Cleveland Sports Forum

Political discussion.

We all should be so proud that Barack Obama is President of the United States.

He's doing a remarkable job, and apparently all the pundits during the election were "spot on" in assessing his marvelous ability to work with world leaders and effect world change.

"Can't we all just talk?"

We can, but it seems like we don't.

Where is HB ???

I'd call Obama a horse's ass, but I know that TFiSC(nC) is a horse person.

Yes, but I've been in a cold streak this Derby Season. I just missed a $10,000+ trifecta at Oak Lawn with my only wager today.


If the #6 horse (Sway Away) would have finished 3rd instead of 4th, I would have had a very nice day.

We still have a long way to go to 2012.

'Negative' Rating for U.S. Debt Sends Jolt Through Capitol Hill Debate on Debt Ceiling

Published April 18, 2011 | FoxNews.com

The United States' latest fiscal standoff -- an intensifying impasse over whether to raise the federal debt ceiling -- got a sudden jolt Monday when a top credit rating service expressed pessimism at D.C.'s political will to solve the debt crisis.

It remained unclear whether Standard & Poor's decision to change its outlook on U.S. fiscal health over the next two years from "stable" to "negative" would prompt the White House and Congress to agree on a debt fix. But it certainly prompted both sides to affirm they are serious about the issue.

“Serious reforms are needed to ensure America’s fiscal health," House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said in a written statement, calling S&P's announcement " a wake-up call to those in Washington asking Congress to blindly increase the debt limit."

Republicans have called for attaching spending reductions to any increase in the debt limit, which nearly has been reached at over $14 trillion, but the White House has warned that failing to increase the limit in the coming months could be ruinous for federal finances and the economy as a whole, because the nation's creditors may lose confidence in the United States' ability to pay its debts.

S&P's announcement sent stocks tumbling Monday, but White House Press Secretary Jay Carney downplayed it, saying the political process will outperform the agency's expectations.

The Obama administration also acknowledged that there is increasing agreement on the scope of the problem.

"Both political parties now agree that it is time to begin bringing down deficits as a share of GDP," Mary Miller, assistant secretary for financial markets at the Treasury Department, said in a written statement. "We believe S&P's negative outlook underestimates the ability of America's leaders to come together to address the difficult fiscal challenges facing the nation."

Not everyone is convinced that raising the debt ceiling is necessary, even with strings attached.

"I wouldn't raise the debt ceiling. I never vote for the spending, so I'd hardly want to accommodate the big spenders," Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, told Fox News. "We should be, you know, live within our means. And you'd be forced to do it that way.

"And of course ... you'll hear the fear mongers. They've already started, 'The end of the world is coming.'"

Republican Sen. Jim DeMint even threatened Monday to block a vote in Congress on raising the debt ceiling unless he wins a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution.

The filibuster threat comes a day after Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner suggested Republican leaders had offered private assurances to the White House that they ultimately would vote to raise the $14.3 trillion ceiling, regardless of whether a deal is reached on long-term spending cuts.

"The issue here is the debt ceiling has to be raised," Carney said Monday, and it cannot be held hostage to a process that is very complicated and difficult," he said. "We hope we will reach an agreement on deficit reduction -- a bipartisan agreement on deficit reduction within the time frame. We believe that's possible."

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., told Fox News on Sunday that Republicans need commitments to significant cuts before a higher debt ceiling can be passed, and he took the S&P's announcement Monday as a "warning" of "the dangers of waiting for the perfect political moment to tackle our debt crisis.

"It’s time for both sides to drop their partisan talking points and decide what we can do together while we still control our own destiny," Coburn said Monday. "If we refuse to negotiate within our own government, we will soon find ourselves negotiating with foreign governments and the international financial community on terms far less favorable than we enjoy today."

According to the Bereau of Economic Analysis, for the first time since the great depression American households are now receiving more money from the federal government then they are paying in taxes.

Energy in America: EPA Rules Force Shell to Abandon Oil Drilling Plans

By Dan Springer

Published April 25, 2011

Shell Oil Company has announced it must scrap efforts to drill for oil this summer in the Arctic Ocean off the northern coast of Alaska. The decision comes following a ruling by the EPA’s Environmental Appeals Board to withhold critical air permits. The move has angered some in Congress and triggered a flurry of legislation aimed at stripping the EPA of its oil drilling oversight.

Shell has spent five years and nearly $4 billion dollars on plans to explore for oil in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas. The leases alone cost $2.2 billion. Shell Vice President Pete Slaiby says obtaining similar air permits for a drilling operation in the Gulf of Mexico would take about 45 days. He’s especially frustrated over the appeal board’s suggestion that the Arctic drill would somehow be hazardous for the people who live in the area. “We think the issues were really not major,” Slaiby said, “and clearly not impactful for the communities we work in.”

The closest village to where Shell proposed to drill is Kaktovik, Alaska. It is one of the most remote places in the United States. According to the latest census, the population is 245 and nearly all of the residents are Alaska natives. The village, which is 1 square mile, sits right along the shores of the Beaufort Sea, 70 miles away from the proposed off-shore drill site.

The EPA’s appeals board ruled that Shell had not taken into consideration emissions from an ice-breaking vessel when calculating overall greenhouse gas emissions from the project. Environmental groups were thrilled by the ruling.

“What the modeling showed was in communities like Kaktovik, Shell’s drilling would increase air pollution levels close to air quality standards,” said Eric Grafe, Earthjustice’s lead attorney on the case. Earthjustice was joined by Center for Biological Diversity and the Alaska Wilderness League in challenging the air permits.

At stake is an estimated 27 billion barrels of oil. That’s how much the U. S. Geological Survey believes is in the U.S. portion of the Arctic Ocean. For perspective, that represents two and a half times more oil than has flowed down the Trans Alaska pipeline throughout its 30-year history. That pipeline is getting dangerously low on oil. At 660,000 barrels a day, it’s carrying only one-third its capacity.

Production on the North Slope of Alaska is declining at a rate of about 7 percent a year. If the volume gets much lower, pipeline officials say they will have to shut it down. Alaska officials are blasting the Environmental Protection Agency.

“It’s driving investment and production overseas,” said Alaska’s DNR Commissioner Dan Sullivan. “That doesn’t help the United States in any way, shape or form.”

The EPA did not return repeated calls and e-mails. The Environmental Appeals Board has four members: Edward Reich, Charles Sheehan, Kathie Stein and Anna Wolgast. All are registered Democrats and Kathie Stein was an activist attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund. Members are appointed by the EPA administrator. Alaska’s Republican senator thinks it’s time to make some changes.

“EPA has demonstrated that they’re not competent to handle the process,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski. “So if they’re not competent to handle it, they need to get out of the way.”

Murkowski supported budget amendments that would have stripped the EPA of its oversight role in Arctic offshore drilling. The Interior Department issues air permits to oil companies working in the Gulf of Mexico.

George Soros' Brazilian oil company will be drilling there soon.

No truth to the rumor that Donald Trump wants to see Osama's Death Certificate.

Pretty ridiculous that the caught this clown less than a thousand yards from the pakistan military academy. Doesnt quite pass the smell test.

God bless America and President Obama.

They dumped him in the sea!

Good luck with that shrine, al-Qaida.

Pakistan has been screwing us from the jump on Bin Laden. We kept paying them money to help us find him. If they gave him up the money would go away. They kept taking our money and flipping us off.

From the sounds of it we got him without their help, and I think there is the possibility when Obama thanked them for their help last night that may have been payback, cause now they're gonna have to deal with alot of pissed off radicals.

I dunno, I may be wrong but that was my initial gut feeling.

I'm gonna have to break out my waterboarding avatar again.

.

Bush-Era Interrogations Provided Key Details on Bin Laden's Location

By Catherine Herridge

Published May 02, 2011 | FoxNews.com

Years of intelligence gathering, including details gleaned from controversial interrogations of Al Qaeda members during the Bush administration, ultimately led the Navy SEALs who killed Usama bin Laden to his compound in Pakistan.

The initial threads of intelligence began surfacing in 2003 and came in the form of information about a trusted bin Laden courier, a senior U.S. official told Fox News on condition of anonymity. Bin Laden had cut off all traditional lines of communication with his network by this time because the Al Qaeda leader knew the U.S. intelligence community was monitoring him. It was said that he also didn't even trust his most loyal men to know his whereabouts and instead communicated only through couriers.

But it was four years later, in 2007, that terror suspects at the Guantanamo Bay military prison started giving up information about the key courier.

Around this time, the use of enhanced interrogation tactics, including waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning, were being denounced as torture by critics of the Bush administration. President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney came under intense pressure for supporting rough treatment of prisoners. Critics claimed that any information given under duress simply couldn't be trusted.

It is an argument that Bush and Cheney strongly rejected then, and now.

"I would assume that the enhanced interrogation program that we put in place produced some of the results that led to bin Laden's ultimate capture," Cheney told Fox News on Monday, a hint of vindication in his voice.

The White House on Tuesday sought to downplay the role that Bush-era interrogations played in gathering the information that led to bin Laden's death.

"Some of it came from individuals who were in custody. Some of it came from human sources," counterterrorism adviser John Brennan told Fox News. "But there was no single bit of information that was instrumental."

Brennan acknowledged that "those in detention" provided key information, but stressed that it was obtained in a variety of different ways.

"Sometimes they gave us information willingly," Brennan said, adding that sometimes they gave misinformation and sometimes they inadvertently spilled clues that unlocked other intelligence.

"This was a painstaking ... body of work that was done that was over the course of many, many years," he said.

Former Bush administration officials, as well as Republican lawmakers, have given President Obama and his national security team great credit for the daring operation Sunday that ended with bin Laden being shot to death by a CIA-led Navy SEALs team. But they also point to indications that the controversial interrogation program and information gleaned from detainees at Guantanamo Bay and at secret overseas prisons may have played a key role, in claiming Bush-era policies helped set the stage for Sunday's success.

"This really does stretch over two presidencies," former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told Fox News on Tuesday. "There's a long train here, and it leads back, I think, to good counterterrorism policies that were put in place in 2001."

Information was given up by prisoners, including 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. U.S. officials described the courier as a talented protege and trusted associate of both Mohammed and Al Qaeda's No. 3 leader at the time, Abu Faraj al Libi. Both men were held at Guantanamo Bay.

U.S. officials were told the courier's name was known only to bin Laden's innermost circle.
By 2009, the U.S. intelligence community had a rough idea of where the courier operated: a region north of Islamabad, Pakistan. It was another year before this compound was identified in August 2010 as a likely home for a senior Al Qaeda member.

The compound was eight times the size of other homes in the affluent neighborhood, and the impressive 18-foot-high walls with barbed wire drew scrutiny from intelligence analysts.

By early this year, information from multiple intelligence sources, including the now-shuttered harsh interrogation program, as well as CIA operatives and Special Operations Forces on the ground in Afghanistan and Pakistan, were building a clearer case that the compound might house bin Laden. Officials found out that there were three families living there. In addition, a significantly older man, who was shown deference by the group, was not required to work on the compound.

Critics of the Bush-era interrogation programs have suggested that the harsh interrogations were not essential to tracking bin Laden and that the information could have been obtained by more humane means. But for Cheney and other Bush administration alumni, Sunday's raid stands as proof their system worked.

USA wastes billions of dollars supporting groups in other countries who screw us at the first opportunity.

Cut off that spending immediately and use those funds to help the citizens of the USA!