The Center for Urban Renewal and Education (CURE) will host a group of prominent figures from the African American community at 9:45 A.M. on Friday, February 22nd at the National Press Club to speak out against gun control legislation currently being considered on Capitol Hill.

Speculation has swirled in recent days that Hollywood star Ben Affleck would run for the Senate seat currently held by John Kerry, who has been nominated by President Obama to replace Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.

Should President Obama be impeached? Someone in Alaska thinks so, and they changed the message on a highway road construction sign to make their feelings known.

Politics resembles few other industries. Although political employment is often maligned as cutthroat, stressful, and low-paying, it offers tremendous opportunity for advancement if you're willing to put in long hours and differentiate yourself from the competition. As the nation's thought leaders become more engaged than ever in politics, the number of political job openings is at an all-time high. Read on to learn more about how to snag potential politics-related job opportunities in your area.

The National Defense Authorization Act that has now passed both the House and the Senate contains provisions authorizing the indefinite military detainment of anyone, even of U.S. citizens, anywhere, even within the borders of the United States, at any time as long as the President has declared them to be supporters of terrorism. What, exactly, might constitute "support" is largely undefined, opening up, and almost certainly guaranteeing, that at some point abuses and political persecution will occur.

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald concurs on this point. In a December 16 review of the measure’s detainment provisions, he noted: “It allows the President to target not only those who helped perpetrate the 9/11 attacks or those who harbored them, but also: anyone who ‘substantially supports’ such groups and/or ‘associated forces.’ Those are extremely vague terms subject to wild and obvious levels of abuse….”

Despite a tremendous, last-minute outcry from both sides of the political aisle, the U.S. Senate passed the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 by a vote of 93 to 7 on December 1.

Civil libertarians on both the left and the right opposed passage because the measure contained language allowing the military detention of American citizens, without trial and indefinitely.

Prior to Senate passage of the measure, the ACLU complained that “under the bill, the military has the power to indefinitely imprison American citizens, but it does not have to use its power unless ordered to do so.”

To gain passage despite public opposition, Senators made a half-hearted effort to water down the bill’s totalitarian language. Democrat Carl Levin, the bill’s sponsor, said after passage that they had succeeded.

In times past the Republican Party pretended, at least, to give lip service to basic morality. It was, so it claimed, the party of “duty, honor, and country.” “Duty,” in the context of American tradition, to the rule of law. “Honor,” also in the American tradition, of respecting the basic, natural rights of all people.

But no more. If the Republican presidential candidates represent mainline Republican “thought” today, then the GOP is now the party of immorality and lawlessness as most of the candidates, with the notable exceptions of Ron Paul and John Huntsman, expressed support for torture during the nationally televised debate on the evening of November 12.

As presidential campaign heats up, bias in the mainstream media’s coverage of the process is increasingly obvious.

Case in point is Yahoo! News and its headline on Sept. 22 ignoring Ron Paul’s performance in New Hampshire.

The second paragraph of the story, penned by Alexis Levinson of The Daily Caller, read:

The Suffolk University/7News poll found Romney leading with 41 percent of the vote from independents and Republicans. His closest competition is Ron Paul, with 14 percent, followed by Jon Huntsman with an uncharacteristically high 10 percent. Perry, who has topped most national polls since announcing his candidacy, does not even break double digits, getting just 8 percent of the primary vote.

It is the dirtiest trick in American politics and it’s used mostly by the radical left wing. When someone from that side of the aisle disagrees with the conservative or libertarian opposition, but doesn’t want to engage in actual debate on the issues, time and again they fall back on name calling, all too often claiming that their conservative opponents are racist.

This time, it is famed actor Morgan Freeman who has abandoned principle and embraced immorality.

In an interview with Piers Morgan, the Oscar-winning actor said the Tea Party was out to get Obama because he is black.

“Their stated policy, publicly stated, is to do whatever it takes to see to it that Obama only serves one term,” Freeman said. “What’s, what does that, what underlines that? 'Screw the country. We’re going to whatever we do to get this black man, we can, we’re going to do whatever we can to get this black man outta here.’”

The Liberty Political Action Conference, sponsored by the Campaign for Liberty, kicks off on September 15 in Reno, Nevada. The conference features a full slate of high profile freedom advocates and is headlined by current GOP presidential candidate and long-time Congressman from Texas, Ron Paul.

Other speakers of note appearing at the conference include Senator Rand Paul, son of Ron Paul and a rising star in the Republican Party in his own right. Joining the Pauls will be Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America, nationally-syndicated talk show host Jerry Doyle (aka Michael Garibaldi from the science fiction television series Babylon 5), professor Walter Block of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and Ivan Eland, senior fellow and director of the Center on Peace and Liberty at the Independent Institute.

In a new report released on September 2, the United States Conference of Mayors, led by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa, calls for greater federal intervention in the economy in order to generate new jobs.

The report, titled A Common-Sense Jobs Agenda [PDF]], calls for new federal jobs programs and federal investments in business.

In introducing its call for more federal money to be spent on job creation, the report argues that the majority of the funding should be targeted at growing the economy in the nation’s large metropolitan areas.

“Any real U.S. Jobs Agenda must focus on growing our metro economies stronger and more globally competitive,” the report states. “Our 363 metro areas are the nation’s economic engine. They account for nearly 89.8 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product and wages, and 85.7 percent of all jobs. Viewed in any context, our metro areas are global powerhouses, with 37 ranking among the world’s 100 largest national economies.”

Vice President Joe Biden allegedly called Tea Party aligned Republicans "terrorists" during a meeting with House Democrats, according to Fox News.

While admitting that the word came up several times during the meeting, for his part Biden denies using it himself.

According to Fox News, Biden made the comments "in reaction to a heated conversation with liberal House members like Rep. Mike Doyle, D-Pa., who are venting that Republicans got too much out of the debt ceiling deal unveiled the night before and 'acted like terrorists.'"

Fox reported that a Biden spokeswoman downplayed the Vice President's role in the debacle. "The word was used by several members of Congress. The vice president does not believe it's an appropriate term in political discourse," said Biden staffer Kendra Barkoff.

In addition, Biden himself claimed that it was the House Democrats using the very politically charged term and that for his part, he "just let them vent."

Yet, sources claim the VP agreed with the assertion that Tea Party Republicans are terrorists.

The New York Post, citing coverage carried by Politico, provided details from the unnamed sources regarding the exchange between Biden and the Democrats.

Former President George Bush has told the National Geographic Channel that his famous non-reaction to being told that an airliner had crashed into the World Trade Center on 9/11 was due to an attempt to project an air of calm in the midst of unfolding tragedy.

That morning, as al-Qaeda terrorists carried out the most infamous attack on Americans since Pearl Harbor, the President was observing a second grade class at Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota Florida.

As the teacher Sandra Kay Daniels led the class in a reading exercise, Chief of Staff Andrew Card swept into the room, and in a now famous moment, whispered news of the second attack on the World Trade Center to President Bush. What happened next has led to a decade of questions and conspiracy theories. Instead of immediately leaving, the President stared briefly into space, then lingered several minutes through the remainder of the lesson.

This seemingly odd behavior has led some to conclude that President Bush knew beforehand of the coming attack on America. After all, why would the Secret Service allow the President to remain at the school in the midst of the attack, particularly since the Secret Service quickly evacuated the Vice President? Did they know that the President was not in danger?

In the ongoing deadlock over the prospect of raising the federal debt limit, a sticking point has been whether or not any deal would include tax increases. These have euphemistically been referred to by Democrats, and chiefly by President Obama, as efforts to “raise revenue.”

On July 16, for instance, Bloomberg News reported that “President Barack Obama said Republican lawmakers should agree to raising revenue in any deficit-cutting deal, noting he has agreed to consider cuts to entitlement programs such as Medicare.”

Said the President: “I’m willing to do what it takes to solve this problem, even it it’s not politically popular.... I expect leaders in Congress to show that same willingness to compromise.”

The White House has continued to push for increased revenue through tax increases, mainly on “the rich” and on corporations. At a July 22 “town hall” meeting at the University of Maryland, President Obama insisted that increasing revenue through taxes on high earners and corporations was necessary.

“[W]e can’t just close our deficit with spending cuts alone,” the President said. He went on to warn that spending cuts alone would result in seniors, students, and the unemployed facing higher costs.

Relying on spending cuts alone, he said, “means that seniors would have to pay a lot more for Medicare, or students would have to pay a lot more for student loans. It means that laid-off workers might not be able to count on temporary assistance or training to help them get a new job. It means that we’d have to make devastating cuts in education and medical research and clean energy research — just at a time when gas prices are killing people at the pump.”

A liberal economist, dining out with her husband to celebrate her birthday recently at an upscale Washington, D.C. restaurant, spied Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan at the same restaurant drinking wine with two other men. The problem for the liberal economist? The wine was $350 per bottle and Ryan and his friends had two of them.

Cue the liberal outrage.

The blog Talking Points Memo covered the story on July 8. According to TPM’s account, Rutgers University associate business professor Susan Feinberg “did the math” on the back of an envelope and discovered that the two bottles of wine cost more than a family on minimum wage earned in a week. Here’s how TPM reported the gist of the story:

"We were just stunned," said Feinberg, who e-mailed TPM about her encounter later the same evening. "I was an economist so I started doing the envelope calculations and quickly figured out that those two bottles of wine was more than two-income working family making minimum wage earned in a week."

The outraged Feinberg decided to confront Ryan in the restaurant. According to TPM, she demanded to know “how he could live with himself” drinking expensive wine while contemplating budget cuts to programs for the poor.