Last week’s suicide bombing outside the U.S. embassy in Ankara, carried out by a Marxist Leninist group known as DHKP-C, drew condemnation from across the Turkish political spectrum.
BuzzFeed reports that Chuck Hagel is refusing to detail foreign funders and disclose other necessary financial information to the Senate Armed Services Committee.
John Kerry, the richest U.S. senator, railed against the "corrupting" power of money in politics in his farewell address today on the floor of the United States Senate:
As Adam White discusses in detail, there’s nothing moderate or incremental about the increase in federal regulations — and hence in centralized executive power — under President Obama. To the contrary (as White notes), according to figures published by the Obama White House (see table 2-1), the costs of regulations issued by this administration have dwarfed the costs of regulations issued by prior administrations.
Tomorrow, President Barack Obama will welcome the Miami Heat to the White House. Star player LeBron James, a donor to Obama's presidential campaign, is expected to attend.
Have you heard much about President Obama’s $787,000,000,000 economic “stimulus” (now estimated to cost $831,000,000,000) lately? In its last report, published in 2011, the president’s own Council of Economic Advisors released an estimate showing that, for every $317,000 in “stimulus” spending that had by then gone out the door, only one job had been created or saved. Even in Washington, that’s not considered good bang for the buck.
New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg talked about gun control this morning on MSNBC--and the failure of politicians to lead on the issues.
"OK, so I have a question for you Mr. Mayor about how to lead on this," said host Mika Brzezinski. "Joe Nocera, in his [New York Times] piece, he basically says when you leave office if you really care about guns, put all your money where your mouth is."
"Well, I've got 356 days left with this job," Bloomberg said, referring to the final year of his term as mayor.
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.
John Kerry, who will be nominated later today to be the next secretary of state, is the richest member of the U.S. Senate. His estimated net worth is, at minimum, $198.65 million, according to disclosure forms.
Kerry's disclosure forms also reveal that he has invested in companies accused of doing business with Iran.
The fiscal cliff is a diversion, designed by politicians to conceal their inability to come to grips with the fact that they continue to spend too much, and refuse to reform a tax structure that reduces the competitiveness of American companies in world markets. No matter what deal is cut, whether before or after the new year, it will at best nibble at the edges of the trillion-dollar annual deficits that are being piled up.
The State Department announced today that it had increased aid to help with humanitarian situation in Syria. Today's announcement stated that an additional $14 million of aid would be given, pushing the grand total of aid to Syria to $210 million.