Will New York Take the Weiner Back?

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Photo Credit: Pablo Manriquez

A bold comeback attempt or the height of chutzpah? In what could be the start of one of the most intriguing second acts in American politics, Anthony Weiner, the congressman who tweeted himself out of a job two years ago with a photo of his bulging underpants, is considering jumping into the New York City mayor’s race.

The Brooklyn Democrat said in a New York Times Magazine story posted online Wednesday that he realizes he would be an underdog, but he wants to “ask people to give me a second chance.”

“I do recognize, to some degree, it’s now or maybe never for me,” Weiner, 48, said in a long and highly personal profile that he clearly hoped would be the start of his rehabilitation.

But are voters ready to forgive? Will they at least stop giggling long enough to hear what he has to say?

Political analysts say Weiner would face a steep climb to get past his past, but his political skills, his rich reserve of campaign money and the dynamics of a crowded Democratic primary could make him a player, if not a clear winner, in the contest this fall to succeed Michael Bloomberg as mayor of the nation’s largest city.

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Post Office Backs Off Threat to End Saturday Mail Delivery

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Photo Credit: MoneyBlogNewz

The financially beleaguered Postal Service backpedaled on its plan to end Saturday mail delivery, conceding Wednesday that its gamble to compel congressional approval had failed.

With limited options for saving money, the governing board said the agency should reopen negotiations with unions to lower labor costs and consider raising mail prices.

Yet the board also said it’s not possible for the Postal Service to meet its goals for reduced spending without altering the delivery schedule. Delaying “responsible changes,” the board said, only makes it more likely that the Postal Service “may become a burden” to taxpayers.

Congressional reaction was mixed, mirroring differences that have stalled a needed postal overhaul for some time. Some lawmakers had urged the agency to forge ahead with its plan, while others had said it lacked the legal authority to do so.

The Postal Service said in February that it planned to switch to five-day-a-week deliveries beginning in August for everything except packages as a way to hold down losses. That announcement was risky. The agency was asking Congress to drop from spending legislation the longtime ban on five-day-only delivery. Congress did not do that when it passed a spending measure last month.

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GOP and Democrats Announce Compromise on Gun Control; Aide Says it Wouldn't Have Stopped Newtown

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Republican Pat Toomey and Democrat Joe Manchin announced a gun bill compromise to expand background checks earlier today. The legislation is in direct response to the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December.

“This amendment won’t ease the pain … but nobody here, not one of us in this great capital of ours in good conscious could sit by and not try to prevent a day like that from happening again,” Manchin told the press at today’s announcement.

But aides on Capitol Hill admit that there is not a thing in the bill that would have prevented the killer, Adam Lanza, from killing 26 at the school in Newtown, Connecticut.

“There’s nothing in this legislation that addresses the fact pattern at Sandy Hook,” a senior Senate aide told me on the phone.

The aide explains that the bill expands on the background-check system already in place, but that the system doesn’t work properly. “They are expanding on a broken system that we know will fail,” says the aide.

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Politico, Washington Post Carry Fabricated Stories About Palin in Wake of Thatcher's Death

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Photo Credit: AP

Mainstream media publications immediately exploited the passing of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on Monday to again advance their political agendas by falsely smearing former Alaska Gov. and Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin.

In a rush to write whatever they could to tarnish both, outlets like Politico and the Washington Post resorted to “reporting” on a fictitious story and an imaginary trip that have already been debunked years ago.

The Post, a publication known for its liberal agenda, immediately “re-upped” the debunked story about Thatcher having snubbed Palin when Chris Cillizza, the editor of “The Fix,” allowed his underling to publish parts of the disproven 2011 report.

Politico ironically included the story in its article about Thatcher as well, even though the publication debunked the story two years ago.

In 2011, a left-wing and anti-Thatcher British newspaper, the Guardian, tried to smear Palin by writing a fictitious story, with an anonymous quote, about how Thatcher supposedly snubbed Palin for a meeting that had never even been scheduled, as both camps immediately confirmed. The British newspaper also claimed a Thatcher adviser called Palin “nuts.”

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14 Slashed, Stabbed With Knife in Texas Campus Assault, 2 Critical

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A student went on a building-to-building stabbing attack at a Texas community college Tuesday, wounding at least 14 people before being subdued and arrested, authorities said.

The attack at about 11:20 a.m. on the Lone Star Community College System campus sent at least 12 people to area hospitals, including four people taken by helicopter, according to volunteer fire department spokesman Robert Rasa. He said several people refused treatment at the scene and all the wounds were consistent with stabbing.

Sheriff Adrian Garcia said officers responded to the campus after receiving a call about a male “on the loose” stabbing people. He said it was not immediately clear what type of weapon was used.

“Some of the details in the call slip did indicate that students or faculty were actively responding to work to subdue this individual,” Garcia said, describing the man as being about 21 years old and enrolled at the college. “So we’re proud of those folks, but we’re glad no one else is injured any more severely than they are.”

Lone Star officials initially urged people on campus, about 25 miles (40 kilometers) northwest of downtown Houston, to take shelter and be on alert for a second suspect. But the sheriff’s department said a short time later that authorities believed just one person was responsible.

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MSNBC’s Touré Founded Militant Anti-White, Anti-Semitic Student Paper

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MSNBC host Touré founded a student newspaper dedicated to black liberation theology while he was a college student attending Emory University from 1989 to 1992.

Touré’s flagship publication, The Fire This Time, lavished praise on famous anti-Semites, black supremacists, and conspiracy theorists whom Touré helped bring to campus. Before he became an intense-but-sardonic TV personality, Touré also decried “the suffocating white community” and defended a nationally famous fake hate crime.

In an interview with The Daily Caller, Touré described the newspaper as “an important black voice on campus” and “a form of community building.”

The Fire This Time only solicited funds from blacks. “Kujichagulia means self-determination,” he wrote. “Economic kujichagulia is an essential part of any realistic program of African-American liberation. This is why we insist on being completely funded by African-Americans.”

The newspaper’s content – a mix of identity politics and post-modern flapdoodle – mark it as an item of its time. In one article entitled “My School, My School Is On Fire… Why EU [Emory University] Doesn’t Need Any Water,” Touré chronicled racial divisions at Emory University and repeatedly asked, “Why’d you go to a white school?” The author turned that rhetorical question into a rallying cry for black liberation: “At a White School like Emory there is a greater potential for higher consciousness and more activism within the black community than at a college,” Touré declared.

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More Obamacare Stupidity: Insurances Exchanges Can't Charge More for Smokers

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Photo Credit: Fried Dough

The board charged with implementing federal health care reforms in the District has voted to prohibit insurance companies from charging higher premiums to cigarette smokers, adding the city to a handful of states rejecting such surcharges because of the effect they have on poor families who are more likely to smoke.

The D.C. Health Benefit Exchange executive board voted Monday to join Rhode Island, Vermont and Massachusetts in eliminating smoking premiums in their health care exchanges.

Dr. Mohammad N. Akhter, chairman of the city’s health exchange board, said the costs of the surcharge could be prohibitive for poor families. The Affordable Care Act allows states to impose up to a 50 percent surcharge for people who have used tobacco at least four times a week over the last six months.

A June 2012 study by the Institute for Health Policy Solutions estimated that the largest effect would be on older couples whose earnings were at 150 percent of the federal poverty line. If subjected to the maximum surcharge, a couple older than 60 years old who both smoke would face a premium equaling 48 percent of their total income and 143 percent of their income above the poverty level.

“That’s basically unaffordable,” Dr. Akhter said.

An estimated 20.8 percent of D.C. adults smoke regularly, compared to a national median of 21.2 percent, according to 2011 statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But smoking rates among black residents in the District were much higher, at 30.8 percent.

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Students Force ex-Bush Official 'War Criminal' to Withdraw as Commencement Speaker

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Leftist students at Swarthmore College, dissatisfied with their commencement speaker’s connection to the Bush administration, persuaded him to withdraw as speaker.

Robert Zoellick served as deputy secretary of state under President Bush in 2005, and is known for strongly backing the Iraq War. These views put him at odds with Swarthmore’s Quaker roots, said some students.

At a meeting last week, one student called Zoellick a “war criminal” who did not share “Swarthmore values.”

The student, identified as “Will L.” in a comment on an online article about the controversy, drew attention to the fact that Zoellick would be receiving an honorary degree: “I, and many others, are opposed to Zoellick’s honorary degree for a number of reasons. His tenure at the World Bank and as U.S. Trade Representative are among them. So is his time in the private sector, when he worked at Goldman Sachs and Fannie Mae — two institutions that would later become infamous for their role in the 2008 financial collapse. So is his role in helping build an ideological foundation for the Iraq War. His whole career has been built on one morally dubious enterprise after another.”

In response, Zoellick decided not speak at commencement, and said that he would refuse the honorary degree.

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Newtown Killer Refused to Say If He Was Male or Female: 'I Choose Not to Answer'

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By Terence P. Jeffrey. Adam Lanza, who murdered 20 first graders and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. on Dec. 14, refused to identify himself by a gender when registering at college, according to documents obtained by CBS News.

“I choose not to answer,” Lanza said when asked his gender on a form for Western Connecticut State University.

President Barack Obama and others have pointed to Lanza’s act of mass murder as an argument for more strictly controlling access to firearms in the United States.

“We got some intriguing new information and a strange new picture of Lanza today,” anchor Scott Pelley said on the April 1 edition of CBS Evening News.

“His college records were delivered to us after we requested them under the Connecticut open records law,” said Pelley. “Lanza enrolled in courses at Western Connecticut State University. When asked his gender he wrote, ‘I choose not to answer.’ When asked to describe himself, he wrote again ‘I choose not to answer.’ Read more from this story HERE.

Biden Says Gender Part of Gun Background Check; Newtown Shooter Refused to Offer Gender on College Form

By Fred Lucas. Vice President Joe Biden Tuesday highlighted gender among other characteristics a gun purchaser must fill out on a background check form after reports that the Newtown, Conn. school shooter refused to identify his gender on a college form.

“You walk into Dick’s Sporting Goods or any other place, and they hand you a form,” Biden said Tuesday at a White House event with law enforcement officials from around the country endorsing the Obama administration’s gun control measures. “They say you’ve got to fill this in: It’s your name, where you live, where you were born, your gender and your race, and if you want to make it even quicker to get this done, your Social Security number, which you do not have to give.”

CNS News first reported on April 1 that Adam Lanza, the Newtown gunman that murdered 20 first graders and six adults in December, refused to identify his gender on his college registration form at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury, Conn.

Biden advocated strongly for the Senate to pass gun control measures being considered this week, specifically universal background checks. Lanza did not buy the gun used in the shooting, but got it from his mother. Thus, closing loopholes on background checks would not have affected whether he obtained a gun.

During his speech Tuesday, Biden said the NRA is engaged in misinformation. “They say we – the federal government – want to put every private firearms transaction right under the thumb of the federal government and keep all those names in a massive federal registry,” Biden said. “Kind of scary, man. Black helicopter crowd really is upset.” Read more from this story HERE.

Limbaugh, Palin and Beck All Outraged Over MSNBC Ad Promoting Government Ownership of Children

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After hearing MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry’s “Lean Forward” advertisement promoting the concept that the “kids belong to their communities,” not their parents, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, and Glenn Beck all engaged, slamming this communistic approach:

Talk-show host Rush Limbaugh declared, “The nuclear family has always been under attack by communists, by leftists. The nuclear family – just like religion – must be destroyed, and in its place, ‘the community,’ the collective.

“So, while this is outrageous in its self-contained form, it isn’t anything new. I guess one of the things that is the most frustrating to me is that liberalism and socialism and Marxism and this kind of stuff have been out there on display for people to see and recognize and accept as true for decades.”

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin tweeted: “‘Apparently MSNBC doesn’t think your children belong to you. Unflippingbelievable.”

Meanwhile, Glenn Beck pointed out that the MSNBC network promo is not just some gaffe by a host or panelist.

“This is something that people thought about,” he said. “This is something that everybody worked on. This is something that everybody got together and filmed.”

Continue to the video HERE.