Politics

The Tampa Bay Times digs into Rubio’s record in the Senate and finds unsurprisingly that he has skipped out on most of his committee responsibilities:

A new, sweeping review of all committees Rubio has sat on since taking office in 2011 paints a bleak picture of participation in the day-to-day responsibilities of the job.

Rubio is on the Foreign Relations, Intelligence, Commerce and Small Business and Entrepreneurship committees. The Florida Republican has missed 68 percent of hearings, or 407 of 598 for which records were available.

US warplanes carried out a series of airstrikes on an ISIS base in western Libya, targeting a leader linked to last year’s beach massacre in Tunisia. The air strikes on Friday came just hours after it was reported that the Obama administration had planned to veto a proposal to bomb ISIS targets in Libya. Noureddine Chouchane, the operative suspected of being behind two Tunisia attacks last year, was most likely killed in the strikes, according to the Pentagon.

Submitted by Michael Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg

Their imminent departure from evening news programmes is not just a loss to their profession; critics say they were forced out as part of a crackdown on media dissent by an increasingly intolerant prime minister, Shinzo Abe, and his supporters.

 

I know I’m a bit late to the memorial on this one, but I wanted to respond to Ross Douthat’s call for a “perhaps-foredoomed but still necessary last stand” on the part of social conservatives in response to the passing of Justice Scalia.

The heart of Douthat’s case is the following:

The United States are to re-open a Cold-War era military base in Iceland amid deteriorating relations with Russia, the U.S. military have announced.  The plans have been kept secret from the public and the Prime Minister of Iceland himself, until now. Sputniknews.com reports: “A lot of Icelanders are worried,” Paul Fontaine, news editor with the Reykjavik Grapevine, told Radio Sputnik.