De Blasio Will Continue Bloomberg’s Soda Cup Fight

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Photo Credit: Politicker After his mayoral campaign sent vague signals yesterday about whether he would maintain Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s legal effort to restrict soda cup sizes at restaurants, Bill de Blasio vowed to do precisely that this afternoon.

“I think the mayor is right and I would continue the legal process. We have to, of course, look at the specifics with our own lawyers to handle the mechanics, but there’s no question I want to see this rule go through,” the front-running candidate told reporters at a rally with Chinese-American supporters.

Yesterday, Mr. de Blasio’s spokesman, Dan Levitan, told The New York Times the candidate would “review the status of the city’s litigation” if elected.

Mr. Bloomberg’s proposed ban on sugary drinks larger than 16 ounces was struck down by a lower court earlier this year, following an intense lobbying effort from the soda industry, small business owners and some elected officials. The Bloomberg administration, however, appealed the decision to the state’s highest court, which agreed to hear the appeal yesterday.

Mr. de Blasio concurred with the mayor that the ban would help combat childhood obesity in particular.

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The Case for GOP Optimism

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Photo Credit: National Review The shutdown is over, and the Democrats have won. Now, we will be told incessantly about the damage that was done to the Republican party, about the insurrectionist “fever” that the president masterfully succeeded in “breaking,” and about the free hand that the White House has to implement Obamacare, its central achievement.

All of this is to be expected, but it is not necessarily to be taken seriously. Given the romantic and unrealistic goals that it established at the outset — and the calamitous absence of anything approaching a strategy throughout — the Republican party can certainly have been said to have “lost” the shutdown. And yet this was a loss that was marked not by any serious policy concessions but by the maintenance of the status quo. The president succeeded in ensuring that his side did not lose anything it wanted, yes. But as Dan Meyer, Newt Gingrich’s former chief of staff, observes, he also “didn’t get more revenue. He didn’t get the sequester caps lifted. All those decisions were punted.”

Punted to less promising ground for the Democratic party, too.

Whether or not the national media will elect to focus on the Obamacare rollout mess now that it cannot claim to be distracted by the shutdown will, in truth, be largely irrelevant going forward. Up and down the country, local newspapers are telling brutal stories of breathtaking technical incompetence and of genuine sticker shock. The national papers can continue to append to objective criticisms the usual “Republicans say . . . ” but it is pretty clear to all but the truest of believers that the administration’s promises are in tatters and that its critics are starting to look happily prescient. The media are corrupt; but they’re not corrupt enough to hide the debacle.

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Kentucky-Bribed Statesman: Mitch McConnell Unmasked

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Anthony Weiner recently lamented that “if the internet didn’t exist,” he’d be the mayor of New York.  In other words, if John Q. Public weren’t so privy to the facts, and so readily able to investigate those facts and exchange opinions about them online, politicians could more easily manipulate their political images and determine the outcome of elections.

Likewise, Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell is now feeling the stinging disapproval of an informed public that he may not have felt twenty years ago.  Like the grand reveal at the end a Scooby-Doo episode, McConnell the “fiscally conservative” Senate leader has been unmasked in the last month’s proceedings and identified as what he really is — a career politician who’d sell his constituents and American taxpayers down the river for a buck (or in this case, a couple billion bucks).  And he would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for meddling Matt Drudge and the like.

In late September, Mitch McConnell used his lofty position in the Republican minority to stand against Senate conservatives like Ted Cruz and fellow Kentucky Senator Rand Paul.  He made and underhanded effort to block a House bill which would fund the government and raise the debt ceiling in exchange for defunding ObamaCare.  Knowing that the Senate would not have the 60 votes necessary to amend the House bill to fund ObamaCare, he and fellow collaborators voted in favor of a cloture vote which would allow Harry Reid and Senate Democrats to amend the bill with an easily attainable straight majority vote.  Then, having cleared the Senate Democrats’ path to funding ObamaCare, he cast a show vote against the amended spending bill, which included the funding of ObamaCare, hoping it would absolve him of any blame.

We noticed it.  In fact, it was insulting and infuriating that McConnell took such care to conceal the betrayal of his stated conviction to oppose ObamaCare.  Now, his efforts to fund ObamaCare have culminated in what’s being described as the “Kentucky Kickback” by the Senate Conservatives Fund.  “In exchange for funding ObamaCare and raising the debt limit,” the group says, “Mitch McConnell has secured a $2 billion earmark” to a pet project in his home state of Kentucky.

Of course, in a further insult to our intelligence, McConnell is again trying to shirk any responsibility for billions in new taxpayer liability which will uniquely benefit his state.  The language, his office reminds reporters, was introduced by Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), and the provision will raise the spending limit of Kentucky’s Olmsted Lock and Dam project from $775 million to $2.9 billion. 

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U.S. Debt Jumps a Record $328 Billion — Tops $17 Trillion for First Time

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Photo Credit: Jacquelyn MartinU.S. debt jumped a record $328 billion on Thursday, the first day the federal government was able to borrow money under the deal President Obama and Congress sealed this week.

The debt now equals $17.075 trillion, according to figures the Treasury Department posted online on Friday.

The $328 billion increase shattered the previous high of $238 billion set two years ago.

The giant jump comes because the government was replenishing its stock of “extraordinary measures” — the federal funds it borrowed from over the last five months as it tried to avoid bumping into the debt ceiling.

Under the law, that replenishing happens as soon as there is new debt space.

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Business Groups Preparing to Fight Conservatives Over Immigration

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Photo Credit: Reuters Business groups that want Republicans to compromise more with Democrats and Washington’s permanent political class on comprehensive immigration reform may declare war on Tea Party candidates by putting money behind moderate and centrist candidates in Republican primaries.

According to the Wall Street Journal, groups like the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable are thinking about “backing challengers to tea-party conservatives in GOP primaries, increasing political engagement with centrist Republicans.” The Chamber of Commerce is reportedly “researching” what races they can influence in GOP primaries “in hopes of replacing tea-party conservatives with more business-friendly pragmatists” who would include support for comprehensive immigration reform.

Even before the government shutdown and the fight over defunding Obamacare, business groups “pressing for an immigration overhaul were venting frustration that the full House has been unwilling to consider any immigration legislation.” Reportedly, “several business executives said they were counting on establishment GOP leaders, including House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, to move immigration and future fiscal legislation.”

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Rand Paul: Another Shutdown Stickup

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Photo Credit: Jose Luis MaganaDuring the shutdown, 85 percent of government stayed open despite the hoopla reported in the media. Government is now 100 percent open. Debt-ceiling deadlines have been averted, but the real problem remains: a $17 trillion debt and a president who continues to pile on new debt at a rate of $1 million a minute.

The government shutdown occurred because Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid allows the Senate to lurch from deadline to deadline without passing a single appropriations bill. Had he done his job and passed each of the 12 appropriations bills, the government could have stayed open.

Opening government has not resolved the big picture — a debt problem so large that it dwarfs all deadlines and threatens the very fabric of the nation. What remains is an unsustainable debt, precisely the problem that motivated me to run for office.

There was never any reason to shut down government. If both sides were willing to compromise, we could have found amicable solutions to these severe problems. But let the record state clearly, no significant spending restraint was accomplished because President Obama steadfastly refused to negotiate. Let us also remember his promise that he will negotiate as long as the compromises are outside of any budgetary deadlines.

We’ve heard this before, and I, for one, am skeptical.

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Drone Strikes by US May Violate International Law, Says UN

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Photo Credit: Massoud HossainiAFP/GettyA United Nations investigation has so far identified 33 drone strikes around the world that have resulted in civilian casualties and may have violated international humanitarian law.

The report by the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, Ben Emmerson QC, calls on the US to declassify information about operations co-ordinated by the CIA and clarify its positon on the legality of unmanned aerial attacks.

Published ahead of a debate on the use of remotely piloted aircraft, at the UN general assembly in New York next Friday, the 22-page document examines incidents in Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan and Gaza.

It has been published to coincide with a related report released earlier on Thursday by Professor Christof Heyns, the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, which warned that the technology was being misused as a form of “global policing”.

Emmerson, who travelled to Islamabad for his investigation, said the Pakistan ministry of foreign affairs has records of as many as 330 drone strikes in the country’s north-western tribal areas since 2004. Up to 2,200 people have been killed – of whom at least 400 were civilians – according to the Pakistan government.

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Bad to Worse: Obamacare Website Slammed by Critics

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesBy Dan Mangan.

The federal Obamacare insurance marketplace is being pummeled by a damning series of new disclosures, expert criticism, Republican demands that the Health and Human Services chief resign and presidential displeasure as the tech-troubled website stumbles into its third week of operation.

And even as officials repeatedly claim there is plenty of time to fix the problems at HealthCare.gov, speculation has risen that the Obama administration could fall well short of its goal of enrolling 7 million people in new insurance plans by 2014 because of a crippling set of technical potholes the venture has encountered.

President Barack Obama is “not happy” with the problems, his spokesman Jay Carney said Thursday. Carney also said the president wants “accountability” from the federal workers overseeing the rollout of his signature health-reform law.

Obama also said HealthCare.gov, which is offering insurance plans to residents of 36 states, has “way more glitches than I think are acceptable.”

The federal and individual state health exchanges are a key part of Obamacare, offering what is supposed to be a menu of affordable insurance options to uninsured or underinsured people so that they can comply with a law that takes effect in 2014 requiring nearly all Americans to have health insurance or pay a tax penalty.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: ReutersObamacare wins? See you in 2014

By David Nather.

Obamacare wins!

Now, let’s talk about that website.

President Barack Obama’s signature health care law is now turning into a 2014 election issue, rather than the disastrous defunding fight that led the government to close for three weeks. With the shutdown out of the way, the health care law’s problems will take center stage in a way that they didn’t while Republicans were stepping on their own message.

Obamacare was always going to be a major issue in the mid-term elections, since so many of its major pieces — the new health coverage, the online marketplaces where the coverage is available, the expansion of Medicaid, and the hated individual mandate — become real in January.

But now, Democrats will also have to talk about a federal health insurance website that barely anyone can use. Even White House spokesman Jay Carney was reduced to arguing Thursday that Obamacare isn’t just a website — after Obama has been saying it would be as easy as shopping for flat-screen TVs online.

Read more from this story HERE.

Cory Booker ‘Excited’ to Officiate Gay Marriages

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Photo Credit: APNew Jersey Sen.-elect Cory Booker will officiate some of the first gay marriages in New Jersey early Monday morning, his office in Newark announced Friday.

“Mayor Booker has refused all requests to officiate New Jersey marriages because gay couples have been denied that equal right. After today’s wonderful news, Mayor Booker is excited to marry both straight and gay couples in City Hall on Monday morning beginning at 12:01 a.m.,” said Booker spokesperson James Allen in a written statement out Friday.

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Mexican Consulate Plans Saturday, Oct. 19, Asheville Visit to Aid Immigrants

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Photo Credit: mountainxMore than 24,000 Mexicans live in Western North Carolina, according to the Consulate General of Mexico’s Raleigh, N.C., office. Nearly 9,000 of them live in Buncombe County, and about 8,500 in Henderson County. For the past three years, the Consulate has brought its office to Asheville so that these legal immigrants can get help with a variety of needs.

“Without the proper identification, people who have immigrated to this country from Mexico cannot even get a library card, let alone utilities or a bank account,” says Carolina McCready, co-director of the nonprofit El Centro of Henderson County. To overcome such barriers and help meet vital identification needs in the local Mexican community, El Centro is hosting a visit from the Mexican Consulate on Saturday, Oct. 19, from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m. at the WNC AG Center in the Expo Building.

Usually, in order to process the paperwork needed to obtain/renew passports, Mexican ID cards or power of attorney, WNC immigrants have to go to the Mexican Consulate’s office in Raleigh, which requires taking time off of work and taking children away from school. In addition to eight hours of driving, most visits require many hours at the Consulate office and an overnight stay. These logistics present an insurmountable challenge for many Mexicans living in this area, say organizers of the October event.

Read more from this story HERE.