"If you watch the news like I do, you know the Obama administration is embroiled in so many scandals that trying to pick which one to report on is like trying to pick which of your children to impeach. For the record, it’s the one who ate chips in Daddy's den."
"If they don't fix these crises pretty soon, honest to God, it could bring gridlock to a screeching halt."
"If there's no private interest that has a reasonable financial backing, then on June 25th, the Harris County Sports and Convention Corporation is to present their best idea of public use of the Dome to Harris County Commissioners Court and our capital improvements planning session. From that point, it will be in the hands of County Commissioners Court. It's very likely to require a bond election. That would be presented to the voters, but I'm told we're not allowed to put options, so it will be a real clear, this is the best idea of what to do with the Dome. If you're not agreeable to this, then the Dome comes down. And all of that will be occurring in the next year or two years."
The much ballyhooed unmaking of daily newspapering seems to be unmaking itself, and there’s a reason for that. Most newspapers have hung onto the ancient practice of embedding prose on a page and throwing it in people’s yards because that’s where the money and the customers are for the time being.The industry tried chasing clicks for a while to win back fleeing advertisers, decided it was a fool’s errand and is now turning to customers for revenue. But in order to charge people for news, you have to prosecute journalism.[...]Newspaper publishing will never return to the 30 percent plus margins it once had, but some people believe there is a business model. Warren E. Buffett thinks that a 10 percent return is reasonable, now that sale prices have sunk.
The collapse will require a detour, making travel between Seattle and Vancouver more difficult. But as we know from experience, it's unlikely to make Republicans in Congress say anything much more about infrastructure investment than "we can't afford it."
Q: Why is chronic myeloid leukemia a good example of a disease that could really benefit from affordable drugs?
A: Chronic myeloid leukemia was a fatal disease in the past. The average survival of patients was about three years. With these new drugs, chronic myeloid leukemia changed into an indolent disease, similar to diabetes. If the patients take the oral medicine on a daily basis, they could live their normal life. The problem is they have to spend $100,000 a year to stay alive.
Q: What should be done?
A: I think what we need to do is start a national discussion on this issue. Drug prices and cancer drug prices are the big elephant in the medical room. If cancer research is paid 80 percent by taxpayers’ money, and if most of the discoveries in cancer drugs are made in the United States, why is it that the U.S. patient pays almost twice the price of a cancer drug as they pay in Europe?
Not according to the Supreme Court. In Bush v. Gore (2000), the Court ruled that “[t]he individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States.” That’s right. Under federal law, according to the Supreme Court, if you are a citizen of the United States, you have a right to own a firearm that might conceivably be used in overthrowing the government. But you have no right to wield a vote that might be used to change the government by peaceful means.
In the past twenty years, corporate profits have quadrupled while the corporate tax percent has dropped by half. The payroll tax, paid by workers, has doubled.In effect, corporations have decided to let middle-class workers pay for national investments that have largely benefited businesses over the years. The greater part of basic research, especially for technology and health care, has been conducted with government money. Even today 60 percent of university research is government-supported. Corporations use highways and shipping lanes and airports to ship their products, the FAA and TSA and Coast Guard and Department of Transportation to safeguard them, a nationwide energy grid to power their factories, and communications towers and satellites to conduct online business.Yet as corporate profits surge and taxes plummet, our infrastructure is deteriorating. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that $3.63 trillion is needed over the next seven years to make the necessary repairs.
Sadly, the states that have the greatest need to expand Medicaid also have the Republican leaders who are refusing to participate. ...
The residents of many of those states, those in the Deep South, would dearly love to see Medicaid expansion, a new survey suggests. Families USA polled in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina—all states where Republicans governors and legislatures have rejected the expansion—and found that 62 percent of respondents in those states support Medicaid expansion.
Here are the Democrats who voted for pulling the president's authority to approve the Keystone XL pipeline.
John Barrow (GA-12) Blue Dog
Sanford Bishop (GA-02) Blue Dog
Cheri Bustos (IL-17)
Jim Cooper (TN-05) Blue Dog
Jim Costa (CA-16) Blue Dog
Henry Cuellar (TX-28) Blue Dog
William Enyart (IL-12)
Al Green (TX-09)
Gene Green (TX-29)
Ruben Hinojosa (TX-15)
Sean Maloney (NY-12)
Sean Matheson (UT-04) Blue Dog
Mike McIntyre (NC-07) Blue Dog
Patrick Murphy (FL-18)
William Owens (NY-21)
Colin Peterson (MN-07) Blue Dog
Terri Sewell (AL-07)
Filemon Vela (TX-34)
John Yarmuth (KY-03)
Attorney General Eric Holder personally signed off on the warrant that allowed the Justice Department to search Fox News reporter James Rosen's personal email, NBC News' Michael Isikoff reported Thursday.
The report places Holder at the center of one of the most controversial clashes between the press and the government in recent memory. The warrant he approved named Rosen as a "co-conspirator" in a leak investigation, causing many to warn that the Justice Department was potentially criminalizing journalism. The warrant also approved the tracking of Rosen's movements in and out of the State Department, as well as his communications with his source, Stephen Kim.
The Justice Department later said that it did not intend to press any charges against Rosen.
The attorney general is usually required to approve requests to search journalists' materials, but that rule does not extend to email records.
(Holder recused himself from the investigation into the Associated Press, meaning that he absolved himself of that responsibility.) Holder has previously said that he was not sure how many times he had authorized the search of journalists' records.
As the Obama administration faces criticism for the Justice Department’s spying on journalists and the IRS targeting of right-wing organizations, newly released documents show how the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and local police forces partnered with corporations to spy on Occupy protesters in 2011 and 2012.
Detailed in thousands of pages of records from counter terrorism and law enforcement agencies, the spying monitored the activists’ online usage and led to infiltration of their meetings. One document shows an undercover officer was dispatched in Arizona to infiltrate activists organizing protests around the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the secretive group that helps corporate America propose and draft legislation for states across the country.
Attorney General Eric Holder is facing what is likely to be aggressive questioning by the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee on topics ranging from the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at The Associated Press to the government's handling of intelligence before the Boston Marathon bombings.
The panel's chairman, Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., said he was concerned about the targeting of conservative groups by the Internal Revenue Service, which is now the focus of an investigation by Holder's Justice Department. The hearing was to take place Wednesday.
Attorney General Eric Holder on Tuesday defended the Justice Department's secret examination of Associated Press phone records though he declared he had played no role in it, saying it was justified as part of an investigation into a grave national security leak.
Asked about it at a news conference on a separate topic, Holder said he removed himself from the leaked-information probe because he himself had been interviewed by FBI agents as part of the investigation. He said he wanted to ensure that the probe was independently run and to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest. It was the Justice Department's No. 2 official, Deputy Attorney General James Cole, who made the decision to seek news media phone records, the department said."This was a very serious leak, a very grave leak" that "put the American people at risk," Holder said. He called it one of the two or three most serious such episodes he had seen since he became a prosecutor in 1976 but did not say specifically how the disclosure of information about the plot had endangered Americans.
In February, CIA Director John Brennan provided a less-than-ominous description of the plot in testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee. He told the panel that "there was never a threat to the American public as we had said so publicly, because we had inside control of the plot and the device was never a threat to the American public."
Condemnation of the government's seizure of the AP phone records came from both political parties.
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus called on Holder to resign, saying he had "trampled on the First Amendment."
Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said "the burden is always on the government when they go after private information, especially information regarding the press or its confidential sources. ... On the face of it, I am concerned that the government may not have met that burden."
Declared the No. 2 Democrat in the House, Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland: "This is activity that should not have happened and must be checked from happening again."
Congress was not told tea party groups were being inappropriately targeted by the Internal Revenue Service, even after acting agency Chief Steven Miller had been briefed on the matter.
Miller was first informed on May, 3, 2012, that applications for tax-exempt status by tea party groups were inappropriately singled out for extra scrutiny, the IRS said Monday.
At least twice after the briefing, Miller wrote letters to members of Congress to explain the process of reviewing applications for tax-exempt status without disclosing that tea party groups had been targeted. On July 25, 2012, Miller testified before the House Ways and Means oversight subcommittee, but again did not mention the additional scrutiny — despite being asked about it.
At the hearing, Rep. Kenny Marchant, R-Texas, told Miller that some politically active tax-exempt groups in his district had complained about being harassed. Marchant did not explicitly ask if tea party groups were being targeted. But he did ask how applications were handled.Miller responded, "We did group those organizations together to ensure consistency, to ensure quality. We continue to work those cases," according to a transcript on the committee's website.
Earlier, Rep. Charles Boustany, R-La., had raised concerns with the IRS about complaints that tea party groups were being harassed. Boustany specifically mentioned tea party groups in his inquiry.But in a June 15, 2012, letter to Boustany, Miller said that when the IRS saw an increase in applications from groups that were involved in political activity, the agency "took steps to coordinate the handling of the case to ensure consistency."
He added that agents worked with tax law experts "to develop approaches and materials that could be helpful to the agents working the cases."
Miller did not mention that in 2011, those materials included a list of words to watch for, such as "tea party" and "patriot." He also didn't disclose that in January 2012, the criteria for additional screening was updated to include references to the Constitution or the Bill of Rights.
[...]
When members of Congress repeatedly raised concerns with the IRS about complaints that tea party groups were being harassed last year, a deputy IRS commissioner took the lead in assuring lawmakers that the additional scrutiny was a legitimate part of the screening process.
That deputy commissioner was Miller, who is now the acting head of the agency.
AP learned of the plot a week before publishing, but “agreed to White House and CIA requests not to publish it immediately” due to national security concerns. But, by reporting the CIA’s involvement in foiling the plot, they put AQAP (Al Qaeda in the Asian Peninsula) on notice that the CIA had a window into their activities. The AP’s reporting also led to other stories involving an operative in place within AQAP, and details of the operations he was involved in. That operative, it was feared, would be exposed and targeted by AQAP as retribution for siding with the United States.
John Brennan, who is now the head of the CIA, said at his confirmation hearing that the release of information to AP was an “unauthorized and dangerous disclosure of classified information.” That the Department of Justice would be pursuing information on these leaks is also not new, given Attorney General Eric Holder’s appointment of federal prosecutors to look into the disclosures last year. What is surprising is the large amount of information the Justice Department seems to have acquired in its pursuit:
In all, the government seized those records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown but more than 100 journalists work in the offices whose phone records were targeted on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.
The Associated Press released its letter to Holder denouncing the invasion of their records without their consent, calling it an “unprecedented step” and “a serious interference with AP’s constitutional rights to gather and report the news.”
The attorney general has been in the middle of controversies over whether to shut down Guantanamo Bay prison and whether to try suspected terrorists in U.S. courts. He has defended the U.S. right to wage drone strikes, to stage the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, and to use lethal force against a leader of al-Qaida who was also a U.S. citizen.
[...]
It is unclear how Holder fits into the latest firestorm, but he's a battered survivor of many controversies and this could be the one that finally convinces him or Obama that it's time to go.
An outspoken nationalist mayor said the Japanese military's forced prostitution of Asian women before and during World War II was necessary to "maintain discipline" in the ranks and provide rest for soldiers who risked their lives in battle.
The comments made Monday are already raising ire in neighboring countries that bore the brunt of Japan's wartime aggression and that have long complained that Japan has failed to fully atone for wartime atrocities.Toru Hashimoto, the young, brash mayor of Osaka who is also co-leader of an emerging conservative political party (emphasis mine), also told reporters that there wasn't clear evidence that the Japanese military coerced women to become what are euphemistically called "comfort women.""To maintain discipline in the military, it must have been necessary at that time," said Hashimoto. "For soldiers who risked their lives in circumstances where bullets are flying around like rain and wind, if you want them to get some rest, a comfort women system was necessary. That's clear to anyone."Historians say up to 200,000 women, mainly from the Korean Peninsula and China, were forced to provide sex for Japanese soldiers in military brothels.
