In the muck that is today’s politics, hearing the news that Congress agreed on anything is a rarity. But in this new congress, a bill actually passed both the House and Senate and is on its way to the president’s desk.
This is news! Politicians actually doing their job!
The Senate overwhelmingly passed a six-year extension of a terrorism insurance program Thursday, wrapping up work on an unfinished piece of business from the last Congress and sending the bill to President Obama for his signature.
The passage of the bill marked the first time legislation was cleared by both chambers of the 114th Congress. The bill passed the House on Tuesday Wednesday.
The Terrorism Risk Insurance Act (TRIA) was signed into law in 2002 by then-President George W. Bush after the 2001 terrorist attacks. It allows the government to serve as a financial backstop for businesses suffering losses due to catastrophic attacks.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) introduced an amendment to the bill that would strip it of a provision that would alter the Dodd-Frank financial regulation law. Warren’s amendment failed.
“Wait, did you just ask if I support ISIS?” That was the comeback from human rights lawyer and activist, Arsalan Iftikhar. as he tried to wrap his head around the rather outlandish question from CNN’s Don Lemon. The two were discussing the events in France where Muslim gunmen murdered 12 people because of satirical cartoons they made about the prophet Mohammed.
Lemon’s question stemmed from a report saying that 16% of French citizens support ISIS and he asked the questioned if Iftikhar supports the terrorist group as well. After asking Don if he really just asked that question, Iftikhar skillfully carried on the conversation talking about the 16% report.
Earlier in the interview, Iftikhar compared the violence of Islam to the violence of Christianity. “It’s important to not conflate the actions of a very few to a population of 1.7 billion people, which represents 20 percent of the word’s population,” he said. “When Christians commit acts of terror, we don’t ask priests and pastors to go on national television and condemn these acts. But sadly, Muslim public intellectuals, thinkers, leaders, and Islamic scholars have that double standard that we have to deal with.”
Like the rest of the world, Jon Stewart expressed his frustrations with the recent shooting in France, where 12 people were executed by Islamic terrorists because of the apparent deadly combination of satire and the Islamic faith.
Jon Stewart of Comedy Central had this to say.
I know very few people go into comedy as an act of courage, mainly because it shouldn’t have to be that. It shouldn’t be an act of courage, it should be taken as established law. But those guys at Hebdo had it and they were killed for their cartoons.
I guess you can say that the new sanctions on North Korea are working.
After it was revealed that they were responsible for the Sony hack, President Obama levied heavier sections on the already isolated nation, causing the North to decry those sanctions as “wars of aggression.”
“The U.S. took part in wars of aggression … But it has never experienced a hail of bullets and shells on its own territory,” North Korea’s National Defense Commission said in a warning through state-run media. “The U.S. should roll back its hostile policy towards the DPRK of its own accord if it does not want to suffer a war disaster.”
The United States on Friday slapped sanctions on 10 individuals and three entities, including North Korea’s primary intelligence organization and its arms dealer, over the country’s alleged role in a cyberattack that threatened to derail Sony’s release of “The Interview” and made public emails that embarrassed top-level executives.
As if the Cowboy kerfuffle wasn’t enough of a distraction for the governor, along comes another story where ‘Boys owner Jerry Jones condescends to Christie’s fandom by saying that having Christie in the owner’s box is payback for when the not-governor was too poor to pay for parking. Jones also said that he will support Christie if he decides to run for president.
Which he will. And apparently he will make that announcement by the end of the month. It would certainly be a delicious treat for the candidate-in-waiting to be able to announce his intentions a day or two after the Cowboys win the Super Bowl on February 1, but I don’t believe that is in the offing if the Green Bay Packers have anything to say about that. A Cowboys loss this Sunday would clear the news cycle for Christie’s announcement, which I assume will come during the week when there’s no game scheduled. The man might be unsuitable to be president, but he does have a knack for public relations.
But, oh! the complications. First up is a report that one of New Jersey’s marquee employers, Mercedes-Benz, is leaving the state and heading for Georgia, which is cheaper and has lower taxes. This doesn’t help Christie with the pro-business crowd and will further reduce the chance that New Jersey’s economy has a robust recovery in time for the governor to run on a miracle.
Then comes another story that says that of people involved in an interstate move involving New Jersey, the vast majority are leaving the state–fleeing is the headline word–rather than moving in. This is not a scientific survey as the data is being supplied by United Van Lines, a moving company, but it does attest to what anecdotal evidence has suggested for years. The Governor will probably seize on these numbers to continue to argue against a millionaire’s tax because his main argument has always been that more people will leave the state rather than pay. But since people seem to be leaving anyway, it doesn’t say much about his improving things in the state.
The real damage, though, comes because these are more negative stories about New Jersey. Christie can go around the country and tell tales about bipartisanship and how he got the Democratic legislature to pass a pension and benefits bill, but his refusal to actually make a mandated payment will also follow him. As will the videos of him yelling at veterans and public employees. Americans do want someone who will fight for them, but they don’t want someone who will fight them because he disagrees with them.
Finally, there’s that darned Bush family. Yes, Jeb Bush is off and raising money for a White House bid that will directly compete for the same voters Christie needs for support during the primaries. And Jeb’s talking about big issues like immigration and income inequality, while Christie is huddling with foreign policy experts to learn what to say in interviews.
It’s clear that Christie will rise above the silliness of the Dallas story, but the pertinent point is that once he declares himself a candidate for president, he will have precious little to run on.
Don’t call them stupid, just call them Fox News watchers… well, maybe they are stupid for watching Fox!
In a Public Mind poll from Fairleigh Dickinson University released Wednesday, more than half of Republicans — 51 percent — and half of those who watch Fox News — 52 percent — say that they believe it to be “definitely true” or “probably true” that American forces found an active weapons of mass destruction program in Iraq.
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Thirty-two percent of Democrats, 46 percent of independents, 41 percent of people who reported to watch CNN and 14 percent of MSNBC viewers answered similarly.
Overall, 42 percent still believe that troops discovered WMDs, a misleading factor in the decision to invade Iraq in 2003. It was later found that Iraq did have individual stockpiles of chemical weapons, but there was no active WMD program in the country.
The FBI is looking for a balding white man in his 40s who may be responsible for Tuesday’s bombing of an NAACP office building in Colorado Springs. The bombing happened on Tuesday before 11AM. According to FBI officials, a device was detonated against the wall of the building at 603 S. El Paso St.
A gas can had been placed next to the device but was not ignited by the explosion, officials said in a news release.
The explosion charred the exterior wall of the building, but no one was injured and no other damage was reported.
The FBI said it is looking for a person of interest, described as a balding white man in his 40s who may be driving a dirty, 2000 or older model white pickup truck with paneling, an open tailgate and a missing or covered license plate.
“Some neighbors came out and said they saw a Caucasian gentleman get into a white truck,” said Gene Southerland, who owns Mr. G’s Hair Design Studios, which shares the building with the NAACP office.
“It was such a beautiful day and everything, sunny. And in broad daylight, you hear this explosion. It’s frightening,” he said.
Southerland, a customer and a beautician were inside the business at the time of the explosion, which knocked down a few plastic bottles on a shelf in the northeast corner of the building, he said.
“I had a corrections officer in my chair, and he said it sounded like a shotgun blast,” Southerland said.
After being a leader of The Party of NO, going against every economic policy implemented by the president and Democrats and being a member of the party that shut down the government, Mitch McConnell is now doing his best trying to take credit for economic prosperity we are now facing in this country.
“After so many years of sluggish growth, we’re finally starting to see some economic data that can provide a glimmer of hope; the uptick appears to coincide with the biggest political change of the Obama administration’s long tenure in Washington: the expectation of a new Republican Congress,” McConnell said on Wednesday.
“So this is precisely the right time to advance a positive, pro-growth agenda.”
The comment provoked snide chuckles from Democrats. The Democratic National Committee emailed out a statement with the subject line “DNC to McConnell: Hahahahahahahahahahaha.”
Here’s the statement from DNC Communications Director Mo Elleithee:
Hahahahahahahahahahaha. That Mitch McConnell is one funny guy. He likes to remind people all the time that he’s not a scientist. Now we know he’s not a mathematician or an economist either. The fact is, under President Obama we’ve had 57 straight months of private sector job growth leading to nearly 11 million jobs added. All Republicans have given us is a government shutdown that cost the economy $24 billion. I get why he wants to take credit for the economic recovery. But maybe he should first do something to help contribute to it.
The new Republican controlled Congress is now formally on its way and yes, Jon Stewart had something to say about that, especially given the fact that Congress is presently scraping the bottom of the barrel in job approval, yet, on their first day back to “work, they arrived at noon!
Noon! You had to get there at noon! You know, normally that would make me mad, but since Congress probably isn’t doing anything anyway, alright, why not get a late start? Hell, why not just serve them legislation in bed for God’s sake? No wonder you folks have a 14 percent approval rating and apparently a roughly 95 percent incumbency rate. You know, 14 percent disapproval to 95 percent incumbency is the same disapproval to recurrence ratio currently enjoyed by the herpes virus.
When it was all over, at least 12 people were reportedly killed in this attack.
It happened on Wednesday in France as gunmen attacked a French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. The sickening cell phone video shows two masked men, dressed in black and carrying rifles, walking slowly forward from a small black car. The camera shakes as loud bangs are heard, then refocuses on the two men crossing the street toward a policeman laying on the sidewalk.
One gunman is then shown firing a shot at the police officer as the officer turns with his hands up. Initial reports were unclear whether the officer was killed. The gunmen then run back to the car and drive away from the scene.
#ThanksObama! How dare you implement policies that actually help people!
The uninsured rate dropped to 12.9 percent for 2014’s fourth quarter, a Gallup poll released Tuesday showed. This figure — the lowest since Gallup began measuring daily in 2008 — is down from the 13.4 percent rate in the third quarter in 2014 and down from 17.1 percent in 2013’s fourth quarter.
While the figure has decreased across all demographics, the pollster notes that the sharpest decline in uninsured has been among African-American and low-income Americans. The number of uninsured Hispanics has decreased as well, but they remain the highest uninsured demographic in the country, with 32.4 percent without coverage.
The poll showed a sharp decrease of uninsured U.S. adults from the end of 2013 to the end of 2014 as a growing number of Americans signed up for coverage through state and federal exchanges under the Affordable Care Act. The 2015 enrollment period opened on Nov. 15 and will close on Feb. 15.
The Gallup poll was conducted Oct. 1 to Dec. 30, 2014, and is based on 43,000 interviews with U.S. adults.
It’s one thing to sit in the owners box and discuss politics or bidness with a somewhat straight face and an unemotional posture.
Then there’s what Governor Chris Christie did on Sunday evening with Dallas Cowboy’s owner Jerry Jones. Christie looked like an unabashed fan who had just won a side of beef in a bet after America’s Team came back from 13 points down to win their playoff game against the Detroit Lions. He never got to actually hug Jones, so much as wrapping his hands near the owner’s underarms and besides, Christie never looks good when his feet leave the ground.
So now to the political fallout. This was not a good moment for the Governor. First of all, he has three teams from which to choose in his own market–the Giants, Jets and Eagles–yet he chose to go halfway across the country to essentially be a win-chaser and to actually look like he was in thrall to Jerry Jones. Christie wants to appear as a lunch pail every day Jersey guy, but now that’s been jettisoned as the Presidential-Candidate-In-Waiting shows his true colors. I’m sure he’s had the money conversation with Jones and they look like they’re real pals, which means something in a race that will also feature the former Governor of Texas.
Mr. Christie, characteristically, doubled down in the face of criticism. He seemed happy to replay the incident when he called into the Boomer and Carton show on New York’s WFAN sports radio, as it gave him another chance to boast of his closeness to Mr. Jones. He gave details on the locker room celebration that the camera did not capture, saying that Dez Bryant, the wide receiver, was the first person to hug him. “Dez knows exactly who I am, yes,” the governor assured his hosts.
Why would the governor want to boast of his closeness to Jones? Aren’t the Tisch’s and the Johnson’s wealthy enough? Or do they see right through Christie’s act?
This is but one episode in what will become a complete circus once Christie enters the presidential race and unveils his true persona to the American people. They will then learn what we in New Jersey already know; Christie has no shame and no filter. These will be his greatest strengths at the beginning of the campaign, but will ultimately prove to be his undoing.
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