If you’ve followed the Club Relaford brand for the last few years, you’ve come to expect policy presented in a way that it never had been before. In our effort to continue this tradition, we also took a hiatus from the actual website (clubrelaford.com) so that we could deliver content to you more efficiently.

Today we re-launch Club Relaford.com, check it out, give us feedback. When Rooster Talk returns we will adhere to this same commitment. The new CR will take a few moments to convert. When it does Rooster Talk will vanish, but don’t worry we’ll be back!

We hope this note reaches you in good spirits and in good health. We all thank you for reading our rants for the last three years, and wish you happy thoughts and success.

We’ll see you soon.

Ex-Rep. Ford ’strongly considering’ NY Senate run

NEW YORK – Former U.S. Rep. Harold Ford Jr. began crafting his argument Tuesday for a potential bid to unseat Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, reinventing himself as an independent thinker battling “Washington insiders.”

Ford has not decided yet whether to get into this year’s Democratic primary in New York, but the former congressman from Tennessee wrote a piece in Tuesday’s New York Post saying he was “strongly considering running.”

He is doing so, he said, because the nation is at its best when “we trust competition to refine the steel of our convictions and the truth of our arguments.”

Ford, a member of the National Rifle Association who often quoted Scripture on the campaign trail and believes illegal immigrants caught without documentation should be deported, also is launching an effort to reinvent himself in a way that might be more appealing to Democratic voters.

Read The Full Article Here

Justice Dept. orders new crackdown on tribal crime

WASHINGTON – The Justice Department on Monday ordered prosecutors in 33 states to step up their efforts to combat persistently high violent crime on Indian reservations, particularly offenses against women and children.

Attorney General Eric Holder was to announce the initiative after his deputy, David Ogden, issued a memo to federal prosecutors in those areas instructing them to do more to fight tribal crime — a problem the Justice Department has long been accused of ignoring. Ogden’s memo also said 47 new prosecutors and FBI personnel will be assigned to handle such crimes.

On tribal lands, federal officials are usually responsible for prosecuting serious crimes. While the nationwide crime rate continues to fall, statistics show American Indians are the victims of violent crime at more than twice the national rate — and some tribes have murder rates against women 10 times greater than the national average.

Read The Full Article Here

Scalia (yes, Scalia) invokes foreign law in court

WASHINGTON – Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia practically hisses when his colleagues consult foreign law to help interpret the U.S. Constitution. But on Tuesday, Scalia found himself looking approvingly to other countries in a case over an international custody dispute.

The court is taking its first look at how American authorities handle the Hague Convention on child abduction, aimed at preventing one parent from taking a child to another country without the other parent’s permission.

“The purpose of a treaty is to have everybody doing the same thing,” Scalia said, “and I think, if it’s a case of some ambiguity, we should try to go along with what seems to be the consensus in other countries that are signatories to the treaty.”

That view seemed to put Scalia, who has said the same thing before, on the side of a British father who accused his estranged American wife of violating Chilean law and a court order in Chile by taking their son to Texas without his consent. The child, born in Hawaii and now 14, is a U.S. citizen.

Read The Full Article Here

Both Presidents aboard their beloved Air Force One

In his first year in office, President Obama did better even than legendary arm-twister Lyndon Johnson in winning congressional votes on issues where he took a position, a Congressional Quarterly study finds.

The new CQ study gives Obama a higher mark than any other president since it began scoring presidential success rates in Congress more than five decades ago. And that was in a year where Obama tackled how to deal with Afghanistan, Iraq, an expanding terrorist threat, the economic crisis and battles over health care.

Listen to the story:

Read full story at CQ

And Football and Politics don’t mix?

Super Bowl-style corporate ads for candidates?

WASHINGTON – Possibly coming soon to your TV screen: election-season Super Bowl-style ads promoting congressional and presidential candidates, paid for by some of the nation’s largest corporations.

It may happen. For decades, business and union money has been largely shut out of state, congressional and presidential campaigns. The Supreme Court may change that in a big way.

The court has raised a range of high-stakes possibilities that could let corporations, unions and wealthy individuals pour money into elections in time for this year’s congressional races, not to mention the 2012 presidential contest. A ruling is expected as early as Tuesday.

Read The Full Article Here

Brown seen as gaining on Coakley in race for Kennedy Senate seat

Massachusetts isn’t the likeliest backdrop for Republicans to begin their long climb back to a Senate majority. Democrats control both of the state’s U.S. Senate seats, the governorship, all 10 House seats and wide majorities in the state legislature.

And yet, the buzz in political circles over the past week is that state Sen. Scott Brown is rapidly making up ground on state Attorney General Martha Coakley in the Jan. 19 special election to succeed the late Edward M. Kennedy — movement that has Democrats scrambling to ensure they keep what should be a sure thing in their column.

Read The Full Article Here

Blagojevich: ‘I’m blacker than Barack Obama’

CHICAGO – Ousted Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich says he’s “blacker than Barack Obama” and tells Esquire magazine that he was a real person in a political arena dominated by phonies.

Blagojevich, referring to the president as “this guy,” says Obama was elected based simply on hope. “What the (expletive)? Everything he’s saying’s on the teleprompter,” Blagojevich told the magazine for a story in its February issue, which hits newsstands Jan. 19.

“I’m blacker than Barack Obama. I shined shoes. I grew up in a five-room apartment. My father had a little laundromat in a black community not far from where we lived,” Blagojevich said. “I saw it all growing up.”

Read The Full Article Here

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid apologized Saturday for calling Barack Obama a “light-skinned” African-American who lacked a “Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”

“I deeply regret using such a poor choice of words. I sincerely apologize for offending any and all Americans, especially African Americans for my improper comments,” Reid said in a statement.

Reid’s remarks were revealed in a new book, “Game Change” by journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann about the 2008 race. According to the book, Reid was impressed by Obama’s candidacy during the primary campaign, and privately said the country was ready for a black president – particularly a “light-skinned” one “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”

Read more at Politico

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

“USA has been in the top 5 over the last 8 years…why the drop in 2009 after President Bush left office?”

USA Drops to 7th Place as France Beats USA as “World’s Best Place to Live” in “International Living” Magazine’s 2010 Quality of Life Index

France, “Best Place to Live” 5th Year Running; Scores 100 for Healthcare

France is the world’s best place to live for the fifth consecutive year, while the USA fell from third to seventh place in “International Living” magazine’s 2010 “Quality of Life Index” (January 2010), which rated 194 countries.

“The ‘Quality of Life Index’ isn’t strictly about best value, but about places where the living is, simply, great. To produce the 30th annual Index “International Living” editors considered nine categories,” said publisher Jackie Flynn: Cost of Living (15% of final ranking), Culture and Leisure (10%), Economy (15%), Environment (10%), Freedom (10%), Health (10%), Infrastructure (15%), Safety and Risk (10%), and Climate (10%). “This involves number crunching from official sources, including government websites, the World Health Organization, ‘The Economist,’ etc., and our global editors’ perspectives.”

Read The Full Article Here

WASHINGTON – The C-SPAN television network is calling on congressional leaders to open health care talks to cameras — something President Barack Obama promised as a candidate.

Instead the most critical negotiations on Obama’s health plan have taken place behind closed doors, as Republicans repeatedly point out. In a Dec. 30 letter to House and Senate leaders released Tuesday, C-SPAN chief executive Brian Lamb asked for negotiations on a compromise bill to be opened up for public viewing, as Democrats work to reconcile differences between legislation passed by the two chambers.

Obama pledged during a presidential debate in January 2008 that he would be “bringing all parties together, and broadcasting those negotiations on C-SPAN so that the American people can see what the choices are.”

Read The Full Article Here

Y2K has finally hit… about ten years late. Millions of Germans are currently coping with the effects of a systemic breakdown in the country’s credit and debit card services. The episode is — amusingly, except to those affected — reminding many of the much-feared millennium computer bug.

Nein!

Read this post at Foreign Policy