This is just one example of many. And yes, he is a Republican hero!
Category: Politics
Wearing a gray cap and inmate’s uniform with the number 103 on his chest, Bae spoke in Korean during the brief appearance, which was attended by The Associated Press and a few other foreign media in Pyongyang.
“I believe that my problem can be solved by close cooperation and agreement between the American government and the government of this country,” he said.
Bae, the longest-serving American detainee in North Korea in recent years, expressed hope that the U.S. government will do its best to secure his release. He said he has not been treated badly in confinement.
A sticking point with Bae might be that the U.S. government has said he is not guilty of any crimes. U.S. Vice President Joe Biden said last month that Bae is being held without reason, which Pyongyang denies. Bae on Monday made an apology and said he had committed anti-government acts. He said recent comments in the media from the U.S. side — likely alluding to Biden’s remarks — have made his situation more complicated.
Bae was arrested in November 2012 while leading a tour group and accused of crimes against the state before being sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. He was moved to a hospital last summer in poor health.
Fox News is hemorrhaging young viewers, but last week, things hit a new low for Fox. Rachel Maddow beat Fox News for the entire week with viewers age 25-54.
According to TVNewser, “The Rachel Maddow Show” averaged 325,000 A25-54 viewers for the week, topping Fox News’ “The Kelly File,” which drew 305,000, and “Piers Morgan Tonight,” which had 159,000. It was MSNBC’s best 9pmET performance since the week of the Boston Marathon bombing (4/15/13). MSNBC’s coverage of the Chris Christie bridge scandal propelled MSNBC to#1 in the primetime demo on both Thursday and Friday of last week. Maddow won the 9pmET timeslot among younger viewers both nights.”
Moving Megyn Kelly to 9 PM was supposed to lure young viewers to Fox News. That move has failed as Kelly isn’t drawing the younger demographic that Fox News desperately needs for the future. The Maddow victory comes on the heels of Fox News seeing a 30% drop in young viewership in 2013. These numbers are also a huge victory for Maddow. She broke the Bridgegate story, and it is nice to see her being rewarded for some excellent reporting.
In an interview with the New Yorker’s David Remnick published Sunday, Obama said while he believes marijuana is “not very healthy,” the drug isn’t as harmful as some insist.
“As has been well documented, I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk of my adult life. I don’t think it is more dangerous than alcohol,” Obama told Remnick.
When asked if he believes marijuana is less harmful than alcohol, Obama said it is less damaging “in terms of its impact on the individual consumer.”
“It’s not something I encourage, and I’ve told my daughters I think it’s a bad idea, a waste of time, not very healthy,” he added.
Marijuana is currently classified by the Drug Enforcement Administration as a Schedule 1 substance, which the DEA considers “the most dangerous class of drugs with a high potential for abuse and potentially severe psychological and/or physical dependence.” Other Schedule 1 drugs include heroin, ecstasy and LSD.
Obama said his focus on reforming laws that punish drug users, noting the racial disparity in drug arrests.
“We should not be locking up kids or individual users for long stretches of jail time when some of the folks who are writing those laws have probably done the same thing,” he said.
Thank you.
Evidence gathered along the East River — body parts, clothing and a pair of sneakers — almost certainly brought to a tragic end the desperate three-month search for autistic teen Avonte Oquendo.
All that remained to confirm the parents’ worst fears was a comparison of DNA taken from the remains with the sample that Avonte’s mother, Vanessa Fontaine, rushed to investigators.
“Unfortunately, there is good reason to think it’s him,” the family’s lawyer, David Perecman, warned. “It’s more than just speculation.”
Still, Avonte’s parents were clinging to dwindling hope that their 14-year-old son was still alive.
“They’re distraught, but they’re hopeful it’s not him,” Perecman said. “They remain optimistic that he’s still out there.”
Avonte walked past a security guard and out of the Riverview School in Long Island City, Queens, on Oct. 4. Avonte was obsessed with the subway system and Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials made announcements on trains for weeks asking for help finding him. The MTA sent subway workers into the tunnels in Brooklyn and Queens to check out tips that the teen had been spotted wandering the tracks.
The NYPD went so far as to enlist the help of psychics in the search for the boy, sources told the Daily News. Police, relatives and volunteers posted flyers and combed waterways. The search generated dozens of false tips and a reward grew to nearly $90,000.
The case gripped the city with curiosity, hope and, finally, the beginnings of despair when a photographer spotted remains along the rocky shoreline in College Point on Thursday afternoon.
Just after 7 p.m. Thursday, police found a left arm that police sources said appeared to have separated via decomposition — rather than a violent act. Police divers returned to the cold and murky water on Friday, feeling around the underwater rocks while wearing heavy gloves. Other cops searched the shoreline using cadaver dogs. They shut down the search by nightfall and were expected to resume at 7 a.m. Saturday.
In all, they found legs in boys’ size 16 Old Navy jeans, a size 51/2 Air Jordan sneaker and a striped shirt — all consistent with the outfit Avonte was wearing when he went missing.
h/t NY Daily News
Last week, I touched on this subject in a post called, Hoboken Could Make Bridge-Gate Look Like Small Potatoes. The point of the piece was based on some reporting by Chris Hayes showing Chris Christie’s lack of interaction with the city – a city ravished by hurricane Sandy – due to political retribution against Hoboken’s mayor, Dawn Zimmer.
Today, MSNBC’S Steve Kornacki took Christie’s new Hoboken scandal to a whole new level. Bringing Hoboken’s mayor on as a guest, Steve showed just how deep Chris Christie’s retaliation against the mayor and the people if Hoboken went.
Breaking the Campaign Finance Laws, bribery, political retribution, holding back federal relief funds, it’s all part of how business is done under the Christie administration and it’s all illegal. This piece by Steve shows that.
Steve Kornacki explains:
Categories
Christie Time?
Worried about a cold weather Super Bowl in a couple of weeks? Don’t be: Now that the subpoenas are out and Randy Mastro is in, there’s going to be plenty of hot air to warm the New Jersey Meadowlands and nourish the state and national news media for the game and beyond.
First up is the list of those individuals who have been subpoenad to testify in front of the legislature. This includes people close to Christie’s campaign and political offices and reaches into the day-to-day operations of the government. Let’s see how much they say, but given immunity, I believe we might hear some evidence that Christie had at least some knowledge of the Bridge lane closings.
Christie’s hiring of former federal Prosecutor Randy Mastro is evidence that the governor is taking this scandal very seriously. Mastro worked for Rudy Giuliani, another politician who liked to bully people and thought that he was above the law. Remember Giuliani time? That was when the mayor sent the message that it was OK to do anything to fight crime. We need to hope that we don’t see a text or e-mail that refers to Christie time, which would be the desire to win a reelection bid by more than 40 points. Which really sounds like it’s the real impetus behind the Bridge scandal.What a waste.
We’ve had our fun with this, but I don’t think the next few months are going to be fun for the governor. And rightly so.
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Hey, I’m just reporting what the man said.
Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) claims in a recent article for Texas Monthly that House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) called Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) an “asshole” in July after King compared undocumented immigrants to drug mules with “calves the size of cantaloupes.”
In the article, Castro reflects on his first year in Congress and expresses his disappointment in the House’s inability to pass immigration reform last year.
Castro himself calls King one of the “less tactful Republicans,” who “seemed to even go out of their way to express disdain for immigrants.” Boehner condemned King’s statements in a July press conference, calling them “deeply offensive and wrong.”
In his piece, Castro offers a candid opinion of Boehner and the circumstances under which the comment was made:
The Democratic caricature of the speaker is that he’s an overly tan, overly emotional cat-herder who has lost control of his flock, but in person, he comes across as approachable and down-to-earth, and you can see how he earned the trust of his colleagues and became their leader. On a day not too long after Boehner’s political body check of Steve King for his immigration comments, the speaker was milling around the aisle walkway in the middle section of the House floor where the Democratic and Republican territories meet. Another Texas Democrat and I were standing a few feet away, and as the speaker passed us we thanked him for denouncing King’s offensive comments. He slowed his stride and then paused to turn toward us. “What an asshole,” he said. My thoughts exactly, Mr. Speaker.
Boehner’s office declined to comment on Castro’s account.
According to a CBS4 report, police are investigating Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officers at Denver International Airport after a woman filed a criminal complaint claiming that her frisking was tantamount to sexual assault.
Jamelyn Steenhoek was frisked by TSA officers while escorting her 13-year-old daughter to her gate. She was not flying herself that day, but had acquired permission to accompany her underage child to her gate.
As she attempted to move through the TSA checkpoint, an alarm sounded. Steenhoek told CBS4 that she believes that metallic jewels sewn into her rear pants pocket were responsible for setting off the machine. She said she consented to have her hands swabbed.
“They told me I tested positive for explosives,” she said, and was then ushered into a small TSA screening room in with her daughter. She was told to spread her arms and legs, and when she told the female TSA agent that she needed to get her daughter to her plane, the agent’s demeanor changed.
“At that point she did a pretty invasive search. They are just areas of the body I’m not comfortable being touched in. On the outside of my pants she cupped my crotch. I was uncomfortable with that,” she said.
“The part of the search that bothered most was the breast search. You could tell it shouldn’t take that much groping . To me it was as extensive as an exam from my physician — full touching and grabbing in the front. I felt uncomfortable, I felt violated.”
When the search yielded no explosive materials, Steenhoek said, the TSA agent repeated it, only this time there was “more touching and grabbing than the first time.”
After successfully escorting her daughter to her flight, Steenhoek complained to TSA officials, but felt they were not taking her complaint seriously enough, so she filed charges with Denver police.
Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) on Wednesday introduced legislation to require food stamp recipients to produce a valid photo ID every time they purchase food with their Electronic Benefits Transfer card. Under the Food Stamp Fraud Prevention and Accountability Act, anyone caught using someone else’s EBT card illegally would be banned from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
“Using a photo ID is standard in many day-to-day transactions, and most of those are not exclusively paid for by the taxpayer dollars,” Vitter said in a press release Wednesday. “Food stamps have more than doubled in cost since 2008 and continue to grow in an unsustainable way.”
Vitter’s bill comes after an October system glitch that temporarily disabled the spending limit on EBT debit cards, leading some recipients to take advantage by exceeding their normally allotted cap.
“A photo ID would not have stopped people from taking advantage of the system failure that day,” The Times-Picayune reported. “But Vitter said requiring photo IDs would make it harder for someone to use a stolen or fraudulently obtained [EBT card].”
National advocacy groups for low-income Americans criticized Vitter’s proposal as ineffective and harmful to struggling beneficiaries.
“Many poor people do not have photo IDs, and it costs money they do not have to get them,” Deborah Weinstein, executive director of the Coalition on Human Needs, told The Times-Picayune on Wednesday. “Senator Vitter’s proposal will be especially tough on elderly and poor people who do not have the documents needed to get their photo ID, and who will struggle even to get to the necessary offices. They will wind up going without food.”
We all may have missed this little piece of information yesterday, but it didn’t get pass the watchful eyes of Rachel Maddow.
On her show yesterday, Maddow explained that a recent appearance by New Jersey’s embattled governor Chris Christie may have contained news about his 2016 presidential prospects.
In his appearance, Christie explained that he was governor of Jersey for eight years, not four. He also said that he was born in Jersey and will stay in Jersey.
This information was interpreted by Maddow to mean that Christie’s Bridge-Gate scandal is taking its toll and the last Republican hope for 2016, is calling it quits.
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