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New Year’s Eve On the Cliff: Lawmakers Have No Bill and No Deal (+Update)

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UPDATE: Deal in the Works?

Senate leaders and Vice President Biden are putting the finishing touches on an agreement to extend income tax rates for the vast majority of the country, just hours before the “fiscal cliff” deadline.

The agreement will extend Bush-era income tax rates on individual income up to $400,000 and on family income up to $450,000, according to a senior GOP aide. It will adjust the estate tax rate to 40 percent, up from 35 percent, but maintain the exemption for all inheritances below $5 million, the aide said.

GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who is engaged in one-on-one talks with Biden, said the tax portion of the deal was finished, and that a broader agreement was at hand.
“I can report that we’ve reached an agreement on all of the tax issues,” McConnell said. “We are very, very close.”

Republican leaders in the House, meanwhile, said they would not hold a late-night vote even if tax and spending legislation cleared the Senate, guaranteeing that the nation will go over the fiscal cliff at midnight, if only for a few hours. Read more from this story HERE.

New Year’s Eve On the Cliff: Lawmakers Have No Bill and No Deal

Senate leaders are racing against the clock to reach a “fiscal cliff” deal the House and Senate can approve on New Year’s Eve.

Leaders in the upper chamber narrowed their differences Sunday as Republicans agreed to drop a demand to curb cost-of-living increases to entitlement benefits, while Democrats showed flexibility on taxes.

Yet after months of talks on ways to avoid the fiscal cliff of tax hikes and spending cuts at the end of 2012, House and Senate lawmakers find themselves approaching the new year without a bill to present to their members.

Significant differences remain over two key parts of a deal — the automatic spending cuts known as the sequester and the estate tax.

Instead of working through the night, the Senate recessed at 7:27 p.m. Sunday with plans to reconvene Monday at 11:00 a.m., and the House recessed around the same time. Read more from this story HERE.

Death of Tea Party Exaggerated? Members in House Appear to Hold Key Fiscal Vote (+video)

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The Tea Party has had an up-and-down political ride since the movement helped Republicans take control of the House in 2010, but those elected in the midterm elections still appear to wield considerable power in the fiscal negotiations.

The roughly 50 members elected to the House two years ago have been a challenge for the more moderate House Speaker John Boehner since they took office. Perhaps most memorably, many of them refused last year to support a debt-ceiling bill because they said it didn’t reduce federal spending enough.

Just last week they squashed Boehner’s fiscal plan by refusing to compromise and vote on a tax increase for any American, despite the House speaker — in his so-called “Plan B” — having suggested extending tax cuts only for those making more than $1 million annually.

And their most powerful vote might be yet to come, should Tea Party-backed House members reject a possible Senate proposal over the next two days to extend tax cuts and perhaps avert massive federal spending cuts that start January 1.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Vows to Make Gun Control Priority, Put ‘Full Weight’ Behind Efforts

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President Obama on Sunday said he would make gun control a priority in his new term, pledging to put his “full weight” behind passing new restrictions on firearms in 2013.

“I’m going to be putting forward a package and I’m going to be putting my full weight behind it,” Obama said in an interview aired on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “I’m going to be making an argument to the American people about why this is important and why we have to do everything we can to make sure that something like what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary does not happen again.”

In the wake of the Dec. 14 mass shooting at a Newtown, Conn., school, the president has launched a White House task force led by Vice President Biden to present proposals in January to help stem gun violence. Obama has said that he would seek a broad approach to the problem addressing the role of violence in entertainment and measures to improve mental healthcare.

But he has also called on Congress to move quickly to reinstate the federal assault weapons ban and a ban on the sale of high-capacity magazines.

Obama on Sunday repeated those calls and said he would meet with lawmakers on both sides of the aisles to see action.

Read more from this story HERE.

Allen West: Obama in ‘Fantasy World’ in Cliff Talks

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photo credit: gage skidmore

President Barack Obama is living in a “fantasy world” with the proposals he has put forward to solve the fiscal cliff, Florida Rep. Allen West charged on Thursday.

“What the president is proposing is not pragmatic whatsoever and it really is a reflection of him, I suppose, living in some type of fantasy world,” West, a favorite of the Tea Party Patriots, told Fox News.

The president has proposed raising taxes on those earning $250,000 a year in his plan to prevent the automatic triggering of tax increases and deep spending cuts scheduled for Jan. 2.

“We’re telling the American people that they have to tighten their bootstraps, but we don’t seem to want to do that in Washington . . .”

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Issues Executive Order Raising Pay for Federal Workers, Including VP and Congress

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photo credit: 401(K)2012

President Barack Obama issued an executive order to end the pay freeze on federal employees, in effect giving some federal workers a raise. One federal worker now to receive a pay increase is Vice President Joe Biden.

According to disclosure forms, Biden made a cool $225,521 last year. After the pay increase, he’ll now make $231,900 per year.

Members of Congress, from the House and Senate, also will receive a little bump, as their annual salary will go from $174,000 to 174,900. Leadership in Congress, including the speaker of the House, will likewise get an increase . . .

“A new executive order has been issued providing for a new pay schedule beginning ‘on the first day of the first applicable pay period beginning after March 27, 2013,'” reports FedSmith.com. “The pay raise will generally be about 1/2 of 1%.”

Read full story HERE.

Obama Administration Redefines ‘Dangerous’ Illegal Aliens

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The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) used the Friday before Christmas to release official word that ICE was once again narrowing its definition of who it considers a dangerous individual.

This latest change involves the process of ICE detainers, a topic addressed routinely at Front Page Magazine. ICE detainers are holds, up to two business days, that ICE places on prisoners in municipal prison. These prisoners would otherwise be let go, but because ICE wants to detain them for immigration violations, they continue being held for ICE to pick them up and process them itself. According to a memo dated December 21, 2012, ICE changed its definition of priority to receive such a detainer to someone with three misdemeanor convictions, from one misdemeanor previously.

The pertinent portion of the memo states that “[t]hree or more prior misdemeanor convictions” not including minor traffic misdemeanors or other relatively minor misdemeanors unless the convictions “reflect a clear and continuing danger to others or disregard for the law.” It should be noted that an individual still only needs to be suspected or convicted of any felony in order to warrant an ICE detainer.

This most recent memo augments policy from the most famous memo, now referred to as the Morton Memo, referring to the long-time Director of ICE, John Morton. In that memo, which was released on June 17, 2011, ICE directed all field agents to prioritize dangerous individuals, which the memo defined using an assortment of prior criminal activity. That memo only asked for one misdemeanor conviction. As such, simply being in the country illegally was no longer an ICE investigative priority.

From there, future directives required that a suspect be convicted of a crime before they were a priority for being held in detention. There are only 32,400 beds in all ICE facilities, even though there are roughly 300,000 individuals in the immigration system at any given time. This means that ICE can only hold about one in nine people that it puts in the system.

Read more from this story HERE.

Video: Krauthammer Says Obama’s ‘Fiscal Cliff’ Crisis Executed With Ruthless Skill To Fracture GOP

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(DC) On Thursday’s broadcast of Fox News Channel’s “Hannity,” syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer criticized President Barack Obama for his ruthlessness in the fiscal cliff negotiations, suggesting his aim is to break House Republicans and not solve the fiscal cliff.

Krauthammer also said the president is not as well-positioned as it seems, nor is the GOP as poorly positioned as some people think.

“I do begrudge what he’s done in this fiscal cliff talks,” Krauthammer said. “It’s been very clear from the beginning that he had no intention to solve the fiscal issues. He’s been using this, and I must say with great skill and ruthless skill and success, to fracture and basically shatter the Republican opposition. The only, you know, redoubt of the opposition is the House. And his objective from the very beginning was to break the will of the Republicans in the House and to create an internal civil war, and he’s done that. How did he do it? By always insisting from day one after the election that Republicans had to raise rates. There’s no reason at all to get the revenue that he needed and that the speaker was offering him that you had to raise rates.”

“Obama himself, as you know, said last July — July 2011 — you can get $1.2 trillion by eliminating loopholes, which is exactly what Republicans offered him,” he continued. “So why did he insist on the rates? He said that is what he will insist upon, and that was the ultimatum. He did that because he knew it would create a crisis among the Republicans, and it did. So right up until now Obama has what he wanted, which was a partisan, political success. He’s been less worried about the fiscal issue for two reasons. Number one, he does not care about debt. He hasn’t in the four years. And number two, he thinks he’s a political winner if we go over the cliff. He thinks he’s holding all the cards.”

Read more from this story HERE.

EPA Chief Jackson Resigns Amid Transparency Investigations

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A Washington attorney says that Environmental Protection Agency Chief Administrator Lisa Jackson’s resignation and investigations into the EPA’s use of secret email accounts are not coincidental.

“Life’s full of coincidences, but this is too many,” Competitive Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Chris Horner told FoxNews.com. “She had no choice.”

The Justice Department also plans to release emails Jan. 14 in which EPA Chief Jackson’s alias account discusses coal regulation. According to Horner, this clearly is a factor behind Jackson’s decision to leave the agency.

“Two full committees and one investigative subcommittee of the House of Representatives have asked several federal agencies, including EPA and the White House,” Horner said in a press release, adding that the Department of Justice acknowledged “12,000 emails from Lisa Jackson’s ‘secondary’ email account that discuss the Obama administration’s war on coal, in response to litigation we have filed over this practice.”

Jackson announced she would be leaving after the president gives the State of the Union address, but made no mention of the investigations .

Read more from this story HERE.

Matt Damon: ‘The Game is Rigged’

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Matt Damon rather infamously said in 2011 that he wouldn’t mind if President Barack Obama — whom the actor had supported in 2008 — was a one-term president because he’d rather have a “one-term president with some balls who actually got stuff done.” (The comment even earned Damon some flak from the president himself.) But, he still did his part to give Obama a second term, admitting that he still voted for him in November.

“I assume there will be some Supreme Court appointments in this next term; that alone was reason to vote for him,” Damon told Playboy magazine in its January 2013 issue. “I don’t think I said anything a lot of people weren’t thinking. It’s easier now more than ever in my life to feel the fix is in, the game is rigged and no matter how hard you work to change things, it just doesn’t matter.”

Damon also was asked for his thoughts on Clint Eastwood’s performance at the Republican National Convention (the two worked together on 2010’s “Hereafter”).

“I heard the backlash, but I never saw the whole thing because I just didn’t want to see my friend … you know. Look, his knowledge of filmmaking is so vast and deep that he can wing it beautifully on the set. What he did at the RNC was an unrehearsed bit he decided to do at the last minute. You can’t go onstage and do 12 minutes of stand-up completely unrehearsed. But I agree with what Bill Maher said — Clint killed it at the convention for 12 minutes, and the audience loved him. I wouldn’t do that unless I spent a month rehearsing.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Video: Senator Rand Paul Says We Should Not Send Congress Any More Money, ‘They’re Not To Be Trusted’

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Americans would do well to heed the advice of Senator Rand Paul. He says that Congress has managed our money so poorly that they don’t deserve to be trusted with any more.

Now you know why many in Washington are not Rand Paul fans, to say the least. But you also know why you should be. He’s on the side of the US taxpayer.

With the so-called ‘fiscal cliff’ just days away and the President demanding more revenue, it is unlikely the Senator will get many takers on his plan when it comes to votes in Congress.

See video below: