Right-wing pundit Glenn Beck responded to criticism over his suggestion earlier this week that the California wildfires are damaging the homes of “a handful of people who hate America.” Beck yesterday lashed out at “a few liberal bloggers” who, he said, “claim that I’m serious when I’m joking and try to cause trouble.”
“Despite new House travel restrictions, lawmakers accepted free trips worth nearly $1.9 million during the first eight months of this year — more than in all of 2006, records show.” For example, the conservative Club for Growth “spent $32,242 to bring 10 GOP lawmakers to its April convention at the Ritz-Carlton Palm Beach in Florida that included a four-hour cruise on a 170-foot yacht.”
“The Bush Administration is reportedly considering air strikes, including cruise missiles, against the Kurdish rebel group PKK in northern Iraq. The move would be an attempt to stave off a Turkish invasion of that country to fight the rebels.”
The Iraqi government announced today that it has decided to “formally revoke the immunity from prosecution granted to private security companies operating in the war-ravaged country.” A government spokesman said in a statement that the Iraqi cabinet “decided to scrap the article pertaining to security companies operating in Iraq that was issued by the CPA in 2004.”
$2.4 trillion: The potential cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through the next decade, “or nearly $8,000 per man, woman and child in the country, according to a Congressional Budget Office estimate.” “The number is so big, it boggles the mind,” said Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL).
“President Bush said yesterday that a missile defense system is urgently needed in Europe to guard against a possible attack on U.S. allies by Iran.” Defense Secretary Robert Gates suggested that the United States “could delay activating such a system until there is ‘definitive proof‘ of such a threat.”
“Despite all his recent bravado about being an apostle of small government and budget-slashing,” Bush is the biggest spending president since 1964. According to an analysis by McClatchy, annual growth of discretionary spending (adjusted for inflation) has increased 5.3 percent under Bush’s watch, a number that exceeds the spending of his recent predecessors.
“The government’s terrorist watch list has swelled to more than 755,000 names,” growing by approximately “200,000 names a year since 2004.” The new report by the Government Accountability Office also “raised worries about the list’s effectiveness.”
And finally: A job listing recently appeared on the D.C. government’s public job database allegedly looking for a personal chef for MSNBC pundit Tucker Carlson. The posting named Carlson, who listed his own occuation as “Able Seaman.” The pay was just “$7.50 an hour, with no benefits.” Evidently though, according to Carlson, the posting was a hoax.
What did we miss? Let us know in the comments section.
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