small internal combustion engine kicks in to generate electricity for a total range of 300 miles (480 kilometers). The battery pack can be recharged from a standard home outlet.
More “No We Can’t” news from the Obama supporters.
On Nov. 4, the hope and happiness seemed boundless for supporters of President-elect Barack Obama, leading some to speculate, with a wink and a nod, that in nine months there would be a virtual Obama baby boom — a celebratory uptick in the national birthrate. But now, 40 weeks later — the average human gestation period — MSNBC is reporting the prediction has largely been nothing more than, well, false hope. In reality, experts said, a generation is not borne from one night.
An 87-year-old Tampa woman had had it with the motherloving snakes on her motherloving porch. So when a seven-inch pygmy rattlesnake slithered up to Esther Orring’s door and bit her on the hand, she got even, strangling the venomous little serpent with her bare hands.
Virginia home sales increased in July, up 10.55 percent over a year ago. “Sales are up, and the sort of better thing, I think, is that prices have stabilized,” says John McClain, senior fellow at George Mason University who studies the region’s housing market. Northern Virginia homes sold after an average of just 62 days, much faster than the 91-day average in July 2008.
Hey all you folks who are mathematically challenged, this just might be the best $33 you ever spent.
On a yellow scratch pad, Albert Clay works out a math problem that can stump a calculator — and all of the ciphering occurs inside his white-haired head. In seconds, Clay multiplies a pair of five-digit numbers and writes down the answer in a single line. There’s none of the sloppy rows of zig-zagging numbers that would normally clutter a page. Such is the beauty of his homemade formula — titled “How to Multiply Any Number by Any Number in Your Head” — which is registered as TXu001325432 in the U.S. Copyright Office.
An 18-year-old U.S. Army soldier and two other men have been charged with capital murder in the contract killing of a midlevel Mexican drug cartel official who was also a U.S. informant. Pfc. Michael Jackson Apodaca, who was based at Fort Bliss, near El Paso, and Christopher Duran, 17, were hired by 30-year-old Ruben Rodriguez Dorado to carry out the May 15 shooting of Jose Daniel Gonzalez Galeana, police said Tuesday. Gonzalez was shot eight times outside his pricey El Paso home.
Quote of the day.
One of the biggest reasons that there are disparities is that African-Americans & Latino Americans are much more likely not to have health insurance. And so if we set up a system in which everybody’s got health insurance, some of those disparities are immediately going to be reduced. Folks who are working but don’t have health care benefits- those groups are disproportionately minority.
-Barack Hussein Obama, more talk on spreadin’ the wealth around