Ben Carson told Newsmax that he’ll decided in the Spring on whether he’ll run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.
Said Carson: “I will announce before May the 1st. I would just say that I am listening extremely carefully. I don’t want to do something that the American people do not want me to do.”
“Legislators in the 24 states where Republicans now hold total control plan to push a series of aggressive policy initiatives in the coming year aimed at limiting the power of the federal government and rekindling the culture wars,” the Washington Post reports.
“The unprecedented breadth of the Republican majority — the party now controls 31 governorships and 68 of 98 partisan legislative chambers — all but guarantees a new tide of conservative laws. Republicans plan to launch a fresh assault on the Common Core education standards, press abortion regulations, cut personal and corporate income taxes and take up dozens of measures challenging the power of labor unions and the Environmental Protection Agency.”
A new Gallup survey finds that concerns over the functioning of government tops the list of America’s concerns, beating out the economy.
2014 was also the first year since 2007 that the economy was not the top ranking issue.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) “has rolled over his Democratic opponents in Wisconsin, shutting down their allies in labor unions, turning back attempts to recall him and handily winning re-election in November,” the AP reports.
“But as he prepares for the possibility of taking his winning record into a campaign for president, Walker is running into trouble from an unexpected source: his own overwhelmingly Republican Legislature. Walker, who’s trying to polish an image of a governor who gets things done efficiently, is confronting lawmakers who want to flex their increased political power by wading into difficult issues, such as right-to-work legislation, to score major conservative victories.”
George Will: “Standing at the intersection of three foreign policy crises and a perennial constitutional tension, Bob Corker (R-TN), incoming chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, may be the senator who matters most in 2015.”
Think Progress looks at four things that were supposed to happen by 2015 if Barack Obama was re-elected president.
Lynn Vavreck: “These three pieces of evidence — that Mr. Romney was thought to be no less conservative before the primaries than during or after them, that his average rating didn’t shift much at all during the entire year, and that he was ideologically closer to most voters than Mr. Obama — bust the myth that Republicans lost the 2012 election because of ideological shifts in the primaries.”
“Mr. Romney did not lose the 2012 election because he was too conservative for general-election voters — or even for those who call themselves independents. The data could not be clearer on this point.”
“He said it was good — especially for a second-termer. See? My father’s a third-termer.”
— New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), quoted by the New York Times, after reading Mario Cuomo a draft of his inaugural speech just hours before he died.
Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) sustained injuries in a workout accident at his home in Nevada on New Year’s Day, Roll Call reports.
Reid was injured when a piece of equipment he was using to exercise broke, “causing him to fall and break a number of ribs and bones in his face.”
“Federal prosecutors have decided not to bring homicide charges against the man who wounded James Brady during an attempt on President Reagan’s life in 1981, citing a series of legal hiccups that would make attaining a conviction nearly impossible,” the Los Angeles Times reports.
“The gun control movement, blocked in Congress and facing mounting losses in federal elections, is tweaking its name, refining its goals and using the same-sex marriage movement as a model to take the fight to voters on the state level,” the New York Times reports.
“After a victory in November on a Washington State ballot measure that will require broader background checks on gun buyers, groups that promote gun regulations have turned away from Washington and the political races that have been largely futile. Instead, they are turning their attention — and their growing wallets — to other states that allow ballot measures.”
“An initiative seeking stricter background checks for certain purchasers has already qualified for the 2016 ballot in Nevada, where such a law was passed last year by the Legislature then vetoed by the governor. Advocates of gun safety — the term many now use instead of ‘gun control’ — are seeking lines on ballots in Arizona, Maine and Oregon as well.”
New York Times: “With more than 120 years in the House and Senate among them, four lawmakers offered a bit of parting wisdom to Capitol Hill newcomers: Partisanship is easy, governing is hard.”
“As the 114th Congress prepares to convene on Tuesday, some senior members, who will not be returning, reflected on what they saw as necessary to the success of both lawmakers and the institution.”
“President Obama ordered new economic sanctions Friday against North Korea aimed at increasing financial pressure on the rogue state’s leadership, a preliminary retaliatory action by the Obama administration in response to what it calls the ‘destructive and coercive’ cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment computers,” the Los Angeles Times reports.
“The executive order signed by the president builds on existing sanctions against North Korea by directing the Treasury Department to cut off access to the U.S. financial sector for 10 individuals and three government entities identified as key operatives engaged in or connected to antagonistic behavior, including the country’s intelligence agency and defense officials.”
Politico: “Republicans are hatching an ambitious plan to rewrite No Child Left Behind next year — one that could end up dramatically rolling back the federal role in education and trigger national blowouts over standardized tests and teacher training.”
Ken Auletta: “Cuomo did not go all the way in baseball (he couldn’t hit a curveball). Nor did he go all the way in politics. He chose not to run for President in 1992 because his ambition was superseded by his distaste for the grovelling, the fundraising, the selling, the motels. He did, however, ‘go all the way’ as a public man.”
“Mario Cuomo had a combination of skills rarely seen in public life. Unlike most pols, he had an active interior life. He spent hours reflecting on events and writing in his diary, not to tout his greatness but to formulate his own thinking. His bookcases were crammed with books he had read and annotated—works by Aristotle, Dante, Marcus Aurelius, and the Jesuit theologian Teilhard de Chardin. His ego was in check and, unlike such able contemporaries as Ed Koch and Hugh Carey, he did not treat others in a room as his audience. He had the rare ability to listen, and he could see four sides of an issue.”
The New York Post says New York City police have launched a “virtual work stoppage.”
Matt Taibbi: “My first response to this news was confusion. I get why the police are protesting – they’re pissed at Mayor de Blasio, and more on that in a minute – but this sort of ‘protest’ pulls this story out of the standard left-right culture war script it had been following and into surreal territory.”
“I don’t know any police officer anywhere who would refuse to arrest a truly dangerous criminal as part of a PBA-led political gambit. So the essence of this protest seems now to be about trying to hit de Blasio where it hurts, i.e. in the budget, without actually endangering the public. So this police protest, unwittingly, is leading to the exposure of the very policies that anger so many different constituencies about modern law-enforcement tactics.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
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