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Monday, December 31, 2012
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Obama to Hold "Fiscal Cliff" Talks with Top Congressional Leaders
Check out this website I found at voanews.com
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Storm brings Christmas Day snow for many, tornado risk for some - U.S. News
Winter storm warnings are stretching from Oklahoma to Pennsylvania, while New England and much of the Northeast can expect rain and gusting winds on Wednesday and Thursday. The Weather Channel's Mike Seidel reports.
By NBC News staff and wire reportsUpdated at 9:15 a.m. ET: A strong winter storm was expected to bring a white Christmas morning to millions of Americans Tuesday - but also high winds and even the risk of tornadoes for some, weather.com reported.
The Midwest and Gulf states were set to receive the bulk of the snow as the front blanketed the Rockies and the Plains from Colorado to Texas. Snow covered the roads in Denver on Christmas morning, weather.com reported.
The storm is set to turn to the north and travel up to the mid-Atlantic East Coast on Wednesday and Thursday, causing potential holiday travel misery for many.
According to the flightstats.com website, 80 flights had been canceled and 505 had been delayed across the U.S. as of 9:15 a.m. ET on Tuesday. It was not known how many of these problems were due to the weather.
The storm is also likely to affect car travelers. More than 93.3 million people are expected to take to the road during the holiday season, the AAA said.
Travel delays could persist into Thursday morning along the East Coast due to “low clouds, wind, and potential changeover to light snow,” weather.com reported.
Over the weekend the storm dumped 6 feet of snow in some areas of the Sierra, weather.com reported.
‘You definitely have to drive slow’
North Texas residents awoke to thunderstorms and hail on Christmas morning, NBCDFW.com reported. As the storm moves east, parts of Northern Texas are likely to see up to four inches of snow, with an inch expected in Dallas and Fort Worth in the afternoon, the site reported. Road crews in Texas are preparing for the rare Christmas storm with the Texas Department of Transportation closely monitoring the roads, a spokesman told the website."You definitely have to worry about everyone while you're driving, especially out here," Dallas resident Jerdal Whitaker told NBCDFW. "We're not used to the weather that comes, especially when it's ugly, so you definitely have to drive slow."
Traveling could be tricky in certain parts of the U.S., where blizzards and severe storms are expected to last through the evening on Christmas day. The Weather Channel's Paul Goodloe reports.
Some mountainous areas of Arkansas' Ozark Mountains could get up to 10 inches of snow amid warnings that travel could become "very hazardous or impossible" in the northern part of the state from near whiteout conditions, the National Weather Service said.
A blizzard warning is also in effect around Memphis, Tenn. from 4 p.m. ET Tuesday to 10 a.m. ET Wednesday, while in Kansas, as much as 3 inches of snow could fall on Christmas day, NBC affiliate KSN.com reported.
Hundreds of flights hit again as winter weather continues
In Oklahoma, freezing rain changed to sleet and snow on Christmas morning, with the Oklahoma Department of Public Safety saying that some bridges and overpasses were already becoming slick.
‘Plan now’
Authorities along the Gulf Coast have warned residents to be on the lookout for strong tornadoes or winds of more than 75 mph, heavy rain, quarter-sized hail and dangerous lightning on Tuesday morning."Please plan now for how you will receive a severe weather warning, and know where you will go when it is issued. It only takes a few minutes, and it will help everyone have a safe Christmas," Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant said.
The winter weather is expected to arrive in the Northeast on Wednesday and Thursday, bringing significant precipitation, although it’s not yet known if it will be rain or snow. The big cities like Boston, New York and Philadelphia, will likely see rain rather than snow, with high wind gusts up to 60 mph, weather.com meteorologist Mike Seidel said on TODAY.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
More content from NBCNews.com:
- 4 firefighters shot, 2 killed, in apparent trap
- Video: Police officer jumps in frigid water to save woman
- Residents consider future as demolitions begin in Breezy Point
- Emotions run high as Newtown splits over gun control
- Snow, tornadoes threaten more holiday travel chaos
- Holiday wreck: 4 killed in wrong-way minivan collision
Monday, December 24, 2012
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Greek Debt Stalemate Centers on Deadlines
The failure to reach an agreement for the second week in a row highlighted the depth of differences among officials on how to find the money to keep the Greek economy afloat to contain contagion in the euro zone even as the country’s debt prospects worsen.
The German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, said after nearly 12 hours of talks that some of “the questions are so complicated, we didn’t find a conclusive solution.” Finance ministers will meet again Monday to resume the discussions, he added.
Mr. Schäuble also noted that European leaders could take up the discussions during a two-day summit meeting in Brussels that is to begin Thursday. As part of that effort, the spokesman for the Greek government said Prime Minister Antonis Samaras would hold talks Thursday with Jean-Claude Juncker, chairman of the euro zone finance ministers’ group, known as the Eurogroup, Reuters reported.
“Greece has done what it had to and what it had committed to doing,” Mr. Samaras said in a statement. “Our partners, along with the I.M.F., also must do what they have undertaken.”
While there is little immediate threat that creditors will deny further aid to the government in Athens, finding a formula to turn the spigot back on has proved intensely difficult, particularly for Germany, where Chancellor Angela Merkel is seeking to avoid making new financing commitments to the most vulnerable euro area countries, like Greece, ahead of her re-election campaign next year.
That has left the leadership of the euro zone jawboning at a seemingly endless series of late-night meetings.
Greece is seeking to unlock a €31.5 billion, or $40.3 billion, installment of loans from an international bailout program. If ministers do reach a deal, Greece is likely to get a larger amount, about €44 billion, because two additional installments are due by the end of the year under the program.
The current program, worth a total of €130 billion, has been frozen since June, when creditors determined that Greece was failing to meet the conditions of the bailout.
During closed-door discussions that began Tuesday evening, ministers and international officials also were at loggerheads over whether to give Greece two more years, to 2016, to reach a primary budget surplus, a concession requiring nearly €33 billion on top of existing bailouts.
Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, insisted that financing Greece until 2016 would help it to the path of making its debt manageable by the end of the decade.
But a number of euro member states resisted that suggestion, insisting on limiting questions of how to finance Greece through 2014. Using a target date of 2014 would cost less, about €15 billion, but that would leave questions unresolved about the country’s financing.
In an effort to address the added costs, the ministers considered options like lowering interest rates on Greek debt, lengthening the deadlines for debt repayments, allowing Greece to buy back its bonds at a steep discount and asking the European Central Bank to return profits made on Greek bonds.
But many analysts agree that at some point, Greece’s official lenders will have to take politically unpalatable losses, or haircuts, on their holdings of Greek debt to keep the country in the euro area, even if other measures are taken to reduce the size of the state deficit and reform the economy.
Another critical challenge for the finance ministers, known as the Eurogroup, was smoothing over differences among the members of the so-called troika of lenders — the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund — over how quickly Greece should be obliged to bring its towering debt under control.
In a public disagreement last week at the previous Eurogroup meeting, Ms. Lagarde insisted that Greece cut its debt to the fund’s target of 120 percent of gross domestic product by 2020, while Mr. Juncker, chairman of the group, recommended giving Greece until 2022, a position shared by Germany.
Arriving at the meeting Tuesday, Ms. Lagarde emphasized the importance of the 2020 goal to her organization, which under its rules cannot continue lending unless Greece’s debt is deemed sustainable. Finding a solution was “our goal, our purpose and our mission,” she said.
The difference is a highly sensitive matter for Greece’s biggest creditors in the euro zone, and for Germany in particular.
The German leadership is wary of political repercussions from higher costs that would result from meeting the 2020 deadline. The Greek debt is now estimated at 175 percent of G.D.P., and the economy could shrink again next year.
“We are narrowing our positions,” Mr. Juncker said early Wednesday, referring to the gulf between him and Ms. Lagarde on Greece’s debt prospects.
“We are very close to a result,” and there was “no major stumbling block,” Mr. Juncker insisted.
Mr. Samaras, the Greek prime minister, who is struggling to hold together an increasingly fragile coalition, has said he hoped that a final push by Athens to tie up loose ends could help speed money for the two-year extension to the country’s fiscal adjustment period.
via nytimes.com
Sunday, November 18, 2012
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CIA Director David Petraeus resigns - CBS News
CIA Director David Petraeus has submitted his resignation to President Obama, citing an extramarital affair.
In a statement sent to the CIA workforce today, Petraeus said he went to the White House Thursday to ask the president to accept his resignation. The president accepted his resignation today.
"After being married for over 37 years, I showed extremely poor judgment by engaging in an extramarital affair," Petraeus said in the letter to the CIA workforce. "Such behavior is unacceptable, both as a husband and as the leader of an organization such as ours."
Petraeus took over as director of the CIA in September 2011. Mr. Obama is expected to release a written response to Petraeus' resignation later today.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said in a statement that the CIA director's decision "represents the loss of one of our nation's most respected public servants."
"From his long, illustrious Army career to his leadership at the helm of CIA, Dave has redefined what it means to serve and sacrifice for one's country," he said.
via cbsnews.com
Thursday, November 8, 2012
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Obama goes after Romney's Jeep ad in Ohio - CBS News
(CBS News) President Obama spent the final Friday of the campaign stumping before crowds of 3,000 and 4,000 in high school gyms and a converted barn in the critical swing state of Ohio. The president will return to Ohio Saturday morning and the Obama camp says their commitment on the ground in Ohio is not an indication that they are nervous about losing the battleground state, but is simply an acknowledgement that it is a must-win state for both sides.
Campaign officials say the large rallies that characterized his 2008 campaign -- crowds of 40,000 in Indiana -- are scheduled for this weekend.
In the last three days of the race, the president is holding three events in Ohio, two events in Wisconsin, and two in Iowa. Obama will also take part in events in Virginia, New Hampshire, Florida, and Colorado before heading to Chicago to watch the returns on Election Day.
On the trail, Mr. Obama took advantage of new jobs numbers out on Friday, which showed the country created more jobs than expected last month.
"This morning, we learned that companies hired more workers in October than at anytime in the last eight months," the president said Friday.
At all three of his Ohio campaign stops, Obama went after a Romney ad that suggests Jeep is moving jobs from Ohio to China.
"Folks who work at the Jeep plant have been having to call up their employers because they're worried," Obama said. "Of course it turns out it's not true. The car companies themselves have told Governor Romney to knock it off. Knock it off, that's what they said!"
The Obama campaign believes the ad will be Romney's undoing in Ohio, where it's gotten a lot of attention.
via cbsnews.com
Friday, November 2, 2012
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George McGovern, a Democratic Presidential Nominee and Liberal Stalwart, Dies at 90
His death was announced in a statement by the family. He had been moved to hospice care in recent days after being treated for several health problems in the last year. He had a home in Mitchell, S.D., where he had spent his formative years.
“We are blessed to know that our father lived a long, successful and productive life advocating for the hungry, being a progressive voice for millions and fighting for peace,” the family statement said.
To the liberal Democratic faithful, Mr. McGovern remained a standard-bearer well into his old age, writing and lecturing even as his name was routinely invoked by conservatives as synonymous with what they considered the failures of liberal politics.
He never retreated from those ideals, however, insisting on a strong, “progressive” federal government to protect the vulnerable and expand economic opportunity while asserting that history would prove him correct in his opposing not only what he called “the tragically mistaken American war in Vietnam” but also the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
A slender, soft-spoken minister’s son newly elected to Congress — his father was a Republican — Mr. McGovern went to Washington as a 34-year-old former college history teacher and decorated bomber pilot in World War II. He thought of himself as a son of the prairie as well, with a fittingly flat, somewhat nasal voice and a brand of politics traceable to the Midwestern progressivism of the late 19th century.
Elected to the Senate in 1962, Mr. McGovern left no special mark in his three terms, but he voted consistently in favor of civil rights and antipoverty bills, was instrumental in developing and expanding food stamp and nutrition programs, and helped lead opposition to the Vietnam War in the Senate.
520 to 17
That was the cause he took into the 1972 election, one of the most lopsided in American history. Mr. McGovern carried only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia and won just 17 electoral votes to Nixon’s 520.
The campaign was the backdrop to the burglary at the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate Hotel in Washington, and by the Nixon organization’s shady fund-raising practices and sabotage operations, later known as “dirty tricks,” which were not disclosed until after the election.
The Republicans portrayed Mr. McGovern as a cowardly left-winger, a threat to the military and the free-market economy and outside the mainstream of American thought. Fair or not, he never lived down the image of a liberal loser, and many Democrats long accused him of leading the party astray.
Mr. McGovern resented that characterization mightily. “I always thought of myself as a good old South Dakota boy who grew up here on the prairie,” he said in an interview for this obituary in 2005 in his home in Mitchell. “My dad was a Methodist minister. I went off to war. I have been married to the same woman forever. I’m what a normal, healthy, ideal American should be like.
“But we probably didn’t work enough on cultivating that image,” he added, referring to his campaign organization. “We were more interested in ending the war in Vietnam and getting people out of poverty and being fair to women and minorities and saving the environment.
“It was an issue-oriented campaign, and we should have paid more attention to image.”
Mr. McGovern was 50 years old and in his second Senate term when he won the 1972 Democratic nomination, outdistancing a dozen or so other aspirants, including Senator Edmund S. Muskie of Maine, the early front-runner; former Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, the nominee in 1968; and Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama, a populist with a segregationist past who was gravely wounded in an assassination attempt in Maryland during the primaries.
Mr. McGovern benefited from new party rules that he had been largely responsible for writing, and from a corps of devoted young volunteers, including Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham, who took time off from Yale Law School to work on the campaign in Texas.
The nominating convention in Miami was a disastrous start to the general election campaign. There were divisive platform battles over Vietnam, abortion, welfare and court-ordered busing to end racial discrimination. The eventual platform was probably the most liberal one ever adopted by a major party in the United States. It advocated immediate withdrawal from Vietnam, amnesty for war resisters, abolition of the draft, a guaranteed job for all Americans and a guaranteed family income well above the poverty line.
Several prominent Democrats declined Mr. McGovern’s offer to be his running mate before he finally chose Senator Thomas F. Eagleton of Missouri.
Mr. McGovern’s organization was so disorganized that by the time he went to the convention rostrum for his acceptance speech, it was nearly 3 a.m. He delivered perhaps the best speech of his life. “We reject the view of those who say, ‘America, love it or leave it,’ ” he declared. “We reply, ‘Let us change it so we can love it more.’ ”
The delegates loved it, but most television viewers had long since gone to bed.
The Eagleton Debacle
The convention was barely over when word got out that Mr. Eagleton had been hospitalized three times in the 1960s for what was called nervous exhaustion, and that he had undergone electroshock therapy.
Mr. McGovern declared that he was behind his running mate “a thousand percent.” But less than two weeks after the nomination, Mr. Eagleton was dropped from the ticket and replaced by R. Sargent Shriver, the Kennedy in-law and former director of the Peace Corps.
The campaign never recovered from the Eagleton debacle. Republicans taunted Mr. McGovern for backing everything a thousand percent. Commentators said his treatment of Mr. Eagleton had shown a lack of spine.
In the 2005 Times interview, Mr. McGovern said he had handled the matter badly. “I didn’t know a damn thing about mental illness,” he said, “and neither did anyone around me.”
With a well-oiled campaign operation and a big financial advantage, Nixon began far ahead and kept increasing his lead. When Mr. McGovern proposed deep cuts in military programs and a $1,000 grant to every American, Nixon jeered, calling the ideas liberalism run amok. Nixon, meanwhile, cited accomplishments like the Paris peace talks on Vietnam, an arms limitation treaty with the Soviet Union, a prosperous economy and a diplomatic opening to China.
On election night, Mr. McGovern did not bother to call Nixon. He simply sent a telegram offering congratulations. Then, he said, he sat on his bed at the Holiday Inn in Sioux Falls and wrote his concession speech on hotel stationery.
In his book on the campaign, “The Making of the President 1972,” Theodore H. White wrote that the changes Mr. McGovern had sought abroad and at home had “frightened too many Americans.”
“Richard M. Nixon,” Mr. White wrote, “convinced the Americans, by more than 3 to 2, that he could use power better than George McGovern.”
Mr. McGovern offered his own assessment of the campaign. “I don’t think the American people had a clear picture of either Nixon or me,” he said in the 2005 interview. “I think they thought that Nixon was a strong, decisive, tough-minded guy and that I was an idealist and antiwar guy who might not attach enough significance to the security of the country.
“The truth is, I was the guy with the war record, and my opposition to Vietnam was because I was interested in the nation’s well-being.”
His staff, he said, urged him to talk more about his war experience, but like many World War II veterans at the time, he was reluctant to do so.
How long, he was asked, did it take to get over the disappointment of losing? “You never fully get over it,” he replied. “But I’ve had a good life. I’ve enjoyed myself 90 percent of the time.”
George Stanley McGovern was born on July 19, 1922, in a parsonage in Avon, S.D., a town of about 600 people where his father, Joseph, was the pastor of the Wesleyan Methodist Church. A disciplinarian, his father, who was born in 1868, tried to keep his four children from going to the movies and playing sports. His mother, the former Frances McLean, was a homemaker about 20 years her husband’s junior.
The family moved to Mitchell, in southeastern South Dakota, when George was 6. He went to high school and college there, enrolling at Dakota Wesleyan University in Mitchell in 1940. After Pearl Harbor, Mr. McGovern joined the Army Air Corps, and before going overseas, in 1943, he married Eleanor Stageberg, who had grown up with an identical twin on a South Dakota farm. They had met at Dakota Wesleyan.
Mr. McGovern was trained to fly the B-24 Liberator, a four-engine heavy bomber, and he flew dozens of missions over Germany, Austria and Italy.
On his 30th mission, his plane was struck by enemy fire and his navigator was killed. Lieutenant McGovern crash-landed the plane on an island in the Adriatic. He earned a Distinguished Flying Cross for the exploit.
After his discharge, Mr. McGovern returned to Mitchell — his father had recently died — and resumed his studies at Dakota Wesleyan. He graduated in 1946 and went to Northwestern University for graduate studies in history.
With a master’s degree, he returned to Dakota Wesleyan, a small university, to teach history and political science. “I was the best historian in a one-historian department,” he said in an interview in 2003. During summers and in his free time, he continued his graduate work and received a Ph.D. in history from Northwestern in 1953.
Mr. McGovern left teaching to become executive secretary of the South Dakota Democratic Party, and almost single-handedly revived a moribund party in a heavily Republican state.
Month after month, he drove across South Dakota in a beat-up sedan, making friends and setting up county organizations. In 1956, gaining the support of farmers who had become New Deal Democrats during the Depression, he was elected to Congress himself, defeating an overconfident incumbent Republican. He became the first Democratic congressman from his state in more than 20 years.
After two terms he left the House to run for the Senate in 1960 and was soundly beaten by the sitting Republican, Karl E. Mundt. He then became a special assistant to the newly elected president, John F. Kennedy, and director of Kennedy’s Food for Peace program, an effort to provide food for the hungry in poor countries.
In 1962, Mr. McGovern ran for the Senate again, and this time he won, by 597 votes, defeating Joseph H. Bottum, a Republican filling the term of Senator Francis H. Case, who had died in office.
In the Senate, Mr. McGovern became a reliable vote for Democratic initiatives and a leader on food and hunger issues as a member of the Agriculture Committee. But he was more interested in national politics than in legislation. After Robert F. Kennedy, fresh from his victory in the California presidential primary, was assassinated in Los Angeles in June 1968, the Kennedy camp encouraged Mr. McGovern to enter the race as an alternative to Humphrey and Senator Eugene J. McCarthy of Minnesota. Mr. McGovern did so but was unable to catch up to Humphrey.
Almost from the moment the 1968 campaign ended, Mr. McGovern began running for the 1972 nomination. He traveled the country, recording on index cards the names of potential supporters he met. He also became chairman of a Democratic Party commission on delegate selection, created after the fractious 1968 national convention to give the rank and file more say in picking a presidential nominee.
What became known as the McGovern commission rewrote party rules to insure that more women, young people and members of minorities were included in delegations. The influence of party leaders was curtailed. More states began choosing delegates on the basis of primary elections. And the party’s center of gravity shifted decidedly leftward.
Though the rules were not written specifically to help Mr. McGovern win the nomination, they had that effect.
After he was crushed by Nixon in the election, Mr. McGovern returned to the Senate and began campaigning for re-election in 1974. At the Gridiron Club’s annual dinner in 1973, he told the assembled Washington elite, “Ever since I was a young man, I wanted to run for the presidency in the worst possible way — and I did.”
Mr. McGovern was re-elected to the Senate in 1974, a landslide year for Democrats after Watergate. He defeated Leo K. Thorsness, a novice politician.
It proved to be Mr. McGovern’s last success in elective politics. As the conservative movement gained force, Mr. McGovern’s popularity dropped.
In 1980, he was defeated by James Abdnor, a plain-spoken Republican congressman who had clung to Ronald Reagan’s coattails and was helped by anti-McGovern advertisements broadcast by the National Conservative Political Action Committee.
Unlike some of his peers, Mr. McGovern did not become wealthy in office, and he said he had no interest in lobbying afterward. Instead, he earned a living teaching, lecturing and writing. He briefly owned a motor inn in Stratford, Conn., and a bookstore in Montana, where he owned a summer home. But neither investment proved profitable.
A Father’s Heartbreaking Loss
What he called “the big tragedy of my life” occurred in 1994. His daughter Teresa J. McGovern, who had suffered from alcoholism and mental illness, froze to death at 45, acutely intoxicated, in a parking lot snowbank in Madison, Wis.
His eyes welled up as he talked about it 11 years later. “That just about killed me,” he said. “I had always had a very demanding schedule. I didn’t do everything I could as a father.”
As therapy, Mr. McGovern researched and wrote a book, “Terry: My Daughter’s Life-and-Death Struggle With Alcoholism,” published in 1997. (An addiction-treatment center named after her was established in Madison.)
That year, President Bill Clinton appointed Mr. McGovern ambassador to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Agricultural Organization. He moved to Rome, and he worked on plans for delivering food to malnourished people around the world. In 2000, Mr. Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
After four years in Rome, the McGoverns moved back to Mitchell, where they lived in a ranch-style house owned by Dakota Wesleyan and helped raise money for a university library that was named after him and his wife. The university is also home to the McGovern Center for Leadership and Public Service, a research and educational institution founded in 2006. He also had a home in St. Augustine, Fla.
Eleanor McGovern died in 2007 at age 85. A son, Steven, who had also struggled with alcoholism, died in July at 60.
Mr. McGovern’s survivors include three daughters — Ann, Susan and Mary — 10 grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
Mr. McGovern remained robust in old age. To celebrate his 88th birthday, he sky-dived in Florida. Last fall, he was hospitalized twice, once after falling and hitting his head outside the Dakota Wesleyan library before a scheduled C-Span interview, and another time for fatigue after completing a lecture tour. But he rebounded and resumed making public and television appearances this year.
Mr. McGovern remained a voice in public affairs, notably in 2008, when, in an op-ed article in The Washington Post, he called for the impeachment of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for their prosecution of the war in Iraq.
He published books regularly, on history, the environment and other subjects. In “Out of Iraq” (2006), written with William R. Polk, he argued for a phased withdrawal from Iraq, to end in 2007. In his final book, “What It Means to Be a Democrat,” released in November 2011, he despairs of an “insidious” political atmosphere in Washington while trying to rally Democrats against “extremism” in the Republican ranks.
“We are the party that believes we can’t let the strong kick aside the weak,” Mr. McGovern wrote. “Our party believes that poor children should be as well educated as those from wealthy families. We believe that everyone should pay their fair share of taxes and that everyone should have access to health care.”
With the country burdened economically, he added, there has “never been a more critical time in our nation’s history” to rely on those principles.
“We are at a crossroads,” he wrote, “over how the federal government in Washington and state legislatures and city councils across the land allocate their financial resources. Which fork we take will say a lot about Americans and our values.”
David E. Rosenbaum, a Washington correspondent for The New York Times, died in 2006. William McDonald contributed reporting.
via nytimes.com
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