Yes, I am happy with the guy that has halved the unemployment rate. So now I will get hate from the guys claiming that rate is not accurate, but the point is it is HALF of what is was in 2008, using the same metric, I believe was used back then.

The Fed upped the interest rate the first time since 2008 because to them the economy seems healthy enough now. It caused the NYSE to jump 200+ points today, as a show of their confidence in the economy. Of course the detractors will come up with more bogus arguments on how meaningless it is... lol. Sour grapes.

I look back on his TWO terms in office and I am disappointed in the Republicans for being so petty minded as to do as much as possible to block all his efforts to make this a better nation. Mitch McCon's pledge to do everything possible to block Obama at every step thus creating a hobbled Presidency. Have the Democrats every stooped so low as to put their party before the needs of the nation?

Ok conservatives, that is your cue to point out how the Democrats stymied a Republican President... for two terms. Go.

By ABRAHAM COOPER By YITZCHOK ADLERSTEIN
Dec. 17, 2015 7:03 p.m. ET
47 COMMENTS

Donald Trump’s bizarre proposal to bar all Muslim immigrants from the U.S. has overshadowed a more legitimate concern regarding religion and immigration: Middle East Christians who are desperate to escape the genocidal campaign against them by Islamic State.

Islamist terror attacks like the ones in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., have underlined the need for more and better vetting of refugees from the Middle East who seek safety in the U.S. But with tens of thousands pushing at the gate, who should to get first preference?

In our view, as rabbis, any immediate admissions should focus on providing a haven for the remnants of historic Christian communities of the Middle East. Christians in Iraq and Syria have been suffering longer than other groups, and are fleeing not just for safety but because they have been targeted for extinction. In a region strewn with desperate people, their situation is even more dire. Christians (and Yazidis, ethnic Kurds who follow a pre-Islamic religion) have long been targeted by Muslim groups—not only Islamic State, or ISIS—for ethnic cleansing. Churches have been burned, priests arrested.

In the worst cases, Christians have been tortured, raped and even crucified. Mosul, Iraq, which was home to a Christian population of 35,000 a decade ago, is now empty of Christians after an ISIS ultimatum that they either convert to Islam or be executed. In Syria, Gregorios III Laham, the Melkite Greek Catholic Patriarch of the Church of Antioch, said in 2013 that “entire villages” have been “cleared of their Christian inhabitants.”

Unlike some others, Middle East Christians have nowhere else to go. As a result of turmoil not of their making and beyond their control, these Christians are the region’s ultimate homeless. Should some sort of peace ever return, the likelihood is that maps will be redrawn, carving up the pie among larger ethnic groups. There will be no place for Christians among hostile Muslim populations.

The animosity toward Christians is illustrated by a horrific incident earlier this year off the Italian coast. In April, Italian police investigating events on a boat that had departed from Libya said 12 Christian refugees who were attempting to cross the sea to Europe were thrown overboard by Muslim migrant passengers, and drowned.

The U.S. can do much good for Christian refugees. Their religious heritage establishes an important basis of commonality in the many Christian communities in our country.

When Secretary of State John Kerry announced in September that the U.S. will accept as many as 100,000 refugees by 2017, many of them Syrian, the State Department provided a list of more than 300 agencies in 190 locations that would assist on the local level. Of those agencies, no less than 215 are Christian. It makes sense to play to the strengths of those agencies.

Success in dealing with the first wave of immigrants will help build bipartisan support for other refugees from the Middle East to come to America.

Tragically, present policy does not take into account the uniquely precarious situation of displaced Christians. Instead of receiving priority treatment, Christians are profoundly disadvantaged.

For instance, the State Department has accepted refugees primarily from lists prepared by the anti-Semitic and anti-Christian Office of the U.N. High Commissioner on Refugees, which oversees the large camps to which refugees have flocked, and where they are registered. Yet endangered Christians do not dare enter those camps.

George Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote in the Telegraph in Britain in September that a similar protocol in the U.K. “inadvertently discriminates against the very Christian communities most victimised by the inhuman butchers of the so-called Islamic State. Christians are not to be found in the UN camps, because they have been attacked and targeted by Islamists and driven from them.”

U.S. missteps and missed opportunities in the region contributed to the crises that disproportionately affected Christians. America’s policy should immediately be amended to include these refugees at the top of the list. Opening America’s doors to them first is the right thing to do.

Rabbi Cooper is the associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and Rabbi Adlerstein is the center’s director of interfaith affairs.

I have two degrees in engineering, a degree in business and am a licensed professional engineer in four states. I have practiced as an engineer for more than thirty five years. I have and currently run a company successfully.

For the life of me, I don't have the slightest idea why anyone, politician or otherwise, thinks that the math taught under common core is the right way to learn. I've reviewed lesson plans and homework sheets from several of my grandchildren and come to the conclusion that the developers of this curriculum and pedagogy either don't understand what they are doing (more likely) or have ill will toward our future (less likely, but still possible).