Obama’s health care law faces criticism as top conservatives jockey for 2016 edge
Obama’s health care law faces criticism as top conservatives jockey for 2016 edge
MANCHESTER, N.H. — Republicans eyeing the 2016 White House race battered President Barack Obama’s health care law and nicked each other Saturday, auditioning before a high-profile gathering of conservatives that some political veterans said marked the campaign’s unofficial start.
A speaking program packed with potential presidential candidates weighed in on the House Republicans’ controversial budget, the party’s struggle with Hispanics, the GOP’s future and the upcoming midterm elections while taking turns on a conference room stage facing hundreds of conservative activists gathered in New Hampshire’s largest city.
But the Republican Party’s near-universal opposition to the president’s health care law dominated the conversation just days after Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius resigned after leading the rocky rollout of the program derided as Obamacare.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz declared that one resignation is not enough. “We are going to repeal every single word of Obamacare,” said the first-term senator and tea party favorite.
Another tea party favorite, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, insisted that the GOP must broaden its appeal in order to grow. The Republican Party, he said, cannot be a party of “fat cats, rich people and Wall Street.”
In the course of a year, Boston and its people find that time heals some wounds
BOSTON — Every time Roseann Sdoia comes home, she must climb 18 steps — six stairs into the building, 12 more to her apartment. It is an old building in Boston’s North End, with doors that are big and heavy, not an easy place for an amputee to live.
When she left the hospital, a month after the Boston marathon bombing, she had a choice: She could find another place to live, one more suitable for someone who wears a prosthetic that replaces most of her right leg. Or, she could stay.
“Early on when all this happened, so many people were telling me to move out of the city and move out of my apartment because of the stairs and I don’t have an elevator and parking is not very convenient,” she recalls. “But I have been able to get past all of that.”
In that, she mirrors Boston itself.
“I have to tell you, honestly, Boston is a better city now than it was before,” says Thomas Menino, Boston’s former mayor. “People learned how to deal with each other, they had to deal with a tragedy.”
With no new signals and black box batteries dying, Aussie PM says jet hunt will take time
PERTH, Australia — A day after expressing optimism about the hunt for the missing Malaysian jet, Australia’s leader warned Saturday that the massive search would likely continue “for a long time.”
“No one should underestimate the difficulties of the task still ahead of us,” Prime Minister Tony Abbott said in Beijing, on the last day of his China trip.
Abbott appeared to couch his comments from a day earlier, when he met in Beijing with Chinese President Xi Jinping to brief him on the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, which was carrying 239 people — most of them Chinese — when it disappeared March 8 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
After analyzing satellite data, officials believe the plane flew off course for an unknown reason and went down in the southern Indian Ocean off Australia’s west coast.
Abbott said Friday that he was “very confident” signals heard by an Australian ship towing a U.S. Navy device that detects flight recorder pings were coming from the missing Boeing 777’s black boxes.
By wire sources