Progressive News Feeds

We’re at the point now where conservatives are going to have to start acknowledging that Barack Obama is the most talented politician in American history.

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Nearly three years ago, as reporters shifted their focus away from the Gulf oil spill, they managed to overlook a pipeline spill that happened just 10 days after the BP well was capped. Their oversight was a boon to a non-profit with only seven full-time employees, which recently beat leading national newspapers in the race for the national reporting Pulitzer Prize for its investigative reporting on that spill. The non-profit InsideClimate’s award-winning report on the oil spill in Michigan’s Kalamazoo River, titled “The Dilbit Disaster: Inside The Biggest Oil Spill You’ve Never Heard Of,” noted that the national press was uninterested in the spill: Despite the scope of the damage, the Enbridge spill hasn’t attracted much national attention, perhaps because it occurred just 10 days after oil stopped spewing from BP’s Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico, which had ruptured three months earlier

Tags: barack-obama, congress, director, elections, environment, health, jobs, michigan, security, the nation

President Obama tore into Congress for voting down a background check amendment that the overwhelming majority of Americans support. Speaking at the White House Rose Garden as the Newtown families and former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords looked on, Obama stressed that he would continue to advocate for the measure, which fell four votes short of the 60-vote threshold: 1) “I’m going to speak plainly and honestly about what’s happened here because the American people are trying to figure out how can something have 90 percent support and yet not happen .” 2) “This legislation, in fact, outlawed any registry. Plain and simple, right there in the text

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Scientist : “The Antarctic Peninsula has warmed to a level where even small increases in temperature can now lead to a big increase in summer ice melt.” Credit: British Antarctic Survey A new study finds “a nearly tenfold increase in melt intensity” on the Antarctic Peninsula in the last few hundred years. Here’s the most worrisome news from this 1000-year reconstruction of ”ice-melt intensity and mean temperature” published in Nature Geoscience : The warming has occurred in progressive phases since about AD 1460, but intensification of melt is nonlinear, and has largely occurred since the mid-twentieth century . Summer melting is now at a level that is unprecedented over the past 1,000 years.

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President Barack Obama’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2014 would eliminate $39 billion of special tax breaks for Big Oil companies over the next decade as part of comprehensive business tax reform. These companies earned billions of dollars in recent years due to high oil and gasoline prices and do not need additional support from taxpayers. These tax breaks emerged over the past 100 years to help the then-nascent industry develop, and they relieved the oil and gas industry of $466 billion in tax payments to the federal treasury between 1918 through 2009, according to DBL Investors .

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Right-wing media are encouraging Republican senators to filibuster gun violence prevention legislation, continuing a long history of trying to influence GOP politics through recommended obstructionism. Gun Violence Prevention Legislation Added To Legislative Calendar Washington Post : Senate Gun Violence Prevention Legislation Includes “Universal Background Check System; Stricter Federal Criminal Laws For Gun Trafficking; And Provisions To Improve School Safety.” A March 21 Washington Post article reported that Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) placed gun safety prevention legislation on the legislative calendar.

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President Obama will today release a sweeping budget proposal that is aimed at reaching a grand bargain with House and Senate Republicans on the nation’s long-term debt and deficits. The budget, as expected from reports last week, largely mirrors the compromise offer Obama made to Republican leaders during fiscal cliff negotiations at the beginning of the year, as it seeks investments aimed at spurring economic growth and new revenues in exchange for cuts to both domestic discretionary spending and entitlement programs. The Obama budget replaces the automatic budget cuts — sequestration — that went into effect on March 1 with a total of $1.8 trillion in deficit reduction achieved through a mix of spending cuts and revenue increases, and it also includes many of the administration’s priorities, including stimulative investments, funding for a universal preschool program, and an increase in the minimum wage to $9.00 per hour

Tags: barack-obama, budget-cuts, credit, health, media, obama, white house

The Daily Caller’s story linking Sen. Robert Menendez to prostitutes continues to disintegrate, as questions emerge about whether the only named source in the original article was paid to make the accusations. While the focus on possible payments to the source further establishes that the story is a farce, it also risks diverting attention from the central fact that the article never should have run in the first place.

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National Rifle Association board member Ted Nugent made inflammatory comments about President Obama and said Cubans “haven’t figured out personal hygiene” during an appearance on an online radio show hosted by 9/11 truther and conspiracy theorist Pete Santilli. Santilli, who has promoted conspiracy theories relating to the December 14 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School that left 20 children and six educators dead, does little to hide the fact that he is a conspiracy theorist.

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Then-Senator Barack Obama visits Israel in 2008 President Barack Obama’s trip to Israel and the West Bank — his first during his time in the White House — will draw attention to a peace process that is currently going nowhere . CAP’s Matthew Duss, who is currently in the region, is concerned that despite calls on all side for a new round of talks between Israel and Palestine, direct negotiations may wind up being counter-productive : While the Obama administration and its partners in the Quartet on the Middle East—the group made up of the United Nations, the European Union, the United States, and Russia, established in 2002—have stressed the importance of returning to direct talks over the past few years, some analysts I spoke with suggested that this may not be a good option at the moment. Given the level of frustration among Palestinians at their own government’s failure to deliver, it’s possible that the Palestinian Authority could not survive another round of failed negotiations

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