TOP 100 NEWS SITES
| |||
|
| |||
| |||
|
| |||
| Democrat opens fire, literally, on Obama's climate change agenda | Suzanne Goldenberg Democrats facing a tough fight in mid-terms are distancing themselves from Obama. Now one says he will stand and fightA number of Democrats trying to hang on to their careers in these congressional elections are distancing themselves from Barack Obama, but only one, so far, is suggesting he would take a gun to the president's energy policies. In a new campaign aid, Joe Manchin, the Democratic governor of West Virginia who is now running for a seat in the Senate, picks up a rifle and fires a bullet into a target labelled "cape and trade bill".Manchin is pictured loading bullets into the gun while striding across an autumn landscape before letting off the shot. He says: "I sued the EPA and I'll take dead aim at the cap and trade." Any chance of Congress passing a cap and trade bill died long ago. But Manchin's ad is not entirely political theatrics.With climate legislation defeated, Republicans and other opponents of action on global warming are trying to strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its powers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Manchin as governor sued the EPA last week to stop the government from enforcing regulations that would restrict mountaintop mining removal. As the name suggests, the highly destructive method involves blasting the tops off mountains, and dumping the debris in valleys. Roughly 2,000 miles of West Virginia's streams have been contaminated this way.Manchin has been facing an onslaught from Republicans who accuse him of siding with Obama and Democrats in Congress against West Virginia's coal industry. Other Democrats in Manchin's predicament are adopting a similar strategy. Joe Donnelly, an Indiana Congressman who is in a tough fight for re-election in Elkhart, an area that soured on Obama because of high unemployment, is running television ads that refers to climate change legislation as "Nancy Pelosi's energy tax".Donnelly voted against last year's climate bill in the house.US midterm elections 2010Climate change scepticismBarack ObamaClimate changeUnited StatesObama administrationDemocratsSuzanne Goldenbergguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Kosovo Coalition Coming Apart A junior partner in Kosovo's coalition government said it is pulling out, a move that throws the country into political turmoil and is likely to lead to a snap general election. online.wsj.com |
A question for our conservative friends | Michael Tomasky Here's a question for our conservatives (and for all of you, by all means). Back during the healthcare debate, many of you were fond of pointing out, and indeed still point out now and again, that Obama and the Democrats ignored the will of the people and passed a law the people didn't want, and for that they will be punished, and rightly so, because democratic leaders are supposed to listen to le peuple. I wax French above for a reason, which is this. What are Nicholas Sarkozy and his political allies doing right now in France? Given the scope of the unrest over the retirement age proposals, I think it's not going too far out on a limb to say that Sarkozy is most definitely ignoring the will of the French people. So if Obama should have backed off, shouldn't he?I've been thinking, by the way, about the riposte many of you offer whenever I post on the hypocrisy of the Republicans accepting and pleading for and bragging about getting stimulus money. For those unfamiliar, you say: These are the rules of the game, and they'd be silly not to play by them, and on that logic, Tomasky, shouldn't the Democrats have refused their Bush tax cuts?This old dog can still learn a new trick here and there. Having pondered the matter, I say yes, Democrats who vote against tax cuts should indeed forego their share of them, or calculate the amount and donate it to charity, since working out the foregoing of tax dollars with the IRS sounds like an impossible thing to do. When the polity is confronted with this question again someday, you have my word that I'll write from whatever forum I then have exactly this.Still, I don't think they're quite the same. The tax cuts for 200-odd legislators, even if a good chunk of them are millionaires, amount to a sou compared to the billions that stimulus-hating GOPers are trying to grab from the treasury. Also, most Democrats in 2001 didn't go around saying the tax cuts were tyranny and socialism and fascism, just that they were bad policy.But as to the main question here: what about it? If Obama was arrogant, isn't Sarkozy? Don't say "but France's pension system is in crisis." America's healthcare system is, too, in the macro sense, very much so. Let's see what you got.United StatesFranceMichael Tomaskyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Vettel not giving up title dream Red Bull driver Sebastian Vettel says he has not given up hope of winning the world title despite his failure in the Korean Grand Prix. news.bbc.co.uk |
Artistry Crème LuXury - Video Creme LuXury Combats Intrinsic Causes of Skin Aging with Industry Leading Technology feedproxy.google.com |