Most Americans See Race Relations Worsening Since Obama's Election

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Photo Credit: Scott Olson / Getty

Photo Credit: Scott Olson / Getty

By Julie Bykowicz.

President Barack Obama had hoped his historic election would ease race relations, yet a majority of Americans, 53 percent, say the interactions between the white and black communities have deteriorated since he took office, according to a new Bloomberg Politics poll. Those divisions are laid bare in the split reactions to the decisions by two grand juries not to indict white police officers who killed unarmed black men in Ferguson, Mo., and Staten Island, N.Y.

Both times, protesters responded with outrage and politicians called for federal investigations. Yet Americans don’t think of the cases as a matched set of injustices, the poll found. A majority agreed with the Ferguson decision, while most objected to the conclusion in the Staten Island death, which was captured on video. The divergent opinions—52 percent agreed on Ferguson compared with 25 percent who approved of the Staten Island outcome—add to an ongoing discussion that was inflamed when Officer Daniel Pantaleo was seen in the July video putting what appeared to be a chokehold on Eric Garner, a 43-year-old man suspected of selling untaxed cigarettes. Garner could be heard saying, “I can’t breathe,” and died of a heart attack in what a medical examiner ruled a homicide. The grand jury decision not to charge Pantaleo came just 12 days after a similar panel in Ferguson declined to charge Officer Darren Wilson, who in August shot to death 18-year-old Michael Brown. That altercation was not captured on video, and the prosecutor presented evidence of a physical confrontation between the two men before the fatal shots were fired.

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To Dania Wilson, 49, a Northern Virginia white woman, the cases shouldn’t be lumped together. “I think sometimes the media likes to put upon people a theme that’s political in nature,” she said in an interview.

Bloomberg Poll on Race Relations

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Obama: Racism ‘deeply rooted in our society’

By Rachel Huggins.

President Obama will sit down with BET Networks to discuss calls for criminal justice reform after two controversial grand jury decisions cleared white officers in the death of black men.

In a special segment, “BET News Presents: A Conversation with President Barack Obama,” the president will help find meaningful solutions to unrest after the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner sparked nationwide protests.

“This isn’t going to be solved overnight,” Obama said in an excerpt of the interview to air Dec. 8 at 6 p.m.

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Why So Secret? GOP Keeps Tight-Lid On $1 Trillion Funding Bill

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spending

Photo Credit: 401(K) 2013

Outside groups are bracing for surprises in the massive government-funding bill the Congress is expected to consider next week.

The $1.014 trillion bill funding most of the government through September 2015 is one of the last trains out of the station, as the 113th Congress is set to close shop on Friday.

That means it could be a final chance for lobbyists and lawmakers alike to find a vehicle for their priorities.

“We’re ready to be surprised,” said Steve Ellis, vice president at Taxpayers for Common Sense, which regularly highlights hidden measures included in funding bills.

Appropriators preparing the bill are keeping a tight lid on its contents. They are expected to release the legislation on Monday.

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ObamaCare Architect Jonathan Gruber: Abortion of 'Marginal Children' a 'Social Good'

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Photo Credit: AFP

Photo Credit: AFP

Embattled MIT professor Jonathan Gruber has not only gotten in trouble for bragging about helping President Obama put one over on the American people with Obamacare, he’s also been uncovered as an abortion advocate—but not a run-of-the-mill advocate of “women’s rights.”

No, Gruber’s abortion advocacy is of a particularly pungent eugenics variety. He’s on record repeatedly making the case from social science that abortion is a “social good” because it reduces the number of “marginal children,” by which he means urban poor—those he says can be counted on to commit crimes if they were ever born.

Gruber co-authored a paper during the Clinton years which argued that legal abortion had saved the U.S. taxpayer upwards of $14 billion in welfare benefits and that it also lowered crime.

Gruber’s work heavily influenced other researchers, including a paper called The Impact of Legalized Abortion by Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago, whose later bookFreakonomics and whose ongoing work makes the strongest case that abortion legalizations in the 1970s caused a dramatic drop in crime twenty years later.

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Why the Supreme Court Might Agree to Hear a Same-Sex Marriage Case After All

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Photo Credit: Jonathan Larson / Getty

Photo Credit: Jonathan Larson / Getty

Last month, the Supreme Court surprised the national news media by refusing to hear any of the seven same-sex marriage cases that had been pending.

Following that denial of review, the status of same-sex marriage appears to be based on an odd sort of federalism.

If you live in a region of the country governed by a federal appeals court that has found a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, you are free to enter into a same-sex marriage — even if your state recognizes only traditional marriage. For example, same-sex marriage is now legal in the areas governed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, which includes Virginia, North and South Carolina, Maryland and West Virginia.

Certainly, the court decisions finding a constitutional right to same-sex marriage are faulty. The Supreme Court’s 1972 summary decision in Baker v. Nelson is, formally at least, still good law.

That decision — which implicitly held that there is no federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage — was not overturned by last year’s Windsor v. United States decision.

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NYPD Cops Warned Militant Group Black Guerilla Family ‘Preparing to Shoot On-Duty Police Officers’

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Photo Credit: STEPHANIE KEITH FOR NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Photo Credit: STEPHANIE KEITH FOR NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

A tattooed gang of militants declared open season on the NYPD in the wake of the Eric Garner grand jury decision, according to a threat a police union verified Saturday.

Ten Black Guerrilla Family members are “preparing to shoot on duty police officers,” Sergeants Benevolent Association President Ed Mullins said.

The gang, formed in the 1960s in the California prison system, recently surfaced on the East Coast and Maryland, where members are at the heart of a drug-trafficking and corruption probe within the Baltimore prison system.

Members swear allegiance for life and sport “BGF” tattoos, as well as ink depicting a dragon surrounding a prison tower, according to gangs.org.

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Civil War Erupting Among Democrats Over Obamacare

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

A civil war has opened up inside the Democratic Party over Obamacare.

With half of all Senate Democrats who voted for Obamacare no longer in office, top Senate Democrats Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and outgoing Tom Harkin (D-IA) have begun trashing Democrats’ decision to embrace the deeply unpopular Obamacare program. Indeed, even progressive New York Times columnist Tom Edsall now concedes that Obamacare is partly to blame for working-class Americans’ all-time low 27% approval rating of Democrats, which Edsall says has now nosedived to “dangerous levels.”

“We blew it,” said Harkin. “What we did is we muddled through and we got a system that is complex, convoluted, needs probably some corrections and still rewards the insurance companies extensively.”

Harkin added, “I look back and say we should have either done it the correct way or not done anything at all.”

Schumer agrees.

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Will GOP's Control of the South Play Significant Role in 2016 Races?

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

The defeat Saturday of Louisiana Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu was essentially the final act in the Republican Party’s control this fall of the South — a transition expected to have a significant impact on the 2016 White House races.

The victory by Republican challenger and Louisiana Rep. Bill Cassidy means that Democrats in January will be left without a single U.S. senator or governor across nine states — stretching from the Carolinas to Texas.

And GOP runoff victories Saturday in two Louisiana House districts ensure the party of at least 246 seats, the largest Republican advantage since the Truman administration after World War II.

Furthermore, Republicans in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas will control nearly every majority-white congressional district and both state legislative chambers.

But will the conservative-leaning voters who appeared this year to have written a closing chapter for the white Southern Democrat have the same impact on the 2016 presidential races?

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House Intelligence Chairman Rogers: Report Will Spur Attacks

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Tensions grew Sunday over the impending release of a Senate report examining the alleged use of torture by the CIA, with a top House lawmaker saying that the release will cause “violence and deaths” abroad.

The comments by Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, came after Secretary of State John Kerry on Friday urged Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the senator in charge of the report on CIA interrogations, to reconsider the timing of the release. Obama administration officials said they still support making the report public.

Rogers is regularly briefed on intelligence assessments. He told CNN’s “State of the Union” that U.S. intelligence agencies and foreign governments have said privately that the release of the report on CIA interrogations a decade ago will be used by extremists to incite violence that is likely to cost lives.

“I think this is a terrible idea,” Rogers said. “Our foreign partners are telling us this will cause violence and deaths…Foreign leaders have approached the government and said, ‘You do this, this will cause violence and deaths.’ Our own intelligence community has assessed that this will cause violence and deaths.”

Rogers questioned why the report needed to become public, given that the Justice Department investigated and filed no criminal charges.

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See the 17 States Who Filed a Lawsuit Challenging O's Executive Amnesty

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Photo Credit: Breitbart

Photo Credit: Breitbart

Seventeen states are involved in a lawsuit filed Wednesday challenging President Obama’s executive actions on immigration.

Texas, Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, West Virginia, Wisconsin and the governors of Mississippi, Maine, North Carolina and Idaho filed the suit in U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Texas.

The states — led by Texas — charge that Obama’s actions violate the president’s duty under the Constitution to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

“The Constitution’s Take Care Clause limits the President’s power and ensures that he will faithfully execute Congress’s laws – not rewrite them under the guise of ‘prosecutorial discretion,’” Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said after filing.

Abbott, who will become governor in January, went on to call the immigration orders “nothing but an unlawfully adopted legislative rule: an executive decree that requires federal agencies to award legal benefits to individuals whose conduct contradicts the priorities of Congress.”

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: AP / Susan Walsh

Photo Credit: AP / Susan Walsh

LEFT MOCKS: Claims ‘War’ on Obama’s Immigration Order Lasted About 5 Minutes…

By Sahil Kapur.

Five months ago, conservatives were so livid over President Barack Obama’s upcoming “executive amnesty” that incoming House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) couldn’t bring himself to rule out impeaching the president as punishment.

Now, even firebrand Rep. Steve King (R-IA) and Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), Obama’s chief immigration foes, have ruled that out. GOP leaders were never seriously considering the idea, but they’ve successfully tamped down any talk of it.

What’s more, Republicans may be on the brink of avoiding a government shutdown fight, at least until March, and effectively permitting the executive actions by “Emperor Obama,” as Speaker John Boehner’s (R-OH) office has dubbed him, with no pushback other than a symbolic vote of disapproval.

Republicans don’t have the votes for this watered down plan yet, and it could still collapse. But it has significant GOP support, a sign that the fury has calmed quite a bit.

How did things change so much?

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Gutiérrez presses ‘millions’ to get documents ready for legal status

By Sarah Ferris.

Immigration reform champion Rep. Luis Gutiérrez (D-Ill.) on Tuesday urged undocumented immigrants to take quick advantage of President Obama’s executive actions giving them temporary legal status.

Speaking in both English and Spanish, he urged those eligible for the new program to also get their paperwork ready for legal status.

“When that door opens, we should have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, with their documents, ready to submit them,” Gutiérrez said at a Capitol Hill press conference. “While Republicans are complaining and bellyaching, we’re going to act.”

Gutiérrez appeared with five other Democrats who sit on the House Judiciary Committee, which will consider on Tuesday the legality of Obama’s actions.

The Chicago-area lawmaker slammed Republicans for trying to derail Obama’s plans for immigration reform without presenting other options.

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Obama Sues Companies for Complying with Obamacare

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Photo Credit: TownHall

Photo Credit: TownHall

What’s the easiest way to avoid getting sued by the Obama Administration? Well… If you come up with an answer, let the rest of us know. A company that has supported the President and his Affordable Care Act, is currently being sued by Obama for following the law. (Wait… “Affordable” Care Act? Can we sue Democrats for false advertising yet?)

Welcome to Obama’s America. Where you can literally get sued for trying to comply with the law. (Boy… That’ll teach you.)

Honeywell International Inc., and two smaller firms, are being sued for taking advantage of a specific provision in the ACA that allows them to lower their out-of-pocket medical expenses. Deroy Murdock at the National Review explains:

These firms are complying with Obamacare, which lets them offer wellness programs to their employees. These activities help workers lose weight, quit smoking, receive regular checkups, and otherwise become healthier. As an incentive, Obamacare offers participating employees as much as a 50 percent reduction in out-of-pocket medical expenses… The comically titled “Affordable Care Act” requires that employees in these programs undergo medical tests to qualify for lower premiums. Unfortunately, such exams violate the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Read more from this story HERE.