Nuclear Cartoon

Poll shows Clinton trailing Republicans in every swing state tested

A stunning new poll shows trouble brewing for Hillary Clinton in key swing states, with the Democratic presidential front-runner trailing potential Republican rivals in every match-up tested. 
The Quinnipiac University poll put Clinton head-to-head against Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker in three states: Colorado, Iowa and Virginia.
In every hypothetical contest, the former secretary of state was either clearly trailing or, as Quinnipiac phrased it, "on the wrong side of a too-close-to-call" race. A majority of voters in all three states also said they found Clinton not honest and trustworthy.
The gap between Clinton and GOP candidates was most pronounced in Colorado and Iowa. She trailed Rubio by 8 points in Colorado, 38-46 percent; and Walker by 9 points, 38-47 percent. She trailed Bush by 6 points in Iowa, 36-42 percent; and Rubio by 8 points, 36-44 percent.
The survey raises troubling questions for the campaign, which has struggled to shed the image of a candidate who is closed off to the media and the public, despite her decisive lead over the Democratic field. The latest results reflect a drop from a similar poll in April.
"She has lost ground in the horserace," Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, said in a statement.
In another troubling sign for the Democratic candidate, voters gave her poor marks on being trustworthy. In Colorado, for instance, voters said 62-34 percent she is not honest and trustworthy.
Clinton wasn't the only one taking a hit in the latest poll. Though Donald Trump has narrowly led the GOP presidential field in some recent polls, the Quinnipiac survey showed voters, by roughly 2-1, had a negative view of the billionaire real estate magnate. Brown said that means his "growth potential" is lower than that of his GOP rivals.
The polls were taken July 9-20, of 1,231 Colorado voters; 1,236 Iowa voters; and 1,209 Virginia voters. Each had a margin of error of 2.8 percentage points.

Seattle sees fallout from $15 minimum wage, as other cities follow suit

Seattle’s $15 minimum wage law is supposed to lift workers out of poverty and move them off public assistance. But there may be a hitch in the plan.
Evidence is surfacing that some workers are asking their bosses for fewer hours as their wages rise – in a bid to keep overall income down so they don’t lose public subsidies for things like food, child care and rent.
Full Life Care, a home nursing nonprofit, told KIRO-TV in Seattle that several workers want to work less.
“If they cut down their hours to stay on those subsidies because the $15 per hour minimum wage didn’t actually help get them out of poverty, all you’ve done is put a burden on the business and given false hope to a lot of people,” said Jason Rantz, host of the Jason Rantz show on 97.3 KIRO-FM.
The twist is just one apparent side effect of the controversial -- yet trendsetting -- minimum wage law in Seattle, which is being copied in several other cities despite concerns over prices rising and businesses struggling to keep up.
The notion that employees are intentionally working less to preserve their welfare has been a hot topic on talk radio. While the claims are difficult to track, state stats indeed suggest few are moving off welfare programs under the new wage.
Despite a booming economy throughout western Washington, the state’s welfare caseload has dropped very little since the higher wage phase began in Seattle in April. In March 130,851 people were enrolled in the Basic Food program. In April, the caseload dropped to 130,376.
At the same time, prices appear to be going up on just about everything.
Some restaurants have tacked on a 15 percent surcharge to cover the higher wages. And some managers are no longer encouraging customers to tip, leading to a redistribution of income. Workers in the back of the kitchen, such as dishwashers and cooks, are getting paid more, but servers who rely on tips are seeing a pay cut.
Some long-time Seattle restaurants have closed altogether, though none of the owners publicly blamed the minimum wage law.
“It’s what happens when the government imposes a restriction on the labor market that normally wouldn’t be there, and marginal businesses get hit the hardest, and usually those are small, neighborhood businesses,” said Paul Guppy, of the Washington Policy Center.
Seattle was followed by San Francisco and Los Angeles in passing a $15 minimum wage law. The wage is being phased in over several years to give businesses time to adjust. The current minimum wage in Seattle is $11. In San Francisco, it’s $12.25.
And it is spreading. Beyond the city of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors this week also approved a $15 minimum wage.
New York state could be next, with the state Wage Board on Wednesday backing a $15 wage for fast-food workers, something Gov. Andrew Cuomo has supported.
Already, though, there are unintended consequences in other cities.
Comix Experience, a small book store in downtown San Francisco, has begun selling graphic novel club subscriptions in order to meet payroll. The owner, Brian Hibbs, admits members are not getting all that much for their $25 per month dues, but their “donation” is keeping him in business.
“I was looking at potentially having to close the store down and then how would I make my living?” Hibbs asked.
To date, he’s sold 228 subscriptions. He says he needs 334 to reach his goal of the $80,000 income required to cover higher labor costs. He doesn’t blame San Francisco voters for approving the $15 minimum wage, but he doesn’t think they had all the information needed to make a good decision.

Immigrant parents suing Texas for withholding birth certificates to US-born kids

Only in America can stupid stuff like this happen.

Immigrant parents living in Texas without proper identification papers are suing the state for withholding birth certificates from their American-born children, in a tricky case that pits Texas' strict ID laws against the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.
The suit was filed in May in U.S. District Court in Austin by a group of Mexican citizen parents living in Texas. The suit claims the state refused birth certificates for 23 children because the parents could not provide the proper photo identification under state law.
But the parents argue Texas is, in doing so, violating the 14th Amendment, which guarantees citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil regardless of their parents’ status.
The lawsuit does not outright say the parents are illegal immigrants, but strongly suggests it -- at one point alleging the state is denying their kids birth certificates due to their "immigration status."
“We’re trying to resolve this issue once and for all,” Efren Olivares, the plaintiffs' lawyer who also works with the Texas Civil Rights Project, told FoxNews.com. “Our two main objectives: obtain birth certificates for the 23 children and to obtain a clear statement from the state agency as to what people in this situation will have to produce in the future to get their birth certificate.”
The concept of birthright citizenship is controversial in its own right, with illegal immigration foes concerned that undocumented parents are having children inside the U.S. to help the entire family stay in the country.
But the right is nevertheless enshrined in the Constitution. Yet some illegal immigrant parents in Texas have had trouble getting a birth certificate for their kids because they themselves lack the right papers.
In 2013, local jurisdictions stopped accepting consulate cards, called “matriculas,” under state pressure. Immigrants had been able to get matriculas from their home country’s consulate in the state, but since have had to show their foreign driver’s license or border ID card as primary verification. Passports without U.S. visas don’t count.
Advocacy groups point out that many illegal immigrants don’t have these documents and going back home to get them would probably mean they couldn't return.
The state, however, says that blocking matriculas is just a matter of enforcing its own rule.
“Texas has never accepted the consular ID’s,” said Chris Van Deussen, press officer for the Texas Department of State Health Services. “Birth and death records are filed at the local registrar … so while we’ve never accepted them at the state level, I cannot say that every registrar rejected them.”
Van Deussen emphasized that matriculas weren’t secure forms of identification. He said “the issuer doesn’t verify data or documents that go into them.”
The purpose of enforcing the ID rules is in part to ensure parents are who they say they are. Van Deussen said while the agency is committed to getting people the documents, they also have a duty to ensure people provide valid information to prevent fraud and ID theft.
“This is not a policy that’s based on anybody’s immigrant status, it is based on the ID a person can present.”
Identification restrictions nevertheless have big implications for immigrants.
The suit claims that potentially thousands of Mexican and Central American parents have been denied birth certificates for their children. Families need certificates to register their children in school or enroll in appropriate health insurance and government programs.
Olivares said that children can be denied benefits over certificates, and that even churches sometimes don’t baptize children without their form. Some parents have been unable to get the certificates for several years, according to an NPR report.
Texas’ ID crackdown coincides with a boom in Central American children being born in the state. Last year alone, more than 55,000 families came to the U.S. from Central America. Three-fourths of them went to Texas, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Jennifer Harbury, another lawyer for the plaintiffs, said Texas’ certificate denials are politically motivated. She told the Los Angeles Times that they're part of the pushback to the Obama administration’s 2012 deportation protections and 2014 proposals to protect immigrant parents with American-born children.
Texas’ attorney general is expected to respond to the lawsuit in the coming weeks.

Islamic State bigger threat than Al Qaeda, FBI chief says

Wow, they're just now figgering this out?

The Islamic State terror group’s effort to inspire troubled Americans to extremism is a greater threat to the U.S. than an external attack from Al Qaeda, the FBI director said Wednesday.
FBI Director James Comey told an audience at the Aspen Security Forum that the group, commonly known as ISIS, has influenced a significant number of Americans through a year-long campaign on social media urging Muslims who can’t travel to the Middle East to “kill where you are.”
Twitter handles affiliated with the group have more than 21,000 English-language followers worldwide, Comey said, adding that thousands of those could be U.S. residents.
The FBI has arrested a significant number of people over the last handful of weeks who had been radicalized, Comey said. He also repeated his previous disclosure, without elaborating, that several people were arrested who were planning attacks related to the July Fourth holiday.
Comey said it was too soon to say how Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez, the Chattanooga gunman who killed five U.S. troops last week, became radicalized.
Abdulazeez's relatives have said he had a history of drug use and depression. Comey noted that "the people the Islamic State is trying to reach are people that Al Qaeda would never use as an operative, because they are often unstable, troubled drug users."
Asked if the threat from the Islamic State group had eclipsed that of Al Qaeda, the rival organization that attacked the U.S. on September 11, 2001, Comey said, "Yes."
The U.S. has tracked dozens of Americans, ranging in age from 18 to 62, who have traveled to Syria or Iraq to fight with ISIS, he said.
"I worry very much about what I can't see," Comey added, because he said ISIS recruiters use encrypted communication software to avoid U.S. eavesdropping.
Comey’s remarks Wednesday signal a deepening concern among U.S. officials about the impact of ISIS efforts to inspire terrorist violence. As recently as September, senior U.S. intelligence officials were downplaying the group’s capacity to attack the U.S. Matt Olsen, then the head of the National Counter Terrorism Center, told Congress last year that the U.S. had "no credible information that ISIL is planning to attack the United States."
Intelligence officials last year were saying they worry about a mass casualty attack against a U.S. airliner by Al Qaeda’s Yemen affiliate or by the Khorasan Group, a cadre of Al Qaeda operatives in Syria.
But Comey said Wednesday the threat from the Khorasan Group has been "significantly diminished" by U.S. military strikes.
The Pentagon on Tuesday announced that it had killed the Khorasan Group's leader, Muhsin al-Fadhli, in a July 8 airstrike in Syria.

C. Cartoon

Obama calls for release of Americans held in Iran, after nuke deal omitted them

President Obama called Tuesday for the release of Americans held in Iran, individually naming them during a speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention -- a week after his diplomatic team helped strike a nuclear accord with Iran that did not secure the prisoners' freedom. 
The deal's failure to address the prisoners' status has fueled criticism of the Obama administration, though State Department officials have said they raised their imprisonment repeatedly. The president also scolded a reporter last week at a White House press conference for suggesting he was "content" to leave the prisoners out of the deal.
Obama vowed Tuesday to continue to press their case.
“We are not going to relent until we bring home Americans who are unjustly detained in Iran,” Obama said at the VFW convention in Pittsburgh.
Obama mentioned Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian, Pastor Saeed Abedini and former U.S. Marine Amir Hekmati by name, saying all of them "should be released." He also said Iran should help the U.S. find retired FBI agent Robert Levinson, who has been missing since 2007.
In his wide-ranging address, the president also took a jab at lawmakers criticizing the Iran nuclear deal, saying negative comments come from “the same people who rushed into war with Iraq.”
Obama accused them of “chest beating” and said they were simply popping off soundbites that could derail the still-delicate deal.
Obama’s comments came one day after the U.N. Security Council unanimously endorsed the agreement. Since then, the White House has mounted a massive outreach campaign to try to win over skeptics and avoid a veto showdown with Congress, which could play out this fall.
The president also told the crowd of veterans he wasn’t satisfied by the level of medical care they were receiving and called for fast-tracking funding for the Veterans Affairs department.
Obama said he has sent an “urgent request” to Congress that would give the VA more flexibility so it can transfer funds where needed.
“I’m calling on Congress to approve this request quickly,” Obama said, adding, “our vets need it and our hospitals need it.”
House Speaker John Boehner's office, in response, urged Obama to join House Republicans in supporting a new bill to give the VA secretary the authority to fire anyone for misconduct. A spokesman said the public doesn't need more "hollow platitudes."
Obama also addressed growing concerns in the military over Thursday’s massacre in Chattanooga, Tenn., that claimed the lives of five service members at two military facilities.
“We don’t know all the details of the attack in Chattanooga but we do know ISIL (Islamic State) has encouraged attacks on servicemembers,” Obama said, adding that it was difficult to detect ‘lone wolves’ but that the government was working hard to do just that.
Earlier Tuesday, Gen. Mark Milley, tapped to be the next Army chief of staff, said during his nomination hearing that he would support a push to arm soldiers manning recruiting stations if certain legal hurdles were cleared.
Obama’s multi-topic speech included comments on an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease, U.S.-Cuba relations and the rise of the Islamic State.
He also announced that the Defense Department is close to finalizing predatory lending legislation that would close loopholes in the law that have “trapped some members of our military in an endless cycle of debt, adding financial strains to families that already bear the burden of defending our country.”
Obama made the announcement on the fifth anniversary of the Dodd-Frank reform bill and said protecting veterans against predatory lenders “is the right thing to do” and that he would “not accept any attempts to roll back this law.”

Appeals court overturns some Blagojevich corruption convictions

A federal appeals court Tuesday overturned some of the corruption convictions that sent former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich to prisoner for 14 years for trying to sell President Obama’s vacated Senate seat.
The unanimous ruling from the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago means Blagojevich, 58, could serve less than his original sentence, of which he has currently served just over three years in a Colorado prison.
The three-judge panel dismissed five of the 18 counts and ordered that the former governor be resentenced, although it suggested the original sentence wasn’t necessarily extreme.
The panel ruled that Blagojevich’s attempt to obtain a seat in Obama’s cabinet did not cross the line between legal and illegal political wheeling and dealing. However, his attempts to trade the Senate seat for campaign cash did cross the line.
Blagojevich wanted a Cabinet job in exchange for appointing Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett to the vacant Senate seat. After Blagojevich's arrest, the seat went to Roland Burris, who served less than two years before a successor was chosen in a special election.
In its ruling, the appeals courts pointed to how President Dwight Eisenhower named Earl Warren to the U.S. Supreme Court allegedly after Warren offered Eisenhower key political support during the 1952 campaign.
"If the (Blagojevich) prosecutor is right, and a swap of political favors involving a job for one of the politicians is a felony, then if the standard account is true both the President of the United States (Eisenhower) and the Chief Justice of the United States should have gone to prison," the ruling said.
Still, the ruling wasn't a resounding win for Blagojevich. The appellate judges upheld allegations that he sought to sell the Senate seat. He had argued that he didn't break the law because he never stated explicitly that he was willing to trade an appointment to the seat for campaign cash.
"Few politicians say, on or off the record, 'I will exchange official act X for payment Y,'" the opinion said. "Similarly persons who conspire to rob banks or distribute drugs do not propose or sign contracts in the statutory language. 'Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, you know what I mean' can amount to extortion ... just as it can furnish the gist of a Monty Python sketch."
Prosecutors could appeal the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court or could choose to retry Blagojevich on the dropped counts, though prosecutors often decline to retry a case if most of the counts are upheld. A spokesman for U.S. Attorney Zachary Fardon declined to discuss the ruling, including prosecutors' next moves.
Despite the ruling overturning a number of the convictions, Blagojevich’s legal team expressed disappointment. Len Goodman, the lead lawyer on the appeal team, said the ruling “doesn’t address the most serious errors in the trial,” The Wall Street Journal reported.
Blagojevich’s wife Patti said she was also disappointed with the ruling, and that her husband had never intended to break the law. She did, however, express hope that her husband would be given a more lenient sentence.
“I think most people think the sentence is harsh for someone who never put a penny in his pocket,” she said, adding that her husband was “optimistic that justice will prevail eventually.”
The two-term governor proclaimed his innocence for years. Taking the stand at his decisive retrial in 2011, a sometimes-tearful Blagojevich said he was a flawed man but no criminal.
Jurors eventually convicted him of 18 counts; 11 dealt with charges that he tried to swap an appointment to the seat for campaign cash or a job, once musing about becoming ambassador to India.
Blagojevich was also convicted on other play-to-pay schemes. They include the attempted shakedown of the Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago for a contribution to Blagojevich's campaign.
After his arrest on Dec. 9, 2008, Blagojevich became the butt of jokes on late-night TV, including for his well-coiffed hair and his foul-mouthed rants on FBI wiretaps. The most notorious excerpt was one where he crows about the Senate seat, "I've got this thing and it's f------ golden. And I'm just not giving it up for f------ nothing."