expires on february 29th. the medicare dock fix. we ll see a few things pertaining to internet and piracy laws. as well as a vote against raising the federal debt limit. as you see on that graphic there, the debt ceiling disapproval vote has a lot of members in the house saying they don t want to see the debt limit being raised again. of that list, the most important is the payroll tax cut extension. if nothing is figured out before february 29th, those taxes could go up. it s been an issue that so far has been good for president obama. he hammered republicans on it saying they were against taxes for the middle class towards the end of 2011. expect a lot of that rhetoric to be back in the debate. gop aids say because this issue is now going to conference where folks from the senate and house are trying to work out a way forward, it has a higher
they were hanging in them and children were crying and people screaming and jumping. we heard crew members jumped at the end into the water. my goodness. frightening moments. a journalist is where survivors are being taken and joins us by phone. barbie, what is the latest on the rescue mission, the search for the missing people and if they know what the ship ran into. reporter: well, right now the rescue operations are sort of winding town. darkness has fallen here and it s starting to get a little bit cold. the divers worked all afternoon searching the underwater components of that ship on its side in search of bodies. they have not ruled out that there will be more fatalities from this accident. several people, though, that did get off the boat at the port prior to this one have come forward to say they got off. so we ve taken the number of missing from 70 to i think the last count was 51. but that s still a considerable number. they don t know, you know, if these peopl
shot rick santorum leap frogs into fourth. his support has tripled since the beginning of the month and closing in on mitt romney and ron paul who are locked in the statistical ties within the margin of error. joe johns is in des moines to break it down. of course, the question is, did the gingrich camp see this coming? yeah, i think to some degree they saw this coming. hammering ron paul, for example. also, mitt romney. it s pretty clear that gingrich saw he had some problems because he was just getting hammered on tv ads day after day from these guys. a lot of people attacking his baggage, attacking his alleged flip-flops. questioning his conservative credentials, questioning what he did when he was speaker of the house and his relationship with nancy pelosi. all of these things play into the mix here in iowa because there are a lot of voters who are very conservative. they want to see the most electable conservative going up against barack obama in november, hala. well
not a crown that goes with that. i don t know. i don t know what the number 7 crown would look like anyway. you know, not brass but perhaps copper or something. yeah. going for the bronze. going to other precious metals like gold, i m trying to think of a way to segue back to the economy, we have a fight there was a lot of chatter expended on the subject of the payroll tax cut debacle. we know that we have a two-month extension. this stuff is all coming back to us on february 29th, which incidentally is leap day. and i m sure many of us will in fact want to leap over that deadline day because if the last few weeks were any indication there is going to be another fight over this. yeah, it s going to get ugly again, and that s because the same disagreements exist now that did as we were debating this two-month extension. it s $100 billion basically to pay for this ten-month extension in february for the rest of the year, and there s no agreement on how to pay for that. republ
those are the crucial things we ve got to get done as a country. and i think we can in 2013. i want to go back to the february 29th for a minute. i think the point that you made is right on point. republicans have a deuce of a time because their way to pay for it is by freezing federal employees for five years. if i m a democrat, i put an amendment to freeze congressional pay for five years, number one. number two, to cut back unemployment benefits from 99 weeks to 59 weeks. those are things that hurt working people. they can t make that their waterloo. they can t make that where they make their stand or they re just playing the whole song all over again that got them in trouble. so we need a mature compromise. are they going to vote for the millionaires tax? no. they re not going to vote for it. we ve got to find a mature compromise and get it done, get it done for the country. maybe that s the one thing we can do in this election year. it s interesting you talk about their position