Long Island Representative Peter King believes the FBI should be doing more to keep an eye on Muslims in America, the Washington Times reports.

King, a Republican, reportedly made these statements in an interview on Fox News Sunday.

“Ninety-nine percent of Muslims are outstanding Americans, but the fact is, that’s where the threat is coming from,” King said.

In another Fox News interview, King noted that he did not think probable cause was needed “just to follow someone.”

King is the chairman of the House Homeland Security subcommittee on counterintelligence and terrorism.

King said that the FBI “overall does such a great job” but asked if they’re “not flagging these people clearly enough to local law enforcement.”

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the two brothers who are suspected of planting the bombs that exploded at the Boston Marathon last week, are ethnically Chechen Muslims.

The elder brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was questioned by the FBI a year and a half ago because of his increasingly fundamentalist religious views, but was apparently not monitored further.

King advised that the FBI take a cue from the NYPD in their approach to surveilling Muslim communities.

“[They should be] going into the communities, monitoring, following if you will, and not being afraid of political correctness,” King asserted.

King, for his part, made clear that he is not afraid of political correctness.

Ater a clip of Tom Brokaw was played in which Brokaw stated, “The fact is that Islamic rage is still out there,” King was asked his thoughts on the comment.

He responded positively then scoffed, “If I had said it that strongly two years ago, the New York Times would’ve called for me to be impeached.”

Follow Danielle Tcholakian on Twitter @danielleiat

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A man from Elmira, N.Y., was arrested for allegedly making death threats to Rep. Carolyn Maloney because of her support of gun-control legislation.

Ronald Buchanan, 40, is accused of making a series of phone calls to Maloney’s office on April 2, the New York Post reports.

The calls were fielded by two interns and a staffer in the congresswoman’s office.

“That stupid c— needs to stay away from my Second Amendment rights,” Buchanan allegedly said in one of the calls.

“I hope that f—ing c— dies from cancer,” he reportedly said to one of the interns. “I want that b— dead.”

Maloney released a statement the day after her office received the calls.

“I am proud of my work to help curb gun violence,” she said. “Given all the acts of gun violence we have seen in the past two years, the shootings in Aurora and Newtown, the attack on my friend and colleague Gabby Gifford, I take the threat of more gun violence very seriously. But it is not something that I will allow to stop me from doing my work.”

Buchanan was ordered held in lieu of $20,000 cash bail Thursday night on charges of aggravated harassment and menacing.

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The federal budget cuts that started taking effect last week will hit the city for $800 million, the city’s budget director said at a council hearing on Monday.

Budget Director Mark Page said a revenue gap for the city is likely because the sequester cuts, an automatic $85 billion reduction in federal spending, were not taken into account in the mayor’s proposed budget for 2013-2014, The Daily News reports.

Local cuts could breakdown as follows:

• $500 million hit to Hurricane Sandy aid
• $75 million less for Medicaid funding for city hospitals
• $60 million in lost funding for city housing
• $200 million in cuts spread between other city agencies.

If lawmakers in Washington reach a deal to reduce the nationwide cuts, the impact on the city could be minimized, Page said.

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The Senate voted to confirm Chuck Hagel on Tuesday as President Barack Obama’s new secretary of defense.

Senators backed the nomination by a 57-41 vote, as voting continued, with only about four Republicans joining Democrats in support of Hagel, a Republican former U.S. senator from Nebraska.

Hagel needed only 51 votes to be confirmed as the new civilian leader at the Pentagon.

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A draft of a White House immigration proposal would allow illegal immigrants to become legal permanent residents within eight years, USA Today reported on Saturday.

The plan, obtained by the newspaper, also would provide for more security funding and require businesses to check the immigration status of new hires within four years. Illegal immigrants could also apply for a newly created “Lawful Prospective Immigrant” visa, under the draft bill, it said.

If approved, they could apply for the same provisional legal status for spouses or children living outside the country, according to the draft.

The White House has emphasized the importance of creating a path to citizenship for the estimated 11 million immigrants who are in the United States illegally. Many Republicans emphasize that the nation’s borders must be secured first.

Latinos favored President Barack Obama over Republican Mitt Romney in the November 6 election by 71 percent to 27 percent, helping tilt politically divided states to the Democratic incumbent.

Members of Congress also are drafting their own immigration bills.

In the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, a bipartisan group has been negotiating an immigration proposal for years and is writing its own bill. Last month, four Republican senators joined with four Democratic senators to announce their agreement on the general outlines of an immigration plan.

One of those Republican senators, Marco Rubio of Florida, dismissed the leaked White House draft bill, however, as a seriously flawed rehash of failed immigration policies that would make the country’s immigration problems worse.

“If actually proposed, the president’s bill would be dead on arrival in Congress, leaving us with unsecured borders and a broken legal immigration system for years to come,” Rubio, who is a Cuban-American, said in a statement on Saturday.

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President Barack Obama sketched an ambitious second-term agenda in his State of the Union speech on Tuesday, challenging a divided Congress to back his proposals to create middle-class jobs and overhaul gun and immigration laws.

Obama entered the well of the House of Representatives for his address to a joint session of Congress at a time when he is again locked in a bitter battle with Republicans over taxes and spending, and this tussle cast a heavy shadow over his appearance.

Americans, said Obama, do not expect government to solve every problem, “but they do expect us to put the nation’s interests before party. They do expect us to forge reasonable compromises where we can.”

But many of his proposals may face a difficult path getting through Congress. He proposed raising the U.S. minimum wage for workers from $7.25 to $9 an hour. Republicans typically oppose increases in the minimum wage out of worry it will prompt businesses to fire workers.

He backed a $50 billion program to fund infrastructure rebuilding projects like fixing aging bridges, but many Republicans are adamantly against such stimulative government spending after Obama’s first term $787 billion stimulus did not lead to a dramatic reversal in the unemployment rate.

“Our economy is adding jobs, but too many people still can’t find full-time employment,” he said. “Corporate profits have rocketed to all-time highs, but for more than a decade, wages and incomes have barely budged.”

It was the kind of rhetoric Obama used to great effect during his re-election campaign when he appealed to the middle class, and he made clear he wanted to help those who supported him, to “reignite the true engine of America’s economic growth, a rising, thriving middle class.”

Seeking to use momentum from his re-election victory, the Democratic president urged Congress to increase taxes on the wealthy, overhaul U.S. immigration laws and enact tighter gun controls. He has about a year to get his legislative priorities enacted before Americans shift attention to 2014 congressional elections.

In a nod to Republican worries over what they see as out-of-control government spending on entitlement programs for the elderly and poor, Obama said he would back efforts to reduce health-care spending by the same amount over a decade as proposed by a bipartisan commission whose recommendations he had rejected.

While heavily focused on domestic policies, Obama’s speech had some crucial foreign policy elements.

He outlined steps to unwind U.S. involvement in the unpopular 11-year-old Afghanistan war and plans to announce that 34,000 of the 66,000 U.S. troops still there will return by early 2014.

He did not give details of what sort of residual American presence might remain in Afghanistan after 2014, when the U.S. withdrawal is supposed to be complete.

Obama’s speech came a day after North Korea conducted its third underground test of a nuclear device in response to what it called U.S. hostility.

“Provocations of the sort we saw last night will only isolate them further, as we stand by our allies, strengthen our own missile defense and lead the world in taking firm action in response to these threats,” he said.

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The move comes as President Barack Obama will also ratchet up pressure with a policy speech on Tuesday in Nevada on immigration – a campaign promise he made last year to Hispanics when running for re-election.

Many important details still have to be worked out before the outlines can be translated into legislation. Here are the main elements of the Senate plan:

THE PLAYERS

Eight senators have been working for months to craft this plan. The Democrats are Dick Durbin, the second-ranking Democrat in the Senate who has a large Hispanic population in his state of Illinois; New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez, who is of Cuban descent; Charles Schumer of New York, who, like Durbin, is a member of the Senate leadership and has a large immigrant constituency, and Colorado Senator Michael Bennet.

The Republicans are Senator John McCain, his party’s 2008 presidential candidate who has long been involved in immigration issues and is from the southwest border state of Arizona; freshman Senator Marco Rubio from Florida, a potential presidential candidate in 2016 who is making immigration reform one of his top priorities; Jeff Flake, also of Arizona, who joined the Senate this month, having previously served in the House; and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who also has been active in immigration reform but who could face a 2014 primary election challenge from the conservative wing of his party.

A PATH TO CITIZENSHIP

There are an estimated 11 million people living in the United States – many of them for decades – who arrived illegally. Most are from Mexico, Central American and South American countries.

The senators’ plan would require those here illegally to register with the federal government and pass a background check. They would have to pay a fine and back taxes to earn a “probationary legal status,” according to a document outlining the program.

Clearing these hurdles would give these illegal residents a legal status for the first time.

Those people earning the status would go to the back of the line of prospective immigrants who have applied through legal means to come to the United States. They also will have to learn English, continue to pay taxes and demonstrate a work history in the United States to apply for legal permanent residency.

Those who successfully do so would get a “green card” allowing them to live and work permanently in the United States. From there, they could apply for citizenship, like any other green card holder.

BORDER SECURITY MEASURES

Efforts to secure U.S. borders – mainly the southwestern border with Mexico – will be further enhanced. This would include increasing the number of unmanned aerial vehicles and other surveillance equipment and adding border law enforcement agents.

An entry-exit system would be completed to track whether everyone entering the United States on temporary visas via airports and seaports have left the country as required by law.

A commission of governors and other public officials and citizens living along the southwestern border would be created to monitor progress toward securing that border and make recommendations.

YOUNG ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS

Last summer, Obama gave a temporary reprieve from deportation to qualifying children who came to the United States with their parents.

Under the Senate proposal, this group would not be subjected to the same requirements for being put on a path to citizenship. It was not clear from the short outline exactly how this group would be treated, however.

Similarly, farm workers also would be treated differently through a new agricultural worker program.

HIGH-TECH WORKERS

The proposals would include means to keep and attract workers with backgrounds in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. This would be aimed both at foreign students attending American universities where they are earning advanced degrees, and high-tech workers abroad. U.S. corporations have been lobbying for years for such a provision.

EMPLOYMENT VERIFICATION SYSTEM

Improvements would be made in holding U.S. employers accountable for knowingly hiring undocumented workers and make it harder for illegal immigrants to falsify documents to get jobs. Meanwhile, the U.S. government would provide faster, more reliable methods to confirm whether new hires are in the United States legally.

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The 354-67 vote will keep the National Flood Insurance Program solvent and able to continue paying claims of thousands of homeowners who suffered damage in coastal New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

The measure still must receive approval from the U.S. Senate, where a senior Democratic aide said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was hoping to approve it by unanimous consent.

U.S. House Speaker John Boehner drew scathing criticism earlier this week from fellow Republicans when he cancelled a House vote on the full $60.4 billion aid package passed by the Senate.

The frustration continued on both sides of the aisle on Friday, as lawmakers said the flood insurance infusion would do little to help the bulk of those suffering more than two months after the devastating October 29 storm.

“It took only 10 days after Katrina for President Bush to sign $60 billion in Katrina aid,” said New Jersey Democratic Representative Bill Pascrell, referring to the 2005 hurricane that devastated the Gulf Coast. “How dare you come to this floor and make people think everything is OK.”

The flood insurance program will run out of money in the coming days to pay claims unless Congress lets it borrow more funds, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said on Thursday.

FEMA has told Congress that unless its borrowing ceiling was raised, “funds available to pay claims will be exhausted sometime around the week of January 7, 2013,” the agency said in a one-sentence statement.

FEMA estimated Sandy-related flood losses of $6 billion to $12 billion in November, far beyond its cash and $3 billion in untapped borrowing authority.

After complaints from Republicans ranging from influential Republican Representative Peter King of New York, to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a possible presidential contender for 2016, Boehner scheduled Friday’s vote and a second vote on January 15 for about $51 billion in remaining disaster funds.

Putting more money into the program would come months after President Barack Obama signed a law aimed at improving its finances. Congress bailed out the program after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and it is $18 billion in debt.

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Despite a few Republicans holding back support for him, Boehner beat Democratic minority leader Nancy Pelosi by 220-192 votes, on the first day of a new Congress.

“The American Dream is in peril so long as its namesake is weighed down by this anchor of debt. Break its hold, and we begin to set our economy free. Jobs will come home. Confidence will come back,” Boehner said. “We do this not just to boost GDP or reduce unemployment, but to secure for our children a future of freedom and opportunity. Nothing is more important.”

No Republican had stepped forward to oppose Boehner and with his party controlling the chamber, 233 to 200 with two vacancies, he looked set to retain his post.

Some Republicans have criticized Boehner for dragging his feet on aid for storm Sandy victims in the Northeast and backing tax hikes on the wealthy sought by President Barack Obama to avert the “fiscal cliff” of steep tax increases and spending cuts.

Minority Democrats offered token opposition at the speakership vote, nominating their leader, Nancy Pelosi, as speaker.

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Here’s a look:



GUN CONTROL

President Barack Obama vows to crack down on gun violence in the wake of the school massacre last month in Newtown, Connecticut, the latest in a series of shooting rampages over the past decade.

According to a USA Today/Gallup Poll, 58 percent of Americans now back tougher gun laws, but 51 percent oppose Obama’s call to outlaw so-called assault weapons.

A sharply divided Congress is awaiting a broad review of gun violence headed by Vice President Joe Biden.

IMMIGRATION

Hispanic voters last year helped Obama win a second term and Democrats to increase their clout in Congress.

Republicans took notice and want to win Hispanic support in the 2014 elections. One step toward that goal would be for Republicans to become more open to immigration reform.

The big question is how far Republicans would go to provide a path toward citizenship for illegal immigrants, estimated to number up to 12 million in the United States.

SEQUESTRATION

The White House and Congress managed to cut a deal on the “fiscal cliff” by agreeing to a two-month delay to sequestration – automatic spending cuts that were set to take effect on January 1.

Obama and lawmakers now have until March 1 to reach agreement on about $85 billion in spending reductions. If they do not, they will see across-the-board ones kick in, about evenly split between military and domestic programs.

DEBT LIMIT

Obama and Congress likely have until the end of February to raise the U.S. debt limit, now at $16.4 trillion.

Failure to do so would result in an unprecedented U.S. default, a move likely to rattle financial markets worldwide.

Obama says he will refuse to allow the debt limit to become a political bargaining tool again.

But Republicans do not seem be willing to raise it without extracting major spending cuts, mostly from government programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

FARM BILL

Congress gave itself a new deadline, September 30, to complete an overdue five-year, $500 billion farm bill that withered in election-year acrimony in 2012.

The House version proposed the deepest cuts in a generation for food stamps for the poor. But fiscal conservatives want more cuts in food stamps as well as farm subsidies.

The bills produced last year by the House and Senate agriculture committees would have cut between $23 billion and $35 billion. They will dig deeper in the months ahead.

It will be the first time Congress began work on a farm bill in one session and had to refile it in the new session.

HURRICANE SANDY RELIEF

Under pressure from fellow Republicans inside and outside of Congress, including New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, the Republican-led House is expected to move quickly in coming weeks to approve a long-delayed relief package for victims of superstorm Sandy in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

SENATE FILIBUSTER

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is fed up with Republican procedural roadblocks commonly known as filibusters.

So Reid, to the outrage of Republicans, vows to try to change the rules – unless both sides enter some sort of an agreement to make the chamber work more efficiently.

VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN

Obama’s fellow Democrats will take another crack at trying to renew the 1994 Violence Against Women Act, which was championed nearly two decades ago by Biden, then a senator.

The measure is designed to combat domestic abuse, but became a legislative vehicle in Congress last year for Democrats and Republicans to jockey for political position.

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The agreement hands a clear victory to President Barack Obama, who won re-election on a promise to address budget woes in part by raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans. His Republican antagonists were forced to vote against a core tenet of their anti-tax conservative faith.

The deal also resolves, for now, the question of whether Washington can overcome deep ideological differences to avoid harming an economy that is only now beginning to pick up steam after the deepest recession in 80 years.

Consumers, businesses and financial markets have been rattled by the months of budget brinkmanship. The crisis ended when dozens of Republicans in the House of Representatives buckled and backed tax hikes approved by the Democratic-controlled Senate.

Asian stocks hit a five-month high and the dollar fell as markets welcomed the news. China’s state news agency Xinhua took a more severe view, warning the United States must get to grips with a budget deficit that threatened not a “fiscal cliff” but a “fiscal abyss”. Most of China’s $3.3 trillion foreign exchange reserves are held in dollars.

The vote averted immediate pain like tax hikes for almost all U.S. households, but did nothing to resolve other political showdowns on the budget that loom in coming months. Spending cuts of $109 billion in military and domestic programs were only delayed for two months.

Obama urged “a little less drama” when the Congress and White House next address thorny fiscal issues like the government’s rapidly mounting $16 trillion debt load.

There was plenty of drama on the first day of 2013 as lawmakers scrambled to avert the “fiscal cliff” of across-the-board tax hikes and spending cuts that would have punched a $600 billion hole in the economy this year.

As the rest of the country celebrated New Year’s Day with parties and college football games, the Senate stayed up past 2 a.m. on Tuesday and passed the bill by an overwhelming margin of 89 to 8.

When they arrived at the Capitol at noon, House Republicans were forced to decide whether to accept a $620 billion tax hike over 10 years on the wealthiest or shoulder the blame for letting the country slip into budget chaos.

The Republicans mounted an effort to add hundreds of billions of dollars in spending cuts to the package and spark a confrontation with the Senate.

RELUCTANT REPUBLICANS

For a few hours, it looked like Washington would send the country over the fiscal cliff after all, until Republican leaders determined that they did not have the votes for spending cuts.

In the end, they reluctantly approved the Senate bill by a bipartisan vote of 257 to 167 and sent it on to Obama to sign into law.

“We are ensuring that taxes aren’t increased on 99 percent of our fellow Americans,” said Republican Representative David Dreier of California.

The vote underlined the precarious position of House Speaker John Boehner, who will ask his Republicans to re-elect him speaker on Thursday when a new Congress is sworn in. Boehner backed the bill but most House Republicans, including his top lieutenants, voted against it.

The speaker had sought to negotiate a “grand bargain” with Obama to overhaul the U.S. tax code and rein in health and retirement programs that are due to balloon in coming decades as the population ages. But Boehner could not unite his members behind an alternative to Obama’s tax measures.

Income tax rates will now rise on families earning more than $450,000 per year and the amount of deductions they can take to lower their tax bill will be limited.

Low temporary rates that have been in place for the past decade will be made permanent for less-affluent taxpayers, along with a range of targeted tax breaks put in place to fight the 2009 economic downturn.

However, workers will see up to $2,000 more taken out of their paychecks annually with the expiration of a temporary payroll tax cut.

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office said the bill will increase budget deficits by nearly $4 trillion over the coming 10 years, compared to the budget savings that would occur if the extreme measures of the cliff were to kick in.

But the measure will actually save $650 billion during that time period when measured against the tax and spending policies that were in effect on Monday, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, an independent group that has pushed for more aggressive deficit savings.

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Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein said Petraeus was willing to testify about the September 11 attack in Benghazi, but the timing had not yet been decided, a spokesman for the California Democrat said.

U.S. lawmakers are demanding to know more about the timeline of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s probe into Petraeus’ affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell.

Representative Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican who heads the House Judiciary Committee, wrote the head of the FBI asking for both a timeline and whether Petraeus is the focus of a criminal probe.

“Has the FBI concluded that General Petraeus is not the subject of any criminal or intelligence-related investigation?” Smith asked in the letter.

Earlier on Wednesday, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, speaking in Perth, Australia, warned against jumping to conclusions over the actions of another military figure, Marine General John Allen, a day after placing him under investigation in connection with the Petraeus scandal.

Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, who denies any wrongdoing, is being investigated for potentially inappropriate communications with a woman at the center of the Petraeus case, Jill Kelley, a Florida socialite.

Panetta defended his decision to refer the case to the Pentagon’s inspector general and for suspending Allen’s nomination to another top position in the U.S. military, saying it was a prudent step “until we determine what the facts are.”

“And we will,” Panetta told reporters at high-level talks in Perth, also attended by the top U.S. military officer, General Martin Dempsey, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

At the same time, he praised Allen’s work commanding the Afghan war effort, a position he retains despite the probe.

“No one should leap to any conclusions here. General Allen is doing an excellent job at ISAF, in leading those forces,” Panetta said, referring to the NATO-led force in Afghanistan.

“He certainly has my continued confidence to lead our forces and continue the fight.”

Clinton acknowledged that allies had raised questions about the Allen case but said there was “no concern whatsoever being expressed to us” about the mission in Afghanistan.

Defense officials and people close to Petraeus say neither he nor Allen had a romantic relationship with Kelley, a 37-year-old wife and mother, who is described as a prominent presence in military circles in Tampa.

She may have been seen as a rival by Broadwell, who sent Kelley a series of anonymous, harassing emails which touched off an investigation that uncovered evidence of an affair between Petraeus and Broadwell, according to a law enforcement source.

FBI investigators decided to pursue the matter when they found the messages contained information about the CIA chief’s activities that was not publicly available, law enforcement officials said.

Kelley had gotten to know both Petraeus and Allen as a volunteer setting up social events at MacDill Air Force Base outside Tampa, headquarters of U.S. Central Command.

The relationship was evidently close enough that both men intervened in a child custody battle involving Kelley’s twin sister, Natalie Khawam.

“She is a dedicated mother, whose only focus is to provide the necessary support, love, and care for her son,” Allen wrote about Khawam in a September 22 letter to a Washington, D.C., court.

Allen and Kelley communicated often enough over the past two years to produce between 20,000 and 30,000 pages of email and other messages, which were turned over to Defense Department investigators on Sunday.

The actual volume of communications is likely much smaller, an official said, as the printouts include messages involving other people and email threads including prior communications.

A senior defense official told Reuters the messages were seen as inappropriate because they were “flirtatious” in nature, not because they dealt with sensitive information.

But “flirtatious” may be an understatement. Another U.S. official said the Pentagon only decided to refer it for investigation after an initial look found the communications to be of “a sufficient character” to warrant further review.

Allen has denied that he and Kelley had a sexual relationship, officials said on condition of anonymity. Adultery can lead to a dishonorable discharge under U.S. military law.

WHITE HOUSE BACKS ALLEN

The scandal complicates President Barack Obama’s efforts to reorganize his national security team following his re-election. The White House said it still had faith in Allen, but acknowledged that its plans to transfer him to Europe, where he would head U.S. and allied forces, have been suspended.

Obama also has to find a replacement for Petraeus at the CIA at a time when the president is vetting candidates to head the State and Defense departments.

The scandal could throw a wrench into Obama’s relations with Congress at a time when he is engaging in high-stakes budget negotiations to avoid the combination of tax increases and spending cuts known as the “fiscal cliff.”

“I certainly wouldn’t call it welcome,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said of the scandal.

Both Allen and the official due to replace him in Afghanistan, Marine Corps General Joseph Dunford, must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate before they can take up their new posts.

Lawmakers on the Senate Armed Services Committee said they would go ahead with a confirmation hearing for Dunford on Thursday. Allen’s appearance was canceled.

Allen had just submitted recommendations on what role the United States should play in Afghanistan after most American combat troops withdraw by the end of 2014.

FBI agents searched Broadwell’s Charlotte, North Carolina, home late on Monday in a sign that the case involving Petraeus was not fully closed.

U.S. officials have said recently that their investigation was largely complete and that prosecutors had determined it was unlikely they would bring charges in that case, which started when Kelley contacted an FBI agent in Tampa.

That FBI agent, who has not been identified, came under scrutiny himself after it was discovered he had sent shirtless photographs of himself to Kelley “long before” this investigation, a law enforcement official told Reuters.

The agent, who alerted an FBI cyber squad to the Broadwell case, apparently became frustrated at the pace of the investigation and complained to a member of Congress about it, the official said.

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Duane Jackson, a disabled Vietnam veteran, called himself “a real outsider” in a campaign that, if he won, would force him to give up the stall where he was working on May 1, 2010, when he noticed smoke curling out of an unattended sports utility vehicle and alerted the police.

Police evacuated the square, and a bomb squad diffused a crude device inside the vehicle made out of firecrackers and propane gas tanks.

In the aftermath, Jackson, 59, turned into a New York celebrity. President Barack Obama congratulated him by telephone and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg celebrated him as one of the heroes of the day. People lined up to thank him as he returned to selling handbags and golf clubs from his stall.

Now he plans to run as a Democratic candidate in New York’s 19th congressional district, just north of New York City, against the Republican incumbent, Nan Hayworth, he said.

“If there was ever a time for an unknown street vendor from 45th and Broadway to step up and say, ‘I’m going to get involved,’ then this is the time,” Jackson said in an interview on Tuesday.

He describes himself as a small-business owner with 15 years of experience in city planning, including stints as a planner for the former New York City Board of Education and as a deputy director at the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development. Spokesmen for both city entities were unable to immediately confirm those details.

Jackson said he became a street vendor in 1989.

“I started that as a temporary thing,” Jackson said. “One year turned into twenty.”

He first set up shop in downtown Manhattan’s financial district, becoming known for his second-hand golf clubs in particular, until the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, seven blocks away from his corner, compelled him to head uptown to Times Square.

He said he has been a member of Disabled American Veterans since 1991 after serving in the Navy and has worked as an advocate for veterans’ rights.

He added that he was closely involved in efforts to protect the legal right of disabled veterans to vend on the streets of New York City when midtown commercial businesses lobbied to restrict the right in the 1990s.

Following the 2010 thwarted bomb attempt, Jackson said he resolved to do more for his community. He said national security would be one of his priorities should he win office.

“I’m a strong supporter of the war on terrorism,” he said. He also said he hoped to help change the partisan dynamics in Congress.

“It’s not the Republicans’ house, it’s not the Democrats’ house, it’s the American’s people’s house,” he said.

Just days after Jackson and fellow street vendors helped police avert disaster in Times Square, authorities arrested a Pakistani-born U.S. citizen, Faisal Shahzad, for the failed car bomb plot. Shahzad later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

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MTA Chairman Joe Lhota joined union representatives, transit advocates and politicians at Grand Central Station to decry proposed federal cuts to mass transit funding.

The group says a Republican federal transportation bill presented late last week in the House will cut $1.7 billion to New York state mass transit funding, the lion’s share being cut from the MTA. Those cuts, the group said, would have a devastating affect on New York City commuters.

“This bill would hit the MTA hard,” said Lhota. “It would raise fares. It would rob the MTA of investments we count on every year.”

Even the Transport Workers Union, currently in a bitter contract dispute with the MTA, stood alongside Lhota.

“We stand with the MTA on this issue,” said TWU member Marvin Holland.

New York Rep. Joe Crowley said the MTA would not have the proper funding to maintain the rails and service customers, should the bill pass.

“With these cuts the MTA will have a harder time planning and funding capital projects,” said Crowley. “Commuters in and around the city … will see longer delays, slower trains, and decaying stations.”

Even Mayor Michael Bloomberg chimed in to blast the bill.

“The lifeblood of New York City is our buses, subways and commuter rails,” said Bloomberg. “Eight million people take mass transit every day in New York which helps to cut traffic, reduce pollution, spur our economy and improve public health.”

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The majority of voters are fed up with every single member of Congress, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. 56 percent of those polled said they would vote out every politician in the House and the Senate if there were a ballot measure to do so.

The bitterness spans the political spectrum with 55 percent of liberals, 55 percent of moderates and 58 percent of conservatives polling that they’d get rid of their incumbents if given the opportunity.

Do members of Congress need to be worried come November 6? All 435 seats are up for grabs in the House and 33 will be voted on in the Senate.

Historically, though, American voters tend to talk the talk, but not walk the walk when it comes to getting rid of their incumbents. In 2010, more than 80 percent of all incumbents up for re-election in the House and Senate retained their seats.

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The Washington Post’s WonkBlog is knocking us out of our pizza-induced food coma to give us the facts.

Congress declared tomato paste equivalent in nutritional value to that of vegetables.

WongBlog points out that the agriculture appropriations bill actually never mentions the words “pizza” or “vegetable.”

According to the Washington Post, “an eighth of a cup of tomato paste is credited with as much nutritional value as half a cup of vegetables.”

The White House’s proposal would have changed the measurements to reflect half a cup of tomato paste would equal half a cup of vegetables.

Congress, though, blocked the change. An eighth of a cup of tomato paste is still considered to have the nutritional value of half a cup of vegetables.

The point is, pizza isn’t a vegetable. Let us not forget that the other two main ingredients to a pizza are bread and cheese. The day Congress declares those two as vegetables, we’re throwing a pizza party!

For the time being, though, considering that 33.8% of US citizens are obese, maybe we should stop arguing over pizza and tomato paste and just have ourselves a handful of carrots.

The post Actually Internet, pizza isn’t a vegetable appeared first on Metro.us.

Obviously, the first reason is that it gives me an excuse to dust off my Roddy McDowall impersonation. But the second is just as compelling: After weeks of watching members of Congress bare their teeth, pound their chests and break the furniture, I’m looking forward to the comfort of a fictional collapse of civilization. 

 And why not? The reality of our situation, especially after this past week, is far scarier than an invasion of horse-riding gorillas with nets and rifles.

Our economy remains a wreck. The grease fire of the deficit was beaten down before it could consume the kitchen, but it is still lashing at the fire blanket and ready to explode again at a moment’s notice.
The markets have been falling faster than D.B. Cooper, — and also, by the way, taking our cash with them. Confidence in our elected leaders has crumbled to dust. Gridlock used to describe the traffic in D.C.; now it is an overall state of being. President Obama seems unable to break through. Leaders in both parties are as hapless as my grandmother on a skateboard.   

I’ve been asking political types lately how this came to be, and they all seem as puzzled as Charlton Heston and his fellow astronauts in the original Apes film when they realized they had landed on a planet much like Earth, only with gibbons inexplicably running the show. These politicos agree that things are not as they should be in D.C., but they feel powerless to fix the situation. So they point fingers at each other and hurl accusations, and nothing changes.

To borrow a line from the film series: It’s a madhouse. And it is too much to contemplate.

So I’m going to the movies this weekend. I’m going to buy my popcorn, grab a soda and curl up in the darkness to watch the planet fall under the domination of an entirely different species. Hey, a boy can dream, can’t he?

– CNN’s Tom Foreman is a regular on “AC360°”/www.ac360.com and “The Situation Room.”

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