(Reuters) – Neighbors of George Zimmerman say he had bandages on his nose and head the day after he shot dead Trayvon Martin, supporting statements by the neighborhood watch volunteer that he was beaten in a confrontation with the black Florida teenager.
The extent of Zimmerman’s injuries could be crucial to his legal defense under Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” self-defense law, which allows the use of deadly force when someone has the reasonable belief he could face death or great bodily harm.
Police said Zimmerman, who has been charged with second-degree murder in the racially charged case, was bleeding from the nose and the back of his head and was treated by medics before being taken to Sanford police station after the February 26 shooting.
But public doubts were later raised by the release of a grainy surveillance video from the police station in which no injuries were readily visible.
Zimmerman later sought medical treatment for injuries including a broken nose, his former lawyers have said.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta flies home to California almost every weekend, racking up costs for the American taxpayer roughly equal to the cost of the General Services Administration’s junket to Las Vegas that has Congress fuming mad this week.
The AP reported earlier this month that Panetta, who has been commuting to his northern California home each weekend for decades, has made at least 27 round trips on government airplanes since becoming defense secretary and only reimburses the taxpayer $630 of the $32,000 cost of each trip. He is only legally required to reimburse the government for the commercial coach class fare.
Obama administration officials say Panetta likes to recharge his battery and often makes side trips to military bases while he’s out West. Regardless, the optics of the expense don’t look good at a time when the United States is in the middle of a fiscal crisis and Congress is searching hard to eliminate waste in government spending.
At Monday’s Pentagon press briefing, Panetta was asked about the travel expenses, which now total about $860,000.
“For 40 years that I’ve been in this town, I’ve gone home because my wife and family are there and because, frankly, I think it’s healthy to get out of Washington periodically just to get your mind straight and your perspective straight,” he said, noting that as defense secretary, he is not permitted to fly commercial and must be always reachable.
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Romney’s own hot-mic moment… At Florida fundraiser (overheard by NBC’s Garrett Haake), Romney singles out HUD for possible elimination and says he wants to cut the Education Dept… He and his wife also were giddy about the Hilary Rosen flap… And Romney revealed he wants a “Republican DREAM Act” to help woo Latinos… Senate to vote on Buffett Rule at 5:30 pm ET… Team Obama rakes in $53 million in March… Anonymous donor writes Crossroads $10 million check… NYT on White House’s access to big donors… Romney, meanwhile, promises his own donors access at “Presidential Inaugural Retreat!!!
*** Romney’s own hot-mic moment: In an interview with the Weekly Standard earlier this year, Mitt Romney said he learned this advice from his unsuccessful 1994 Senate race against Ted Kennedy: don’t get too specific. “One of the things I found in a short campaign against Ted Kennedy was that when I said, for instance, that I wanted to eliminate the Department of Education, that was used to suggest I don’t care about education,” he said. “So I think it’s important for me to point out that I anticipate that there will be departments and agencies that will either be eliminated or combined with other agencies.” But at a Florida fundraiser Romney attended last night — which NBC’s Garrett Haake overheard because he was sitting on a seawall outside the home — the former Massachusetts governor got MUCH MORE specific. Indeed, it was in a way Romney’s own hot-mic moment, where he was more open about his plans than he’s been to voters and reporters to date.
*** Eliminate HUD, cut Education Department: He singled out HUD for possible elimination. “I’m going to take a lot of departments in Washington, and agencies, and combine them. Some eliminate, but I’m probably not going to lay out just exactly which ones are going to go,” Romney said. “Things like Housing and Urban Development, which my dad was head of, that might not be around later.” He said he’d cut the Education Department, though not eliminate it entirely, referring again to that 1994 Senate defeat. “The Department of Education: I will either consolidate with another agency, or perhaps make it a heck of a lot smaller. I’m not going to get rid of it entirely.” Romney also identified specific loopholes and deductions that he’s eliminate to finance his across-the-board tax cut. “I’m going to probably eliminate for high income people the second home mortgage deduction,” Romney said, per Haake, adding that he would also likely eliminate deductions for state income and property taxes as well.
*** Giddy over the Rosen flap: At the fundraiser, Haake adds, both Romney and his wife Ann remained absolutely giddy about last week’s Hilary Rosen flap. “It was my early birthday present for someone to be critical of me as a mother, and that was really a defining moment, and I loved it,” Ann Romney said. The candidate went further, calling the episode a “gift” that allowed his campaign to show contrast with Democrats in the general election’s first week. But while Romney said last week that “all moms are working moms,” that doesn’t apply to mothers who are welfare recipients, the Boston Globe says. Romney said at a Jan. 4 campaign stop in Manchester, N.H.: “Even if you have a child two years of age, you need to go to work,” Romney describing his position as Massachusetts governor. “And people said, ‘Well that’s heartless,’ and I said ‘No, no, I’m willing to spend more giving daycare to allow those parents to go back to work. It’ll cost the state more providing that daycare, but I want the individuals to have the dignity of work.’”
*** Romney wants a “Republican DREAM Act”: Here’s a final bit of news from last night’s Romney’s fundraiser: He said the GOP must offer its own policies to woo Hispanics, including a “Republican DREAM Act,” to give Hispanic voters a real choice between the two political parties. So Romney here is admitting the obvious: He and his party have A LOT of work to do with Latinos. Why? Consider this: Obama can get to 270 electoral votes (275 to be specific) by winning the following battleground states: Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Virginia. Under the scenario of this Hispanic path (CO, NM, NV, and VA), Obama doesn’t need to win Florida, Ohio, Iowa, or New Hampshire. That’s right — this is a viable path to 270 that does not include EITHER Florida or Ohio. It’s pretty stunning.
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The scandal surrounding the Secret Service continues to get notice from the media — and from Congress. Rep. Darrell Issa, chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, told CBS earlier today that he doesn’t plan on opening a separate investigation into the matter, at least not yet. However, Issa pledged to “look over the shoulder” of the Inspector General as the DHS office conducts a probe into how one or more prostitutes penetrated the secure zone that the Secret Service had set up for President Obama’s trip to the Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia:
“What we see is that this story is larger than eleven individuals,” said Issa on “CBS This Morning” on Monday. “It’s part of what has been, told to us, as a pattern of behavior that’s built up, so called ‘wheels up’ parties and the like and clearly you have an elite unite that we count on to have the greatest of security not just for the president but for the cabinet for other officials and we need to know that they’re living up to on a broad basis.”
“We clearly have lost confidence and we need to get that confidence back by knowing that the system will be changed,” he warned.
Issa said he had heard many reports that Secret Service agents often celebrate once the president has completed a visit with a ‘wheels up’ party, but said this incident was not comparable.
“Okay, fine, that’s when you can sort of let your hair down. The question is in this case you had a pre-wheels down party. You had drinking, you had activities that clearly compromised the ring of security, at least some because you now had people inside the secure areas, people who could have come in with all kinds of microphones, or in fact could have done something or could have later on blackmailed,” said Issa. “All of this went on before the president arrived, so this really goes beyond what we’ve heard in the past. It’s an area of concern.”
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BOSTON – Mitt Romney today revealed for the first time that he has put longtime adviser Beth Myers in charge of his vice presidential vetting process.
“I have selected someone who has been a counselor of mine for a number of years, Beth Myers. She was my chief of staff when I was governor,” the former Massachusetts governor told ABC News’ Diane Sawyer in an exclusive interview.
“I’ve asked her to be the person who oversees the process of the vice presidential selection and vetting an analysis and so she’s begun that process and is putting together the kinds of things you need to do to vet potential candidates,” Romney added.
Asked whether there is a deadline for choosing his running mate, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee said he does have a deadline in mind but would not reveal the specifics.
“It would certainly be by the time of the convention,” he said. “I don’t think we’ve chosen the time we’d actually make an announcement,” Romney said during a stroll through Fenway Park, where he is scheduled to join two contest winners at a Red Sox game.
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Over the last several weeks, the shooting of Trayvon Martin has been front and center in the mainstream media and on talk shows, both conservative and liberal. The focus of the coverage has been on the supposed racial divide — fueled in part by the involvement of the Reverends Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, the New Black Panthers and other “experts” like former heavyweight champion and convicted felon Mike Tyson.
Following close behind the racial overtones of the incident has been the expected effort by the anti-firearms crowd to use the shooting to argue against the laws in Florida and many other states that permit individuals to defend themselves with deadly force if placed in fear of their lives or of severe bodily injury — so-called “stand your ground” laws.
Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the media frenzy over the incident has been incredibly disingenuous. People seeking to make names for themselves have run in front of television cameras or microphones to make their opinions about the shooting known, no matter how irresponsible their remarks may be.
President Barack Obama, who is a self-proclaimed constitutional law expert, weighed in on the eve of the shooting, claiming strangely that if he had a son, “he’d look like Trayvon.” In an utterly idiotic stunt, Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL) tried to make comments about the shooting from the floor of the House of Representatives wearing a gray hoodie similar to that worn by Martin on the night he was killed.
In such an environment, it is not hard to see how comments and actions like these might fan the flames of political pressure on prosecutors in Florida to take action against George Zimmerman, the man who shot and killed Martin. Most prosecutors, however, take their sworn duty to follow the facts and the law seriously and don’t cave to political pressure or public cries for “action” and jump in and level serious charges based on such factors.
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The president’s acolytes have been working overtime to convince the American people there’s a “war on women.” They’re right—but it’s not being waged by the Republicans.
The real “war on women” is tied to the state of the U.S. economy, which is currently engaged in its most anemic recovery in the post-war period. President Obama’s policies of tax, spend, and regulate have prevented business expansion, produced layoffs, and led to nearly 3 million people dropping out of the workforce. Of those, women are the hardest hit.
Since Obama took office the nation has lost a net 740,000 jobs, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports, and unemployment had gone from 7.8 percent to as high as 10.1 percent in October 2009 before coming down to it’s current rate of 8.2 percent. And that’s only counting people still looking for work. Without them, it’s closer to 9 or 10 percent according to various estimates.
For women the picture is even bleaker. The bureau reports that the unemployment rate for women has increased from 7 percent to 8.1 percent and the number of female employees in the workforce has declined by 683,000. The female labor force participation rate fell in March from 57.9 percent to 57.7 percent.
The president’s failure to get a handle on the economy constitutes the real “war on women,” depriving them of opportunities to enter or remain in the workforce. In order to divert attention from these cold, hard facts, Obama and his allies—like former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democratic National Committee Chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz—have tried to focus attention on the nonsensical idea that the Republicans want somehow to ban women’s access to birth control.
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The authenticity of conservative women has always been under attack by radical orthodox feminists, but perhaps not as brazenly as by someone with such direct and frequent access to the corridors of the White House message machine as Hilary B. Rosen.
The D.C. career lobbyist and Democratic media strategist took to CNN’s airwaves this week to craft a left-wing “War on Women” attack on the real moms of the GOP. Ostensibly aiming at Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney for his “old-fashioned” views of women, Rosen’s mouth instead shot off in the direction of wife, stay-at-home mother of five, grandmother of 16, and cancer and multiple sclerosis survivor Ann Romney. Mrs. Romney, sneered Rosen, “never worked a day in her life” outside of the home and should have no voice on women’s issues.
President Obama never met a payroll in his life, but that hasn’t stopped him from dictating what business owners across the country should and shouldn’t be doing. But I digress.
This was no accidental rhetorical drive-by. “Progressives” from Gloria Steinem to Patricia Ireland to Naomi Wolf have derided their conservative counterparts as female impersonators, fake women and men with breasts from time immemorial. It’s SOP: standard operating procedure. In 1992, Hillary Clinton mocked women who stayed at home and “baked cookies and had teas.” In 2004, blueblood Teresa Heinz Kerry, wife of Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry, sniffed that first lady Laura Bush (a former teacher and librarian before becoming a homemaker) never “had a real job — I mean, since she’s been grown up.”
Alas, if you’re a conservative mom, you’re damned if you do stay home and damned if you don’t. In 2008, Howard Gutman, a member of the Obama campaign’s national finance committee, attacked GOP vice presidential candidate and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s ability to be a good parent and have a high-powered public life at the same time. “Your responsibility is to put your family first,” Gutman lectured as he singled out Palin’s Down syndrome baby and then-pregnant teenage daughter. “The proper attack is not that a woman shouldn’t run for vice president with five kids; it’s that a parent, when they have a family in need…” should get out of the public sphere and stay home.
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Coca Cola executives who recently decided to stop supporting the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) did so in response to demands from an obscure left-wing activist group, Color of Change (COC). So were executives of giant candy-maker Mars, Inc. when they announced a similar decision earlier today.
That is why Color of Change may be the most powerful group in America you’ve never heard about.
The demand that Coke, Mars and other corporate donors stop making contributions to ALEC – a long-established conservative legislative group that researches and writes model legislation that is often adopted by state legislatures – is only the latest COC campaign to hit a nerve.
Previous COC successes include pushing advertisers on Glenn Beck’s Fox News Show to withdraw their ads, a campaign that played a role in the cable news and opinion network’a decision to drop the controversial production in June 2011.
Others who have felt the wrath of COC include now-former MSNBC opinion analyst Patrick Buchanan, Fox Business News anchor Eric Bolling, Lou Dobbs when he was on CNN, and the late Andrew Breitbart.
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When Republicans abandon the free market and smaller government, the culprits are often the industry lobbyists within the GOP’s inner circles.
Former K Street lobbyist Ed Gillespie, who joined Mitt Romney’s campaign last week as adviser, shows how industry can muddle Republicans’ economic message. Specifically, Gillespie’s and Romney’s closeness with the health insurance industry has weakened the GOP’s ability to attack President Obama’s least popular policy, Obamacare’s individual mandate.
In 2007, Gillespie was the headline Republican for the bipartisan Coalition to Advance Healthcare Reform. CAHR advocated “market-based solutions,” but it also held as a core principle that “every American should be required to carry health insurance,” as stated in an op-ed written by CAHR founder Steve Burd, CEO of Safeway.
CAHR was made up of large employers, plus insurers like Aetna, Blue Cross of California, and Cigna, as well as drugmaker Eli Lilly. Of course Aetna and Blue Cross supported the idea of forcing people to buy health insurance. They were paying for CAHR, and CAHR was paying Gillespie.
Gillespie tells me he never advocated a federal individual mandate. Instead, he advocated “a requirement that able-bodied people should have health insurance,” as he put it in a phone conversation Wednesday. Anyone not carrying health insurance would lose half of his personal exemption, under Gillespie’s idea. “It was not a mandate,” Gillespie told me. “It was a way of addressing the free-rider problem” of uninsured people obtaining health care from hospitals, which are required by law to care for all comers regardless of ability to pay.
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