AP – Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer came to greet President Barack Obama upon his arrival outside Phoenix Wednesday. What she got was a critique. Of her book.
Read the original post:
Arizona Gov. Brewer gets book critique from Obama
(AP)
**Written by Doug Powers President Obama went to Arizona Wednesday afternoon, and according to Governor Jan Brewer who met him on the airport tarmac, the Book-Critic-in-Chief took her to task for something she recently published : He stepped off Air Force One at 3:28 pm and was greeted by Gov. Jan Brewer. She handed him a handwritten letter in an envelope and they spoke intensely for a few minutes. At one point, she pointed her finger at him. Afterwards, (I) spoke with the governor. “He was a little disturbed about my book, Scorpions for Breakfast,” Brewer said. “I said to him that I have all the respect in the world for the office of the president. The book is what the book is. I asked him if he read the book. He said he read the excerpt. So.” It was clear from the moment they greeted one another that this would not be a run-of-the-mill encounter between the president and a local official. At one point, she was pointing her finger at him and at another, they were talking at the same time, seemingly over each other. He appeared to walk away from her while they were still talking, and she confirmed that by saying she didn’t finish her sentence. When Brewer spoke with your pooler, the AP and an NBC producer for several minutes afterwards, she appeared a bit flustered and taken aback by the conversation. Asked if she was, that’s when Brewer said, “I’ll regroup.” Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal had a similar run-in during the BP Gulf oil spill. Obama is expected to even both scores in his next book, “Sweat the Petty Stuff.” Here’s video from a local news story: Feel free to provide your own caption: Over at Hot Air, Allapundit has audio of a radio interview with Jan Brewer describing what happened: “He was somewhat thin skinned and a little tense, to say the least.” Jay Carney will probably be given the opportunity to distort what happened at tomorrow’s White House presser, so we’ll have to wait to get the Obama administration’s version of events. Meanwhile, the fate of Arizona’s immigration law simmers in the Supreme Court. (h/t Drudge ) **Written by Doug Powers Twitter @ThePowersThatBe
**Written by Doug Powers Yes, there’s no better way to calm the racial seas than by getting Al Sharpton involved in the conversation. From The Hill : Newt Gingrich was confronted by a black man outside Tommy’s Country Ham House, who questioned him on his comments on having poor children work as janitors. The man said what Gingrich was asking for amounted to a “new form of slavery” and would force young African Americans to drop out of school. Gingrich engaged the man, speaking levelly and holding eye contact with him. He said that he suggested the jobs so that “They can get paid — they’d go to school, stay in school instead of dropping out.” The man persisted. “You say you want Afro-Americans to come into your political party but you’ve ratcheted [your rhetoric] up since you got down here,” he said. The man then said he’d spoken with Rev. Al Sharpton and asked Gingrich to meet with him, Roland Martin of CNN, Ben Jealous of the NAACP and Juan Williams. “Sure — glad to do it,” Gingrich said. “I’d be willing to do it. I know Al.” The protester kept pushing for the meeting as Gingrich talked, demanding that he meet with the black community. Gingrich nodded his head after the man interrupted him, and agreed. “Sure — and find a way to have everybody have a chance for a better future,” he said. Going to Al Sharpton for advice on the subject of improving the tone of racial rhetoric is like getting help overcoming an addiction to prop comedy by talking to Carrot Top. Newt and Al aren’t strangers , but if Gingrich does follow through on a meeting, for his own good I hope he waits until the current campaign is over… just in case the mini-summit culminates in another ill-advised public service announcement. Resist you much, Newt. **Written by Doug Powers Twitter @ThePowersThatBe
Link:
Gingrich Tells South Carolina Man He’d Talk to Al Sharpton
Time.com – In an exclusive interview with TIME’s Fareed Zakaria, Obama opens up on Iran, Afghanistan, China and the challenges the U.S. faces in navigating a rapidly changing world. A full transcript of their conversation follows
Read more here:
Inside Obama’s World: The President talks to TIME About the Changing Nature of American Power
(Time.com)
“Tax policy should be serious business carried out by serious politicians using real facts and figures. This is why we have the Library of Congress and the Congressional Budget Office, among other expert institutions,” writes Paul Roderick Gregory of Forbes . Indeed, given the current state of the U.S. economy, tax policy has become an increasingly important subject. And yet, some top-ranking politicians have been making “patently inaccurate, outrageous and bizarre” claims on tax-policy issues and they are doing it without repercussion. For instance, on Dec.12 , while proposing his 1.9 percent surtax on millionaires, Sen. Harry Reid said the following (via Forbes ): Millionaire job creators are like unicorns. They’re impossible to find, and they don’t exist…Only a tiny fraction of people making more than a million dollars, probably less than 1 percent, are small business owners. And only a tiny fraction of that tiny fraction are traditional job creators…Most of these businesses are hedge fund managers or wealthy lawyers. They don’t do much hiring and they don’t need tax breaks. His comments were based on a Dec. 9 National Public Radio report that claimed to have gone searching for the oft-touted “millionaire jobs creator.” They came back with this earthshattering discovery: “NPR requested help from numerous Republican congressional offices, including House and Senate leadership. They were unable to produce a single millionaire job creator for us to interview.” However, the NPR report and Sen. Reid’s subsequent claims did not sit well with Paul Roderick Gregory of Forbes . He decided to dig deeper than NPR and thoroughly scrutinized Sen. Reid “facts.” “Unlike Harry Reid’s office, I went to the IRS’s Table 1.4 ‘Sources of income, adjustments, and tax size of adjusted gross income, 2009’ to check things out,” writes Gregory . This is what he found: There are 236,883 tax filers with incomes of a million dollars or more. By Harry Reid’s count, only one percent, or 2,361 of them, are business owners, and a tiny fraction of them create jobs. I do not know what Harry means when he says “a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction.” If we let 5 percent represent Harry’s “tiny fraction,” we are left with 118 businesses owners who earn a million or more and create jobs. Yes, they are only slightly less rare than unicorns, if Harry is to be believed. This leaves 236,765 million-dollar-plus tax payers, most of whom are “hedge fund managers and wealthy lawyers” who “don’t create jobs and don’t need tax breaks…” Millionaire tax filers earn a total taxable income of $623 billion, on which they pay the highest average rate (30 percent) of any tax bracket…A 1.9 percent tax surcharge on million-dollar-earners would yield $11 billion, assuming those shifty millionaires take no evasive action to avoid the tax. Millionaire tax filers earn $221 billion – almost a quarter of a trillion — from business and professions, partnerships, and S-corporations. This is puzzling: If Harry Reid’s figure is correct (2,361 millionaire businesses), then the average millionaire-owned business earns almost a hundred million dollars, and all, except 118 of them, do this without hiring anyone. These super heroes do their own typing, selling, drafting. public relations, building, and manufacturing. They do not need employees. Remarkable! So what does this mean? “Millionaire tax filers earn almost a quarter trillion dollars from their businesses. They must hire hundreds of thousands of employees to do so,” Gregory concludes. If Gregory’s facts are correct, and it is simply the case that Sen. Reid– a top-ranking U.S. politician– is simply lobbing undisciplined and poorly researched “facts” while discussing issues critical to the fiscal health of the country, this does not bode well for the future of the U.S. economy. Unless those in charge start taking this conversation seriously, America will most likely continue its downward spiral into financial ruin. Furthermore, such “class warfare will be the anchor of the Democrat election playbook,” Gregory predicts. Indeed, it may not be unwarranted to expect more of this type of rhetoric as we approach the 2012 election. Read the full report here. Update : Since the original publication of this article, an update has been made. It was mistakenly reported that Sen. Reid’s comments were made on Dec. 6, before the NPR report. This is not true. His comments were based on a report that NPR produced on Dec. 9 and the Senator made his comments on Dec. 12. (h/t Ken Hansen).
Continued here:
Fact Check: Harry Reid‘s Claim That ’Millionaire job Creators…Don’t Exist’ Thoroughly Debunked
December 1 statement by Sen. Robert J. Portman (R.-Ohio) on the confirmation of Richard Cordray to be the first director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: “As we stated in our letter to President Obama, and as I reiterated in my conversation with Mr. Cordray, there are serious problems in the current structure of the Consumer. . .
Former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson has been a marijuana legalization advocate since 1999 and medicinal pot smoker from 2005-2008 , outspoken critic of the “social conservative fringe” of the Republican Party, has called for a 43% reduction in defense spending , and has been outside of the mainstream political dialogue and elected office since 2002. That said, Gov. Johnson feels “The Republican Party has left me by the wayside.” Gov. Johnson is currently running for president in the GOP primary but told the Santa Fe New Mexican Wednesday that he feels “abandoned by the Republican Party,” and is considering going elsewhere: “In an interview Wednesday, he said he’s seriously considering running for the Libertarian Party nomination for president. ‘I feel abandoned by the Republican Party,’ Johnson said in a phone interview. ‘The Republican Party has left me by the wayside.’ He’s been left out of all but two of the seemingly endless Republican presidential debates. His fundraising is low and his poll numbers are below radar level. ‘If I’d have been included in 16 of the last debates we wouldn’t even be having this conversation,’ Johnson said. Johnson said there have been ‘overtures made’ by the Libertarian Party. While there’s no guarantee he’d win the nomination, Johnson believes he’d have a fair chance.” Gov. Johnson is an avid triathlete that led New Mexico during two successful terms from 1995-2003, leaving the state with a budget surplus after creating 20,000 new jobs and cutting taxes 14 times without ever raising them. As a candidate, Gov. Johnson calls for a complete elimination of the corporate income tax and an internet free of regulation and taxation .While fellow libertarian-leaning candidate Texas Rep. Ron Paul has seen increasing support and been very much a part of the national dialogue, the successful private and public sector executive Johnson has been largely ignored.
Gary Johnson in GQ Magazine November 2011
Here is the original post:
Failing to Gain Traction Among GOP Electorate, Gary Johnson Considers Run as Libertarian
Promoting his new book Tuesday on “The View,” Bill Maher and Elisabeth Hasselbeck almost literally butted heads. They probably would have had the segment lasted any longer than it did. It began with Hasselbeck confronting Maher on a joke he told about her and CNN’s Lara Logan earlier this year on his HBO show “Real Time.” After some uncomfortable back-and-forth, the conversation moved on to the Republican presidential contenders for yet more awkward TV. “I actually feel smarter sitting next to you,” Hasselbeck said. “Really? I feel like I’m in high school sitting next to you,” Maher responded. A conversation fit for in-laws. And almost in time for Thanksgiving dinner. Watch:
Go here to read the rest:
Hasselbeck, Maher have tense sitdown on ‘The View’
It was the fifth debate of the fall season Tuesday night and is it getting hot in here? Here’s your recap of the itty bitties: 1. Who won? Michele Bachmann ‘s double-breasted coat: Three words: Fab. U. Lous. 2. The conclusion of this debate required a “final thought” to feel complete. Because it was a lot like the “Jerry Springer” show. 3. Mitt Romney was tag-teamed like a Mexican luchador on Cinco de Mayo by Rick Santorum and the smooth-talking Rick Perry . Watch the uncomfortable unfold right before your eyes via THE BLAZE front page: 4. Speaking of Perry, does he actually know what’s happening? Every time the conversation moves beyond the words “border,” “jobs,” and “Texas,” he gets this look: 4. Anderson Cooper deserves credit for not making this debate a two-person show, as past moderators have done, turning it into a Romney-Perry show. The guys lagging behind — Bachmann, Santorum and Ron Paul — got a fair shake. Regardless, Cooper’s daytime show still sucks . 5. Like Paul, Newt Gingrich plays one tune on his flute. He frames the debate rather than debating the debate. There’s ne’er a criticism for any Republican sharing the stage ( Ronald Reagan ‘s 11th commandment ). Cool. But, as mentioned in a previous “GOP debate on the surface,” Gingrich appears to simply be running for #2. 6. Herman Cain did what he does: defend his 9-9-9 plan on his terms. Not yours. Not mine. It’s working for him now, but it likely won’t play for long. He’ll have to talk about the tax increase it will result in for some people. 7. Jon Huntsman wasn’t there and it required a Google search to even realize it.
Read more from the original source:
Round 5: GOP debate on the surface
