The Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday shot down a California congressman’s claim that Islamic State fighters were apprehended in Texas, saying the statement was “categorically false” and “not supported by any credible intelligence.”
The congressman, Duncan Hunter, a Republican and a member of the House Armed Services Committee, told Greta Van Susteren of Fox News on Tuesday that “at least 10 ISIS fighters have been caught coming across the Mexican border in Texas.”
Pressed by Ms. Van Susteren, Mr. Hunter was unequivocal. “I’ve asked the Border Patrol,” he said, adding, “If they catch five or 10 of them, then you know there’s going to be dozens more that did not get caught.”
On Wednesday, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, Marsha Catron, flatly denied the lawmaker’s claims.
“The suggestion that individuals who have ties to ISIL have been apprehended at the southwest border is categorically false and not supported by any credible intelligence or the facts on the ground,” she wrote in a statement, using an alternative name for the Islamic State. “D.H.S. continues to have no credible intelligence to suggest terrorist organizations are actively plotting to cross the southwest border.”
Mr. Hunter’s comments gained widespread attention on Wednesday, especially on conservative news websites.
Republicans have been raising concerns for weeks that Islamic militants were streaming across the border, though federal officials have denied that is the case. Some Republicans have seized on reports that prayer rugs were found near the border as evidence that Islamic fighters are trying to enter the country illegally. (Similar reports have surfaced occasionally since at least 2005, fanned by conservative politicians like Tom Tancredo, the former Colorado congressman.)
It has also become a campaign issue. The National Republican Congressional Committee, for example, is running an ad in Arizona that claims terrorists are entering the country through the state’s southern border.
CORRECTION: A photograph with an earlier version of this post was published in error. It showed Duncan Hunter’s father, also named Duncan.
Future visits by the president are intended to rally millennials by highlighting the benefits of his economic agenda for the Democratic Party's core constituencies.Credit Christopher Gregory for The New York Times
When President Obama visits a technology incubator in Santa Monica, Calif., on Thursday to talk about his economic record, he will be working to appeal directly to young voters who the White House says are critical to Democratic chances of holding the Senate next month.
The president’s visit to the tech entrepreneurs’ center, called Cross Campus, is the first in a series of appearances that Mr. Obama plans to make before Nov. 4. The visits are intended to rally Democratic voters by highlighting the benefits of his economic policies.
Similar events in the coming weeks will focus on women, African-Americans and Latinos, all “core elements of the Democratic coalition,” in the words of one senior administration official.
The effort began Wednesday night with the release of a 49-page report by the Council of Economic Advisers that argues that Mr. Obama’s policies – including the Affordable Care Act, measures to make college more affordable, and investments in innovation and clean energy – have helped Americans between the ages of 17 and 36 rebound from the economic slump.
“There are substantial challenges to meet, but no generation has been better equipped to overcome them than millennials,” the report says.
Millennials, whom the White House defines as those born between 1978 and 1997, make up the largest, most diverse generation in the United States, and many of them came of age as the recession set in.
The report offers a glimpse of how Mr. Obama is now pitching his economic message. It notes, for example, that with college enrollments growing, more students are relying on loans to pay for education beyond high school. A White House fact sheet distributed with the report outlines steps the president has taken to make education more affordable.
Still, members of the millennial generation have been slower to experience the effects of the recovery than any age group. They had an unemployment rate of 8.6 percent last month, according to the report, substantially higher than the overall jobless rate of 5.9 percent.
Mike Rounds, the former governor of South Dakota and Republican Senate nominee, once had a commanding lead in the polls, but more recent polling has shown the gap narrowing.Credit Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times
South Dakota’s Senate race was largely considered a lost cause for Democrats, but with former Gov. Mike Rounds, the Republican nominee, showing weakness in recent polls, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is looking to make the race competitive.
According to a committee official, that will come in the form of a $1 million ad buy in the state, focused heavily on television in the hope of bettering the prospects of Rick Weiland, the Democrat trying to succeed Tim Johnson, the retiring Democratic incumbent.
Mr. Rounds was leading by double-digits in polls this summer, but more recent polling has shown the gap narrowing.
Democrats are hopeful that Mr. Rounds will be caught up in a controversy surrounding a federal program meant to bring more investment to the state, further weakening him. The presence of a third-party candidate, former Senator Larry Pressler, a Republican, is also adding to the uncertainty.
The most powerful voice in Gabby Gifford’s former congressional district in Arizona may still be Gabby Giffords herself.
And now Ms. Giffords — the former Democratic House member who was shot in the head at a “Congress on Your Corner” event in 2011 — is making her voice heard in support of her successor and former aide, Representative Ron Barber.
In a minute-long spot, Ms. Giffords, speaking with evident difficulty, addresses the camera to make a pitch for Mr. Barber, who is locked in a tight race in Arizona’s Second Congressional District against Martha McSally, a Republican.
“Ron Barber — he’s independent, he’s courageous, and, most of all, he’s Arizona through and through,” Ms. Giffords says.
Michelle Obama speaks at a Fashion Education Workshop on Wednesday at the White House.Credit Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated Press
We all wear them with pride.
Michelle Obama, confessing on Wednesday that she, too, wears Spanx — the undergarment known for shaping with discretion — at a White House event for fashion students.
Senator Pat Roberts, left, and his independent challenger, Greg Orman, before a debate last month in Hutchinson, Kan.Credit Charlie Riedel/Associated Press
Greg Orman, the independent candidate challenging Senator Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, did his best to keep his distance from Democrats and President Obama in a debate on Wednesday afternoon.
Mr. Orman, who suddenly has Mr. Roberts on the ropes after Chad Taylor, a Democrat, pulled out of the race, said that he was in favor of streamlining corporate taxes, that he was against amnesty for undocumented immigrants, and that the Affordable Care Act had “expanded a broken system.”
Hammering home the point, Mr. Orman even said that he had donated money to Scott Brown’s Senate campaign in Massachusetts to help prevent the health law from passing.
“I’ve often said we don’t live in the information age anymore, so much as the misinformation age,” Mr. Orman said of accusations that he is a liberal Democrat.
Mr. Roberts pushed a message that Mr. Orman is a patron of the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, and of Mr. Obama, and suggested that he would caucus with the Democrats if elected.
“A vote for Greg Orman is a vote to continue the Barack Obama and Harry Reid agenda,” Mr. Roberts said.
As The Times’s Jonathan Martin reported last month, a surprise victory by Mr. Orman, a former McKinsey consultant, could upend Republican hopes for taking control of the Senate.
Lawmakers in Virginia will have to scramble this winter to come up with new congressional districts after three federal judges ruled that the state’s Third District was drawn in violation of the Constitution.
While the 2014 elections will be held with the current map of 11 districts, new lines must be drawn by April, giving the General Assembly the first few months of the year to cobble together the map.
Of most pressing concern is whether the state will have to redraw the entire map, or just fiddle with the lines surrounding the Third District, which is largely African-American and is currently served by Representative Robert C. Scott.
“I think it will probably be a fairly extensive change,” said Jack Austin, a special projects manager at the Division of Legislative Services, the legal arm of the General Assembly. “There is no requirement that you change all 11,” he added, but there could be a domino effect.
The state attorney general is reviewing the decision to determine how to move forward; to maintain the current map, an appeal would have to be made to the Supreme Court, since the map was found to be out of compliance with the Voting Rights Act.
David Wasserman, the House editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, is among the skeptical.
“It seems pretty clear to me that the Republican-drawn map was designed with political intent, not racial intent,” he said in an email. “Namely, it was drawn to protect incumbents. Otherwise, why would heavily white liberal precincts in Richmond and Norfolk” be included?
Mr. Wasserman added that it was possible that the governor, Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, and the legislature, controlled by Republicans, could deadlock, and that a court would then have to draw a new map.
David Perdue, the Republican Senate candidate in Georgia, at a campaign rally in Perry on Tuesday.Credit Erik S. Lesser/European Pressphoto Agency
A bankruptcy court document that surfaced last week has roiled the Georgia race for retiring Senator Saxby Chambliss’s seat and put the Republican David Perdue on the defensive over his record as a business executive and his role sending jobs to low-wage countries.
Though most of the attention — and the attacks from his opponent, Michelle Nunn — have focused on comments he made about outsourcing, a close reading of the 186-page deposition, first disclosed last week by Politico, paints Mr. Perdue as a hard-charging hired gun who was so aggressive in claiming his compensation perks from his failing textile company that other executives accused him of a “money grab,” a characterization he hotly denied.
In page after page, Mr. Perdue, who had come from a lucrative post at Reebok, expresses more concern with his own financial security than with the tanking business and the 7,600 jobs that were going down with it.
“I just didn’t feel like the board and Oaktree were sensitive to the vulnerability that I was in,” the multimillionaire executive told lawyers in 2005, referring to Pillowtex, a North Carolina-based textile maker, and Oaktree Capital Management, the company’s largest financial backer.
“From my perspective, this thing had totally blown up in my face. The equity that I walked away from, the stock at Reebok continued to go up. This thing was not what it had been represented to me to be,” he complained.
As his company was heading toward bankruptcy, Mr. Perdue pressed the board for a $700,000 payout to cover taxes he owed on a signing bonus and $100,000 for a relocation he never actually took. He received both, as well as a $500,000 stipend to stay on during final, failed takeover negotiations that could have rescued Pillowtex. He announced his resignation that spring, effective after a two-week paid vacation.
Mr. Perdue pushed back this week against the criticism by saying that he was “proud” of his record and that outsourcing was “part of American business, part of any business.” In a debate Tuesday night, Mr. Perdue described the criticism as “another attempt by my desperate opposition” to distort his career. He quickly moved on to a critique of “bad government policies” that he contended have harmed the economy.
The Nunn campaign has made clear that Mr. Perdue’s comments will be a main line of attack during the campaign’s final weeks as it seeks to portray Mr. Perdue as out of touch with Georgia voters.
Representative Joyce Beatty, Democrat of Ohio, is part of a small group of minority lawmakers.Credit Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Updated, 3:31 p.m. |
Ronald Reagan once said that “a state is nothing more than a reflection of its citizens,” but new demographic research shows that these days that is hardly the case, if it ever was.
The findings revealed that 71 percent of elected officials were men, even though men represent less than half of the population. White men hold the most power, accounting for 65 percent of people in elected office.
According to the research, produced in conjunction with the New Organizing Institute and Rutgers University, 90 percent of elected officials are white. The authors say that taken together, their findings show that white men have eight times the political power of women of color.
Donna Hall, the president of the Women Donors Network, a group of female philanthropists, said that limited access to donors and deeply entrenched political relationships had made it difficult for women and minorities to break into politics on a national scale.
“Our democracy has no winners when the people who make it to the finish line do not represent the full array of talent and experience of the American people,” she said.
The group also polled 800 likely voters about the ideal makeup of Congress. The majority said that they wanted lawmakers who were “the best and brightest” and the “face of America”, rather than “an old boys club” that is made up of “the one percent.”
Douglas W. Elmendorf, the director of the Congressional Budget Office, in 2013.Credit Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Four years after an exploding budget deficit helped fuel a Tea Party electoral sweep, the federal government’s tide of red ink has receded — not only as an election issue but also as an economic problem.
The government ran a deficit of $486 billion in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the smallest since 2008, according to a report issued by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office on Wednesday. Measured against the size of the economy, the deficit — at 2.8 percent of the gross domestic product — is now lower than the average deficit over the past 40 years. That figure is down from 9.8 percent of G.D.P. in 2009.
While other economic indicators have been mixed, the federal government’s budget outlook has been strengthening. The budget office said federal tax revenues were up 9 percent over the 2013 fiscal year, while spending climbed just 1 percent. The C.B.O.’s deficit estimate is $20 billion smaller than the shortfall it projected as recently as August, a reflection of better-than-expected economic performance. Revenue came in $7 billion higher than expected, and spending was $13 billion lower than projections.
Corporate income taxes were up a whopping 18 percent over the year before, a result of rising profits.
An expanded Medicaid and subsidized health insurance under the Affordable Care Act pushed health care spending up $49 billion, or 19 percent. With the rising tide of baby boomer retirees, Social Security spending continued to climb, up 5 percent.
But those increases were nearly offset by declining spending in welfare programs as Americans either found jobs or were knocked off the unemployment rolls. Spending on unemployment benefits fell 34 percent, or $24 billion. Military spending declined 5 percent. And outlays by the Department of Homeland Security dropped 26 percent, in large part because disaster relief spending was down over the year before.
Spending on Medicaid, expanded under the Affordable Care Act, was actually lower than the C.B.O. had projected, helping the government beat red-ink expectations.
The “Better Know a District” segment on “The Colbert Report” is one of our favorites here on First Draft (although we’re growing increasingly worried that Mr. Colbert will not finish his 434-part series before taking over “The Late Show”; tonight’s segment is the 80th in the series).
Last night’s trip took us to (the Washington office) of Illinois’s Eighth District — “the Fightin’ Eighth!” — featuring Representative Tammy Duckworth. The interview touches on issues like an immigration overhaul and whether there is a difference between Taiwan and Thailand.
An earlier version of this post misstated the show Mr. Colbert will take over. It is “The Late Show,” not “The Tonight Show.”
Senator Rob Portman of Ohio came out in favor of same-sex marriage after learning that one of his sons was gay. “I think it will be a while, to the extent the party platform or the consensus of the party moves on it, but it’s moving in that direction,” Mr. Portman said.Credit Gabriella Demczuk/The New York Times
After the Supreme Court tacitly allowed same-sex marriage in five more states on Monday, the country moved a little bit closer to giving marriage rights to gay couples nationwide.
So when does Senator Rob Portman of Ohio — a Republican who came out in favor of same-sex marriage last year after learning that one of his sons was gay — think his party will join him in support?
“Oh, gosh, I don’t know,” Mr. Portman said in a phone interview on Tuesday.
Mr. Portman, who said he had discussions every week with people who have “very emotional and very deeply held” beliefs on both sides of the issue, said he looked at same-sex marriage “less politically than some people because it’s so personal to me.”
But, he said, the Republican Party is not quite ready to embrace same-sex marriage. “I think it will be a while, to the extent the party platform or the consensus of the party moves on it, but it’s moving in that direction,” he said.
And, Mr. Portman added, while he doesn’t think same-sex marriage is the main issue on most people’s minds in this election, it is hurting Republicans in their effort to win over young voters.
“A lot of voters younger and older alike are with Republicans on fiscal conservatism and economic growth, but they have concerns with our party on this issue,” Mr. Portman said. “And I think it will continue to be an issue that divides our party.”
Members of a militant group in Libya reported to have pledged allegiance to the Islamic State last week. Thirty-six percent of those surveyed in a CBS News poll said President Obama’s policies had made the country less safe from terrorism.Credit Reuters
President Obama continues to get low marks on his handling of the threat from the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. More than a third of the public views his policies as making the country less safe, and over half are concerned about another terrorist attack in the near future, according to the latest CBS News poll.
The poll also found that only a third think that Mr. Obama has done a good job assessing the threat from the Islamic State, although even fewer, 17 percent, say that Congress has done well in evaluating the risk posed by the militant group. American intelligence agencies are viewed slightly more positively by the public: 40 percent say they have done a good job gauging the threat from the group.
Although the economy tops the list of important issues in next month’s election, terrorism comes in second, tied with health care. Just over half of voters say the Republican Party will do a better job dealing with terrorism, while only a third think the Democrats would be better.
Thirty-six percent of those surveyed said Mr. Obama’s policies had made the country less safe from terrorism, while 29 percent said his policies had made the country more secure. There are strong partisan differences: 64 percent of Republicans think that Mr. Obama’s course of action has made the United States more vulnerable, while 53 percent of Democrats think his policies have made the country safer.
The nationwide telephone poll was conducted Oct. 3 to 6 with 1,260 adults of whom 1,068 said they were registered to vote. The margin of sampling error for both groups is plus or minus three percentage points.
Good Wednesday morning from Washington, where attention is shifting from baseball and back to midterm elections, President Obama and his party continue to drift apart, and Sarah Silverman makes a political ad that we can tell you about but cannot show you.
The Senate field is quickly narrowing, elevating the importance of the tight Colorado and Iowa races in the battle for control.
An official of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee confirmed Tuesday that the group was significantly scaling back its television advertising buy in Michigan. That follows a decision by its Republican counterpart to cancel about $1 million in commercials for two weeks in late October.
Those decisions reflect strategists’ beliefs that Representative Gary Peters, the Democrat, has the race in hand against the Republican, Terri Lynn Land, and that the money could be better spent in races that are up for grabs.
Here’s the emerging math. Republicans are heavily favored to take Democratic-held seats in three Republican-leaning states — Montana, South Dakota and West Virginia — giving the party three quick pickups of the six it needs to to take over.
Strategists for both parties now say that Minnesota, Oregon and Virginia — always seen as long-shots for Republicans — will remain in the Democrats’ hands. In New Hampshire, Senator Jeanne Shaheen holds a solid lead over Scott Brown, although neither side is writing off that race quite yet.
Republicans believe Alaska and Arkansas are going their way (the fourth and fifth pickups). But Senator Pat Roberts, the veteran Republican, is in trouble in Kansas, putting a seat at risk. Still, Republicans like their chances in Democrat-held Louisiana, a race that appears headed for a December runoff. And the Georgia seat, now held by a Republican, might not be decided until Jan. 6.
That leaves Colorado, Iowa and North Carolina as the “states the majority runs through,” as one Republican operative put it.
But Kay Hagan, North Carolina’s Democratic senator, is leading in polls after an $11.5 million splurge over the last three months. So watch for the resources being diverted from Michigan (and elsewhere) to help Republicans close a spending gap in Colorado and keep pace in Iowa.
As always, one of President Obama‘s main messages to Democratic donors on Tuesday was his fear that stagnating wages were erasing hope for a generation of middle-class Americans. And as always, it seemed almost comically divorced from his anything-but-middle-class audience.
The pitch on Tuesday was in Greenwich, Conn., at the gated mansion of Richard Richman – yes, his real name – a real estate mogul whose company has investment banking, construction, mortgage-banking, asset and property-management arms.
Flanked by a set of paintings depicting a fox hunt, Mr. Obama addressed the donors, who had paid $10,000 to $32,400 each to attend the dinner. “A combination of technology and globalization, but also policy, have made for a winner-take-all economy where folks in Greenwich, most of the folks in this room, are doing very well,” Mr. Obama said. But ordinary people, he said, worried about their children doing as well as they did.
Political fund-raisers — like this one, for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee — are ultimately about thanking the big-money donors, starting with his hosts. Mr. Obama praised the Richmans for their hospitality, though he joked that their dog, Spree, had gotten hair all over his pants.
“Fortunately, these days, I travel with one of those,” he paused for several seconds, searching for the word “rollers.”
New York — long proud of its reputation as the nation’s melting pot and the birthplace of the women’s movement — shares with Delaware a dubious distinction: They are the only states in a new study to rank in the bottom 10 in the proportion of both women and minorities among elected officials.
Illinois, Indiana, Maine, Montana, New Hampshire and the District of Columbia made the Top 10 as places where officialdom is “most reflective” of the women and the racial and ethnic minorities who live there.
In the study, to be released Wednesday by the Women Donors Network, states were ranked separately, by gender and race, on whether officials — from sheriff to United States senator — reflected their populations. The worst states for electing women were mostly in the South; those where minorities are under-represented were more evenly dispersed.
In the country as a whole, the study found, whites make up 63 percent of the population but fill nine out of 10 of the country’s more than 40,000 local, state and federal offices. Fifty-one percent of American are women, but men hold 71 percent of elective offices.
Maine’s three candidates for governor will face off at 8 this morning at the “Eggs and Issues” debate sponsored by the Portland Regional Chamber of Commerce.
The gubernatorial candidates in Massachusetts are to meet Wednesday at a chamber forum in Boston, also at 8 a.m.
And in Tennessee this month, Senator Lamar Alexander will meet his Democratic challenger, Gordon Ball, at a forum sponsored by the Tennessee farm bureau in Cookeville. Start time: 7:30 a.m.
More and more, it seems, candidates are debating at sunrise, rather than sunset, and less often in television studios than at events sponsored by the local chamber of commerce or another non-media outlet.
Nighttime debates sponsored by news organizations are still the norm, of course. But bit by bit, that quaint family-time ideal ritual has been blown to bits in the Internet era. Voters can now live-stream debates on their computers, replay them at another time or skip them and pick up highlights on Twitter.
The ratings for live televised debates in midterm elections are usually fairly low, said Ken Goldstein, a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco and a specialist in political media. And stations would rather not disrupt their early evening lineups for debates, which rarely break for a commercial sponsor.
KYW Newsradio in Philadelphia, which has been broadcasting live debates during morning drive time for 20 years, simulcast a governors’ debate last week in the morning on television, repeated it Sunday afternoon, made it available on its website and used excerpts on its TV and radio news shows.
But it has not broadcast the debate on television at night.
The comedian Sarah Silverman wants to do for pay equity what she did for President Obama in 2008 when she encouraged young Jews to head to Florida to persuade their grandparents to vote Obama. (That video went viral.)
Ms. Silverman is rather expressively raunchy in an unsuitable-for-work video to be released this morning in which she makes a pitch for donations to offset the $500,000 average lifetime earnings difference between men and women in similar jobs, a tax on womanhood, so to speak.
In the video, she appears to be preparing for a sex change and ambitiously says she hopes to crowd-source the more than $29 trillion needed to pay each woman what she is owed. Since that seems a stretch, Ms. Silverman says any contributions will go to the National Women’s Law Center, an education and advocacy group whose name, Ms. Silverman admits, sounds like “an old ladies’ gym.”
Justice John Paul Stevens, in The New York Review of Books, recommends the new book “Judging Statutes” and analyzes Justice Antonin Scalia’s approach to the law during his time the Supreme Court.
The New Republic says former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas had the “scariest reaction” to the Supreme Court’s gay marriage decision.
Christianity Today reports that more and more Americans are comfortable with their pastors talking politics from the pulpit.
The Des Moines Register has posted a video of Representative Steve King, the outspoken Republican, reading mean tweets about himself. One example: “I bet Steve King smells like mothballs and dusty Bibles.”
