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Several leading Republicans have called for raising the federal minimum wage and others are speaking more forcefully about the partys failure to connect with low-income Americans stances that are causing a growing rift within the party over how best to address the gulf between the rich and poor.

With most tea party leaders in Congress and elsewhere opposed to a wage hike and intensely focused on dismantling President Obamas health-care law and his second-term agenda, the prospects for raising the minimum wage this year remain slim.

The growing party division, pitting GOP officials fearful of losing the support of workers against staunch conservatives who believe an increase would harm the economy, reflects Republican nervousness about the depth of their support ahead of the midterm elections, even though polls show them poised to retain their House majority and potentially take control of the Senate.

It also comes as Obama and his fellow Democrats are placing a heavy emphasis on income inequality with a number of votes on Capitol Hill and a series of populist speeches by the president all part of an effort to energize the Democratic base and pressure Republicans to act.

The latest GOP fissure came Friday and involved the partys 2012 presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, whose campaign was savaged by Democrats after he said that 47 percent of Americans are too dependent on government.

Appearing on MSNBCs Morning Joe, Romney said he parts company with many of the conservatives in my party on the issue of the minimum wage and thinks we ought to raise it.

Romney, who has previously said that the federal minimum wage should be indexed to inflation, joined a group of prominent Republicans who have urged the partys congressional wing to consider lifting it.

The list includes former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, who briefly ran for president in 2012, and former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, another former 2012 contender who last month published a book lamenting the GOPs reputation as the party of Scrooge.

The issue has not yet risen to the level of attention it deserves, both inside and outside the party, Pawlenty said in an interview. Republicans may benefit from near-term tail winds this fall, but the demographic reality is that diverse voters have a diminishing view of Republicans and that needs to be addressed.

Speaking Monday on MSNBCs The Daily Rundown, Santorum voiced similar views. Lets not make this argument that were for the blue-collar guy but were against any minimum-wage increase ever, he said. It just makes no sense.

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Split appears in GOP as more call for raising federal minimum wage

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Washington (CNN) -- Republicans call it a government cover-up similar to what forced Richard Nixon to resign. Democrats call it a right-wing conspiracy theory.

The fallout from the September 11, 2012, terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans continues more than 19 months later, with further details last week that raised questions about how the Obama administration responded to the violence less than two months before the President's re-election.

Few issues reveal the hyper-partisan politics of Washington more than the ongoing debate over an issue now known simply as Benghazi.

Last Friday, House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa announced that he had subpoenaed Secretary of State John Kerry to testify at a May 21 hearing, alleging that the State Department failed to comply with an earlier subpoena for documents.

House Speaker John Boehner followed up by announcing a special congressional committee led by a Republican colleague would investigate the matter. The House voted on party lines Thursday to create the panel, but Democrats have yet to decide if they will take part in what they claim could be a Republican-led witch hunt.

GOP-led House votes to establish select committee on Benghazi

Hillary Clinton: No reason for new Benghazi committee

Issa called the administration's lack of compliance "in violation of any reasonable transparency or historic precedent at least since Richard Milhous Nixon."

At the White House, spokesman Jay Carney shot back that Republicans continued trying to reap political benefit with what he called conspiracy theories about a Benghazi cover-up.

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Benghazi: Government cover-up or right-wing conspiracy?

Stephen Heller 30 Etudes Progressives op.46 4 by alice zhang
2014.5.9.

By: jing zhu

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Stephen Heller 30 Etudes Progressives op.46 4 by alice zhang - Video

The In Anemas gas plant, Algeria, seen from the air. It was attacked by Islamists in January 2013.

A beheading in Woolwich, a suicide bomb in Beijing, a blown-up marathon in Boston, a shooting in the head of a young Pakistani girl seeking education, a destroyed shopping mall in Nairobi and so it continues, in the name of Islam, from south London to Timbuktu. It is time to take stock, especially on the left, since these things are part of the worlds daily round.

Leave aside the parrot-cry of Islamophobia for a moment. I will return to it. Leave aside, too, the pretences that it is all beyond comprehension. Progressives might ask instead: what do Kabul, Karachi, Kashmir, Kunming and a Kansas airport have in common? Is it that they all begin with K? Yes. But all of them have been sites of recent Islamist or, in the case of Kansas, of wannabe-Islamist, attacks; at Wichita Airport planned by a Muslim convert ready to blow himself up, and others, in support of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. We cannot stop lone wolves, a British counterterrorism expert told us after Woolwich. Are they lone? Of course not.

A gas facility in southern Algeria, a hospital in Yemen, an Egyptian police convoy in the Sinai its complex all right a New Years party in the southern Philippines, a railway station in the Caucasus, a bus terminal in Nigerias capital, and on and on, have all been hit by jihadis, with hostages taken, suicide belts detonated, cars and trucks exploded, and bodies blown to bits. And Flight MH370? Perhaps. In other places in Red Square and Times Square, in Jakarta and New Delhi, in Amman and who-knows-where in Britain attacks have been thwarted. But in 2013 some 18 countries gotit in the neck (so to speak) from Islams holy warriors.

There are battlefields and battlefields in this conflict. Some are theatres of actual orpotential civil war, most often when Sunnis and Shias are at each others throats on behalf, respectively, of Saudi Arabia andIran. Other battlefields are in failed or failing Muslim states, others again where the infidel has unwisely intruded upon and assaulted Muslim lands. At the same time, weapons and warriors are in constant movement in Islams cause across dissolving national boundaries, many of themof western colonialisms creation. And in India, with its 175 million Muslims, their mujahedin will be in action soonenough if Hindu nationalists come to power this month.

Jihadist groups, from Pakistan to the Philippines, also fight each other. But for the most part they are consolidating and expanding often as affiliates of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, in the Maghreb, in Somalia and Kenya, in Iraq and Syria, in Gaza, in Bangladesh and in south-east Asia. There are separatist or secessionist Islamic insurgencies, too, from Russias Caucasus to north-west China, in southern Thailand, in Burma, in northern Nigeria and in divided Kashmir.

Warriors for Islam, believing that they areunder infidel threat, today range an increasingly frontier-less world. Thats globalisation too. A car-bombing in New York which failed was planned by a Pakistani-American trained in a tribal area ofnorthern Waziristan. Many would-be warriors from western countries learned their skills from Taliban instructors, going on to fight in Iraq as they now fight inSyria. There, ubiquitous Bearers of the Sword and Defenders of the Faith from Britain and France, Saudi Arabia and Morocco, Indonesia and Kazakhstan, and evenUighurs from Chinese Xinjiang, are to befound armed to the teeth in the battle against Assad while being trained for future combat in their countries of origin.

In the Islamist merry-go-round, jihadis from Libya after the countrys collapse went on to Syria, Tunisian holy warriors crossed into Mali, Egyptian and Canadian Muslim fighters were among the attackers on the refinery in Algeria, and Somalis from Minnesota have returned home to join al-Shabab, the al-Qaeda affiliate that carried out the Kenyan mall attack. Ugandan Islamists are in eastern Congo, and a Malaysian army captain was linked to two of the 9/11 hijackers. Beat this? No.

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Latitude Festival

Conservatives acting just like the Liberals in their mismanagement of Temp. Foreign Worker Program
Conservatives acting just like the Liberals in their mismanagement of Temp. Foreign Worker Program.

By: Jinny Sims

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Conservatives acting just like the Liberals in their mismanagement of Temp. Foreign Worker Program - Video