The Senate and House judiciary committees pressed Attorney General Michael Mukasey for information Monday about the Department of Justice’s decision to pay as much as $24,000 a month for a private attorney to defend Alberto Gonzales from a federal lawsuit accusing him of politicizing the DOJ when he was attorney general. Last week, McClatchy Newspapers [...]
Minnesota’s State Canvassing Board will meet Wednesday and could issue a key ruling on the fate of more than 1,000 absentee ballots rejected by election officials that may tip the balance of the bitterly fought senate race between incumbent Norm Coleman and Democratic challenger Al Franken in favor of the former comedian. As of Sunday [...]
House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI) and Commercial and Administrative Law Subcommittee Chairwoman Linda Sánchez (D-CA) said they will introduce legislation allowing homeowners facing foreclosure to protect their homes in bankruptcy. Their bill, the Democratic lawmakers said, would correct a 30-year-old anomaly in the Bankruptcy Code allowing the modification of nearly all loans [...]
I’m not quite sure when the mainstream gay rights advocates adopted George W. Bush’s “you are either with us or against us” mantra, became obsessed about exit polls, and started to believe that it’s OK to marginalize people of color, but here we are. In the past few weeks, a tremendous backlash – fueled by [...]
President Bush, as has every president since his father began the practice in 1989, annually pardons a Thanksgiving turkey. Amid hundreds of spectators, most of them members of the media, the president makes a few cute comments, issues a pardon for the turkey and a “runner-up” (in case the Main Bird can’t fulfill all the [...]
Trevor L. Blackann, 34, a former aide to Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., pleaded guilty Thursday to making a false statement on his 2003 tax returns by failing to report thousands of dollars in illegal gifts he received from people connected to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, according to Matthew Friedrich, the Department of Justice’s acting assistant [...]
Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens conceded the senate race Wednesday to Democrat Mark Begich, the mayor of Anchorage, who made a dramatic comeback Tuesday defeating the seven-term Republican by more than 3,000 votes. Stevens acknowledged that the 2,500 remaining absentee ballots that still need to be counted won’t help him catch up to Begich.
Democratic Senate candidate Al Franken has the right to see a list of voters in one Minnesota county whose absentee ballots were rejected by local election officials, a judge ruled Wednesday afternoon. Ramsey County District Judge Dale Lindman granted the former Saturday Night Live comedian’s campaign a temporary restraining order and said Ramsey County election [...]
Barack Obama’s Pentagon transition team is sitting down with Defense Secretary Robert Gates in a move that some Beltway observers believe signals that the President-elect does plan to keep Gates on despite protests from Iraq War opponents. Another sign that Obama may be close to retaining Gates has been the lack of chatter from transition [...]
Detainees released from U.S. detention in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba and Afghanistan live shattered lives as a result of U.S. policies in the “war on terror,” according to a new report by human rights experts at the University of California, Berkeley done in partnership with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). The report, Guantánamo and Its [...]
