Bernice King, daughter of Martin Luther King, Jr., tells Starting Point Anchor Soledad O’Brien that she is touched by President Obama using her father’s bible during the Inauguration’s swearing in ceremony and is hoping that he addresses reconciliation in his speech.
King says, “Well, I think first and foremost, the fact that the president is using daddy's bible is heart warming for me. Because my father was first and foremost a preacher, pastor, it reminds people of that. That is one of the things I will stress today.”
Starting Point with Soledad O’Brien airs weekday mornings from 7-9am ET on CNN.
Visit the CNN Press Room for additional highlights from the network’s special coverage of the second inauguration of President Barack Obama: http://on.cnn.com/T6ba6n
Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett (R) makes his case to Starting Point as to why he’s suing the NCAA over Penn State sanctions months after his office came out with a statement in July that accepted the penalties as the right course of action.
Gov. Corbett says, “I held off. I didn’t want to interfere with the momentum that the team had. Coach O’Brien had done a great job with the team. The final decision to go forward wasn’t made until October. The lawsuit then was drafted; we went through many variations. And at the end of the season was when I made my decision that we would announce it.”
CNN Anchor John Berman says, “You put football first…. If the case was so important, why not bring it up when you’re ready to bring it up. You put football first, which is one of the criticisms of Penn State all along.”
Corbett responds, “This is going to be a very long case and the start of that case can easily wait until after the end of the football season, which we did.”
Starting Point with Soledad O’Brien airs weekday mornings from 7-9am ET on CNN.
Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ) criticizes Speaker John Boehner for not bringing a Hurricane Sandy relief bill up for a vote on Tuesday because he thinks Boehner wanted to avoid too much spending at one time, opting for a more “obscure” piecemeal plan of lesser payments.
Rep. Pallone says, “I really think that the speaker doesn't care about New York and New Jersey. In other words, we're blue states. The fact of the matter is that he was afraid to bring this up yesterday, in my opinion, because the Tea Party and the right wing did not want to vote for the spending bill for New York or primarily for New York and New Jersey.”
Early Start with John Berman & Zoraida Sambolin airs weekday mornings from 5-7am ET on CNN.
Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) tells CNN’s Soledad O’Brien that he is not going to vote for an expiration of tax cuts for the top two percent.
Rep. Hensarling says, “The President’s going to get his revenue one way or the other. House Republicans will do everything we can to minimize the damage to our economy. We know that by raising the rates on the top two brackets, as the President wants to do – Ersnt & Young says will cost middle income workers at least two percent off their paychecks, lose another 700,000 jobs. That’s not something Republicans are going to be a part of. But, the president obviously is going to get some revenue. There’s nothing we can do to stop that. It’s written into current law. But the bottom line is you can’t solve this problem through revenue. The President’s not being serious. He’s moving the goal post. He started out saying he wanted a ‘balanced approach.’ So, the President’s going to get some kind of revenue. I’m not voting for it. But he’s going to get it anyway. The question is where are his spending reductions? He hasn’t put that on the table.”
Starting Point with Soledad O’Brien airs weekday mornings from 7-9am ET on CNN.
Israel Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon tells CNN’s Soledad O’Brien that Gaza may have a day or two before ground troops move in.
Ayalon says, “We are kind of reluctant warriors. We don’t want to get into Gaza if we don’t have to. But if they keep firing at us… a ground operation is still in the cards…. We have very simple, specific goals.”
When O’Brien asks what would trigger a ground operation, Ayalon responds, “If we will see in the next 24 to 36 hours more rockets launched at us, I think that would be the trigger.”
Starting Point with Soledad O’Brien airs weekday mornings from 7-9a ET on CNN.
Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) weighs in on fiscal cliff debate, violence in Gaza and how Mitt Romney’s comments that President Obama won reelection because he gave a lot of gifts to voters “were way off base.”
Rep. Van Hollen says, “With respect to allowing young people to stay on their parents’ healthcare plans until their 26 – if I recall right, Governor Romney said hey that was a part of the Affordable Care Act, a part of Obamacare that he was going to try to keep.”
Starting Point with Soledad O’Brien airs weekday mornings from 7-9am ET on CNN.
Tea Party Patriots National Coordinator Keli Carender says that the Republicans did not have a good ground game for the election and Mitt Romney’s health care legislation in Massachusetts was a liability.
On why Romney lost the election, Carender says, “In a nutshell, the Republicans sat on their hands for four years. After 2008, you had Barack Obama and the Democrats who left paid staffers in critical swing states and offices open, and they were working to indentify new voters… that they managed to register in the four years between the two elections. And I don’t know what the Republicans were doing. The Tea Party was just getting started.”
Starting Point with Soledad O’Brien airs weekday mornings from 7-9am ET on CNN.
Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) opens up about being the first openly gay member in the upper house of the United States legislature and working together with Republicans to face very clear challenges including the fiscal cliff.
When CNN Anchor Soledad O’Brien asks if she feels burdened to push for gay rights, Sen. Baldwin says, “What I would say in terms of crashing through that glass ceiling is if you’re not in the room the conversation is about you, if you’re in the room the conversation is with you and that does transform things…. I didn’t run to make history. I ran to make a difference. And my campaign was about the struggle of the middle class, retirement security for seniors, doing right by our veterans when they return home from war…. I think it was much more about confronting the very significant challenges that our nation faces right now.”
Starting Point with Soledad O’Brien airs weekday mornings from 7-9a ET on CNN.
Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) says Americans have mandated bipartisanship and a balanced approach to reduce the deficit.
Rep. Van Hollen says, “One of the big issues in this election was whether or not we should take the balanced approach to reducing the deficit.... A combination of cuts, but also revenue. It’s very clear from the exit polling that a majority of Americans recognize that we need to share responsibility in reducing the deficit. That means asking higher income earners to contribute more to reducing the deficit. So, that was one of the clear messages… in this campaign. The President won. And I think it’s important that Republicans on the Hill recognize that the American people have said balanced approach is necessary to get our deficit under control.”
Later in the interview, CNN Political Contributor Erick Erickson asks Rep. Van Hollen what cuts will be made.
Starting Point with Soledad O’Brien airs weekday mornings from 7-9a ET on CNN.
President Obama Campaign Senior Adviser David Axelrod discusses election day, the Ohio race, provisional votes and the impact of the auto bailout and Jeep advertisement.
Axelrod says, “An issue that’s crystallized in the last few days, is this issue of the auto bailout, the auto intervention. The President stepped in, saved the auto industry. In Ohio, one in eight jobs flow from that auto industry. Governor Romney’s opposition to that action as been an issue in the campaign. And then a late ad in that campaign that implied otherwise and suggested that somehow Jeep was moving jobs to China creating a real backlash in that state and I think that’s going to come into play, as well.”
He later adds, “What it did was create an even larger gulf of trust and trust is a big issue in this campaign, and particularly for these voters in Ohio for whom questions like the survival of the auto industry are very much questions about their family’s economic well being.”
Starting Point with Soledad O’Brien airs weekday mornings from 7-9a ET on CNN.
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