Senate Republicans Just Blocked A Bunch Of Gun Control Measures

WASHINGTON -- One day after 14 people were killed in a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, Senate Democrats pushed through votes on measures to strengthen gun control laws. Republicans succeeded in blocking every single one.

In an effort to apply pressure on their GOP colleagues, Senate Democrats tried to change the focus of legislation aimed at repealing Obamacare and defunding Planned Parenthood on the Senate floor Thursday. Their package attempted to strip out the text of the underlying bill and replace it with three measures that would have blocked individuals on terrorist watch lists from purchasing guns, expanded existing gun background checks, and increased funding for mental health services and treatment for substance abuse disorders. 

"Our thoughts and prayers are not even close to enough. This country is dangerously close to falling into a new normal," said Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), the Senate's third-ranking Democrat. "Is this the kind of country we want to be? Senate Democrats are not waiting one more day."

Democrats offered the package during a vote-a-rama on the GOP Obamacare bill. While every amendment failed -- they each needed to secure 60 votes -- Schumer said earlier in the day that the point of it all was to ensure the entire country knows where every senator stands on the issue. He predicted a "good number" of Republicans were "dreading" the votes. 

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Former intel chief says WH worried over re-elect 'narrative'

Washington (CNN) President Barack Obama's former top military intelligence official said Tuesday that the White House ignored reports prefacing the rise of ISIS in 2011 and 2012 because they did not fit its re-election "narrative."

"I think that they did not meet a narrative the White House needed. And I'll be very candid with you, they just didn't," retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told CNN's Jake Tapper on "The Lead."

Flynn, who has been critical of both Obama's and former President George W. Bush's handling of the Iraq War and involvement in the Middle East, said that Obama was served poorly by a small circle of advisers who were worried about his re-election prospects at the time.

The story they needed to tell, he said, was that pulling troops from Iraq would not leave the region vulnerable to the rise of a radical Islamic group like ISIS.

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NATO invites Montenegro to join alliance, defying Russia

NATO foreign ministers invited tiny Montenegro on Wednesday to join their military alliance in its first expansion since 2009, defying Russian warnings that enlargement of the U.S.-led bloc further into the Balkans would be a provocation.

In a scripted session at NATO's headquarters in Brussels, Montenegro's Foreign Minister Igor Luksic strode into the imposing conference hall to loud applause from his peers as NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg declared: "This is the beginning of a very beautiful alliance."

Stoltenberg said inviting Montenegro had nothing to do with Russia. But NATO diplomats have said the decision sends a message to Moscow that it does not have a veto on NATO's eastwards expansion, even if Georgia's membership bid has been complicated by its 2008 war with Russia.

Moscow opposes any NATO extension to former communist areas of eastern and southeastern Europe, part of an east-west struggle for influence over former Soviet satellites that is at the centre of the crisis in Ukraine.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said last September that any expansion of NATO was "a mistake, even a provocation". In comments to Russian media then, he described NATO's so-called open door policy as "irresponsible".

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Trump builds his lead, Carson falls in latest Quinnipiac Poll

Republican Donald Trump solidifies his advantage nationally in the party's presidential race as Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton improves her showing in potential general election matchups, Quinnipiac University poll finds.

·         In contest for GOP nomination, Trump leads with 27%, followed by Sen. Marco Rubio with 17%

·         Ben Carson, Sen. Ted Cruz tied with 16%, Jeb Bush next with 5%, no other contender tops 3%

·         In comparable poll released Nov. 4, Trump and Carson were in virtual tie for first

·         Poll Asst. Director Tim Malloy sums up: "Dr. Ben Carson, moving to center stage just one month ago, now needs some CPR. The doctor sinks. The Donald soars."

·         NOTE: Much of poll taken as reports emerged that Trump had disparaged reporter by making fun of his disability

Are the 'overwhelming majority of violent criminals' Democrats? Ted Cruz said so

During an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz said most violent criminals are Democrats.

It came after Hewitt brought up the shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic that left three dead and nine injured in Colorado Springs, Colo., over Thanksgiving weekend. Hewitt told Cruz that he’d been doing anti-abortion events for 25 years and had never met "a single pro-life activist who is in favor of violence of any sort."

Cruz agreed. "And I would note that this whole episode has really displayed the ugly underbelly of the media," Cruz said. "You know, every time you have some sort of violent crime or mass killing, you can almost see the media salivating, hoping, hoping desperately that the murderer happens to be a Republican, so they can use it to try to paint their political enemies. Now listen, here’s the simple and undeniable fact. The overwhelming majority of violent criminals are Democrats. The media doesn’t report that."

We received dozens of emails from readers asking us to check the claim, so we took a closer look.

We queried the Cruz campaign, but didn’t hear back. CNN reported that Cruz’s campaign, when asked, cited research by two academics, Marc Meredith, of the University of Pennsylvania, and Michael Morse, then of Stanford University. They published a paper in the January 2014 edition of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science titled, "Do Voting Rights Notification Laws Increase Ex-Felon Turnout?"

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Why the Presidency is Weak

One big thing Barack Obama has learned about being president? The job isn't as powerful as you might expect.

In a new interview with Bill Simmons at GQ, which is well worth reading in full, Obama explains that he "didn't fully appreciate" how "decentralized power is" in the US political system until he took office.

That is, to get anything done, he had to spend a ton of his time trying to persuade other people. Here's what he told Simmons:

OBAMA: What I didn’t fully appreciate, and nobody can appreciate until they’re in the position, is how decentralized power is in this system. When you’re in the seat and you’re seeing the housing market collapse and you are seeing unemployment skyrocketing and you have a sense of what the right thing to do is, then you realize, "Okay, not only do I have to persuade my own party, not only do I have to prevent the other party from blocking what the right thing to do is, but now I can anticipate this lawsuit, this lobbying taking place, and this federal agency that technically is independent, so I can’t tell them what to do. I’ve got the Federal Reserve, and I’m hoping that they do the right thing—and by the way, since the economy now is global, I’ve got to make sure that the Europeans, the Asians, the Chinese, everybody is on board." A lot of the work is not just identifying the right policy but now constantly building these ever shifting coalitions to be able to actually implement and execute and get it done.

House Votes To Increase Security Checks On Refugees From Iraq, Syria

The House of Representatives has easily passed a GOP-authored bill to restrict the admission of Iraqi and Syrian refugees to America by requiring extra security procedures.

The bill — called the American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act of 2015, or the American SAFE Act of 2015 — would require the secretary of Homeland Security, the head of the FBI and the director of national intelligence to sign off on every individual refugee from Iraq and Syria, affirming he or she is not a threat.

The FBI director would also need to confirm that a background investigation, separate from the Homeland Security screening, had been conducted on each refugee.

Lawmakers say it is the first of many bills aimed at addressing security concerns in the wake of the Paris attacks, reports NPR's Muthoni Muturi.Supporters of the bill say it would require a "pause" in admitting Syrian and Iraqi refugees, as current applications would be halted while a new vetting process was established. Some conservative critics object that it doesn't ban such refugees outright.

Meanwhile, liberal House members say requiring top officials to be involved in thousands of individual applications is unmanageable, and that the bill would result in an extended roadblock for Syrians and Iraqis fleeing a humanitarian crisis. That's a rejection of American values, some Democrats argue.
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What The 2016 Candidates Would Do About ISIS, In One Chart

Hillary Clinton has revealed how she would fight ISIS in the wake of the attacks on Paris. Among her ideas: a no-fly zone, support for local troops, and a new authorization for the U.S. to use force in the region.

In a Thursday speech, the former secretary of state laid out her plan, as well as some attacks on her Republican opponents.

"Turning away orphans, applying a religious test, discriminating against Muslims, slamming the door on every single Syrian refugee — that is just not who we are. We are better than that," she said in response to some GOP candidates' plans to either stop Syrian refugees from entering the U.S. or to only allow Christians to enter.

She's not the only one with a plan for fighting ISIS; there has been a flurry of candidate promises in the wake of the attacks in Paris a week ago. In Politico on Thursday, Marco Rubio laid out the steps he'd take, which include reversing defense sequestration. Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, told Georgetown students that he wants Middle Eastern nations to step up more in the fight.

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Fact-checking the 2016 Democratic presidential candidates

PolitiFact has fact-checked each of the top 5 Democratic candidates running for president. Now you can see how they all stack up on PolitiFact's Truth-O-Meter. 

Interested on keeping up on the latest from PolitiFact? Sign up for our weekly email newsletter.

Candidates are ordered based on the RealClearPolitics.com average of presidential polls as of Oct. 23, 2015
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Fact-checking the 2016 GOP presidential candidates

PolitiFact has fact-checked each of the top 13 Republican candidates running for president. Now you can see how they all stack up on PolitiFact's Truth-O-Meter. 

Candidates are ordered based on the RealClearPolitics.com average of presidential polls as of Nov. 4, 2015.
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Where The 2016 Candidates Stand On Immigration, In One Chart

Immigration is shaping up to be one of the most contentious and emotional topics in the 2016 presidential race. It's also one on which candidates' views aren't yet fully formed.

It turns out that nailing down candidates' stances on immigration is really hard. They change their minds (or, at least, their messaging) fairly often, and they place a lot of conditions on what they want: mandatory E-Verify, but only if the system is revamped to work better. A path to legal status, but only once the border is secure (which raises another question: Does "secure border" mean the same thing to everyone?).

But it's worth it to figure this out. After research and reaching out to campaigns, here's our rundown of where candidates fall on six different immigration policy questions. (We plan to do this for other topics throughout the campaign season, as well. Check out our climate change table here.)

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Gotcha! Can't Politicians Handle Tough Questions?

Democrat, Republican, independent — it doesn't matter. They all love griping about the "gotcha" question.

Politicians of all stars and stripes say "gotcha" has got to go. And with the fervor of attacks against "gotcha" questions, you might think the term, or the accusation, was new. Not so fast.

Merriam-Webster defines "gotcha" as "an unexpected problem or usually unpleasant surprise." It's often paired with an exclamation mark for emphasis on its ambush-like nature.

The meaning of "gotcha" in a political context is hotly debated — and it usually depends whom you're asking.

"Gotcha" journalism is "what politicians frequently accuse reporters of when doing their jobs of trying to uncover information," Chuck McCutcheon and David Mark wrote in Dog Whistles, Walk-Backs and Washington Handshakes. The two journalists wrote the book in an effort to decode the political jargon tossed around in our nation's capital.

Politicians would probably fire back with a different definition, one that mentions catching them off guard with the goal of making them look bad.

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Ben Carson said raising the minimum wage will increase joblessness

At the Fox Business Network debate, it didn’t take long for the topic of the minimum wage to come up.

During a back-and-forth with the moderators, Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson urged caution on raising the minimum wage, saying, "People need to be educated on the minimum wage. Every time we raise the minimum wage, the number of jobless people increases."

We checked a similar claim by Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md. In November 2014, Cardin made the opposite case, claiming that "every time we've increased the minimum wage, we've seen a growth in jobs."

We rated Cardin’s claim Mostly False, after determining that during the 12 months following each of the 11 minimum wage increases since 1978, about half produced a net gain in jobs and about half produced a net loss of jobs.

In this case, we decided we couldn’t rely on the exact same data, since Cardin referred to a growth in jobs, while Carson referred to an increase in joblessness. Those aren’t exactly the same things, though the Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates both metrics.

So we used the same methodology to look at the 12-month changes in unemployment level after those 11 minimum-wage hikes.

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Takeaways from the Republican debate

(CNN)As the first primaries creep ever closer, candidates are feeling the pressure to rise above the pack and prove their electoral viability.

Each candidate came in with different marks to hit. Jeb Bush needed a game-changing performance. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz wanted to maintain their momentum. And Rand Paul wanted to get into the act.

Here's how they fared:

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Prior to Benghazi, were there 13 attacks on embassies and 60 deaths under President George W. Bush?

As the U.S. House of Representatives was readying a new special committee to investigate the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, many Democrats were arguing that continuing to probe the Sept. 11, 2012, attack -- which killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens -- amounted to a political witch hunt.

On May 5, 2014, Rep. John Garamendi, D-Calif., told MSNBC host Ed Schultz that there has already been exhaustive testimony and investigation of the incident.

"This thing is just going on and on to boredom actually," Garamendi said. "The Armed Services Committee actually did a hearing and the result was there’s nothing here. That’s obviously a great tragedy, but Ed, during the George W. Bush period, there were 13 attacks on various embassies and consulates around the world. Sixty people died. In Karachi, there was a death of one of our diplomats, and those were not investigated during that period of time because it was a tragedy."

Readers asked us whether it’s true that under Bush, "there were 13 attacks on various embassies and consulates around the world, (and) 60 people died."

We turned to the Global Terrorism Database, a project headquartered at the University of Maryland. The database documents terrorist attacks around the world going back to the 1970s, and experts told us it is the best resource available for this fact-check.

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Marathon Benghazi hearing leaves Hillary Clinton largely unscathed

Washington (CNN) Hillary Clinton avoided major damage to her presidential campaign during a nearly 11-hour congressional hearing Thursday dominated by Republican criticism of her response to the Benghazi attacks.

Bitter political undercurrents festered all day during a contentious showdown that turned into a political endurance test. After a day-long grilling on the details of the attack and how Clinton handled it, the former secretary of state was forced to defend her use of a private email account while in office from a flurry of late evening attacks by GOP lawmakers.

She also came under testy cross-examination over the extent to which she has taken responsibility for the deaths of the Americans in the September 11, 2012, attacks and her contact with U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens, one of the victims, after sending him to the North African country.

"I came here because I said I would. And I've done everything I know to do, as have the people with whom I worked, to try to answer your questions. I cannot do any more than that," Clinton said towards the end of the grueling day -- before later breaking into a coughing fit and taking a throat lozenge to ease her failing voice.

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Paul Ryan's winning pitch to House Republicans

Washington (CNN)Rep. Paul Ryan's winning pitch to House conservatives amounted to this: Let's start over.

For years, tensions had been boiling between the hard right of the Republican Party and the House leadership, a battle that effectively pushed Speaker John Boehner out of office and ended the bid of Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy to succeed him.

But Ryan, facing skepticism from hardliners in the House Freedom Caucus, spoke bluntly to the conservatives, telling them that he was more ideologically in line with them than with moderates in the so-called Tuesday Group. He said he was not the type of leader who is out to seek retribution, unlike past leaders.

The 45-year-old Wisconsin congressman said he would only push important bills such as immigration that have a majority of support from Republicans -- abiding by the "Hastert Rule." He promised bold policy ideas on the House floor like welfare reform, health care legislation and a tax overhaul -- and that the chamber would stand firm on those policy proposals with Senate Republicans and the White House. He softened his demand to roll back a procedure allowing lawmakers to overthrow a sitting speaker.

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Viewer’s guide for the 2015 Democratic presidential primary debate

Central Michigan University debate experts want to help viewers get the most out of Tuesday evening's showdown.

Edward Hinck, Shelly Hinck and William Dailey, co-authors of "Politeness in Political Debates," used their expertise to provide viewers with questions to ask themselves and key elements to take note of when watching the Oct. 13 Democratic debate.

"In this debate we should be looking to see how the candidates distinguish their positions from one another. A debate where candidates offer specific information and engage in rich policy discussions would be ideal," Shelly Hinck said.

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Republicans Were More United Than Ever Under John Boehner

John Boehner’s tenure as speaker of the House, which will end with his resignation next month, is striking because of a seeming contradiction. By statistical measures, it featured an extraordinary degree of party unity among Republicans in the House. At almost no point in history have such a large majority of Republicans voted together so often, especially when they stood in opposition to Democrats.

And yet, Boehner was brought down by division within the Republican ranks: His decision to resign was motivated by a group of dissident, highly conservative Republicans, the Freedom Caucus, who had threatened a no-confidence vote in his speakership. Meanwhile, Republicans have had trouble reaching consensus in many other respects during Boehner’s years as speaker: most notably, in choosing a candidate in the current presidential race.

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Having a conservative track record isn’t everything in the Republican Party. Just ask Donald Trump, who doesn’t have one. Or Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who does. McCarthy decided today not to run for speaker of the House after supposedly having the edge. He faced opposition from the Freedom Caucus, a group of House Republicans who have pushed for a more confrontational approach with Democrats.

McCarthy is in the middle of the House GOP ideologically. Of course, because the GOP as a whole has gotten much more conservative in recent years, that means McCarthy is quite conservative too. But the resistance to electing him speaker wasn’t just about ideology; McCarthy represents a Republican establishment less willing to threaten a government shutdown or refuse to raise the debt ceiling to achieve legislative goals. The split within the party is largely a disagreement over tactics.

The Freedom Caucus¹ isn’t composed exclusively of far-right Republicans; many members sit squarely in the GOP’s ideological mainstream. You can see this in the following chart, which shows Freedom Caucus members according to two metrics:

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House Speaker John Boehner to resign

            John Boehner, the Ohio Republican who steered his party to an overwhelming House majority in 2010, told colleagues Friday he's stepping down as Speaker and will leave Congress at the end of October.

The abrupt decision comes after he faced heavy pressure from conservatives to take a harder line on their causes, most recently over defunding Planned Parenthood.

Boehner, who has presided over the House since 2011, explained during a closed-door meeting with Republicans Friday morning that he had only planned to serve two terms as speaker but decided to hold onto his post after then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost his seat during a primary last year, a Republican lawmaker in the room told CNN.

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Lawmakers file 'Tennessee Natural Marriage Defense Act'

Tennessee lawmakers promised some sort of legislative response after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled same-sex marriage legal for every state in the country.

On Thursday two state Republican lawmakers unveiled their answer: a bill that they believe voids the Supreme Court decision and continues to define marriage under Tennessee law as a union between a man and a woman.

"Natural marriage between one (1) man and one (1) woman as recognized by the people of

Tennessee remains the law in Tennessee, regardless of any court decision to the contrary," the bill

states.

"Any court decision purporting to strike down natural marriage, including (a recent U.S. Supreme

Court decision), is unauthoritative, void, and of no effect."

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FactCheck.org: Republican Debate #2

Th:e Republican presidential candidates met for their second debate on Sept. 16, this one hosted by CNN at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Csalifornia. We found they strayed from the facts on numerous issues, including

§  Donald Trump told a story linking vaccination to autism, but there’s no evidence that recommended vaccines cause autism. And Sen. Rand Paul suggested that it would be safer to spread out recommended vaccines, but there’s no evidence of that, either.

§  Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said Trump donated to his gubernatorial campaign to get him to change his mind on casino gambling in Florida. But Trump denied he ever wanted to bring casino gambling to the state. A former lobbyist says he did.

§  Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said that Hillary Clinton was “under investigation by the FBI” because she “destroyed government records.” Not true. She had the authority to delete personal emails.

§  Trump said that “illegal immigration” cost “more than $200 billion a year.” We couldn’t find any support for that. Actually, it could cost taxpayers $137 billion or more to deport the 11 million immigrants in the country illegally, as Trump proposes.

§  Trump again wrongly said that Mexico doesn’t have a birthright citizenship policy like the United States. It does.

§  Carly Fiorina said that the Planned Parenthood videos released by an anti-abortion group showed “a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.” But that scene isn’t in any of the videos.

§  Fiorina repeated familiar boasts about her time at Hewlett-Packard, saying the size of the company “doubled,” without mentioning that was due to a merger with Compaq, and she cherry-picked other statistics.

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Republican debate: Fact-checking the candidates

Washington (CNN)The CNN Fact-Checking Team worked through both Republican debates Wednesday night, comparing notable, surprising or otherwise interesting claims from the candidates against the facts.

The team, comprised of researchers, editors and reporters across CNN, picked the juiciest statements, analyzed them, consulted issue experts and then rated them either: True; Mostly True; True, but Misleading; False; or It's Complicated.

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What you need to know about Hillary Clinton’s e-mails

What happened

Hillary Clinton used a private e-mail server to carry out State Department business while she was Secretary of State. Some of her correspondence was between non-government e-mail addresses.

Records not under government control

Why it matters

Used private e-mail server

Records not involving government e-mail addresses were not under government control, raising issues concerning security and the State Department’s ability to follow open records laws.

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