Obama to focus on middle class in State of Union address
WASHINGTON
(Reuters) - President Barack Obama will challenge the Republican-led
Congress with tax-raising ideas for helping middle-class Americans in a
State of the Union speech on Tuesday that will set up a tough debate and
may impact the 2016 campaign to replace him.
Obama
will push a plan in his speech to increase middle class benefits by
hiking taxes by $320 billion over 10 years for the wealthy and financial
firms.
Obama and Republicans had signaled after the
November midterm election that they saw tax reform as a potential area
for compromise. But Republicans who control of both houses of Congress
are in no mood to raise taxes on anyone and were quick to pan Obama's
proposal.
"This plan that we'll hear about tonight
appears to be more about redistribution, with added complexity, and
class warfare, directed at job-creating small businesses, than about tax
reform," said Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, the Senate's top tax law
writer, in a speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Seems the West will do anything these days to avoid a confrontation with Vladimir Putin.
IS THERE NO ONE WHO WILL STAND UP FOR UKRAINE?
Oleksander
Turchynov, the secretary of Ukraine's national defense council, told
the country's parliament something startling last week. He said that
there were 8,500 Russian regular troops now deployed in eastern Ukraine
and that another 52,000 were poised just on the other side of its
eastern border.
The figures are dramatic-and so much larger
than what has been reported during the months of Russian attempts to
destabilize Ukraine, while Vladimir Putin
's denials of his troops' presence continue with stubborn
ridiculousness. I asked a Western security expert if the numbers sounded
plausible.
He responded: "It would be difficult to believe
that the Ukrainians could have such hard numbers on Russian troop
presence without that also being visible to Western intelligence." A day
later, Alexander Vershbow, NATO's deputy secretary-general, described
the situation in Ukraine as deteriorating.
F.B.I. Is Broadening Surveillance Role, Report Shows
WASHINGTON — Although the government’s warrantless surveillance program is associated with the National Security Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has gradually become a significant player in administering it, a newly declassified report shows.
In
2008, according to the report, the F.B.I. assumed the power to review
email accounts the N.S.A. wanted to collect through the “Prism” system,
which collects emails of foreigners from providers like Yahoo and
Google. The bureau’s top lawyer, Valerie E. Caproni, who is now a
Federal District Court judge, developed procedures to make sure no such
accounts belonged to Americans.
That
information is in a 231-page study by the Justice Department’s
inspector general about the F.B.I.’s activities under the FISA
Amendments Act of 2008, which authorized the surveillance program. The
report was entirely classified when completed in September 2012. But the government has now made a semi-redacted version of the report public in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by The New York Times.
The
Times filed the lawsuit after a wave of declassifications about
government surveillance activities in response to leaks by the former
intelligence contractor Edward J. Snowden.
