President Obama said Thursday he doesn’t have a strategy yet for defeating Islamist militants in Syria. “I don’t want to put the cart before the horse,” Mr. Obama said in a news conference at the White House.
The mayor of Lynn, Mass. says that some of the illegal aliens from Guatemala who are enrolled in her city’s public schools are adults with graying hair and “more wrinkles than I have.” “They are not all children,” Judith Flanagan Kennedy told reporters at a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.
The Department of Justice has announced that it is suing the small town of St. Anthony, Minnesota, after a two-year investigation into the town’s denial of a permit to create an Islamic cultural center. The DOJ claims that the north Minneapolis town broke a federal law when it rejected the center in 2012.
Has there ever been an administration that has had more disdain for the U.S. military than the Obama administration?
A West Point man was taken to hospital with life-threatening injuries after he and a friend were attacked by a group of around 20 people in a Huddle House parking lot, police said, potentially as retaliation for Michael Brown’s killing. Ralph Weems IV, who is white, was injured early Saturday but is now in fair condition at North Mississippi Medical Center, hospital spokeswoman Genie Causey said. A relative, Bradley Barnes of Madison, told The Associated Press by telephone on Sunday that his brother-in-law was in a medically induced coma following brain surgery.
Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto thanked California on Thursday for improving the lives of immigrants from his country, including legalizing drivers’ licenses for undocumented migrants and making it easier for them to work and start businesses. Pena Nieto, on his first trip to the United States since becoming president in 2012, addressed a joint session of the California legislature, detailing economic and electoral reforms enacted back home and emphasizing his country’s social and economic ties to the state. “I want to thank you for what you have done for migrants, especially the ones from Mexico,” Pena Nieto said.
As Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto travels across California and declares America to be “the other Mexico,” a Pew Research survey has found that 60% of Mexicans disapprove of Peña Nieto on the economy. Perhaps as a result, a plurality of Mexicans think that life is better across the border, and a third want to move to America. In addition, the Pew survey found that “two-thirds are dissatisfied with the way things are going in Mexico today” while “only 30% are satisfied with the country’s direction.
The already disgraced Department of Veterans Affairs has found a way to make itself even more unpopular with Americans, and particularly with Veterans after depicting them in leaked training materials as Sesame Street’s cantankerous homeless bum Oscar The Grouch. While the President continues to vow to reform and improve the veterans’ health care system, the VA office in Philadelphia has been forced to issue an embarrassing apology after the internal training guide, titled “What to Say to Oscar the Grouch – Dealing with Veterans During Town Hall Claims Clinics,” was obtained by the Philadelphia Inquirer. The guide contained an 18-page slide show which compares disgruntled or disaffected Veterans to the grumpy garbage can dwelling green creature.
The federal government is spending nearly $1 million to create an online database that will track “misinformation” and hate speech on Twitter. The National Science Foundation is financing the creation of a web service that will monitor “suspicious memes” and what it considers “false and misleading ideas,” with a major focus on political activity online. The “Truthy” database, created by researchers at Indiana University, is designed to “detect political smears, astroturfing, misinformation, and other social pollution.
Lois Lerner’s BlackBerry was intentionally destroyed after Congress had begun its probe into IRS targeting of conservative groups, a senior IRS lawyer acknowledged in a sworn declaration. Thomas Kane, Deputy Assistant Chief Counsel for the IRS, wrote in the declaration, part of a lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch against the IRS, that the BlackBerry was “removed or wiped clean of any sensitive or proprietary information and removed as scrap for disposal in June 2012.” That date – June 2012 – is significant because by that time, ex-IRS official Lerner had already been summoned before congressional staffers who interviewed her about reports of the IRS’ targeting of conservative groups.
The Obama administration is working to forge a sweeping international climate change agreement to compel nations to cut their planet-warming fossil fuel emissions, but without ratification from Congress. In preparation for this agreement, to be signed at a United Nations summit meeting in 2015 in Paris, the negotiators are meeting with diplomats from other countries to broker a deal to commit some of the world’s largest economies to enact laws to reduce their carbon pollution. But under the Constitution, a president may enter into a legally binding treaty only if it is approved by a two-thirds majority of the Senate.
CNN chief Jeff Zucker recently shared not so encouraging words with some of the news operation’s employees, many of whom have been bracing for potential jobs cuts. “We are going to do less and have to do it with less,” Zucker said during a call-in to a news meeting Tuesday morning. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently received a partial transcript of the call from a Turner employee who asked not to be identified.
Now, federal law prohibits health insurance companies from discriminating against transgender people, and it bars insurers from denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions. That makes it possible for more transgender people to purchase private plans. And in states that expanded their Medicaid programs, those with low incomes may get free coverage.
More than one-third of Americans are now receiving means-tested federal benefits, and Heritage Foundation analyst Rachel Sheffield says the Obama administration is planning to vastly increase spending on welfare and now measures the success of public assistance programs by the number of people signed up for benefits. On Tuesday, the U.S.
Americans receiving food stamps were caught selling and bartering their benefits online for art, housing and cash, according to a new federal report that investigates fraud in the nation’s largest nutrition support program. Complicating the situation is the fact states around the country are having trouble tracking and prosecuting the crimes because their enforcement budgets have been slashed despite the rapidly-rising number of food stamp recipients, according to the Government Accountability Office report. Under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, 47 million people have been awarded $76 billion in benefits.
A new law that has been introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives “would prohibit the sale, transfer or possession of military-level body armor by civilians”.