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By ERIC LIPTON Representative Denny Rehberg of Montana has been an aggressive advocate for the coal and minerals mining industry, a big employer in Montana. December 24, 2011 us News Representative Dan Boren of Oklahoma is a champion in Washington of an industry that is experiencing a historic boom but also increasing scrutiny. Representative Darrell Issa’s private and business lives often overlap, with at least some of his government actions helping make him richer.
The Champions - Series - The New York Times - http://topics.nytimes.com/
The Senate Banking Committee is responding to outrage over the news that J.P. Morgan lost some $3 billion in customer money because of a risky trading strategy. The committee is preparing for two hearings with regulators, and Senator Tim Johnson (D-SD), chair of the committee, is hoping that Jamie Dimon will testify in the near future.
Former J.P. Morgan Lobbyist Manages The Banking Committee Expected To Investigate J.P. Morgan's Trading Loss
A Federal Communications Commission (FCC) decision issued Monday (PDF) will clear the runway for hundreds of new community radio stations that broadcast on low-power FM signals, bringing progressive, community voices to urban areas that have for decades only known what’s being broadcast by major corporations and America’s political right. In other words, the dismantling of Rush Limbaugh was just the beginning, and the whole FM dial is next. The FCC’s decision on Monday wipes away a massive backlog of applications for FM repeater stations, which are transmitters that repeat signals broadcast by corporate and religious radio operators — many of which rake in big listening audiences for right-wing syndicated talk shows.
FCC decision strikes critical blow to right-wing radio dominance | The Raw Story
Last week, Rep. Dennis Kucinich was defeated in a Democratic primary by Rep. Marcy Kaptur after re-districting pitted the two long-term incumbents against each other. Kucinich’s fate was basically sealed when the new district contained far more of Kaptur’s district than his. His 18-year stint in the House will come to an end when the next Congress is installed at the beginning of 2013. Establishment Democrats have long viewed Dennis Kucinich with a mixture of scorn, mockery and condescension.
Dennis Kucinich and “wackiness” - Salon.com
“Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practise to deceive!” Sir Walter Scott wasn’t talking specifically about self-proclaimed “corruption fighter” Sheriff Paul Babeu of Pinal County, AZ , but he could have been all the same. Babeu’s the strident, rightwing, bald-headed blowhard who’s neck and neck with Sheriff Joe Arpaio in the contest to see which of them can get the most “Hey, look at me!” media attention for being the most hateful racist hard-ass in Arizona law enforcement. He was in John McCain’s “border patrol” campaign ad in 2008.
Dangerous Minds | Anti-immigrant Republican congressional candidate outed by his Mexican boyfriend!!!
Rep. Bachus faces insider-trading investigation - The Washington Post
The Office of Congressional Ethics, an independent investigative agency, opened its probe late last year after focusing on numerous suspicious trades on Bachus’s annual financial disclosure forms, the individuals said. OCE investigators have notified Bachus that he is under investigation and that they have found probable cause to believe insider-trading violations have occurred. (Washington Post investigation: Capitol Assets) The case is the first of its kind involving a member of Congress. It comes at a time of intense public scrutiny of congressional ethics, with the House passing legislation Thursday to tighten rules against insider trading by lawmakers. The impetus for the legislation, a version of which passed in the Senate a week earlier, came from a “60 Minutes” report and a book mentioning Bachus’s trades, “Throw Them All Out,” by Peter Schweizer.
Democratic Party priorities - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com
That said, it’s hard to believe that these distortions are anything but deliberate — deterrence-driven punishment for the ultimate Election Year crime of partisan heresy: i.e. , suggesting that someone is uniquely advocating important ideas even though they lack a “D” after their name – given that (a) I expressly renounced in advance the beliefs now being attributed to me and, more important (b) the point I was actually making was clear and not all that complex. Here’s Political Science Professor Corey Robin explaining it : Our problem—and again by “our” I mean a left that’s social democratic (or welfare state liberal or economically progressive or whatever the hell you want to call it) and anti-imperial—is that we don’t really have a vigorous national spokesperson for the issues of war and peace, an end to empire, a challenge to Israel, and so forth, that Paul has in fact been articulating. . . . But he is talking about these issues, often in surprisingly blunt and challenging terms.The Money & Media Election Complex | The Nation
Like the wizard telling the people of Oz to "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain," Karl Rove used media appearances at the close of the 2010 midterm campaign to dismiss President Obama's complaints that Republican consultants, led by the former White House political czar, were distorting Senate and House races across the country with a flood of money—hundreds of millions of dollars—from multinational corporations and billionaire conservatives into Senate and House races. "Obama looks weirdly disconnected—and slightly obsessive—when he talks so much about the Chamber of Commerce, Ed Gillespie and me," Rove mused. "The president has already wasted one-quarter of the campaign's final four weeks on this sideshow." The congressman imagines he’s surrounded by radicals. But it was his own Republican Party, founded by utopian socialists and militant abolitionists, that brought Marxist ideas to Washington and leftists to Congress.
WASHINGTON -- Congress is pressing ahead with a massive $662 billion defense bill that requires military custody for terrorism suspects linked to al-Qaida, including those captured within the U.S. Lawmakers hope their last-minute revisions will satisfy President Barack Obama and erase a veto threat. Leaders of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees announced late Monday that they had reached agreement on the policy-setting legislation that had gotten caught up in an escalating fight on whether to treat suspected terrorists as prisoners of war or criminals. Responding to personal appeals from Obama and his national security team, the lawmakers added language on national security waivers and other changes that they hoped would ensure administration support for the overall bill.
National Defense Authorization Act: House And Senate Negotiators Agree On Bill Hoping To Avoid Obama Veto
Ahead of the 2012 elections, a wave of legislation tightening restrictions on voting has suddenly swept across the country. More than 5 million Americans could be affected by the new rules already put in place this year — a number larger than the margin of victory in two of the last three presidential elections. In October 2011, this report was the first full accounting and analysis of this year's voting cutbacks. Click here to read an up-to-date summary of both the bills that have been proposed and the legislation that has been passed since the beginning of 2011.
Voting Law Changes in 2012 | Brennan Center for Justice
Progressive leaders led by Ralph Nader and Cornel West unveiled a proposal today to challenge President Obama in the Democratic Party’s presidential primaries in 2012. The proposal, which has been endorsed by over 45 distinguished leaders, seeks to have a slate of six candidates run against President Obama, each representing a field in which Obama has never clearly staked a progressive claim or where he has drifted toward the corporatist right. “Without debates by challengers inside the Democratic Party’s presidential primaries, the liberal/majoritarian agenda will be muted and ignored,” said Ralph Nader.
Progressives Vow to Challenge Obama in Democratic Primaries | Common Dreams
Targeting the Post Office » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names
On Labor Day The New York Times ran a front page article that, through the lens of the United States Postal Service, simultaneously addressed two of our most burning issues: the condition of workers and our underfinanced government. The Post Office has a deficit, and on its front page the paper of record listed the main reasons why: labor costs are 80% of total cost in the post office but only 53% and 32% at UPS and Fed Ex; health benefits are more generous at the post office than those offered to most other federal employees; and the USPS union contracts contain no layoff clauses. A chill must have gone down the spine of post office workers upon reading that they are overpaid; they know firsthand that they are actually underpaid and they also know why the labor cost components in the various mail delivery services are different.Those lines of dialogue from a classic film noir sum up the state of the two political parties in contemporary America. Both parties are rotten - how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election? Both parties are captives to corporate loot.
Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult | Truthout
Two days ago I mentioned the " Goodbye to All That " essay by Mike Lofgren, a respected (including by me) veteran Congressional staffer who had worked for Republican legislators on defense and budget issues for nearly 30 years. If you have not read his essay yet, please read it now . And then, please return! Among the important aspects of his essay is that it goes beyond one now-conventional point of "the worse, the better" analysis: that the GOP's main legislative goal is to thwart Obama, and if that includes blocking proposals that might revive the economy, so much the better for the Republicans next year. More fundamentally, Lofgren argues that today's Republicans believe they are better off if government as a whole is shown to fail, not just this Democratic Administration. Republican hard-liners might seem to have "lost" the debt-ceiling showdown, in that they wound up even less popular than the Democrats are.
'People Don't Realize How Fragile Democracy Really Is' - James Fallows - Politics - The Atlantic
Without comment or framing, let me pass along this video from the "Joe Mason for President" campaign, up recently on YouTube . I have no idea how "real" this effort is, and it sends some contradictory messages. For instance, its home site is " Vote Third Party ," but the video announces itself as a challenge to Obama for the Democratic nomination. Still, what makes this interesting is its distillation of the critique-from-the-left about the way Obama has presented himself, explained the nation's problems, and confronted his opponents. You get the gist of the complaint in the first 5 or 6 minutes, and the most biting indictment is between minutes 4 and 6. The main complaint in this video is that Obama's "conciliatory" and "reasonable" approach, far from being wise and strategically far-seeing, has proven to be simply weak and vacillating.
A Harsh Case Against Obama (and His Opponents) - James Fallows - Politics - The Atlantic
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