Arizona Republican gubernatorial hopeful Al Melvin is using quotes from Abe Lincoln in his running fight with President Barack Obama and his policies.
The problem: The 16th president never said the things about class warfare Melvin is quoting.
For example, in postings last week on Twitter, the state senator from Tucson wrote, “You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.” That quote, Melvin said, came from Lincoln.
Ditto for a quote of, “You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich,” and “You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.”
None of these came from Lincoln, Brooks Simpson, a professor of history at Arizona State University, said when asked about the quotes by Capitol Media Services.
“I can tell you that these quotes are spurious,” Simpson said. “They do not appear in Lincoln’s writings or in his recollected words.” Melvin said he got the quotes from a Republican club newsletter.
An unhinged Arizona dad gunned down his two young daughters before turning the weapon on himself in a shocking double murder-suicide just hours into the new year.
Police say Alejandro Gallardo, 45, killed the 6- and 8-year-old girls some time early Wednesday in the Phoenix suburb of Tolleson before he took his own life, the Arizona Republic reports.
Cops learned of the killings about 10 a.m. Wednesday.
“It’s very somber; this is the time of year when we should be rejoicing with our family,” Sgt. Obed Gaytan, a Tolleson police spokesman, told the newspaper. “It’s sad this sort of incident happened.”
Neighbors reported hearing fireworks as residents rang in the new year — blasts which may have masked the sounds of Gallardo’s sickening slaughter.
Other neighbors recalled past incidents of domestic violence between a man and a woman at the house. A young girl, of no certain relation to the dead, appears to have stumbled upon the carnage.
BOSTON — A man charged with trying to bilk the Boston Marathon bombing victims’ fund out of more than $2 million has filed a federal lawsuit claiming state police violated his constitutional rights when they arrested him.
Branden Mattier, 23, alleges police misconduct and is seeking $100,000 in damages, according to the suit filed in U.S. District Court in Boston on Dec. 23 and reported Tuesday by the Boston Herald.
Mattier, of Boston, and his brother filed a claim with The One Fund using the name of a dead aunt, prosecutors said. They claimed she had lost both legs in the attack. Mattier was arrested July 2 when he allegedly accepted a fake check for almost $2.2 million from an undercover state trooper posing as a delivery driver.
His suit says state police never received permission from The One Fund to make a phony check in the organization’s name. Mattier named the state police, a trooper assigned to the state attorney general’s office and FedEx as defendants in the lawsuit.
State attorney general’s spokesman Brad Puffer said he had no comment on the lawsuit.
Mattier and his brother had an appointment to test drive a $52,000 Mercedes Benz the day they expected the check to arrive, prosecutors said.
Mattier is free on $10,000 bail after pleading not guilty to conspiracy to commit larceny, attempt to commit larceny and identity fraud. He is under GPS monitoring and is not allowed to leave the state.
Despite near-global adulation signaled by his recognition as Time person of the year for 2013, not everyone is in raptures over Pope Francis’ attempts to rebrand the Catholic Church.
Home Depot founder Kenneth Langone, who is estimated to be worth $2.1 billion, has baulked at what he sees as hyper-critical comments aimed at the rich by the pontiff in his first published exhortation Evangelii Gaudium – fearing that he does not comprehend rich Americans.
Langone, 78, who is a devout Catholic has called the statements attributed to the pope on capitalism as ‘exclusionary’ and pointedly said that one wealthy anonymous benefactor he knows is reconsidering the seven-figure donation he wants to make to the restoration of Manhattan’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue.
In an interview with CNBC, Langone said that the donor, who he would not name, was becoming concerned at the message the Argentinian pope was espousing – in which he urges the rich to give more to the poor and attacks a ‘culture of prosperity’ that causes some to become ‘incapable of feeling compassion for the poor’.
Langone told the network that he has personally raised his worries with Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the archbishop of New York.
‘I’ve told the cardinal, ‘Your Eminence, this is one more hurdle I hope we don’t have to deal with,’ said Langone.
‘You want to be careful about generalities. Rich people in one country don’t act the same as rich people in another country.’
Worried that the Pope does not understand wealthy American’s, Langone, who prays every morning, said that he has told Cardinal Dolan that ‘you got more with honey than vinegar’ and that he wants the archbishop to make it clear to the pope that wealthy Americans are the largest givers to charity in the world.
‘There is no nation on earth that is so forthcoming, so giving,’ he said to CNBC, adding that he hopes the pope can ‘celebrate a positive point of view rather than focusing on the negative.’
As the year ends, Gallup reports that public approval of Congress averaged 14 percent during 2013. This, the polling firm points out, is “the lowest annual average in Gallup’s history.”
The pollsters added: “2013 is the only year in Gallup’s history in which all monthly readings were below 20 percent.”
Yet this is “the new normal,” according to Gallup, because in each of the last four years the congressional approval rating for the year has been below 20 percent.
It was such a bad year for Congress that Gallup predicts the 2014 midterm elections will not, fundamentally, be a fight over which party controls the House and Senate.
Instead, the campaign could hinge on the overwhelmingly negative view of Congress and the sense “that more Americans feel that problems are with the institution itself rather than with the particular party or people who control it.”
This brings us to the quote of the year about political life on Capitol Hill. It came from Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), defending the Republican-led House.
“We should not be judged on how many new laws we create,” he told CBS in July. “We ought to be judged on how many laws we repeal.”
This Republican strategy is at the heart of why Congress is so unpopular. They will not work on the big issues, beginning with their failure to deal with the number one public priority: creating jobs and boosting the economy.
Instead, the GOP’s congressional focus, according to the influential Republican Study Committee, is on extracting what they term “reforms” — really, they’re talking about budget cuts — in “mandatory spending” programs including food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. There is practically no desire for those cuts reflected in any polling.
As Campaign 2014 gets underway, Republicans are threatening another government shutdown tied to refusal to approve a debt-ceiling hike to pay bills. Their demand is for President Obama to make major cuts to programs such as Social Security.
The reduced-government, reduced-spending, reduced-federal-power strategy extends to the Senate where Republicans have used an historic number of filibusters and threats to block nominees to Obama administration posts and judicial seats. That led Senate Democrats to the “nuclear option,” opening the door to simple majority votes on most nominees.
Samsung promised at CES last January that it would deliver a 110-inch UHDTV this year, and with just a couple of days left to spare here it is. Apparently rolling out in China, the Middle East and a few European countries first, there’s no word on price (the 85-inch version that launched earlier this year had a $40K pricetag attached when it launched), but can you really put a price on a TV that’s bigger than a king-size bed? That’s right, at 2.6-meters by 1.8-meters there’s more than enough room for well-heeled VIPs or employees of large companies and government agencies (the target market for the S9110) to catch some z’s on it — and bring a few friends. It’s available for custom orders just before we see the new generation of Ultra HD (including a 105-inch curved model) at CES 2014 next week, although most of us will be looking for TVs that actually fit inside our living room.
Update: Even though the set is custom order only, an Associated Press report puts the price at about $150,000 — anyone want to get a group order going?.
A Pittsburgh-area mohel is being accused of accidentally severing an infant’s penis during a botched circumcision.
The lawsuit against Rabbi Mordechai Rosenberg alleges that he performed a bris at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Squirrel Hill, during which a baby’s private parts were cut off and had to be surgically reattached.
KDKA reports that doctors performed emergency microsurgery on the child for six hours following the April 28 incident. Six blood transfusions, leech therapy, and a two month hospital stay were required before the child was sent back home.
The surgery was declared a success, though KDKA’s sources say it is too early to know if the child will make a full recovery.
Two suicide bombings on consecutive days killed at least 31 people in southern Russia city, highlighting the terror threat Russia faces as it prepares to host the Winter Games in six weeks.
A suicide bomber on a bus early Monday in Volgograd killed at least 14 people and left nearly 30 wounded, Russian officials said, a day after another suicide bombing killed at least 17 at a railway station in the city.
Vladimir Markin, the spokesman for Russia’s main investigative agency, said Monday’s blast involved a bomb similar to the one used in Sunday’s bombing at the city’s train station.
“That confirms the investigators’ version that the two terror attacks were linked,” Markin said in a statement. “They could have been prepared in one place.”
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks, but they came several months after Chechen rebel leader Doku Umarov called for attacks against civilian targets in Russia. Umarov, leader of a terrorist group that calls itself the Caucasus Emirate, has called on Muslims to disrupt the Olympics, which will be held in Sochi in February.
“If you are a terrorist group in the Caucasus, the Sochi Olympics are going to be a very inviting target,” said Steven Pifer of the Brookings Institution’s Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Initiative.
Some Muslim terrorists view the Olympics as a provocation, says Jeffrey Mankoff of the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Russia and Eurasia Program. Sochi was conquered in the 19th century. “They view it as a provocation on territory they consider stolen from Muslims,” he said.
Her wish was to dance with Beyonce and the supertar made it happened earlier this month in one of her concerts. The video below was uploaded on Beyonce’s YouTube page, and it showed part of the Taylon Davis’ story.
Taylon, who has an inoperable brain tumor, told her wish to the good folks at The Make-A-Wish Foundation. After some quick maneuvering by the Foundation, Taylon was invited to the Beyonce concert in Las Vegas where her dream to dance with the star came through.
“I am having so much fun,” Taylon told the camera, as she danced with the superstar in her wheelchair.
Beyonce and Taylon sang “Love on Top” and Destiny’s Child “Survivor” together.
HONOLULU (AP) — A December surge propelled health care sign-ups through the government’s rehabilitated website past the 1 million mark, the Obama administration said Sunday, reflecting new signs of life for the problem-plagued federal insurance exchange.
Of the more than 1.1 million people now enrolled, nearly 1 million signed up in December, with the majority coming in the week before a pre-Christmas deadline for coverage to start in January. Compare that to a paltry 27,000 in October —the website’s first, error-prone month — or 137,000 in November.The figures tell only part of the story. The administration has yet to provide a December update on the 14 states running their own exchanges. While California, New York, Washington, Kentucky and Connecticut have performed well, others are still struggling.
Still, the end-of-year surge suggests that with HealthCare.Gov now functioning better, the federal market may be starting to pull its weight. The windfall comes at a critical moment for Obama’s sweeping health care law, which becomes “real” for many Americans on Jan. 1 when coverage through the exchanges and key patient protections kick in.
“As we continue our open enrollment campaign, we experienced a welcome surge in enrollment as millions of Americans seek access to affordable health care coverage,” Marilyn Tavenner, the head of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said in a blog post.
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