http://bleacherreport.com...nn-sports-bin&hpt=hp_bn14

Illinois’ credit rating has taken another hit. Standard & Poor’s Ratings Service downgraded the state from an “A” rating to “A-minus”, making it the worst in the country.
The New York ratings firm’s ranking means taxpayers may have to pay tens of millions of dollars more in interest when the state borrows money for roads and other projects.
The downgrade is the latest fallout over the $96.8 billion debt to five state pension systems.
The downgrade now ties Illinois with California, but California has a positive outlook.
Illinois’ fragile overall financial status netted it a negative outlook, putting it behind California overall.
The ratings came out now because Illinois plans to issue $500 million in bonds within days.

Read more: http://wgntv.com/2013/01/...the-nation/#ixzz2J6xdXqE8
Read more at http://wgntv.com/2013/01/...tion/#oP42PFuKmAx3mwzK.99

Obama 'exceeded authority'


PRESIDENT Barack Obama violated the constitution by making appointments to the federal labour board without senate approval, a US appeals court said in a ruling that calls hundreds of board decisions into question and may extend to the head of the new consumer finance agency.

The US Court of Appeals in Washington sided with Republican lawmakers. The court held that Mr Obama's recess appointments to the US National Labor Relations Board last year, made after Republicans refused to consider his nominees, were ''constitutionally invalid'' because the Senate wasn't in recess at the time.

''Allowing the president to define the scope of his own appointments power would eviscerate the constitution's separation of powers,'' US Circuit Judge David Sentelle wrote in a 46-page opinion - one that may be cited in challenges to recess appointments throughout the federal government.

The ruling may be used to undo more than 200 decisions by the NLRB, the nation's industrial relations arbitrator, over the past year, as well as regulations by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, whose director, Richard Cordray, was named at the same time as the board members. The White House said the ruling won't affect Mr Cordray.
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In recent years, Democratic President Bill Clinton made 139 recess appointments, while Republican President George W. Bush made 171 and Obama, a Democrat, has made 32.

The appeals court ruling came in a case brought by a soda bottling company over an NLRB decision in a collective bargaining agreement. The company argued that a recess only occurs in the period between one session of Congress and the next, not when members are simply absent and the Senate hasn't adjourned.

White House press secretary Jay Carney, calling the decision ''novel and unprecedented'', said it contradicts 150 years of practice by Democratic and Republican administrations.

BLOOMBERG

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/...-2des8.html#ixzz2JBV6QJtY

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama says he's a football fan but that if he had a son, considering the impact the game has on its players, he would think long and hard before allowing his son to play.

Obama tells The New Republic that football fans are going to have to wrestle with the fact that the game will probably change over time to try to reduce the violence.

The president says that some of those changes might make football, in his words, "a bit less exciting" but that it will be much better for players.

"And those of us who are fans maybe won't have to examine our consciences quite as much," he said.

- Crimsoninja

I wince everytime this thread is up.

I wince everytime this thread is up.
- Cptmjl

wish you answered my question

wish you answered my question
- Crimsoninja

want me to answer it?

want me to answer it?
- the_cause2000

only via PM

wish you answered my question
- Crimsoninja

What was the question?

name a president that you feel earned total support.
- Crimsoninja

Ronald Regan

Ronald Regan
- Cptmjl

You mean Donald? 'Cos Donald Regan was never president.

You mean Donald? 'Cos Donald Regan was never president.
- Flyskippy

That's hysterical. Got anything else?

That's hysterical. Got anything else?
- Cptmjl

No...

No...
- Flyskippy

always loved Ronald Reagan, who cant admire a republican who raised taxes 7 out of 8 years in office??

always loved Ronald Reagan, who cant admire a republican who raised taxes 7 out of 8 years in office??
- watsonnostaw

always loved Ronald Reagan, who cant admire a republican who raised taxes 7 out of 8 years in office??
- watsonnostaw

incredible

always loved Ronald Reagan, who cant admire a republican who raised taxes 7 out of 8 years in office??
- watsonnostaw

I dunno. I don't really get this thread - except for kick's posts.

Ballooning disability payouts crippling U.S. funds



By John Robson ,Parliamentary Bureau

First posted: Saturday, January 26, 2013


What's wrong with Americans? No, not their political choices, domestic arsenals or supersized appetites. I mean literally. Why do nearly nine million American workers collect federal disability insurance, one for every 13 with full-time jobs?

Possible suspects do include obesity with all its negative health effects, the aches and pains of an aging populace and greater social and medical willingness to classify bad habits as disabilities. But behind it all is the growing tendency of the state to give you money if you convincingly "present" as too ill to work. It's part of a much larger problem of paying people for things we don't want and getting more of them than we can afford.

Consider that 1.3 million more people are officially disabled than when Obama was first sworn in. That can't all be due to overeating, aging or psychiatrists deciding a bad attitude is Oppositional Defiant Disorder (seriously, in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). Nor can it all be Barack Obama's fault that the equivalent of everyone in New Jersey is now too sick to go to work.

When George W. Bush was first sworn in there were five million people collecting Social Security Disability Insurance; by his second inauguration, almost 6.2 million, and by Obama's first, 7.4 million. So it's been going up 300,000 a year for more than a decade and fairly steadily since December 1968 when 51 people worked full time for each one on federal disability.

Including spouses and children the program covers 11 million people and costs over $130 billion a year. And the Disability Insurance Trust Fund, supported by a 1.8% payroll tax, has run deficits for four straight years and is projected by Social Security's own trustees to go bust in 2016.

This is surely the very definition of social policy failure: an unaffordably expensive program that produces an explosion of ill-being. Yet Obama said at his second inauguration: "The commitments we make to each other - through Medicare, and Medicaid, and social security - these things do not sap our initiative; they strengthen us."

Not true. Rather, the confounding paradox of all social programs is that the better they relieve misery, the more likely they are to create it, especially as time goes by.

For instance, in the short run, if you genuinely don't feel very well and dislike your job, getting paid to convince a bureaucrat you can't keep doing it is bound to have some appeal. And in the long run, if such attempts frequently succeed, people will be more likely to ignore warnings that bad habits will wreck your health and destroy your livelihood, since the probable result becomes a regular cheque not a soup kitchen. Just as the hard choice to save your next dollar for your later years or spend it fixing the roof or taking your kids skiing cannot help being influenced by a government offer to top up insufficient retirement funds.

I do not deny the misery of poverty in old age or the often grim reality of disability. But I do deny that genuine disability in America has nearly doubled since 2001.

Or that hunger has exploded in the last four decades. Yet "food stamps", formally the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, went to about one in 50 Americans in the 1970s and by November 2008 to one in 10, or 31 million people.

Over that time per capita income nearly doubled and obesity shot up. But you get what you pay for, including squandering money on inessentials because government is buying your groceries. And since the Obama administration worked hard to expand the program, including ads extolling it, they presumably consider its 44% increase by July 2012 to 46.4 million, one in seven Americans, a policy success.

The problem is, it's breaking the bank and ruining lives. So are a host of similar programs, including for the middle class. The New York Times says Washington now gives Americans nearly $1 dollar in benefits for every $4 in other income, at a total cost up 70% in real terms since 2000.

The United States cannot afford much more such "strengthening", fiscally or socially. But refusal to face the dependency problem is crippling America, figuratively and literally.

I dunno. I don't really get this thread - except for kick's posts.
- Flyskippy

reagan was hated by the gays for not addressing AIDS.

GOD HATES FAGS

It took nearly a full week, but President Barack Obama on Monday called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to congratulate the Israeli leader on his election win last Tuesday.

However it took Obama only hours to phone Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi on his election win over the summer.

It took nearly a full week, but President Barack Obama on Monday called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to congratulate the Israeli leader on his election win last Tuesday.

However it took Obama only hours to phone Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi on his election win over the summer.
- Doppleganger

like omg