Page 7 - Florida Sentinel 10-30-15 Edition

White House News
President Obama Wins: Budget Agreement Struck
Trump On His Drop In
WASHINGTON — The budget agreement struck late Monday between the White House and Congress hands President Obama a major victory, vindi- cating his hard line this year against spending limits that he argued were a drag on the econ- omy and also buying himself freedom for the final 14 months of his term from the fiscal dys- function that has plagued his presidency.
The deal is the policy equiva- lent of keeping the lights on — hardly the stuff of a bold fiscal legacy for the President — but it achieves the main objective of his 2016 budget: to break free of the spending shackles he agreed to when he signed the Budget Con- trol Act of 2011.
For this fiscal year alone, the deal would add $50 billion in spending, divided equally be- tween defense and domestic pro- grams, as well as $16 billion for emergency war spending, half for the military, and half for the State Department. Together, that rep- resents an increase of $66 billion in the spending limits for 2016, not far off the $70 billion increase Mr. Obama requested in his budget.
From the moment he intro- duced his budget on Feb. 2, the
two years while enacting an array of cuts that the Democrats found palatable. The deal also would suspend the statutory debt limit — on track to be breached on Tuesday without action from Congress — until March 2017, beyond his presidency.
In the end, the retirement of Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio, Pres. Obama’s negotiat- ing partner in several abortive at- tempts at a much more sweeping fiscal deal, handed the Presi- dent the leverage he needed to break the budget impasse for the remainder of his term. Mr. Boehner said he wanted to “clean out the barn” before hand- ing over his gavel to a successor, telegraphing to Mr. Obama that there was an opening for an agreement. Rep. Paul Ryan on Tuesday blasted Speaker John Boehner, Senate leadership and the White House for the secretive process they used to negotiate a two-year budget and debt ceiling agreement that appears poised to pass Congress this week.
“I think the process stinks,” said Ryan, who is expected to be elected speaker on Thursday. The Wisconsin Republican added that he hadn’t gone through the details of the agreement, which was released Monday night.
The Polls: ‘I Don’t Get It’
As his support slips, the blustery billionaire goes on a rant against Carson and polls.
Pres. Obama was handed a major victory by Congress.
President held firm on his insis- tence on breaking through the punishing across-the-board cuts known as sequestration in the Budget Control Act to provide equal increases to domestic and military spending.
Senate Democrats created an impenetrable wall for Republi- cans determined to stick to the caps, filibustering the spending bills that reached the Senate floor and threatening to block the ones that did not.
The result was a deal that would raise spending $80 billion, or about 1 percent, over the next
BEN CARSON And DONALD TRUMP
President’s Speech To Police Chiefs: Tougher Gun Laws
Donald Trump appears to be getting a lesson in gravity. And he’s not happy about it.
For more than three months, Trump’s rise in the Republican polls continued unabated, whether nationwide or in individual states. But be- ginning last Thursday, a quar- tet of polls showed Ben Carson, another political out- sider, rising above the Man- hattan real-estate magnate in the first caucus state of Iowa. Then on Tuesday, more bad news for the previously un- stoppable billionaire business- man — for the first time in a national poll, Carson over- took Trump.
Trump’s response to being No. 2? “Well, I don’t get it.”
“I’m going there actually today and I have tremendous crowds and tremendous love in the room and, you know, we seem to have hit a chord,” Trump continued, talking on Tuesday to MSNBC’s “Morn- ing Joe” about the Iowa polls.
“But some of these polls com- ing out, I don’t quite get it. I was No. 1 pretty much in Iowa from the beginning, and I would say we’re doing very well there. So I’m a little bit surprised ... The other polls, as you know, in other states are extraordinary, actually. This one I don’t quite get. I would have thought we were doing much better. I think we are doing much better, actually.”
There are plenty of caveats to Trump’s slippage — Car- son’s lead in the national poll is within the survey’s margin of error, Carson’s own stay- ing power could be in jeopardy as he gets more media scrutiny, and many reports of Trump’s imminent implosion have proved premature.
Still, the national CBS News/New York Times survey that showed Carson grab- bing 26 percent to Trump’s 22 percent got people wonder- ing what a Trump campaign that’s not at the top looks like.
President
Barack Obama
returned Tues-
day to his home-
town, a city that
has become a na-
tional symbol of gun
violence, and spoke with police leaders from around the country about the need for tougher firearm laws.
In his speech at the annual conference for the International Association of Chiefs of Police at McCormick Place, Pres. Obama pushed for national
laws that make it harder to get around local restrictions by sim- ply driving across a state border with less stringent gun laws.
Weaker guns laws in Indiana, for instance, have long been a problem for Chicago police, lead- ing to a steady stream of illegal guns crossing the border and ending up on the city’s West and South sides. A recent report is- sued by the city said 60 percent of the illegal guns recovered by Chicago police from 2009 to 2013 came from out of state, many from Indiana.
The President’s visit comes at a time when Chicago contin- ues to struggle with gun violence. Even on the most recent late Oc- tober weekend, shootings left 28 people wounded and six killed.
Speaking to reporters Monday at the police chiefs’ conference, Chicago Police Superinten- dent Garry McCarthy stuck to his familiar script of blaming Chicago’s violence on easy access to illegal firearms and a criminal justice system that doesn’t put away gun offenders for long enough.
Education Department: Testing Too Much Is Partly Our Fault
The Education Department took some of the blame for the sometimes stressful, excessive and time-consuming testing at many schools and said last Sat- urday that it hasn't done enough to help states tackle the prob- lem.
The Obama administration is responding to loud com- plaints from across the country about how much time students spend on testing and the dozens of consequences now associated with poor results on those exams for students and teachers — policies it had a hand in ex- panding. Schools have taken on a "test-and-punish" culture, ad- vocates say, a movement that got underway with the 2002 No Child Left Behind law.
"In too many schools, there is unnecessary testing and not
Pres. Obama and former Sec. Of Education Arne Duncan meet with students.
enough clarity of purpose ap- plied to the task of assessing students, consuming too much instructional time and creating undue stress for educators and students," the plan says. "The administration bears some of the responsibility for this, and we are committed to being part of the solution."
The department issued a
"testing action plan" with rec- ommendations and proposals for cutting back on testing that include easing up on the widely criticized use of student test scores in a proposed rule about evaluating training programs for teachers.
The final rule, expected in December, will still emphasize student learning, the depart- ment noted. But states will have flexibility on how to weigh those test results when college educa- tion programs are evaluated.
The Obama administration has said repeatedly this year that it has concerns about how much testing students are ex- posed to while emphasizing the need for quality testing and the preservation of annual testing, in part to protect students' civil rights.
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