If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed. -- Benjamin Franklin
A simple yes or no would have sufficed, but when House Speaker John Boehner was asked whether anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist was a positive influence on his caucus, he feigned ignorance.
“It’s not often I’m asked about some random person in America,” he said.
Obama does indeed have a “Jewish problem.” Polls find that his standing among Jews has deteriorated: only about 54 percent of them approved of his performance in the most recent Gallup survey. But this is to be expected when a president has a 40-something approval rating. He also has a Hispanic problem and a problem among the white working class. He has a problem in Ohio and a problem in Florida and a problem in New Hampshire. He even has, to a mild extent, an African-American problem: Obama’s approval ratings among black voters are still high, but down to about 80 percent from 90 percent.
All of these, however, are symptoms of Obama’s larger problems, a set of three fundamental misgivings shared by much of the American electorate.
• First, many of us understand that Barack Obama inherited a terrible predicament. We have a degree of sympathy for the man. But we have concerns, which have been growing over time, about whether he’s up to the job.
• Second, most of us are gravely concerned about the economy. We’re not certain what should be done about it, but we’re frustrated.
• Third, enough of us are prepared to vote against Obama that he could easily lose. It doesn’t mean we will, but we might if the Republican represents a credible alternative and fits within the broad political mainstream.
Obama has gone from a modest favorite to win re-election to, probably, a slight underdog. Let’s not oversell this. A couple of months of solid jobs reports, or the selection of a poor Republican opponent, would suffice to make him the favorite again.
A wealthy Manhattan real-estate agent buying Halloween goodies for underprivileged kids at an East Harlem mall was nearly killed by two 12-year-old punks who dropped a shopping cart on her from four stories above — then laughed about it later, police sources said yesterday.
Marion Salmon Hedges was with her 13-year-old son, who watched in horror as his mom fell to the ground in the East Harlem mall on Sunday.
Earlier this year, the Department of Health and Human Services announced new guidelines requiring insurance companies to cover contraceptive services free of charge.
But on Wednesday, a House subcommittee opened a hearing into the new guidelines, with Republicans arguing that that mandate does not offer a broad enough opt-out rule for religious groups and others who have a moral objection to providing such services.
The guidelines require insurance providers to cover women’s preventative services — which includes everything from birth control to breast exams — free of charge starting next August as part of the Affordable Care Act. Health and Human Services already exempted some religious groups from the new rules, but critics contend that the regulations still ensnare others who have a moral disagreement with birth control.
In opening remarks, Committee Chairman Rep. Joe Pitts (R-PA) said that the current opt-out clause is too narrow, and that the government was taking, “coercive actions to force people to abandon their religious principles.”
“When the healthcare law was being debated last Congress, the proponents adamantly refuted claims that this would be a federal government takeover of our healthcare system,” Pitts said. “Now we have the federal Department of Health and Human Services forcing every single person in this country to pay for services that they may morally oppose.”
Where has that market share gone? In the early days, it all went Firefox's way. These days, it's Chrome that's the main beneficiary of Internet Explorer's decline, and October was no exception. Chrome is up 1.42 points to 17.62 percent of the desktop browser share. Firefox is basically unchanged, up 0.03 points to 22.51 percent. Safari grew 0.41 points to 5.43. Opera has been consistently falling over the last few months, and it dropped again in October, down 0.11 points to 1.56 percent.
Democrats want higher taxes on millionaires to pay for the infrastructure plan. Republicans don't. Republicans in the House of Representatives have led the way in passing a series of bills to provide private-sector initiatives aimed at creating jobs. Democrats vow to keep pushing the Obama package.
There was little evidence that the two sides are taking serious steps to reach consensus on efforts to bring down the nation's 9.1 percent unemployment rate.
Gov. Jan Brewer and the GOP-controlled state Senate on Tuesday touched off legal and political battles as they took the unprecedented step of removing the chairwoman of the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission.
On a 21-6 party line vote, the Senate gave the Republican governor the two-thirds majority vote she needed to oust Colleen Coyle Mathis, citing "gross misconduct" in her role at the helm of the independent panel. The commission is in the midst of drawing new political boundaries for next year's legislative and congressional races. As the Senate voted in early evening, commission attorneys left one court and rushed to the state Supreme Court to try to block the Senate's action. They were too late to get immediate relief, but said they will petition the court today to allow Mathis to remain as commission chairwoman.
"It's my view that she is most certainly still the chairman," said Paul Charlton, Mathis' attorney.
However, Senate officials and Brewer's office said Mathis' eight-month tenure as chairwoman ended once the Senate endorsed the governor's action.
The conflicting views will fuel a legal battle over the extent to which the five-member commission is independent.
Herman Cain may have some surprises at his first national security briefings should he win the presidency.
In an interview with PBS, Cain appears to suggest that Americans should consider China dangerous in part because they’re pursuing “nuclear capability.” In fact, China tested its first nuclear device in 1964 and has had a stockpile of warheads for decades.
A small, private college in Georgia has a new requirement for its employees: that they be straight.Please God, tell me that this will finally bring workplace rights to the forefront. No employer should be able to dictate how employees live off the clock, especially if it is participating in a legal activity. Not ony is this way the hell over the line, it can be used against people. Did John annoy you that morning? Maybe you let it slip that he made a pro-gay comment. Apparently, that's enough to put your job at risk at Shorter University. If you choose to have sex, that is your right as an adult. You do not owe your boss an explanation at the water cooler for what you do in your private life. That's why it's your private life.
Shorter University, a Christian Baptist school located in Rome, Ga., is mandating that its 200 employees sign a "personal lifestyle pledge" declaring that they reject homosexuality, premarital sex and adultery, WSBTV reports.
Shorter President Don Dowless told WSBTV that their goal "is not to offend people," but to "declare who we are."
It goes on to list three simple things government can do to stop violence against women. First, pay women equally. It would allow women to not be forced into a relationship because it's better to get the crap beaten out of you daily than be homeless in the winter. And I know plenty of women who have had to look at it just that way. In a society that values money above everything else, the fact that women are not paid equally for identical responsibility says a lot. Stop stereotyping women is number two. And this is the one area where women have a hand in the problem. We are taught to live up to certain expectations, and never question whether they are right or even make sense. We also learn patterns of abuse as children. Stereotyping is not always a conscious decision, but we must be on our guard to see things for how they really are. Finally, actually give a damn. If this was a priority and given the real respect and criminal weight that it deserves, the bottom line is it wouldn't happen nearly as often. There is a certain social acceptability when it comes to violence and women, especially if there is a relationship. But see reason number one, and we can easily determine it isn't always the woman's choice to stay and endure.This article contains absolutely nothing new about violence against women. That's because we already know everything we need to know about it. Everyone knows it exists. Most people would say it's a pretty bad idea. And yet it doesn't go away. To say it's annoying would be a serious understatement.In the many years I have worked on women's rights, violence against women has been a constant. Violence as an obstacle to health care. Violence as a barrier to education. Violence as an inevitable fact of life.
Pay no attention to soaring executive compensation, or Wall Street bonuses, or even to the latest CBO report on income distribution: skyrocketing income inequality the past few decades is just a “myth”—at least according to Jim Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute. In a recent post on AEI’s Enterprise blog, Pethokoukis contends that the data liberals typically tout on inequality understates key factors like median income gains, discounts the effects of taxes and benefits, and ignores the differing inflation rates on goods that different income groups purchase. At first glance, Pethokoukis’s case sounds sober and reasonable enough. But according to the experts I interviewed, it suffers from the defect of having a tenuous relationship with reality.
Consider the research and writing of Robert Gordon, a professor of social sciences at Northwestern University. He’s has done pioneering work questioning the extent of the aforementioned gap between productivity and median wages—work that Pethokoukis misappropriates to claim that income gains have been shared “fairly equally.” Gordon found that the productivity gap may be about a tenth the size as what is commonly thought, but, as he told me, that doesn’t negate the story about runaway wealth at the top of the income distribution. “The evidence on the long-term increase of inequality within the bottom 99 percent is ambiguous and complex, but what stands out like a searchlight is the unprecedented and increasing inequality between the bottom 99 percent and the top 1 percent,” Gordon told me.
Appearing on Hannity’s show Monday night, Coulter agreed that the Cain story is a “high-tech lynching,” adding that “it’s coming from the exact same people who used to do the lynching with ropes, now they do it with a word processor.”
She continued that liberals are “too dense” to see the “many wonderful qualities” about Herman Cain, because “all they see is a conservative black man.”
“That’s why our blacks are so much better than their blacks,” Coulter said. “To become a black Republican you don’t just roll into it. You’re not going with the flow. You have fought against probably your family members, probably your neighbors, you have thought everything out and that’s why we have very impressive blacks in our party.”Is there some sort of store where people like Ann Coulter can purchase black people like me in bulk? Can you order particular features that she's raving about? Am I just missing that section of the phone book where that is? I mean it's hard for me to compete on this heretofore unknown market when the GOP models come with things like "complete expendability" and "a total lack of self-awareness", whereas I have this outdated and useless appendage known as a "soul" and all. I guess they've got new firmware or something. I don't get it. All this time I thought I was a human being and not some accoutrement with "impressive" features.
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