2016 will be about the economy
CORONADO, Calif. – Not yet in the presidential race, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mitt Romney already are previewing the likely focus of the 2016 campaign, a competition over who’s better able to boost paychecks for working Americans.
And that ostensibly populist message about jobs and wages for the middle class? It’s what their potential rivals for the Democratic and Republican nominations – Jeb Bush and Elizabeth Warren, among them – are talking about, too.
It started Friday afternoon when Clinton – who mostly has been quiet over the last few weeks as a GOP field of more than two dozen potential candidates jockeyed for attention – sent her first tweet in more than a month: “Attacking financial reform is risky and wrong. Better for Congress to focus on jobs and wages for middle-class families.”
Late on Friday night, it was Romney’s turn. The wealthy, former private-equity chief sounded almost nothing like the Romney of 2012, when he told voters “corporations are people, my friend” and said to a group of rich donors that when it comes to the 47 percent of Americans who don’t pay income taxes, “my job is not to worry about those people.”
Romney said, “Under President Obama, the rich have gotten richer, income inequality has gotten worse and there are more people in poverty than ever before.”
2 dead, 1 wounded after Florida shooting
MELBOURNE, Fla. – A Florida man had “several pockets full of ammunition” when he targeted his wife in a shooting Saturday morning that killed two people at a mall food court, police said.
Jose Garcia Rodriguez, 57, of Palm Bay, died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound at Melbourne Square Mall, said Cmdr. Vince Pryce of Melbourne Police.
His 33-year-old wife was hospitalized with a gunshot wound in good condition, Pryce said.
“The survivor is the intended victim,” he said.
Around 100 people were in the mall preparing to open their stores for shoppers at 10 a.m. when officers responded to reports of multiple gunshots around 9:30 a.m.
Deal hailed as victory for Penn State
STATE COLLEGE, Pa. – Not everybody is happy after the NCAA agreed to restore football wins it had stripped from Penn State and Joe Paterno in the Jerry Sandusky child-molestation scandal, and the NCAA did not necessarily win any fans with the move.
The agreement, swiftly approved Friday by the boards of the NCAA and the university after intermittent talks heated up this week, lifts the last of the sanctions imposed in 2012 and wipes away the black marks that had tainted one of the nation’s most celebrated college athletics programs.
It reinstates the venerated late coach as the winningest in major college football history, prompting the family of Paterno, who died as the scandal was unfolding, to hail the agreement.
But lawyers for Sandusky’s victims worried that the NCAA’s retreat sent the wrong message. And in State College, home to Penn State’s sprawling main campus nicknamed Happy Valley, the news was welcome, although not everybody felt warmly toward the NCAA.
The sanctions damaged Penn State and its reputation, and that will take time to heal, many said.
Associated Press
