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House Democrats are continuing to block testimony from about a dozen witnesses who sought to appear before the intelligence oversight panel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. Congressional officials said one of the key witnesses, former informal adviser to the Trump campaign Carter Page, was scheduled to testify at a closed hearing of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

For almost ten years, Hot Air has utilized a proprietary, members-only comment system. In 2006, this kind of system made much sense, but Internet standards and technology have moved beyond this kind of system. Beginning tomorrow, Hot Air will move from its present proprietary closed-comment system to Facebook comments. At that time, native commenting functions will cease, and all comments will come through the Facebook interface.

Every day more children come. They cross the Rio Grande on rafts. Some have Hello Kitty backpacks. Some come with their mothers, but many are on their own. They come from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador. Many are teenagers, but some are no more than toddlers. Some disappear before they ever make it to the United States.

It's no secret that Japan was, shall we say, 'economically disadvantaged' in her ability to wage war against the Allies. However, the sheer, stunning magnitude of this economic disparity has never ceased to amaze me. So, just go give you an idea of the magnitude of the mismatch here, I decided to compile a few statistics. Most of them are taken from Paul Kennedy's "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" (which, among other things, contains an excellent analysis of the economic forces at work in World War II, and is an all-around great book) and John Ellis' "World...

Call this a triumph of nuance over plain speaking, which sounds like a good description of standard operational diplo-speak, too. The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler — who used to work the diplomatic beat — decided to fact-check Barack Obama’s assertion this week that “I didn’t set the red line” on Syria’s use of chemical weapons, but that the world did. Kessler doesn’t assign Obama any Pinocchios for this dodge, but he doesn’t let the President off the hook, either.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Economic issues dominate Americans' concerns about the nation's future. Americans say the economy (17%) is their greatest worry or concern for the future of the United States, followed by the federal debt (11%). Five percent or more also mention jobs and international wars and conflicts.

SEN. MITCH MCCONNELL (R-KY): "I am prepared to say, and I will say today, I think the president and his political allies encouraged this kind of bureaucratic overreach by their public comments. But that’s quite different from saying they ordered it. With regard to who’s actually responsible for it, we need to find out: that investigation will go on for quite some time."

While the controversy over the National Security Agency surveillance program has dominated the news recently, concern about the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of Tea Party groups and other conservative organizations remains high and is inching up. Despite the large number of controversies engulfing official Washington, the number of people following the IRS scandal has actually increased in recent weeks.

For the past five years, a fierce war of words and policies has been fought in America and other economically challenged countries around the world. On one side were economists and politicians who wanted to increase government spending to offset weakness in the private sector. This "stimulus" spending, economists like Paul Krugman argued, would help reduce unemployment and prop up economic growth until the private sector healed itself and began to spend again. On the other side were economists and politicians who wanted to cut spending to reduce deficits and "restore confidence." Government stimulus, these folks argued, would only increase...

Gallup is now tentatively planning on conducting interviewing over the last four days of this week, Thursday through Sunday, to provide a final pre-election estimate of the election race. The decisions we make on the validity of the sample and the analysis of the data that results will be carefully informed by the degree of recovery from the storm over the period of the survey.

A pollster for President Barack Obama is disputing the accuracy of the latest Gallup/USA Today survey that shows Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney tied at 48 percent among likely women voters in battleground states. Joel Benenson says this result "is an extreme outlier, defying the trends seen in every other battleground and national poll." Benenson argues that Obama remains ahead among women.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/archive/mood_of_america_archive/partisan_trends/summary_of_party_affiliation

Justice Department officials joined a whistle blower lawsuit and alleged that The Gallup Organization, a major polling firm, intentionally overestimated the amount of time it would take to complete a job for the government and was paid accordingly. “Contractors who do business with the federal government must honor their obligations to provide honest services and products,” said U.S. Attorney Ronald C. Machen Jr. in a statement on the lawsuit. “Working with relators and federal investigators, we will do all that we can to act against those who illegitimately bill the American taxpayers.”

For the first time since early July, more Americans approve of the job President Barack Obama is doing than disapprove, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll that shows his approval rating now at 50 percent. The poll, taken March 8-11 on the heels of reports that 227,000 jobs were added to the U.S. economy in February, indicates that Obama's rating has risen by 2 percentage points during the past month. The percentage of Americans who disapprove of the Democratic president was 48 percent, down from 49 percent in February.

The number of Republicans in the country was virtually unchanged in February, while the number of Democrats fell to a new low for the third month in a row. During February, 36.0% of Americans considered themselves Republicans. That’s up from 35.9% in January and the highest number of Republicans measured since December 2010.