March 21, 2010 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
If the healthcare reform legislation currently going through the House of Representatives, in an effort to forge a unified House-Senate bill the president can sign, does not include a provision that immediately bans any and all discrimination based on “pre-existing conditions”, people will die. This is an undeniable and tragic fact of life in our country, and the United States Congress has to take far more seriously the real-world ramifications of the timelines they build into the legislation.
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March 21, 2010 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Today on Meet the Press, Republican strategist Ed Gillespie asked why has the United States Senate become so polarized, when Pres. Obama “ran as a post-partisan”. The association was deliberately disingenuous; there is nothing about Pres. Obama’s 1st year in office that suggests the climate should be brutally, relentlessly partisan, except the Republican party’s collective vow to oppose him everywhere they can, to undermine his presidency and the credibility of the Democratic majority.
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March 21, 2010 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
On the morning of an historic House vote to pass Pres. Obama’s healthcare reform legislation, Democrats are reporting they are closing in on 216 votes needed to pass the legislation. After a week of vote-counting and vote-switching, with House members wavering between Yes and No, and trying to predict which vote will win them reelection in November, sources within the Democratic caucus are telling the press that the votes are there to pass the legislation.
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March 20, 2010 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
The town of Lyndeborough, New Hampshire, voted last weekend to approve a warrant article —a kind of citizen-prompted legislation— banning any method of vote-counting that is not fully conducted within view of citizen election monitors. The vote means that even traditional methods of counting ballots, if conducted in a “blind” way, out of view of people who can assess the physical veracity of the count, will not be considered legitimate within the town.
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February 28, 2010 :: Riga Listin :: No Comment Yet
The media are exploding with reports that explicitly declare that “the public opposes the current healthcare reform bills” passed by both houses of Congress. In fact, this is patently false, and any of the major polls on the subject bear this out, if one devotes the time necessary to understand the numbers. It is inaccurate to say “the public opposes”, because there is not one uniform majority of Americans opposing a specific set of initiatives in the pending reforms.
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February 28, 2010 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Republican House minority whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) said today on Meet the Press that Republicans want healthcare reform, but they favor a “common-sense, modest, incremental approach”. The statement is sly and problematic: Cantor wants to imply that incremental is responsible, playing on the emotional fetish that brings many to conservative politics, but he is simply fudging the facts and reframing an historically irresponsible approach in order to attack the president. Incremental fixes to the pervasive healthcare crisis have so far failed to reverse the trend toward ever-higher costs and ever-less-competent insurers.
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February 27, 2010 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
The Republican party’s Congressional leadership is participating in a bipartisan healthcare reform summit moderated by Pres. Barack Obama, at Blair House near the White House. The “square-table” discussion includes the leading budgetary and health policy partisans from the House and Senate, as well as Pres. Obama, Vice Pres. Biden and Sec. of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius. The president invited Republicans to “show me what you got”, and to lay out constructive alternative ideas for healthcare reform, in the interest of building consensus.
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February 20, 2010 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
The other week, men and women across California opened up their mailboxes to find a letter from Anthem Blue Cross. The news inside was jaw-dropping. Anthem was alerting almost a million of its customers that it would be raising premiums by an average of 25 percent, with about a quarter of folks likely to see their rates go up by anywhere from 35 to 39 percent. … Over the past year, as families and small business owners have struggled to pay soaring health care costs, and as millions of Americans lost their coverage, the five largest insurers made record profits of over $12 billion.
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February 14, 2010 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
There were three individuals convicted by the Bush-Cheney administration in military courts, and two of them are currently free and walking the street. There have been hundreds of individuals convicted on terrorism charges in civilian criminal courts, over the last three administrations, the current one included, and every one of those convictions has been upheld, and every one of those terrorists is behind bars today.
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February 14, 2010 :: Denver Lessing :: No Comment Yet
Newsmax, the ultra-right-wing political propaganda outfit that calls itself a news service, is once again using its news pages to push financial get-rich-quick schemes on its customers. While railing against any politician who happens to be a Democrat and who is struggling to fix the problems 30 years of Republican de-regulation of wrought on the American economy as anti-American, Newsmax has routinely sought to push its readers into risky foreign currency trading schemes. Now, it’s pitching financial services directly.
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February 12, 2010 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
Blue Cross has reportedly announced plans for a massive 39% rate-hike on hundreds of thousands of customers, despite earning record profits of $4.7 billion in 2009. The announcement has spurred outrage among healthcare rights activists and public interest groups and raised the ire of the president and the Congress of the United States. The progressive pressure group MoveOn.org has launched a campaign to demand an immediate reversal of the Blue Cross rate-hike.
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February 12, 2010 :: Webb Tisch :: No Comment Yet
NBC’s chief Pentagon corresondent Jim Miklaszewski told MSNBC this morning that in his opinion military trials are “more reliable” in terms of the outcomes they produce. The comment was perhaps an unwelcome introduction of Constitutional questions into the debate over whether to try accused 9/11 terrorist conspirators in a civilian criminal court or before a military tribunal.
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February 12, 2010 :: Eva Scherson :: No Comment Yet
Let down your guard for five seconds, and you will likely find some emanation of the pseudo-conservative hostility market explaining that Pres. Obama is deliberately plotting the destruction of the United States of America, that his administration is lazy and incompetent, and that terrorists are about to seize control of the homeland. Those propagandists, who expect you will not notice their absurd claims are in fact lies, are the ones who are, very deliberately, trying to ruin America.
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February 6, 2010 :: J.E. Robertson :: 6 Comments
Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) has been revealed to be placing a “blanket hold” on 70 of Pres. Obama’s nominees, while demanding an estimated $40 billion in earmarks for his state. The revelation, published yesterday in CongressDaily, is being called one of the most flagrant examples of political corruption in recent memory. According to CongressDaily’s reporting, “While holds are frequent, Senate aides said a blanket hold represents a far more aggressive use of the power than is normal.”
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February 2, 2010 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
There is talk in the House of Representatives that a “reconciliation patch” could allow the US Senate to pass a small amendment to the Senate healthcare bill, in connection with a budget reconciliation measure, could allow the Senate to provide the House with an overall bill that could pass the House of Representatives. If the Senate is able to make those necessary adjustments, there could be a comprehensive healthcare reform package passed and signed into law in the coming weeks.
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February 2, 2010 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
I’ve said this before, but I’m a big believer not just in the value of a loyal opposition, but in its necessity. Having differences of opinion, having a real debate about matters of domestic policy and national security — and that’s not something that’s only good for our country, it’s absolutely essential. It’s only through the process of disagreement and debate that bad ideas get tossed out and good ideas get refined and made better. And that kind of vigorous back and forth — that imperfect but well-founded process, messy as it often is — is at the heart of our democracy. That’s what makes us the greatest nation in the world.
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January 30, 2010 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
Pres. Barack Obama yesterday attended a first-of-its-kind question and answer session, as part of a Republican Congressional caucus conference in Baltimore. The president took some aggressive questions, classed by media analysts as “grandstanding”, from some Republicans who pushed the party line on the refusal of Democrats to deal with them. Obama adroitly and with a [...]
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January 28, 2010 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
Those of us in public office can respond to this reality by playing it safe and avoid telling hard truths and pointing fingers. We can do what’s necessary to keep our poll numbers high, and get through the next election instead of doing what’s best for the next generation. But I also know this: If people had made that decision 50 years ago, or 100 years ago, or 200 years ago, we wouldn’t be here tonight. The only reason we are here is because generations of Americans were unafraid to do what was hard; to do what was needed even when success was uncertain; to do what it took to keep the dream of this nation alive for their children and their grandchildren.
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January 28, 2010 :: Denver Lessing :: 4 Comments
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito last night revealed how deeply unfit he is to serve on the nation’s highest court. When Pres. Obama made the entirely factual statements that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. FEC reversed a century of precedent on campaign finance regulation and would allow foreign corporations to spend money to influence US elections, Alito was seen shaking his head, grimmacing and mouthing something like “simply not true”. While it’s well documented how widely Obama —a Constitutional law scholar— and Alito differ on legal philosophy, Alito crossed a line with his reaction.
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January 26, 2010 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
Four young men, aged 24 to 25, have been arrested and charged with entering federal property under false pretense, with the purpose of committing a felony. The charges are in connection with an alleged attempt to carry out a plot to wiretap the phones at one of Democratic senator from Louisiana Mary Landrieu’s offices. The charges could result in fines up to $250,000 and up to 10 years in prison.
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January 26, 2010 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
This video is a talk given by Dr. Eugene McCarraher, at Villanova University, on the subject of corporate personhood. He explores the many problems related to the development of the legal principle that corporations can be granted the actual rights that law assigns only to persons. He reveals the stunning historical roots of corporate personhood in the “legal fiction” of the “metaphysical body” of medieval kings.
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January 26, 2010 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
This video details the CLEAN campaign finance model, a specific set of principles that allows candidates to receive public funding in exchange for raising a set number of small donations from ordinary people and agreeing not to raise private campaign funds, not to spend more than a fixed amount, and not to spend from their own pocket. This standard has revolutionized the political process in both Maine and Arizona, allowing people not tied to special interests to take control of state and local government.
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January 22, 2010 :: J.E. Robertson :: 3 Comments
The ONLY way to make any argument of the kind that alleges the economic difficulties of 2009 are Obama’s fault is to operate absolutely and without exception on the premise that George W. Bush left Obama with a perfectly healthy, well-oiled functioning economy and zero debt. In fact, not only is that rosy picture not the case; the polar opposite is true: Barack Obama took office while the United States was experiencing its worst economic decline since the Great Depression, including near total paralysis of the banking system, unprecedented government debt, and an ethically deficient backlog of hidden borrowing that would cause deficits to escalate by as much as 1,000% in just one decade.
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January 22, 2010 :: J.E. Robertson :: 2 Comments
The Supreme Court of the United States has taken a special interest in the case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which regards the claim that campaign finance regulations limiting the amount an entity can donate to a political party are an infringement on freedom of speech. Yesterday, the Court issued a 5-4 ruling against those campaign funding limits that is now expected to unleash a wave of virtually unlimited corporate funding for political campaigns. Numerous observers have claimed the integrity of American elections would be threatened.
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January 9, 2010 :: Denver Lessing :: No Comment Yet
Former Vice President Dick Cheney has been a relentless defender of the most aggressive tacts used during the Bush era to combat terrorism. The word aggressive applies to the attitude, of course, not the thoroughgoing nature or effectiveness of those policies. He is now attacking Pres. Obama for his response to the alleged terror plot that involved a Christmas Day bombing over Detroit, which was foiled. Yet Senator Richard Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Senate foreign relations committee, has called Cheney’s criticism unfair, and says Obama’s response has been “strong” and “decisive”.
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January 8, 2010 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
There is a fundamental difference between the logic of military tribunals for battlefield captures and the Constitutional order of criminal prosecution and due process: the Constitutional criminal justice system is designed to deal with people who violate laws; military tribunals are meant to be an ad-hoc legal variation of that standard, reserved for representatives of enemy states that violate the laws of war in a battlefield setting. By inveighing against the US criminal justice system’s ability to handle terror prosecutions, the Republican party is not only actively promoting lies, but working to elevate Al Qaeda to the status of a legitimate, sovereign government.
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January 5, 2010 :: J.E. Robertson :: 3 Comments
At the end of Barack Obama’s first year in office, there is controversy over the nature and extent of his accomplishments, and even some allies and supporters appear to have forgotten the atmosphere of multidirectional crisis in which Obama took office. What’s more, the steady decline in Obama’s approval ratings appears to follow very closely a shift in media reporting away from reporting facts and back to the hyper-commentary style of the run-up to the Iraq war, an atmosphere in which conservative political propaganda fares better than the facts of deliberative action.
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December 24, 2009 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
The United States Senate scheduled what might be the most important vote on domestic issues for 2009 for a special late legislative session on Christmas Eve. Republicans say Democrats are trying to manipulate the process and punish them for opposing the measure, while Democrats say obstructionist Republicans made it necessary to extend the legislative session in order to hold the vote this year. This morning, the bill passed by a vote of 60 to 39, along party lines.
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December 24, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Pres. Barack Obama took office in the midst of the worst economic recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s, with two wars in Asia and skyrocketing unemployment, record numbers of bankruptcies, a financial services industry in a state of near total paralysis and/or collapse, and declining federal revenues with which to alleviate the fast-rising federal budget deficit. Not one of those aspects of life in 2009 America was caused by anything Barack Obama did before or after assuming the presidency. Yet the new game in Washington, DC, is blaming Obama for everything everyone else failed to do, both before and after he assumed the presidency.
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December 24, 2009 :: staff :: 3 Comments
The pulitzer prize-winning news service PolitiFact.com, a fact-checking operation of the St. Petersburg Times, has awarded Sarah Palin its first ever “Lie of the Year” award, for her patently false claim that healthcare reform legislation would create “death panels”. Properly told, the lie of the year is the “death panels” claim itself, for which Palin is only partly responsible. She appears to have been responsible for the most high profile and most fundamentally false telling of the lie, though other Republican opponents of healthcare reform had falsely asserted that reimbursement for doctors who provide end of life counseling would be devoted to a campaign of euthanasia designed to eliminate the elderly and infirm.
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December 22, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
The Republican party is now taking a political position radically opposed to their entire philosophical and strategic posture during the healthcare debate. Upset to learn that Sen. Ben Nelson may have won special funding guarantees to help his state provide funding for Medicaid in an economic climate where the state is facing record budget shortfalls and may have to cut funding, Sen. Lindsey Graham is now demanding full federal funding for his state’s Medicaid program. Republicans have jumped on the bandwagon and are now demanding that Medicaid funding for their states be expanded as well.
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December 22, 2009 :: Denver Lessing :: No Comment Yet
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is alleging “back-room dealmaking” and what he believes to be a misuse of office in Sen. Ben Nelson’s securing additional federal funding for his state’s Medicaid program, which is facing a severe budget shortfall. He wants the attorney general of his state to investigate whether anything unconstitutional was done in the dealmaking process. But Graham was part of numerous “dealmaking” sessions in the Bush-era Senate, in which corruption was not only alleged but was more or less publicly demonstrable.
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December 21, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
The United States Senate has been grappling all this year with a record number of threatened filibusters of key legislation, a problem which has held up work on issues of vital national interest and slowed economic reforms designed to help speed recovery and prevent future abuses. The healthcare reform process is now synonymous with the worst effects of the filibuster, famously used by the late Sen. Strom Thurmond to block civil rights reforms that would bring the law in line with the US Constitution.
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December 20, 2009 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
The Democratic leadership has scheduled an historic vote on healthcare reform legislation for 1:01 am Monday morning. All 100 senators are expected to participate in the vote for cloture, which would end debate and clear the way for a straight up-or-down vote on passage of the comprehensive health insurance reform package, later this week. The bill has been the subject of intense negotiation, fierce criticism and major compromise, though all of the compromise was within the ideologically diverse 60-member Democratic caucus.
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December 19, 2009 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
The last time a Patient’s Bill of Rights was within reach was roughly a decade ago, and it was supported by Democrats and Republicans alike, from Ted Kennedy to John McCain. It included the right to an appeals process so you could challenge an unfair decision by an insurance company before a third party. It included the right to choose your own doctor. It included the right to access information about what your health insurance plan means for you. And it called for a new level of transparency so that patients would know if their doctors had a conflict of interest when providing services.
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December 19, 2009 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
After nearly a full year of partisan wrangling and internecine disputes between liberal and conservative Democrats, the sponsors of healthcare reform have reportedly secured their 60th vote in the Senate, the vote needed to break a filibuster, end debate and bring the bill to a vote for passage. Once the public option for low-cost healthcare and an expansion of Medicare were stripped from the bill, Sen. Lieberman (I-CT) signed on; progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) then threatened to withhold support, but agreed to support the measure once $10 billion were set aside for community health clinics, and now, Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE), the last holdout, has reportedly voiced his support for the reforms.
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December 17, 2009 :: staff :: 2 Comments
A bipartisan bill, proposed by Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), proposes restoring the provision of the Glass-Steagall Act, which prohibited banks from merging certain types of activities which present inherent fiscal conflicts of interest. The Cantwell-McCain bill would force the break up of major Wall Street firms that many believe have grown beyond the size where low-level commercial lending is seen as profitable.
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December 16, 2009 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), a fiercely progressive independent and a strong leader in the Democratic caucus, today introduced an amendment to extend the Medicare program to all Americans, creating a universal, single-payer healthcare plan that would be able to pay for any bills across the entire privately-administered health services sector. The Republicans demanded that the amendment be read word by word, out loud, into the record.
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December 15, 2009 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
Barack Obama’s campaign for the United States Senate, in 2004, was driven by a clear moral commitment to the need to make government more open and more accountable to the people. His record of work in state government to tackle predatory lending, corruption and ethics conflicts, helped make him a national figure almost upon entry into the Senate. He sponsored and pushed the most sweeping ethics reforms in over a generation, to make government more transparent, and promised to do so as president. Now, the White House has issued a studied and comprehensive open government directive that will ensure greater transparency and a freer flow of information to the public.
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December 14, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Intellectual property laws designed to help protect the ability of researchers to retain compensation for major innovations have led to a uniquely problematic “innovation” in the laws themselves, where specific genes, or the informational access to them, are patented, barring individuals or their physicians from dealing directly with those genes except through the for-profit patent-holders.
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December 13, 2009 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
The difficult steps we’ve taken since January have helped to break our fall, and begin to get us back on our feet. Our economy is growing again. The flood of job loss we saw at the beginning of this year slowed to a relative trickle last month. These are good signs for the future, but little comfort to all of our neighbors who remain out of a job. And my solemn commitment is to work every day, in every way I can, to push this recovery forward and build a new foundation for our lasting growth and prosperity.
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December 13, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
There has long been a view in Washington that the federal government cannot enact regulations aimed at curbing carbon emissions and other greenhouse gases (GHG) without a specific new statutory framework passed by Congress. In an effort to be conciliatory toward pro-business interests and conservatives in both parties, Pres. Obama has largely held to this view of climate-linked emissions regulations. But this view is actually not supported by existing legislation and judicial precedent.
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December 9, 2009 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
Democrats in the United States Senate, in hopes of reaching a compromise on health reform legislation, are reported to be considering a plan that would scrap the so-called “public option” for low-cost, full-coverage health insurance, in favor of a non-profit plan that would be run by the private insurers themselves, but regulated through the Office of Personnel Management.
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December 9, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
The United States’ Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has ruled that carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions pose a danger to human health, two years after the US Supreme Court gave it the authority to regulate carbon emissions for that very reason, under the Clean Air Act. The finding gives new weight to the American administration’s efforts to help achieve international consensus on aggressive emissions reductions at Copenhagen.
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December 3, 2009 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
GE, the parent company of NBC Universal, has agreed to a deal that would give Comcast a controlling interest in the media giant. NBC Universal is one of the leading producers of feature films, network television and TV news. Its flagship news services, NBC News, MSNBC, and CNBC, could see their budgets affected by the sale, and there are concerns over conflict of interest for a cable TV and internet service provider owning a controlling stake in such a vast media enterprise. Congressional hearings and federal communications regulatory investigations are considered likely to ensue, before the deal can be implemented.
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December 3, 2009 :: staff :: One Comment
The date was 3 December 1984. The people of Bhopal, India, were the victims of a chemical spill of unprecedented proportions. 40 tons of toxic gas spilled into the city, killing tens of thousands of people. Methyl isocyanate, the substance that caused the mass death, prevents oxygen from entering the blood when inhaled. In just one night, thousands were killed, literally drowning in their own bodily fluids. At least 15,000 more people were killed over the next several weeks, and many believe the total number of those killed from exposure to methyl isocyanate is well above 30,000.
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November 30, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
The United States Senate will begin deliberations on comprehensive health insurance reform legislation this week. Already there is intense criticism of the Senate’s health reform bill, from both ends of the ideological spectrum. A number of pro-business conservatives argue it is too costly and will hamper free enterprise and pro-patient progressives argue the bill is already too watered-down and needs a stronger public option, to expand coverage and reduce cost.
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November 22, 2009 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
For the first time in decades, the United States Senate has voted to open floor debate on comprehensive healthcare insurance reform legislation. All 58 Democratic members of the Senate, plus the two independents that caucus with them, voted to approve debate. 39 of the 40 Republicans voted against opening debate, except Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH), who did not vote. Though not expected to vote with Democrats today, Maine Republicans Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins were thought to be more conciliatory with regard to passing legislation containing a compromise on the public option, so their no-votes are seen as a further challenge to the Democratic majority.
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November 21, 2009 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) has announced she will vote to support cloture, which will allow debate to move forward in the Senate on healthcare insurance reform legislation. Lincoln joins other conservative Democrats, Mary Landrieu, of Louisiana, and Ben Nelson, of Nebraska, in supporting her party leadership’s call for a vote to begin debate on the healthcare insurance reform legislation.
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November 16, 2009 :: Webb Tisch :: No Comment Yet
In a vile new low, former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani has said he expects bringing the accused 9/11 mastermind to justice will directly cause new terror attacks on New York. Mr. Giuliani is now seeking to use the memory of 9/11 and the very real and lasting trauma felt by so many people, to [...]
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