Photo Credit: Majordomo2012
At the time, I called this “perverse,” and suggested Republicans couldn’t effectively out-Santa-Claus Obama.
Today, Michael Scherer writes that House Speaker John Boehner is fighting to keep this tank factory open. Scherer also names other pork projects sought by Republicans who spend most of their time attacking federal overspending.
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The good news for the jobless? US industry is now in the throes of a “reshoring” trend: “Next year we’re going to bring some production to the US,” Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) CEO Tim Cook told Bloomberg Businessweek in December. “This doesn’t mean that Apple will do it ourselves, but we’ll be working with people and we’ll be investing our money.”
The bad news? The Bureau of Prisons is angling to have as many reshored jobs as possible filled by federal prisoners.
Between 2000 and 2011, wages in Asia have nearly doubled, according to the International Labour Organization. The Chinese government is planning to increase the minimum wage by 13% annually until 2015. Labor unrest, formerly unheard of in Asia, has become more frequent, with companies routinely raising workers’ pay after strikes. At the same time, wages paid to federal inmates working in prison factories across the United States have remained flat, ranging from $0.23 to $1.15 an hour.
Federal Prison Industries — also known by the trade name UNICOR — is a self-sustaining, self-funding company within the US Bureau of Prisons. It is owned wholly by the US government and was created by an act of Congress in 1934 to function as a rehabilitative tool to teach real-world work skills to federal inmates. These inmates were historically limited to producing goods for government use, such as furniture, uniforms, even, believe it or not, components for Patriot missiles.
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Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore
Former UN Ambassador John Bolton was on with Greta Van Susteren tonight to discuss the situation in Afghanistan. Bolton told Greta that he believes the Obama administration has been talking to the Taliban for some time now…
Watch video here:
https://youtu.be/T71kmgUNMeA
See a related story HERE where President Karzai of Afghanistan has alleged a conspiracy between the US and the Taliban.
Read more from this story HERE.
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The reason Obama should prohibit the pipeline, according to the Times, is to begin choking off America’s oil supply.
The paper thinks this is a good thing.
The Times was responding to a draft environmental impact statement on the latest version of the pipeline proposal that the State Department released a week ago. A year ago, the State Department rejected an earlier proposal from TransCanada, the company seeking to build the pipeline, because the route the company proposed at that time would have traversed the Sand Hills of Nebraska. TransCanada subsequently changed the route, and the State Department is now signaling that this new route would not cause significant environmental problems.
Under executive orders issued by past administrations, the president has assumed authority to approve pipelines that cross the international borders of the United States. The State Department carries out that authority.
Read more from this story HERE.
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Perhaps the most contentious portion of the dialogue, which purportedly took place at a women’s rights rally, is the section in which she seems to indicate that a much larger push against firearms could inevitably take aim at handguns.
At the beginning of the exchange, Mattera identifies himself but tells Schakowsky that he “appreciated her remarks” (he does not indicate his conservative worldview and she appears not to recognize him). Considering these tactics, his introduction potentially gained her trust, leading the congresswoman to candidly share her views. He also repeatedly addressed her using “we” and it appears as though Schakowsky doesn’t realize she’s being recorded.
Watch video here:
Read more from this story HERE.
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The policy also allows records for births abroad to be changed to reflect the “new” gender of an individual.
“The U.S. Department of State is pleased to use the occasion of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Pride Month to announce its new policy guidelines regarding gender change in passports and Consular Reports of Birth Abroad,” the June 9, 2010 media note states on State’s website states.
“Beginning June 10, when a passport applicant presents a certification from an attending medical physician that the applicant has undergone appropriate clinical treatment for gender transition, the passport will reflect the new gender,” the note states. “The guidelines include detailed information about what information the certification must include.”
“It is also possible to obtain a limited-validity passport if the physician’s statement shows the applicant is in the process of gender transition,” the note states. “No additional medical records are required.”
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Photo Credit: Minnesota National Guard
In a message to all post, district and department managers, Vietnam veteran and former Marine John Hamilton says he wants every member of the nation’s largest organization for combat veterans to support House and Senate bills that would make certain the new Distinguished Warfare Medal ranks below the Purple Heart.
Defense Department officials, so far unswayed by complaints, want the new medal for cyber warriors and drone operators ranked ninth in order of precedence, ahead of the Bronze Star and Purple Heart.
“I cannot tell you how displeased I am with the new defense secretary for not overriding what has proven to be an extremely divisive decision by his predecessor, but the buck has not stopped yet,” Hamilton says in the letter.
Read more from this story HERE.
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According to an internal draft of the minute-by-minute schedule at CPAC, Rand Paul, Rick Perry, Bobby Jindal, and Scott Walker are each slated to give 13-minute remarks on the main stage. Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan, however, get eleven minutes to deliver their comments. Former presidential candidate Rick Santorum is scheduled for a mere seven minutes.
The biggest winners in the time lottery are Sarah Palin (16 minutes) and Donald Trump (14 minutes). Palin and Trump are expected to be crowd-pleasers at CPAC: News of their respective appearances caused ticket sales to spike, according to a source.
Read more from this story HERE.
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The federal government also says that in a given month in 2012, the number of households on food stamps was 22,329,713.
The state with the highest average number of participants per month in 2012 was Texas, with an astonishing 4,038,440 folks drawing from the program. The second highest is California, with 3,964,221, and then Florida, at 3,353,064.
Washington, D.C., with an estimated population of 617,996, had an average of 141,147 participants. Meaning, roughly 23 percent of folks living in D.C. are on food stamps, according to the numbers provided by the federal government. The participation rate in Texas, which has an estimated population of 26,059,203, 15.5 percent.
The state with the lowest number of participants in the program was Wyoming, with 34,347 out an estimated population of 576,412.
Read more from this story HERE.
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Defence lawyers have indicated that the former neuroscience graduate might plead not guilty by reason of insanity. If he does, the judge has ruled, he might have to submit to a “narco analytic interview” – including the use of what some have dubbed a “truth serum” – as part of the evaluation of his mental state.
A narcoanalytic interview is a decades-old process in which patients are given drugs to lower their inhibition. The judge said Holmes could also be given a lie detector test as part of the evaluation.
Holmes will face 166 counts during an arraignment hearing in connection with the shooting spree at a cinema in Aurora, Colorado, last July. Last week that same judge rejected defence claims that the rules relating to an insanity plea were unconstitutional.
Holmes was arrested immediately after the shootings at a midnight showing of ‘The Dark Night Rises’. A preliminary hearing in January was presented with harrowing evidence of the scene inside the cinema in the aftermath of the shooting and the desperate attempts to save lives.
Read more from this story HERE.