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Mind-Blowing Charts From the Senate's Income Inequality Hearing

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Mother Jones - By Josh Harkinson - Feb. 10 (News Report) - In another sign that Democrats have embraced income inequality as a cause célèbre, the Senate Budget Committee held a hearing on the subject today. The committee's ranking Republican, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, managed to look concerned during two hours of testimony about the kneecapping of the Middle Class—not that it should have been all that difficult. Here are some of the hearing's most striking charts ...

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Rachel Maddow Hammers Mitt Romney For Being Like Rick Lazio

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - By Rachael Maddow - Dec. 18 (News Analysis) - Rachel Maddow hammered Mitt Romney on her show Friday night for being like former New York Republican congressman Rick Lazio. Maddow likened Romney to Lazio...

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Kathleen Sebelius Pressed On Plan B Decision By 14 Democratic Senators

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - By Amanda Terkel - Dec. 14 (News Report) - Fourteen Democratic senators, led by Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), sent the Obama administration a letter on Tuesday asking for the scientific basis behind its decision to limit access to emergency contraception. Last week, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius rejected the Food and Drug Administration's conclusion that the Plan B One-Step pill was safe enough to be placed on pharmacy shelves without an age limit. The decision raised eyebrows because HHS has never before overruled the FDA on a drug recommendation. Many reproductive rights groups openly questioned whether the Obama administration was putting electoral politics above sound science ahead of next year's election.

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Fact-checking the Chamber of Commerce

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

PolitiFact - By Bill Adair - Dec. 07 (Fact Check) - The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has begun its "voter education" drive, running ads that attack Democrats and boost Republicans. The blitz is beginning in Iowa, Montana, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Washington, including this ad against U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio. PolitiFact Ohio checked the ad's claim that Brown "voted to block American energy production and increase energy taxes" and rated it Mostly False.

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US Senate passes its version of NDAA bill, which would allow military to detain anyone on US soil - OpenGlobe

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

OpenGlobe - By Tempodivalse, OpenGlobe contributors - Dec. 02 (Special Report) - The US Senate on Thursday passed its version of a bill that, among other provisions, would enable the US military to indefinitely detain anyone who is deemed to be engaging in terrorist activities.

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Mitt Romney: Repealing the health care law "would save $95 billion in 2016."

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

PolitiFact - By Angie Drobnic Holan - Nov. 09 (Fact Check) - Mitt Romney has recently been emphasizing one of the favorite themes of the tea party movement: cutting government spending. He’s been getting pretty specific about some of his ideas, both in an op-ed in USA Today and in speeches on the campaign trail.

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Barbara Boxer says 400 richest taxpayers saw incomes grow by 400 percent, tax rates fall by 40 percent

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0700

PolitiFact - By Louis Jacobson - Sep. 21 (Fact Check) - During a Sept. 20, 2011, interview with Al Sharpton on MSNBC, Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., sought to highlight how America’s richest taxpayers have benefited economically in recent years. "The top 400 earners in this country are worth more … than half of the American people," Boxer said. "And since 1995, the top 400 wealthiest families have seen their incomes go up 400 percent and their tax rates go down 40 percent." We checked the first part -- that the top 400 tax payers saw their incomes grow by 400 percent -- in March 2010, giving it a rating of True. ...

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Man, That Debt Ceiling Fight Sucked! Let's Do It Again!

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 10:52:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Andy Kroll - Aug. 03 (News) - Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), in remarks on the Senate floor on Monday, described the Republican tactic of refusing to raise the debt ceiling in order to extract favorable concessions as "a new way of doing business in Washington." He went on: "One of th

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Debt Limit Debate Round-Up

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

FactCheck - By Lori Robertson - Jul. 29 (Fact Check) - The last few weeks have been filled with debate, accusations, stalemate and false claims about the debt ceiling and how -- and whether -- it should be raised. As the Aug. 2 default deadline looms, here's a look at the less-than-factual talking points ...

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Bernie Sanders Gets Sarcastic, Rips Gang Of Six Plan

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - Jul. 21 (News Report) - Sanders congratulated the GOP members of the Gang of Six on their "very significant victory in negotiating a deficit-reduction plan which achieves their long-term goal of dismantling every major social program relevant to working families."

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Justice Department Filing Casts Doubt on Guilt of Bruce Ivins, Accused in Anthrax Case

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

ProPublica - By by Mike Wiser, PBS FRONTLINE, Greg Gordon, McClatchy Newspapers, Stephen Engelberg, ProPublica This story was co-published with PBS FRONTLINE, McClatchy. WA - Jul. 19 (News Report) - The Justice Department has called into question a key pillar of the FBI's case against Bruce Ivins, the Army scientist accused of mailing the anthrax-laced letters that killed five people and terrorized Congress a decade ago. Shortly after Ivins committed suicide in 2008, federal investigators announced that they had identified him as the mass murderer who sent the letters to members of Congress and the media. The case was circumstantial, with federal officials arguing that the scientist had the means, motive and opportunity to make the deadly powder at a U.S. Army research facility at Fort Detrick, in Frederick, Md. On July 15, however, Justice Department lawyers acknowledged in court papers that the sealed area in Ivins' lab -- the so-called hot suite -- did not contain the equipment needed to turn liquid anthrax into the refined powder that floated through congressional buildings and post offices in the fall of 2001. The government said it continues to believe that Ivins was “more likely than not” the killer. But the filing in a Florida court did not explain where or how Ivins could have made the powder, saying only that the lab “did not have the specialized equipment’’ in Ivins' secure lab “that would be required to prepare the dried spore preparations that were used in the letters.” The government’s statements deepen the questions about the case against Ivins, who killed himself before he was charged with a crime. Searches of his car and home in 2007 found no anthrax spores, and the FBI’s eight-year, $100 million investigation never proved he mailed the letters or identified another location where he might have secretly dried the anthrax into an easily inhaled powder. Earlier this year, a report by the National Academy of Science questioned the genetic analysis that had linked a flask of anthrax stored in Ivins’ office to the anthrax contained in the letters. The court papers were uncovered by a reporter for the PBS program FRONTLINE which is working on a forthcoming documentary on the case with McClatchy Newspapers and ProPublica, the investigative newsroom. They were filed by lawyers in the Justice Department’s Civil Division who are defending the government against a wrongful death suit brought by the family of Robert Stevens, a photo editor at the Sun. Stevens was the first to die from a tainted letter and his family has accused federal officials of lax procedures that allowed someone to make a germ weapon using anthrax from a government laboratory. In asserting that Ivins was culprit, criminal investigators pointed to his access to the specialized equipment at the laboratory. Officials drew up elaborate charts showing that Ivins’ time in the hot suites spiked in the weeks before the letters were mailed. But Ivins’ colleagues have said in depositions for the Stevens case that the powder could not have been made in the lab without sickening lab technicians and others who had not been vaccinated against anthrax. A Justice Department spokesman Monday shed little light on the seeming shift in positions, saying that investigators still believe Ivins produced the anthrax at Fort Detrick and are unaware of evidence that he did so elsewhere. The Justice Department filed the papers in federal court in West Palm Beach, Fla., last week. The lawyers were attempting to counter allegations by the Stevens family of negligence at Fort Detrick, including inadequate controls over anthrax controls, by arguing that the anthrax in the letters wasn't produced there. Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman, said Monday that the court filing did not contradict the government’s conclusion that Ivins sent the letters. Rather, he said, the lawyers merely argued that “Ivins’ actions were not foreseeable to his supervisors’’ because he did not have equipment to dry the spores in his containment laboratory. Boyd said this meant the United States should not be held liable for his actions.” “To clarify, this statement was intended to relate to the specific containment laboratory” where Ivins kept a flask of liquid anthrax with genetic markers similar to those found in the letters, Boyd said. In excerpts from one of more than a dozen depositions made public in the case last week, the current chief of of the Bacteriology Division at the Army laboratory, Patricia Worsham, said it lacked the facilities in 2001 to make the kind of spores in the letters. Two of the five letters, those sent to Democratic U.S. Sens. Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Thomas Daschle of South Dakota, were especially deadly, because they were so buoyant as to float with the slightest wisp of air. Worsham said that the lab’s equipment for drying the spores, a machine the size of a refrigerator, was not in containment. “If someone had used that to dry down that preparation, I would have expected that area to be very, very contaminated, and we had non-immunized personnel in that area, and I would have expected some of them to become ill,” she said. In its statement of facts, the government lawyers also said that producing the volume of anthrax in the letters would have required 2.8 to 53 liters of the solution used to grow the spores or 463 to 1,250 Petri dishes. Colleagues of Ivins at the lab have asserted that he couldn’t have grown all that anthrax without their noticing it. The government’s own summary of the case against Ivins, released early last year when the Justice Department formally closed its investigation, noted that “drying anthrax is expressly forbidden by various treaties,” and “overt use of any of these methods, if noticed, would have raised considerable alarm and scrutiny.’’ Paul Kemp, Ivins’ lead defense attorney, said Monday that the department’s concession that the equipment wasn’t available “is at direct variance to the assertions of the government on July 29, 2008,” the day Ivins died, thus “invalidating one of the chief theories of their prosecution case.” Kemp said that government officials told him and a colleague, Tom DeGonia, that the FBI could “prove that Dr. Ivins manufactured the dried spores used in the anthrax attacks, and would prove this by the records of his presence in the hot suites in August and September. Anthrax is one of the deadliest biological weapons. Once inhaled, the tiny spores germinate inside the human body, producing rapidly multiplying, highly toxic bacteria that, if untreated, typically kill a person within days. The anthrax mailings came as a second shock to the nation just weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks. Beginning Sept. 18, 2001, the perpetrator sent at least five letters containing anthrax powder to three media outlets and to the offices of Sens. Leahy and Daschle. Two postal workers, a nurse and an elderly woman in Connecticut also died, some 32,000 congressional and postal employees took long-term antibiotic treatments and teams wearing moon suits spent months cleansing a Senate office building and large postal facility of the deadly spores.

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Senator Calls For News Corp. Probe Amid Bribery, Hacking Allegations

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Michael Calderone - Jul. 13 (News Report) - Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), the chairman of the commerce committee, urged government agencies late Tuesday to investigate News Corp's practices in the U.S., including reported targeting of Americans.

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Cantor Hit By Democrats For Potentially Profiting From U.S. Default

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Amanda Terkel - Jul. 08 (News Report) - House Democrats are circulating a resolution accusing House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) of having a conflict of interest in the debt ceiling debate, a move that could provide an akward C-SPAN moment for one of the lead Republicans in the budget negotiations. The resolution goes after Cantor's investment in ProShares Trust Ultrashort 20+ Year Treasury EFT, a fund that "takes a short position in long-dated government bonds."

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GOP: Saying Millionaires Should Share Pain Is 'Pathetic'

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Michael McAuliff - Jul. 06 (News Report) - Having the Senate declare that millionaires should share more of the pain involved in putting America's financial house in order is "rather pathetic," Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) declared Tuesday. The top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee made that pronouncement

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Rand Paul Plans Senate Filibuster Over Debt Ceiling

Mon, 04 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Amanda Terkel - Jul. 04 (News) - Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is planning a Senate filibuster next week in an attempt to force debt ceiling negotiations into the open.

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14th Amendment: Democratic Senators See Debt Ceiling As Unconstitutional

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Ryan Grim, Samuel Haass - Jun. 29 (News Report) - Growing increasingly pessimistic about the prospects for a deal that would raise the debt ceiling, Democratic senators are revisiting a solution to the crisis that rests on a simple proposition: The debt ceiling itself is unconstitutional.

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Presidential Hopeful Serves On Board of Hospital Chain Being Sued By DOJ

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Jason Cherkis - Jun. 07 (News Report) - Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who announced his bid for president Monday, has spent the past four years serving on the board of Universal Health Services Inc. (UHS), one of the country's largest and most troubled hospital chains. It turns out Santorum may have had a more personal stake in railing against President Barack Obama's signature health care legislation and beating the drum for less government intrusion in our health care system. Both federal and state officials have routinely cited UHS for a seemingly endless number of violations, ranging from Medicaid fraud to patient neglect and abuse. Investigations have uncovered everything from riots to rape to homicide at UHS facilities.

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Republicans Packed Defense Spending Bill With Earmarks, Says Sen. Claire McCaskill

Fri, 27 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Colin Clark - May. 27 (News Report) - One of the Senate's top campaigners for good government is charging House Republicans with quietly loading their new defense policy bill with earmarks that are currently banned by the GOP's own rules. Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has pledged to keep all earmarks out of the Republican version of the Defense Authorization Act.

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GOP Budget Would Leave Up To 44 Million More Low-Income Americans Uninsured: Report

Tue, 10 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Ricardo Alonso Zaldivar - May. 10 (News Report) - The House Republican budget would leave up to 44 million more low-income people uninsured as the federal government cuts states' Medicaid funding by about one-third over the next 10 years, nonpartisan groups said in a report issued Tuesday. The analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Urban Institute concluded that Medicaid's role as the nation's safety net health care program would be "significantly compromised ... with no obvious alternative to take its place," if the GOP budget is adopted.

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Under House Budget, “Tax Reform” Places Top Priority on High-Income Tax Cuts and Ignores Deficit Reduction

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities - By Chuck Marr, Gillian Brunet - Apr. 29 (Special Report) - The proposal in the House budget plan to devote every dollar of revenue raised by curbing tax expenditures to finance other tax cuts — principally the lowering of the top rate to 25 percent — suggests that the plan’s framers regard additional tax cuts for high-income individuals as a higher national priority than stronger deficit reduction. Their proposal also ignores the fact that incomes have skyrocketed at the top of the income scale even as the real income of the typical American household has fallen over the last decade.

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John Ensign Expected To Announce Resignation

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Michael McAuliff - Apr. 22 (News Report) - Embattled Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) plans to resign his seat amid an ethics probe, according to breaking reports. Several sources confirmed the news...

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Jon Kyl Sponges Remark That Was 'Not Intended To Be A Factual Statement' From Congressional Record

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Jason Linkins - Apr. 22 (News Report) - a few days after Senator Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) stood on the Senate floor and misled America about what proportion of Planned Parenthood's activities were related to abortion -- which begat his famous "not intended to be a factual statement" excuse that brought a torrent of ridicule down upon him -- Kyl had his false statement stricken from the Congressional Record. You can do that? Apparently so!

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Senate Panel: 'Goldman Sachs Profited From Financial Crisis'

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

readersupportednews.org - By Jim Puzzanghera, Nathaniel Popper - Apr. 14 (News Report) - Some of the findings in the report by the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations will be referred to the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission for possible criminal or civil action, said Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the panel's chairman.

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Reid: GOP Culture Wars Will Shut Down The Government

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Michael McAuliff - Apr. 07 (News) - A government shutdown is beginning to look inevitable, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid warned Thursday morning, charging that Republicans are holding up a deal over ideological issues.

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The unbeatable Republican?

Thu, 31 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Salon - By Steve Kornacki - Mar. 31 (News Analysis) - Massachusetts is a deeply Democratic state, one in which barely more than 15 percent of the seats in the state Legislature are held by Republicans and fewer than 15 percent of all registered voters belong to the GOP. So it's hardly surprising that national Democrats have been making noise about defeating the state's Republican senator, Scott Brown, when he stands for reelection next year.

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