On Monday, Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy spoke with The Daily Caller’s Vince Coglianese about the connection Media Matters founder David Brock (pictured) might have to the Obama re-election effort, specifically in the form of a PAC going after new VP pick Paul Ryan.
American Bridge, Coglianese explained, an opposition research group, had “flopped financially,” with Brock lying to the New York Times about how much money the group had taken in. But now — thanks to the financial backing of George Soros — it’s back on its feet and going after Romney and Ryan. What’s more, he added, the group shares office space, workers and funding with Media Matters, with Brock at the helm of both.
"I draws what I like and I like what I drew!" sings Bert, the affable sidewalk artist in Disney's Mary Poppins. He doesn't know how easy he's got it. If Bert lived in one of a dozen American cities, his colorful chalk drawings of boats and circus animals could very well land him in jail.
Take the recent example of Susan Mortensen, 29-year-old mom in Richmond, Virginia. In March, Mortensen was arrested for allowing her four-year-old daughter to draw on rocks at a local park with sidewalk chalk. This month a judge sentenced her to 50 hours of community service helping to strip and repaint 200 boundary posts on a bridge. Mortensen told a local TV station that her daughter is now "very nervous around cops" and "very scared of chalk."
That's not all. One week ago in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, police cited two teenagers for decorating a street with chalk renditions of a whale and a sea turtle. The kids must now appear in court and pay a fine to be determined by a dis
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George Zimmerman's legal team announced on Monday night that it wouldn't argue its case under Florida's stand-your-ground law, instead pursuing a traditional self-defense argument, but that that doesn't mean his lawyers see their case as any weaker. To the contrary, the decision not to invoke Florida's special statute in Zimmerman's second-degree murder case for the killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin actually suggests Zimmerman's attorneys feel they have a more widely accepted self-defense argument. And they're still going to try to get the case thrown out on self-defense grounds.
Zimmerman's attorney, Mark O'Mara, told The Associated Press' Kyle Hightower that the facts didn't support a stand-your-ground argument, which is a Florida statute that gives people the right to use deadly force to defend themselves without backing down. Another 23 states have similar statutes. As a refresher, let's look at the language of that law, via the state's online statutes:
Genetic mutations have been found in three generations of butterflies from near Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, scientists said Tuesday, raising fears radiation could affect other species.
Around 12 percent of pale grass blue butterflies that were exposed to nuclear fallout as larvae immediately after the tsunami-sparked disaster had abnormalities, including smaller wings and damaged eyes, researchers said.
The insects were mated in a laboratory well outside the fallout zone and 18 percent of their offspring displayed similar problems, said Joji Otaki, associate professor at Ryukyu University in Okinawa, southwestern Japan.
That figure rose to 34 percent in the third generation of butterflies, he said, even though one parent from each coupling was from an unaffected population.
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), Mitt Romney's new running mate, has been hailed as the closest thing to a libertarian on the Republican ticket since Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas). "Ryan is going to be very attractive to the broad libertarian voters," the Cato Institute's David Boaz told Buzzfeed. But aside from his Ayn Rand-reading, entitlement-busting ways, just how libertarian is Ryan?
MIAMI (AP) -- Sandra Pico is poor, but not poor enough.
She makes about $15,000 a year, supporting her daughter and unemployed husband. She thought she'd be able to get health insurance after the Supreme Court upheld President Barack Obama's health care law.
Then she heard that her own governor won't agree to the federal plan to extend Medicaid coverage to people like her in two years. So she expects to remain uninsured, struggling to pay for her blood pressure medicine.
Paul Ryan was born into a well-to-do Janesville, Wisc. family, part of the so-called “Irish mafia” that’s run the city’s construction industry since the 19th century. When his lawyer father died young, sadly, the high-school aged Ryan received Social Security survivor benefits. But they didn’t go directly to supporting his family; by his own account, he banked them for college. He went to Miami University of Ohio, paying twice as much tuition as an Ohio resident would have; the in-state University of Wisconsin system (which I attended) apparently wasn’t good enough for Ryan. After his government-subsidized out-of-state education, the pride of Janesville left college and went to work for government, where he’s spent his entire career, first serving Republican legislators and then in his own Congressional seat, with occasional stints at his family-owned construction business when he needed a job (reportedly he also drove an Oscar Mayer Wiener Mobile for a while).
One of Rep. Paul Ryan’s many past proposals to remake the federal safety net included a sweeping plan to privatize Social Security and risk the program’s solvency in attempting to save it. He championed the idea as recently as 2010 but pushed it under the rug the following year. Mitt Romney, who recently selected Ryan to be his vice presidential nominee, is steering clear of the plan.
The proposal was in Ryan’s 2010 “Roadmap For America’s Future,” a broad blueprint to remake the federal budget which elevated the little-known congressman into the Republican Party’s visionary. It involved shifting Social Security funds to private retirement accounts as well as reducing benefits and gradually raising the age of eligibility.
Gawker's Louis Peitzman makes a claim I've seen a lot, especially from progressives, in the wake of Mitt Romney's selection of Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate: The campaign kind of blew it. Not on the substance, mind you, but on the rollout. "I'm not saying this was a complete fail on the Romney campaign's part, but to pretend that they announced Paul Ryan exactly as they'd said they would — via smartphone app, and then in a joint public appearance — is just silly," Peitzman writes. "Instead of admitting they botched their plan to obfuscate, the Romney campaign is pushing a Hardy Boys narrative..."
The VP app served the same purpose the Obama campaign's 2008 promise to text its supports its VP pick did: It was an excuse to collect your data. Although it was predictably scooped by the New York Times and CNN, Team Obama was able to collect 2.9 million phone numbers using this gimmick. Those numbers were used for fundraising and organizing efforts later in the campaign. (T
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MIAMI (AP) - Mitt Romney held a campaign event Monday evening at a Miami juice shop owned by a convicted cocaine trafficker.
Romney appeared at El Palacio de los Jugos, which is owned by Reinaldo Bermudez. Court records show that Bermudez pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to distribute cocaine in 1999 and served three years in federal prison.
Appearing with Romney was Sen. Marco Rubio. Both men handed out juices to an excited crowd after making brief remarks. Romney was filming a campaign ad at the juice shop, aides said.
n the past year, a series of mass protests and revolutions have swept the globe, exploding in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, Greece, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Russia and Mexico, among other countries. The Financial Times called 2011 the "Year Of Global Indignation," while the Guardian's John Harris called comparisons made by individuals observing the modern global awakening to Paris in 1968 "not completely misplaced."
Now, political scientists in Russia are making a prediction that shouldn't come as surprising to close observers of international protests. Igor Bunin, president of the Center for Political Technologies, predicts that Russia may soon experience the rise of a radical new breed of protester.
uliet Sandler dresses in the latest $650 dresses and $400 shoes from Parisian fashion house Lanvin. Juliet is 3.
Her mother, Dara Sandler, says she dresses her daughter in the latest fashions because Juliet is a reflection of her - even though her daughter can't spell the names of the designers, let alone pay for their clothes.
"I dress my daughter exactly the way I dress myself," says the 33-year-old Manhattan mother, who spent $10,000 for her daughter's summer wardrobe. She plans to spend a few thousand dollars more for fall.
Mitt Romney told reporters Monday after a third consecutive shooting made headlines that something must be done to curb the violence. But whatever that is, he said, it shouldn’t include gun-control measures.
Romney held a brief press conference in Florida Monday afternoon, as details of a mass shooting in College Park, Texas, were coming to light.
“This tragedy raises once again the question of what can be done to help prevent events like this from occurring,” Romney said Monday. “I guess I’m not referring to any particular legislation. I’m just saying this is something that needs to make thoughtful consideration.”
It only took two hours after the Paul Ryan vice presidential announcement for Republican congressional candidates to get their talking points on how to spin the Ryan budget and Medicare attacks.
“Do not say: ‘entitlement reform,’ ‘privatization,’ ‘every option is on the table,’” the National Republican Congressional Committee said in an email memo. “Do say: ‘strengthen,’ ‘secure,’ ‘save,’ ‘preserve, ‘protect.’”
The email read like a warning shot, alerting Republicans that they would soon face a barrage of Medicare-themed attacks and telling them they needed to be ready for the scrutiny that was to come. The internal email, obtained by POLITICO, was a clear and immediate sign that Republicans knew Ryan could create trouble down ballot for GOP candidates in tight congressional races.
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