Woodward said, "The reality now in my view that in the Obama administration, there are lots of unanswered questions about the IRS, particularly. If I were young, I would take Carl Bernstein and move to Cincinnati where that IRS office is and set up headquarters and go talk to everyone."
Prop 1: No. This proposition is better than the one previously passed, but it is so laden with pork and political payoffs to the enviro-extremists that we wind up paying $14.5 Billion (when you include the interest over 40 years) for $2.7 Billion in water storage funding. There’s no guarantee that they will finish Temperance Flats or Sites Reservoir, and there is language that concern some experts about the possibility of the future removal of Klamath River Dam. Wasting money on bike paths in San Diego and sand dune restoration in Pismo Beach has nothing to do with water storage or conveyance, and shouldn’t be stealing scarce dollars from critically needed water infrastructure.
Prop 2: Yes. Anything that restrains or slows down politicians from spending our money, I’m for! Say yes to the rainy day fund.
Prop 45: No! The last thing in the world we need is to put more power in the hands of the Insurance Commissioner. This is a blatant power grab that would give the insurance commissioner sole authority to implement ObamaCare instead of an independent commission.
Prop 46: No. No need to punish good doctors for the behavior of a handful of bad apples. This will increase the cost of healthcare and make trial lawyers even richer.
Prop 47: No. This bill seeks to address prison overcrowding, and while I favor it’s intent, and even some of it’s provisions, instead of sticking with low-level drug offenses, this bill would allow potential rapists (in possession of date-rape drug) and forgers be charged as misdemeanors.
The latest Wall Street Journal / NBC News poll says Republicans have soared to a mind-blowing 11 point lead, with voters saying they want a Republican-led Congress by a margin of 52-41. The generic lead for the GOP was only 5 points in the same poll last week. The Tea Party wave elections in 2010 rolled in with only a 7-point lead. It’s relatively rare for the Republicans to have a lead on this question at all, even in years when they do fairly well.... a big polling lead like this could make for wind in Republican sails as the finish line for those close races draws near. At this point, tea-leaf reading is down to political voodoo about the probability that a candidate X points ahead in the polls Y days out from the election will win. There is much talk of "momentum" - with a couple of weeks to go, a candidate 1 or 2 points down who has been steadily gaining ground would seem to have a good chance of pulling into the lead if his party is sporting an 11-point generic polling advantage.
By historical measures, an 11-point lead on the question of which party should control Congress is large. Republicans held a seven-point lead on the question at this point in the 2010 election in a Journal/NBC survey, which used a different method to determine which voters were most likely to cast ballots. Republicans went on that year to make big gains in the Senate and to retake the majority in the House.
In the new survey, Republicans also led on the “congressional control” question among registered voters, a broader group than likely voters, with 46% favoring GOP leadership and 42% favoring Democratic control. The GOP lead had been two percentage points a week earlier.
...While Democrats' pre-midterm frustration is being fueled largely by his recent missteps and bad poll numbers, their disenchantment with the president was seeded back in 2011, when Obama kept waiting to strike a bigger debt limit deal with House Speaker John Boehner, one that never happened. Stumbling responses to the Syrian civil war, the emergence of the Islamic State, and a scandal that toppled the head of the Secret Service all contributed to a Republican mantra that the Democrats can't govern.
(I’m just going to post an excerpt of this. There is nothing I could add that would make it any more satisfying to read. So I will not put my own thoughts between Thomas Frank at Salon.com playing the sad trombone and the readers.)
If Bristol Palin was Chelsea Clinton or Malia Obama, we’d be having a different national conversation right now....
Last month, news broke about a brawl involving the Palin family in Alaska. Several of the Palins were involved in a drunken fight that erupted at a house they stopped at after after Todd Palin’s birthday party.
This week, TMZ obtained and released audio from police of a distraught and upset Bristol Palin, talking about the incidents that preceded the brawl. She says, “Some guy gets up, pushes me down on the grass, drags me across the grass, [and says] ‘You slut, you f—ing c—, you f—ing this.”
On CNN, female anchor Carol Costello breezily introduced the segment this way: “Okay. I’m just going to come right out and say it. This is quite possibly the best minute and a half of audio we’ve ever come across – well, come across in a long time anyway.” Then, Costello advised the audience before playing the audio of Bristol, “Sit back and enjoy.”
Because it’s so funny when a young woman is pushed down and dragged and called sexually derogatory terms to boot....
...After the tape, Costello said “the long bleep was my favorite part....”
Costello’s reaction immediately received backlash from conservatives on social media and websites like The Daily Caller and Right Scoop.
On Thursday’s “Morning Joe,” hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski said they were guilty of jumping to conclusions over the incident, initially approaching news of the brawl with a “humorous tone.”
“The more we learned about what happened its clearer that it’s not that funny,” Brzezinski said. “We played into stereotypes from maybe our own outlook, quite frankly. So it’s definitely more of a story than that.”
Scarborough said everyone is guilty for presuming the Palins are to be used as a “punch line.”
“There is the very real possibility that something terrible happened to them,” Scarborough said. “… I think we all shot first and asked questions later and a lot of people are guilty of that.”
In a blog post on Wednesday, Bristol Palin said the "hypocrisy of the media is laid bare" by their treatment of that night.
Soon, after school doors opened this semester, doctors and hospitals across the country began tackling massive flare-ups of infectious diseases and severe respiratory illness among children. Experts have called these outbreak unprecedented.
“It’s worse in terms of scope of critically ill children who require intensive care,” noted Children’s Mercy Hospital’s division director for Infectious Diseases, Dr. Mary Anne Jackson. I've practiced for 30 years in pediatrics, and I’ve never seen anything quite like this.”
While analyzing hundreds of documents, articles, and releases for this article, this examiner discovered on Tuesday that the Center for Disease Control (CDC) disclosed in a May 29, 2014 press release that “nearly all cases of measles this year have been associated with international travel by unvaccinated people.” As thousands of illegal immigrants from South and Central America crossed over the U.S.-Mexico border, the CDC recognized that this was “the largest number of measles cases in the United States in the first five months of a year since 1994.”
By the end of May, CDC also declared that 97 percent of the measles cases “were associated with importations from at least 18 countries. More than one in seven cases has led to hospitalization.”
From Jan. 1 to Oct. 11, 2014, the CDC announced that 599 confirmed cases of measles were reported with 18 outbreaks in 22 states. In 2013 and 2012 there were only 187 and 55 cases reported.
Measles, respiratory illness, tuberculosis and other communicable diseases continue as a prime concern for the millions of Americans conflicted about the perpetual arrivals of illegal immigrants pouring into the country. While some diseases have emerged from the Philippines, Africa, Asia and Europe, the unprecedented amount of undocumented aliens is a major issue.
Perhaps the White House doesn't want Americans to know that out of over 70,000 illegal immigrant children who crossed into the U.S. almost 48,000 came from Honduras, Guatemala and Salvador. In these countries measles and the EV-D68 virus are quite common. If we include these children's family and friends, not listed an "unaccompanied," over a quarter of a million people from Central and South America have entered the U.S. illegally this year.
From 1970 to 2005 there were only 26 cases of EV-D68 ever reported in America. The number in 2014 is approaching 1,000 cases, with about 10 percent of those cases known to be causing a polio-type virus that has left children crippled.
Americans for Prosperity California: Environmental policies to send stored surface water to the ocean for the Delta smelt fish (a non-native species) is forcing farmers and towns in the Central Valley to rely on ground water and wells. Now the aquifers are drying up and the ground is sinking in ways that will never allow the aquifers to replenish at the same level. By sending stored water to the ocean, instead of to the Central Valley, environmentalists are doing long-term damage to the environment's aquifer system.
