The Congress Members Receiving the Most N.R.A. Funding - The New York Times. 8 years of suffering under Barack Obama – Teri's Public Library. Photo credit: The Associated Press The sentence I hear most from well-meaning, conservative friends since President Trump’s election is this: “We suffered 8 years under Barack Obama.” Fair enough. Let’s take a look. The day Obama took office, the Dow closed at 7,949 points.
General Motors and Chrysler were on the brink of bankruptcy, with Ford not far behind, and their failure, along with their supply chains, would have meant the loss of millions of jobs. While we remain vulnerable to lone-wolf attacks, no foreign terrorist organization has successfully executed a mass attack here since 9/11. Obama ordered the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden. He drew down the number of troops from 180,000 in Iraq and Afghanistan to just 15,000, and increased funding for the Department of Veterans Affairs. He launched a program called Opening Doors which, since 2010, has led to a 47 percent decline in the number of homeless veterans.
He set a record 73 straight months of private-sector job growth. Like this: Donald Trump Is Unintelligible. Five Questions About the Clintons and a Uranium Company. The Times has reported that people involved in a series of Canadian uranium-mining deals channelled money to the Clinton Foundation while the firm at the deal’s center had business before the State Department.
And, in one case, a Russian investment bank connected to the deals paid money to Bill Clinton personally, through a half-million-dollar speaker’s fee. There were a number of transactions involved, and corporate name changes, but, basically, a Canadian company known as Uranium One initially wanted American diplomats to defend its Kazakh uranium interests when a Russian firm, Rosatom, seemed about to make a move on them; and then, after the company decided to simply let Rosatom acquire it (through Rosatom’s alarmingly named subsidiary, ARMZ), Uranium One needed State Department approval. (The approval was necessary because Uranium One controlled American uranium mines and exploration fields, a strategic asset.) The Times sums it up this way: Here are five: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. The 11 nations of the United States. Bad news for Ted Cruz: his eligibility for president is going to court.
The Circuit Court of Cook County in Chicago has agreed to hear a lawsuit on Sen. Ted Cruz's eligibility for president — virtually ensuring that the issue dominates the news in the runup to the South Carolina primary. Cruz was born in Canada to a US citizen mother and a noncitizen father. The Constitution requires presidents be "natural-born citizens," but what exactly that requires hasn't been settled in court. Now, perhaps, it will be. The lawsuit in Illinois aims to resolve the question by challenging Cruz's eligibility for the presidency. "Joyce said his concern is that the eligibility issue lie unresolved during Republican primaries, thus letting the Democrats take advantage of it after a potential Cruz nomination, when it’d be too late," reports the Washington Examiner.
When this question initially came up, the conventional wisdom among constitutional lawyers was that it was a nonissue: Cruz was obviously eligible. The problem: the meaning of "natural-born citizen" Scandal in 1968 | Guide to the presidential primaries. Right now, presidential candidates are crisscrossing the country, begging primary voters for their support. So it's easy to forget that not too long ago, these voters had no say in who their party nominated for president. But everything changed after the Democratic National Convention in 1968: <div>Please enable Javascript to watch this video</div> In the nation's early days, members of Congress picked their party's nominee. And for most of the 19th and 20th centuries, party bosses told delegates at the convention which candidate to support, and everybody else found out in the papers and on TV.
But things changed in 1968. The riots, police violence, and lack of party unity paved the way for a Republican victory in the general election. Enter presidential primaries. Customer Letter - Apple. Even if Sanders wins the popular vote, Clinton could still get the nomination | US news. Many people on Twitter expressed surprise that Hillary Clinton basically walked away with the same amount of total delegates as Bernie Sanders after the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday night, despite the decisive 20-plus-point rout by Sanders. It highlights the longstanding but little-discussed “superdelegate” system that could play a huge role in who wins the Democratic nomination this year. It turns out, the Democratic party decides its nominee in a massively undemocratic way – and is a ticking time bomb for the party and its voter base if Sanders keeps winning.
The Democratic party’s nomination will ultimately be decided by more than 4,700 delegates at its nominating convention in the summer. Most of those delegates are allocated based on votes in each state’s primary or caucus. According to University of Georgia lecturer Josh Putnam, superdelegates exist solely to allow DNC elites to better control who ultimately becomes their nominee. Chicago_cop_is_suing_family_of_teenager_he_killed. Scott Olson/Getty Images The Chicago cop who shot and killed a mentally ill teenager thinks he deserves to be paid for his decision to pull the trigger. The cop also accidentally killed the 19-year-old college student’s neighbor, Bettie Jones, a 55-year-old woman.
So that’s two families officer Robert Rialmo devastated, but he’s apparently the one who is suffering from “extreme emotional trauma,” according to the lawsuit filed on Friday against the estate of Quintonio LeGrier seeking between $50,000 and $10 million in damages. LeGrier’s lawyer was incredulous at the news. “After this coward shot a teenager in the back ... he has the temerity to sue him? That’s a new low for the Chicago Police Department,” Basileios Foutris tells the Chicago Tribune. Rialmo’s lawsuit provides the first account from the officer of what happened on Dec. 26, when the officer shot LeGrier six times. Ben Franklin's Famous 'Liberty, Safety' Quote Lost Its Context In 21st Century.
Benjamin Franklin once said: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. " That quote often comes up in the context of new technology and concerns about government surveillance. Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the editor of Lawfare, tells NPR's Robert Siegel that it wasn't originally meant to mean what people think. Ben Franklin was innovative, but it's fair to say that he didn't imagine a future of cellphones and of all the privacy issues that come with them. Still, his words are often applied to such issues. Take our conversation last week about police technologies with Virginia State Delegate Richard Anderson. RICHARD ANDERSON: Very simply - and I'm paraphrasing here - but Ben Franklin essentially said at one point, those who would trade privacy for a bit of security deserve neither privacy nor security.
BENJAMIN WITTES: Hey. SIEGEL: What's the exact quotation? WITTES: Thank you. President Obama's boldest action on guns yet, explained. After high-profile mass shootings, President Barack Obama has urged the American people to call on Congress to pass measures that would restrict access to guns and, hopefully, reduce gun violence. But after multiple pleas, Congress hasn't acted, even after the grisly mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012. So Obama is now acting on his own — with executive actions. "Every single year, more than 30,000 Americans have their lives cut short by guns," Obama said at a press conference on Tuesday.
"We are the only advanced country on Earth that sees this kind of mass violence erupt with this kind of frequency. " Obama met with Attorney General Loretta Lynch on Monday to consider what he can do without congressional legislation to reduce gun violence in America, which kills many more people in the US than other developed nations. This would not be the first time Obama has taken executive action on guns. There are risks to Obama acting without congressional approval. All Politicians Lie. Some Lie More Than Others.
Washington — I’m a political fact-checker, which is usually an automatic conversation starter at parties. These days, I get two questions repeatedly: “Is it worse than it’s ever been?” And “What’s up with Donald Trump?” I’ve been fact-checking since 2007, when The Tampa Bay Times founded PolitiFact as a new way to cover elections. We don’t check absolutely everything a candidate says, but focus on what catches our eye as significant, newsworthy or potentially influential. Our ratings are also not intended to be statistically representative but to show trends over time. Donald J. . , another candidate in the Republican race who’s never held elective office, does slightly better on the Truth-O-Meter (which I sometimes feel the need to remind people is not an actual scientific instrument): Half of the statements we’ve checked have proved Mostly False or worse.
Most of the professional politicians we fact-check don’t reach these depths of inaccuracy. Continue reading the main story Pants on Fire. Think voting is for chumps? You might be interested in this system that some states are trying out. Elections in almost all states in our country come down to primaries, where the candidate who actually makes it onto the final ticket is chosen by a small percentage of people. In fact, in some states, you actually have to register for a specific party in order to vote in the primaries for given candidates. In other words, if you want to vote in the primaries for Party X, you have to be registered as a Party Xer. Even if you don't agree with them.
That big yellow block of voters in the middle of the graphic above? Those are independent voters, which — per October 2015 Gallup Poll results — make up close to 42% of Americans. They often don't even get to participate in the primary, unless they register as one of the other parties. Ahem. In fact, 50% of millennials don't register for either party. An alternative? This means that the two people with the most votes advance from the primary to be on the general election ballot regardless of their party affiliations. Muslim ninth grader arrested for bringing an electronics project to school. Ahmed Mohamed is a ninth-grader in Irving, Texas, who likes to tinker with electronics. On Monday, according to the Dallas Morning News, he built a simple electronic clock — a project he said took about 20 minutes — and strapped it inside a pencil case.
He showed the project to his engineering teacher, who praised the design but advised him not to show it to other teachers. Later, in Ahmed's English class, the clock beeped while it was in his bag. When he showed the project to his teacher, she thought it looked like a bomb. He insisted that the clock wasn't a bomb, but the authorities at the school weren't impressed: The teacher kept the clock. According to the Dallas Morning News, the police arrested Ahmed and led him out of school in handcuffs.
Which of the 11 American nations do you live in? Red states and blue states? Flyover country and the coasts? How simplistic. Colin Woodard, a reporter at the Portland Press Herald and author of several books, says North America can be broken neatly into 11 separate nation-states, where dominant cultures explain our voting behaviors and attitudes toward everything from social issues to the role of government. “The borders of my eleven American nations are reflected in many different types of maps — including maps showing the distribution of linguistic dialects, the spread of cultural artifacts, the prevalence of different religious denominations, and the county-by-county breakdown of voting in virtually every hotly contested presidential race in our history,” Woodard writes in the Fall 2013 issue of Tufts University’s alumni magazine.
Take a look at his map: Courtesy Tufts Magazine Want to receive GovBeat in your inbox? The clashes between the 11 nations play out in every way, from politics to social values. North Korea Loses Its Link to the Internet. SAN FRANCISCO — ’s already tenuous links to the Internet went completely dark on Monday after days of instability, in what Internet monitors described as one of the worst North Korean network failures in years.
The loss of service came just days after President Obama pledged that the United States would launch a “proportional response” to the recent attacks on Sony Pictures, which government officials have linked to North Korea. While an attack on North Korea’s networks was suspected, there was no definitive evidence of it. Doug Madory, the director of Internet analysis at Dyn Research, an Internet performance management company, said that North Korean Internet access first became unstable late Friday. The situation worsened over the weekend, and by Monday, North Korea’s Internet was completely offline. “Their networks are under duress,” Mr.
North Korea does very little commercial or government business over the Internet. By Monday morning, those addresses had gone dark for over an hour. Vote all you want. The secret government won’t change. The voters who put Barack Obama in office expected some big changes. From the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping to Guantanamo Bay to the Patriot Act, candidate Obama was a defender of civil liberties and privacy, promising a dramatically different approach from his predecessor.
But six years into his administration, the Obama version of national security looks almost indistinguishable from the one he inherited. Guantanamo Bay remains open. The NSA has, if anything, become more aggressive in monitoring Americans. Drone strikes have escalated. Most recently it was reported that the same president who won a Nobel Prize in part for promoting nuclear disarmament is spending up to $1 trillion modernizing and revitalizing America’s nuclear weapons. Continue reading below Why did the face in the Oval Office change but the policies remain the same? RELATED: Coverage of the 2014 midterm elections Glennon’s critique sounds like an outsider’s take, even a radical one. Related coverage: • Alan M. Expatriate Americans Break Up With Uncle Sam to Escape Tax Rules - WSJ. Sex, power, and money: how a porn star took on web payments and won. The trouble started with an infection. An actress named Eden Alexander had a bad drug reaction, which triggered a rare skin infection, building into a swarm of secondary illnesses.
She needed to raise money for treatment. It should have been a simple thing — she has plenty of fans, plenty of would-be donors — but Alexander is a porn actress, and when you’re moving on the web, that makes things complicated. Instead of a quick fundraiser, she ended up tangling with a payments company, rallying a following, and finally leading a flamewar that cut to the core of the way money moves on the internet. Payments "in connection with pornographic items" are prohibited Alexander’s friends had set up the fundraiser on GiveForward, a crowdfunding platform devoted entirely to healthcare costs.
The goal was $4,000, enough to fund in-home care and physical therapy until she was strong enough to care for herself, but on Friday, it was suddenly shut down. "Unforgivable and appalling" . U.S.: dismiss lawsuit over Americans killed by drones. Americans Call for Term Limits, End to Electoral College. Benghazi inquiry sparks Hill turf battle - POLITICO.com Print View. What is wrong with Americans. Behind Court Challenge to Health Care Lies the Right’s ‘Freedom Fetish’ e80Lj.jpg (JPEG Image, 465x348 pixels) Lobby group objects to new regulation banning gifts to all federal employees. Al Jazeera news director, Wadah Khanfar, resigns: GlobalPost. Dick Cheney Claims He -- Not Bush -- Was The Decider. On population manipulation. Gerrymandering Explained
Bush White House Broke Elections Law, Report Says. Rogue tweet by Secret Service! | POLITICO 44. George W. Bush Found Guilty of Turning White House Political Office Into GOP Boiler Room'