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At the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library, President Obama and former President Clinton took to the podium to praise Bush – and in the process, stump for their version of immigration reform. Trying to leverage Republicans into handing over their principles by suddenly singing odes to the president he labeled the root of all evil, President Obama gushed over Bush “reaching across the aisle to unlikely allies like Ted Kennedy” with regard to his immigration reform effort. He continued: “Seven years ago, President Bush restarted an important conversation by speaking with the American people about our history...

Israel's top military intelligence official said Tuesday that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons repeatedly, and he criticized the international community for not taking tougher action against the Syrian leadership. Israel and the Syrian opposition have on multiple occasions accused President Bashar Assad's government of using chemical weapons in the country's civil war, but have not offered much in the way of evidence. Israeli Brig. Gen. Itai Brun, speaking at a security conference in Israel, gave the most definitive statement so far by an Israeli official. "To the best of our professional understanding, the regime used lethal chemical weapons...

The 19-year-old suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings has told interrogators that the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan motivated him and his brother to carry out the attack, according to U.S. officials familiar with the interviews. --------------snip------------------------------ The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe an ongoing investigation, said Dzhokhar and his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed by police as the two attempted to avoid capture, do not appear to have been directed by a foreign terrorist organization. Rather, the officials said, the evidence so far suggests they were “self-radicalized” through Internet sites and U.S....

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — Zombies seem to be everywhere these days. In the popular TV series "The Walking Dead," humans struggle to escape from a pack of zombies hungry for flesh. Prank alerts have warned of a zombie apocalypse on radio stations in a handful of states. And across the country, zombie wannabes in tattered clothes occasionally fill local parks, gurgling moans of the undead.

Three leading House Energy and Commerce Committee Democrats are calling for an oversight hearing on the Federal Communications Commission's Lifeline program, a phone subsidy for the poor that has been disparagingly referred to as the "Obama phone" program. The program, which began long before President Obama took office, has been notorious for waste and abuse. The FCC enacted reforms last year aimed at trimming billions of dollars from the program, but recent reports indicate that people who are ineligible for the program are still receiving subsidies. The program gained more attention last year when conservatives seized on a viral video...

On the web-only "Overtime" segment of HBO's "Real Time" with host Bill Maher, guest Tina Brown, editor in chief of Newsweek/Daily Beast, said if President Obama were former President George W. Bush he would have been impeached by now.

Steven Chu, the retiring Secretary of Energy, is blaming the power outage at the Superbowl on the Republicans. Steven Chu had arranged to have the Superbowl completely powered by solar panels as a final act of demonstrating the reliability and feasibility of solar power. To accomplish it, he had asked the Food Stamp President to request Congress to change the day/night ratio to 80% daylight versus 20% night to support the increased light requirements. The Republicans laughed off the request and the resultant unexpected darkness rendered the solar panels inoperable. The battery and generator backups proved to be up to...

Boomer Esiason, the former Cincinnati Bengals quarterback and co-host "The NFL Today" on CBS, said Beyonce's halftime performance may have been responsible for the 34-minute blackout during Sunday's Super Bowl between Baltimore and San Francisco. “Beyonce blew the electric in the Superdome twice, I’m told, during her rehearsals during the week," Esiason said on Monday on his radio show. Esiason recalled there was a buzzing sound in the Superdome shortly after Beyonce's halftime show. On his "Boomer & Carton" radio show, Esiason said about "five or six minutes prior to" the "the breaker going," Kevin Harlan, a CBS announcer who...

President Obama blamed the recent contraction of the U.S. economy on “bad decisions in Washington” in his weekly address. The national economy shrank by 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012, according to figures released this week by the Commerce Department. The contraction was an unexpected reversal of months of modest economic growth since the end of the recession in mid-2009. Obama said in his address that the dip was the fault of “bad decisions” being made in Washington. “We began this year with economists and business leaders saying that we are poised to grow in 2013,” he said....

It's being reported on KXAN.com noon news that multiple people shot at on Lone Star College in Houston, TX. It's a tech school.

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: This is hilarious. As you know, ladies and gentlemen, beginning with the first day of the year, and because of the fiscal cliff deal, the temporary partial tax cut on the Social Security tax expired. There was a temporary partial exemption on the payroll tax. I've been asked if most people noticed it. They didn't notice it until they were told about it. It added up to, depending on your income, it could be a thousand dollars a year that you had extra because of this partial tax. Anyway, on January 1, that partial temporary tax cut...

Bonnie Gray knows there are people out there who are worse off than she is. After all, at least she has a job. It’s just not a full-time gig. Like many other Americans, she works part time and it’s barely enough to pay for food, fuel and shelter. Millions of Americans were working part time in November but they would like to have been working full time. These so-called “involuntary part-time workers” are an example of some of the stubborn pockets of weakness that remain in the labor market even as the jobs picture improves very slowly. The Bureau of...

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo made headlines and raised eyebrows Monday when he said that while Hurricane Katrina was deadlier than Hurricane Sandy, the latter storm was “more impactful” over all and “affected many, many more people and places than Katrina.” Mr. Cuomo added that Hurricane Sandy had a greater economic impact, destroyed or damaged more units of housing, affected more businesses and caused more customers to lose power. For our part, City Room decided to undertake a little truth-squadding. While apples-to-apples numbers for the two storms are very difficult to come by, especially given that Hurricane Sandy’s costs are still...

In an emergency evacuation, there will always be people who stay behind to protect their personal belongings. People who ignored evacuation warnings had to be rescued and some lost their lives in one of the worst storms in the history of natural disasters in the United States.The biggest challenges were hunger and cold because of electrical outages. More than 8.1 million homes and businesses lost power.In the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, city leaders across the country are asking how their city would respond to a similar disaster and examining their preparedness and self-reliance needs. Sandy would have resulted in much...

Rising prices and chronic unemployment were heavy on the minds of voters Tuesday even as a glimmer of optimism peeked through. Four in 10 said the nation’s battered economy is getting better. Most everyone agreed there’s still far to go. They were less likely to blame President Barack Obama for the economic troubles, however, than to point the finger at his predecessor, George W. Bush, according to preliminary results of a national exit poll. Only a fourth thought they were better off financially than four years ago when Obama was elected. Voters were most likely to say their families were...

The U.S. has lost track of some of Syria’s chemical weapons, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Friday, and does not know if any potentially lethal chemicals have fallen into the hands of Syrian rebels or Iranian forces inside the country. “There has been intelligence that there have been some moves that have taken place. Where exactly that’s taken place, we don’t know.” Panetta said, in a Pentagon press briefing.

Bill Clinton: No president could have "magically" fixed economy in one term By Leigh Ann Caldwell Last Updated 10:12 a.m. ET (CBS News) Former President Bill Clinton offered a strong defense for President Obama's re-election Sunday morning, arguing that no president could have "fully healed" the economy in four years. "That's why we've got to keep working at it," Mr. Clinton said on "Face the Nation." The president's efforts, Mr. Clinton argued, have reversed the downward spiral of losing up to 800,000 jobs per month. "His jobs record is better" than the Bush administration's, he said, adding that no president...

Asked about the Fast and Furious program at the Univision forum on Thursday, President Obama falsely claimed that the program began under President George W. Bush. “I think it’s important for us to understand that the Fast and Furious program was a field-initiated program begun under the previous administration,” the president said. “When Eric Holder found out about it, he discontinued it. We assigned a inspector general to do a thorough report that was just issued, confirming that in fact Eric Holder did not know about this, that he took prompt action and the people who did initiate this were...

(April 24, 2011) Abu Sufian Ibrahim Ahmed Hamuda bin Qumu was a prisoner at the Guantánamo Bay prison, judged “a probable member of Al Qaeda” by the analysts there. They concluded in a newly disclosed 2005 assessment that his release would represent a “medium to high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the U.S., its interests and allies.” Today, Mr. Qumu, 51, is a notable figure in the Libyan rebels’ fight to oust Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, reportedly a leader of a ragtag band of fighters known as the Darnah Brigade for his birthplace, this shabby port...

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