The hosts of Fox & Friends on Friday suggested that fast food workers should stop striking for higher pay and get a second job because the minimum wage "was never meant to be a career wage."
On Thursday, hundreds of restaurant workers in New York City went on strike to demand a wage of at least $15 an hour. The current median wage of $9 an hour puts workers at about $4,500 lower that the poverty threshold of $23,000 for a family of four. The current minimum wage in New York City is $7.25.
"Here's the deal, you're a minimum wage worker, that's an entry-level salary," Fox News host Brian Kilmeade opined on Friday. "If you're good, you'll get a raise."
"Minimum wage was never meant to be a career wage. If you work hard you will get higher -- you will get more money. Here's the other thing, as hard as it is in some cases, because you are a single mom or a single dad, you've got to get another job. You've got to get another job on top of that so you have two incomes."
"Brian you hit on the nose, I think, the key thing," co-host Steve Doocy remarked. "If it is a minimum wage job, expect to get paid the minimum wage."
"The National Restaurant Association said that they provide 13 million jobs, and those jobs could be jeopardized across the country if the minimum wage goes up," he added. "The industry says one of the best paths to achieving the American dream is to start with an entry level, minimum-wage job that is minimum wage."
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on Sunday suggested that President Barack Obama was "disengaged" and personally responsible for some of the deaths caused by a terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi on Sept. 11 of last year, but seemingly forgot that President George W. Bush read the book "My Pet Goat" for seven minutes as almost 3,000 people died during the 2001 terrorist attacks.
"Did the president at any time during this eight hour attack pick up the phone and call anybody in Libya to get help for these folks?" Graham opined during an interview on CBS News. "And I do believe if he had picked up the phone, called the Libyan government, these folks could have gotten out of the airport to the annex, and the last two guys may very well be alive... But if he failed to call on behalf of those people under siege then I think that's a massive failure of leadership by our commander in chief."
CBS host Bob Schieffer asked Graham if he had any proof that the president had not made an attempt to contact Libya during the September attacks.
"I don't know what the president did that evening," the South Carolina senator admitted. "I don't know if he ever called anyone, I know that he never talked to the secretary of defense, I know that he never talked to the chairman of the Join Chiefs. They never talked to anybody at the White House."
"This was incredibly mismanaged, and what we know now, it seems to be a very disengaged president," he added. "Again, if he had lent his voice to this cause, I think it would have made a big difference. And I'm not going to stop until we get an accounting."
"We know nothing about what the president did on the night of Sept. 11th during a time of national crisis, and the American people need to know what their commander in chief did, if anything, during the eight hour attack."
As Bush was reading the book "My Pet Goat" with school children on Sept. 11, 2001, Chief of Staff Andrew Card interrupted to let him know a second plane had hit the World Trade Center in New York City.
Republican New York Congressman Peter King was near tears on Wednesday as he threatened to leave the Republican Party, while excoriating the leadership and other members after they reversed course and refused to pass a relief package for victims of Hurricane Sandy.
In an emotional interview with CNN, King pointed a finger directly at House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) for the failure to bring Sandy aid up for a vote after passing a bill to avert the so-called fiscal cliff.
"Boehner is the one," the New York Republican explained. "He walked off the floor. He refused to tell us why. He refused to give us any indication or warning whatsoever... I'm just saying, these people have no problem finding New York -- these Republicans -- when they're trying to raise money. They raise millions of dollars in New York City and New Jersey, they sent Gov. [Chris] Christie around the country raising millions of dollars for them. I'm saying, anyone from New York and New Jersey who contributes one penny to the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee should have their head examined. I would not give one penny to these people based on what they did to us last night."
CNN host Victor Blackwell wondered if King's disgust over scuttling the hurricane relief was enough to make him leave the Republican Party.
"I'm going to do what I have to do," King insisted. "I'm going to be independent minded. Sometimes, as John Kennedy said, party loyalty demands too much. And I would -- as all of us do -- often, you give the benefit of the doubt to your party. We are a two-party system. But I'm over that because as the very least, you're expected to be treated fairly... When your people are literally freezing in the winter and they're without food and they're without shelter and they're without clothing and my own party refuses to help them, then why should I help the Republican Party?"
King recalled that Boehner refused to even speak to the Republican lawmakers from hurricane-stricken areas, at one point yelling, "I'm not going to meet with you people!"
"I was chasing the Speaker all over the House floor last night," he said. "So he wouldn't tell us why, he just decided to sneak off in the dark of night."
"I would say that the Republican Party says that it's the party of family values," King continued. "Last night, it decided to turn its back on the most essential value of all. And that's to provide food, shelter, clothing and relief for people who have been hit by a natural disaster. And I would say that the Republican Party has turned its back on those people. And it's going to be very hard for me to ask any of those people to vote for the national Republican Party."
"We were told everything was on board, everything was ready, we had all the papers ready to go, we had lined up the votes, we had the committed votes where this bill would have passed on the House floor with no problem at all, we had gone around and spoken to people, we had done everything we were asked to do. And, again, the knife in the back. And that's all it is."
UPDATE: A few hours later everything was hunky-dory between King and Boehner with the promise of $9 billion and a vote in a couple of weeks. Is there a more useless politician in America than Peter King?
(CNN) – Republican Rep. Peter King of New York said Wednesday that House Speaker John Boehner has promised a vote Friday on $9 billion in disaster aid for Superstorm Sandy and then another vote on $51 billion in aid on January 15.
Saturday Night Live opened their show with a powerful and heartbreaking tribute to the recent massacre at a Connecticut elementary school. Instead of going for laughs in their cold open, The New York City Children's Chorus performed "Silent Night."
"Silent night, holy night / All is calm, all is bright / Round yon Virgin Mother and Child / Holy Infant so tender and mild."
"Sleep in heavenly peace / Sleep in heavenly peace."
Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R) says that the presidential election is now trending towards President Barack Obama because of Hurricane Sandy.
During a Sunday panel segment on State of the Union, CNN's Candy Crowley noted that the president had gotten a boost after New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced his endorsement in the aftermath of the super storm.
"He said that he thinks President Obama is better on the issue of climate change," CNN Senior Congressional Correspondent Dana Bash explained. "And that the hurricane -- the super storm -- was a reminder from his perspective of what's going on with the climate."
"But that wasn't the best thing that happened to Barack Obama this week," Barbour noted. "The hurricane is what broke Romney's momentum. I don't think there's any question about it."
"Any day that the news media is not talking about jobs and the economy, taxes and spending, deficits and debt, Obamacare and energy is a good day for Barack Obama. You had a blackout -- you had a blackout on all of those issues that started about last Saturday and lasted until about yesterday. That was what was really good for Barack Obama."
Barbour added that Obama's proactive response to Hurricane Sandy didn't "help him a bit."
"What happened is that the news media absolutely blacked out any coverage of the issues that have been the issues of this campaign," the former governor insisted. "Nothing was stopping Romney's momentum. No matter what Obama did, he couldn't stop the momentum. This blackout -- and I'm not blaming the news media -- just all the news coverage was about everything but Obama's policies and the results of those policies."
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani says that if President Barack Obama's health care reform law is going to force insurance companies to cover contraception then "it's only fair" that men are provided with pills to treat erectile dysfunction.
Speaking to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce earlier this week, the surrogate for Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney hinted at the controversy over the Obama's administration's mandate that all health insurance cover contraception for women and warned that the "commissars in Washington" could expand coverage even further in the future.
"They get to write the list of what is legally sufficient health insurance," he explained. "I hate to bring this up because I don't think Gov. Romney would like me to bring this up, but I will. This is what made health care in Massachusetts three times more expensive than people thought. Because when they sat down to define health insurance, everybody added everything to the list and the cost of health insurance went way up."
"That's going to happen on a national level," Giuliani continued. "And you know an Obama appointed commission is going to cover everything. If you cover condoms, I mean, you've got to cover everything, right?"
"If you cover condoms, you should cover Viagra. It's only fair."
Ann Coulter on Monday suggested that “we had paradise for a dozen years” after O.J. Simpson was acquitted for murder because African Americans stopped making white people feel guilty for racial unfairness.
During an interview on Fox News, Coulter told host Sean Hannity that her new book “Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama” proved that “everyone — blacks especially — are better off when the white guilt bank is shut down as it was for more than a decade after the O.J. verdict.”
“Liberals kept trying to push the racial narrative in their newspapers and on TV, but Americans just weren’t buying it,” she explained. “After Oct. 3, 1994 when they heard the verdict and saw black law students at Howard University cheering it, that was it.”
“And for a dozen years, we had paradise. Suddenly, people weren’t walking on eggshells, you could have [then-New York City Mayor Rudy] Giuliani enforcing sane criminal laws in New York and not caring that we was constantly being called a racist by liberals and Al Sharpton, the Clinton administration. And look what it did, it transformed the city and it saved — because the policies were continued — tens of thousands of black lives.” Read on...
Fox News host Steve Doocy on Monday likened the latest Occupy Wall Street protests to the attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Libya that resulted in the deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.
During a segment on Fox & Friends, Doocy asked Fox News contributor (and conservative "comedian") Steven Crowder to comment on protests in New York City that mark the one-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street.
"But a new report from the AP says the group is in total disarray, it's completely fallen apart," Doocy told Crowder. "Would you agree with that assessment? You know what, they just don't know what they're doing these days?"
"Here's the thing, the movement is entirely based on selfish motives," Crowder explained. "So, it has to implode under its own weight. I talked with Tucker Carlson about this yesterday. You know, the tea party -- because it's the most comparable movement in the last decade -- is inextricably tied to conservatism. It's attached to an ism. The ism of life, freedom, pursuit of happiness, constitutionally limited government. The Occupy movement is based on wanting more free crap. It's like herding cats, and that's why you see the biggest mark the Occupy movement has made, Steve, really over the last year has been a mark of crime."
"Sure," Doocy agreed. "And we're looking at some of the video next to our faces right now and that almost looks like what happened last week in Libya and in Cairo, and we're talking about the Occupy forces moving out. In the last year, 7,000 arrests in 119 different cities."
"The tea party leveraged their ideology into really political influence of keeping conservative candidates accountable to the platform they publicly professed," Crowder insisted. "Occupiers were able to do none of that because -- Steve, you can say it with me -- they just want more free crap. We'll make it a sing-song for them. Exactly, they can follow the dancing crack pipe."
CBS's Bob Schieffer spoke to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg this Sunday about the shootings in Aurora, CO this weekend and unlike some of our other politicians out there, Bloomberg wasn't worried about any backlash from the NRA with speaking out on the need for some rational gun control laws in America and to enforce the ones that are already on the books.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has a question for President Obama and Mitt Romney in response to the mass shootings in Colorado: "What are you going to do?"
"You know, Governor Romney when he was governor of Massachusetts actually passed a ban on assault weapons, and President Obama when he came into office in 2008 said he would reinstitute a federal ban on assault weapons," Bloomberg told CBS News chief Washington correspondent Bob Schieffer, in an interview for "Face the Nation."
"The governor has apparently changed his views, and the president has spent the last three years trying to avoid the issue - or if he's facing it, I don't know anybody that's seen him face it.
"It's time for both of them to be called, held accountable," he continued. "You know, we spend all our time talking about tax returns, and gaffes, and things like that. This is one of those issues, along with a handful of others, that really matter to the American public. It matters to the future of our country, it matters to you and me and to our children and grandchildren. And it's time I think that we hold them accountable and say, 'Okay, you want our votes? What are you going to do?'"
A elementary school principal at PS 195 in Queens, New York City has barred a fifth-grade student from delivering a speech about marriage equality to the rest of the school even though he won a class competition.
Same sex marriage is legal in New York, but principal Beryl Bailey told Kameron Slade's mother that the topic was not appropriate for a school speech. The boy was given the choice of writing another speech or sitting out of the contest.
"For him to be denied the right to voice his opinion really upsets me," the mother told NY1.
Kameron Slade explained why he was disappointed when he got the news.
"I was really looking forward to it," Kameron remarked. "I thought that this was a real good winning speech for tomorrow."
"She said that people have different opinions on it and that some parents may not want their children to learn about this type of topic."
In his speech, the student says he supports marriage equality and calls for tolerance from others.
"Like President Obama, I believe that all people should have the right to marry whoever they want," Kameron insists, speaking of his mother's gay friends. "They seem happy and best of all, they seem to love each other."
The school's website indicated that "Democracy Speeches" were being delivered by grades 1-5 on Friday.
For his part, the Kameron said he was preparing a new speech about animal cruelty.
"Public schools, like all institutions of learning, are supposed to teach facts and relevant topics," The New Civil Rights Movement's David Badash observed. "Schools need to recognize that for students to learn about equality, they have to start teaching it."
