The President declared 2014 the year for action, and called the potential reinstatement of the unemployment benefits for 1.3 million Americans the starting point.
This will be a year of action. I’ll keep doing everything I can to create new jobs and new opportunities for American families – with Congress, on my own, and with everyone willing to play their part. And that action should begin by extending unemployment insurance for Americans who were laid off in the recession through no fault of their own. This vital economic lifeline helps people support their families while they look for a new job. And it demands responsibility in return by requiring that they prove they’re actively looking for work. But Republicans in Congress just let that lifeline expire for 1.3 million Americans. And if this doesn’t get fixed, it will actually hurt about 14 million Americans over the course of this year. Earlier this week, Democrats and Republicans in the Senate took the first steps toward making this right. But Congress needs to finish the job right away. More than one million Americans across the country will feel a little hope right away.
Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA) warned that there’s “no such thing as free lunch” for school children in Georgia, but he seems to have enjoyed a few.
An investigation by Georgia’s WSAV channel 3 found that Kingston, who is currently running for Senate and recently suggested students work cleaning cafeterias in exchange for lunch, had expensed as much as $4,182 worth of lunches for his office over the past three years.
“Kingston and his staff expensed nearly $4200 in meals for business purposes to his congressional office, paid for by the American taxpayer,” WSAV 3’s Dan Kartunen reported. The amount could have purchased nearly 2,000 Georgia school lunches.
WSAV also found that Kingston also racked up $4,289 of free meals paid for by third-party groups like the Georgia Bankers Association and the Congressional Institute. Kingston has also travelled to a handful of continents on congressional business racking up $24,313 in costs. Those expenses include more than just meals. What’s more, Kingston also expensed $145,391 worth of meals for campaign events.
In December Kingston, who is against a federal lunch program, also argued that poor students should sweep floors in exchange for lunch.
Shaquille O’Neal scored headlines last year when he threw his considerable weight behind Republican Chris Christie in the race for New Jersey governor.
So perhaps it should come as no surprise that the NBA legend is still supporting the embattled would-be presidential contender as he struggles with arguably the greatest crisis of this tenure: ‘Traffic-gate’.
Several members of Christie’s inner-circle allegedly conspired to create bad traffic in Fort Lee, New Jersey, ostensibly as retribution against that city’s mayor, a Democrat who opposed Christie’s re-election.
Christie has vehemently denied any role in or knowledge of the scheme.
Shaq takes Christie as it his word, reportedly telling TMZ, “I believe him.”
“When you have a lot of employees, it’s kind of very difficult to police everybody. Some leaders let people police themselves and some of them micromanage and try to police everybody. One thing I know about Christie: He’s not a micromanager,” O’Neal, also a New Jersey native, said.
“The unfortunate thing about being a leader is that when you’re on a team and a teammate makes a wrong decision, it’s all going to come back on you,” he added.
(CNN) – A Nebraska toddler who repeated a slew of profanities in an online video has been taken into child protective custody, Omaha police said Wednesday.
While authorities found nothing criminal in the video, officials from the Omaha police’s Child Victim Unit and the Nebraska Child Protective Services took the infant and three other children into custody on Wednesday, the police department said on its Facebook page.
The joint investigation found safety concerns, the statement said.
In the video, the diapered child is bombarded with obscenities and racial slurs by the adults around him.
The African-American toddler knocks down a chair and gives nearly as good as he gets, responding to some of the comments with an upraised middle finger and telling one of the adults at one point, “Shut up, bitch.” The adults laugh and prompt him to repeat other crudities.
Brilliant. Let me summarize. Christie was mad at New Jersey’s Senate Democrats because they were giving his nominees a hard time, so he decided not to re-nominate one of his close friends, a Republican, yo the judicial bench.
They’re “animals” an angry Chris Christie said about the Senate Democrats, in a hastily called press conference held to explain why he was not re-nominating his friend to the bench. That press conference, where he called the Democrats “animals,” was held on August 12th.
A little after 7am on August 13th, a message was sent from Christie’s office saying, “time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.”
The head of the Senate Democrats represented Fort Lee.
We’re still in the middle of this Bridge gate controversy, but already Democrats have released their first ad.
Using Christie’s own words and tying those words into New Jersey’s Bridge-Gate scandal, Democrats manage to paint a very dark picture of what a Christie presidency could be like for this nation.
Governor Christie’s statement Thursday that he fired senior staffer Bridget Anne Kelly after being “misled” about the George Washington Bridge traffic jam has echoes of an episode when he fired his education commissioner more than three years ago.
In August 2010 Christie claimed that his education chief at the time, Bret Schundler, lied to him about a bungled application for $400 million in federal Race to the Top funds. But Schundler fiercely disputed the charge that he misled the governor and quickly showed reporters emails to prove his case.
“The governor called me a liar,” Schundler wrote in a seven-page chronology of events relating to the application. “I have no choice now but to defend my name.”
At the time, a Christie’s spokesman said Schundler was engaging in “revisionist history.”
The dispute occurred when New Jersey lost the first round of the Race to the Top contest by only three points out of 500. The failure to include budget data for 2008 and 2009 in the application cost five key points.
After losing the contest, Christie said at a Wednesday press conference that the state had provided the budget data to a panel of judges in Washington D.C. – and blasted the Obama administration’s “drones” for being too bureaucratic in their rules. But a video released by the U. S. Department of Education the next day proved Christie’s remarks to be inaccurate; the Schundler team did not have the budget data on hand.
Christie fired Schundler soon after the video came out.
Hours after his termination, Schundler showed reporters emails that he sent to the governor’s top staff before the Wednesday press conference; the emails underscored that he did not present the necessary budget numbers to the panel. Schundler told reporters that before the governor’s televised tirade, Schundler had made it “crystal clear” that he did not have the precise numbers with him for the judges’ review.
Christie told reporters back then that the takeaway from the episode was “Don’t lie to the governor.”
Schundler responded that the governor was being “dishonest.”
“The governor is embarrassed,” Schundler added at the time “He looks and blames somebody else. And it’s usually not the misstep; it’s usually the coverup that gets people in trouble.”
Schundler declined to comment Thursday. A former mayor in Jersey City, he now serves as a consultant for a charter school in the city.
A class action complaint has been filed in federal court against top government officials connected to the George Washington Bridge scandal, the Fort Lee, N.J., attorney behind the move said Thursday.
The complaint — filed in the U.S. District Court of New Jersey by attorney Rosemarie Arnold — takes aim at key players in the controversy, naming Republican Gov. Christie, former Christie aide Bridget Kelly, former Port Authority officials Bill Baroni and David Wildstein, the State of New Jersey, and the Port Authority as defendants.
As a class action suit, the exact number of members has not yet been determined, but according to the filing “includes any and all individuals and business owners” who were inconvenienced or hurt by the lane closures between Sept. 9 and Sept. 13. According to Arnold, the plaintiffs work or live in or near Fort Lee or New York City and are citing economic damages by the lane closures.
The complaint follows a whirlwind week for Christie, who said in a press conference Thursday that he was blindsided by a report in The Record that said that senior members of his staff were connected with the lane closures on the George Washington Bridge.
The problem for Christie and his “office” is not that they would be perceived to be using the office of governor as petty personal fiefdom. The problem for Christie and his “office” is this.
Emergency responders were delayed in attending to four medical situations – including one in which a 91-year-old woman lay unconscious – due to traffic gridlock caused by unannounced closures of access lanes to the George Washington Bridge, according to the head of the borough’s EMS department.
The woman later died, borough records show.
And this.
“There was a missing child that day. The police had trouble conducting that search because they were tied up directing traffic,” says Jan Goldberg, a Fort Lee councilman who works with local emergency personnel.
Endangering the public safety as “payback” for a member of the opposing party not sufficiently cowing to you would seem to be beyond what a non-sociopath would consider to be reasonable policy.
In a statement released on Thursday, former NBA player and current BFF to North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-Un, Dennis Rodman apologized for the freak show performance he displayed in an interview with CNN.
“I want to first apologise to Kenneth Bae’s family. I embarrassed a lot of people. “I’m very sorry. At this point I should know better than to make political statements. I’m truly sorry.”
Rodman blamed his outburst on drinking, stating that some of the other players he brought to North Korea were feeling pressure from back home and were preparing to leave.
In the game they played against North Korea on Wednesday, Rodman played the first half of the game, changed, then watched the rest of the game with his new best friend, Kim.
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