Sen. Blanche Lincoln said Friday morning she has not decided whether she's going to vote to allow debate to start on the health care reform bill, despite reports that the Arkansas Democrat had informed party leaders of her decision. Meanwhile, fellow Democrat Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska announced that he would vote in favor of the motion, arguing that he didn't want to obstruct reform efforts and hopes to improve the legislation on the floor. "The Senate should start trying to fix a health care system that costs too much and delivers too little for Nebraskans," Mr. Nelson said in ...
The Senate Select Committee on Ethics admonished Sen. Roland W. Burris on Friday for giving "inconsistent, incomplete and misleading" testimony about contact with disgraced former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich prior receiving his senate appointment. The committee issued a "letter of qualified admonition," chastising Mr. Burris for being less than truthful about the circumstances surrounding his appointment to fill the seat vacated by President Obama. But the committee said the misconduct, while reflecting poorly on the Senate, does not appear to be "any actionable violations of law." Mr. Burris, Illinois Democrat, said he was pleased "this matter is finally closed." He ...
Mullah Mohammed Omar, the one-eyed leader of the Afghan Taliban, has fled a Pakistani city on the border with Afghanistan and found refuge from potential U.S. attacks in the teeming Pakistani port city of Karachi with the assistance of Pakistan's intelligence service, three current and former U.S. intelligence officials said. Mullah Omar, who hosted Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders when they plotted the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, had been residing in Quetta, where the Afghan Taliban shura -- or council -- had moved from Kandahar after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Two senior U.S. intelligence ...
The Army has guidelines on how to deal with racist views and actions within the ranks, but none on how to deal with Islamic jihadism, a former Army vice chief of staff told Congress on Thursday. Retired Army Gen. John M. Keane said this absence of guidance fostered a politically correct reluctance to investigate the man accused in the Fort Hood shootings, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan. A military pamphlet created after the 1995 racially motivated shootings at Fort Bragg is the intended guidebook on how to deal with extremist activities and prohibited conduct but is mostly focused on white supremacist ...
Senate Democrats' health care bill would create a new marriage penalty by imposing a tax on individuals who make $200,000 annually but hitting married couples making just $50,000 more. That's one of 17 new taxes imposed by the bill, which also creates a levy on elective plastic surgery - some call it "botax" - and places a 40 percent excise tax on those who have generous health care plans. "If you have insurance, you get taxed. If you don't have insurance, you get taxed. If you need a life-saving medical device, you get taxed. If you need prescription medicines, you ...
The road to health care reform, it seems, passes through Nebraska, Arkansas and Louisiana. And maybe Maine. Democratic leaders don't yet have the 60 votes required to start formal floor debate on the health care reform bill, but hope that pledges to lower the deficit, improvements to affordability and, in one case, a home-state sweetener, could seal the deal. All but three Democrats - Sens. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana - are expected to support the procedural vote required to start debate on the bill that Majority Leader Harry Reid of ...
The most prominent defenders of the University of North Dakota's right to call its teams the Fighting Sioux are neither alumni nor hockey fans. They're Sioux. A group of Spirit Lake Sioux won a temporary restraining order last week to stop the North Dakota University System from retiring the nickname and logo, one of the last in the country associated with an American Indian tribe. A hearing for a preliminary injunction is slated for Dec. 9 in Ramsey County District Court in Devils Lake, N.D. Most such university team names have been abandoned in the face of criticism that they ...
ATLANTA (AP) | Air travelers nationwide scrambled to revise their plans Thursday after an FAA computer glitch caused widespread cancellations and delays for the second time in 15 months. The Federal Aviation Administration said the problem, which lasted about four hours, was fixed about 9 a.m., but it was not clear how long flights would be affected. It started when a single circuit board in a piece of networking equipment at a computer center in Salt Lake City failed about 5 a.m., the FAA said. That failure prevented air traffic control computers in different parts of the country from talking ...
President Obama didn't visit the city of Xi'an on his trip to China, but he still has the chance to see some of its famous archaeological treasures. Some of the terra-cotta soldiers excavated from around the tomb of the first Chinese emperor plus related artifacts are on view at the National Geographic Museum in its first ticketed exhibition. Then again, the president and his fellow visitors may be let down by this hyped show. Instead of featuring row after row of warriors as they often appear in photographs of the ancient site, the touring exhibit displays just 15 figures — ...
Ever since he came to the Washington Redskins seven years ago, Ladell Betts has believed the same thing. "He's always said, 'Get me 20 carries, I'll get you 100 yards,' " longtime teammate Rock Cartwright said. Betts has backed up his words in the few opportunities he has gotten, most recently in the Redskins' victory over the Denver Broncos last week. Betts has reached the 100-yard mark seven times in the nine games in which he has carried at least 20 times, including the 114 yards he gained on 26 attempts against the Broncos. Betts will get another shot Sunday ...
OPINION/ANALYSIS: Now that every nut in America is equipped with a laptop computer, you're likely to run afoul of a nut on the loose almost anywhere. I observed in this space earlier this week that Barack Obama's curious compulsion to travel the world to make endless apologies for America could stem from his spending the most formative years of his childhood in the Third World. I mentioned two observable facts, neither in any way accusatory or rude, that his father was a Kenyan (Marxist) and the mother who raised him was obviously attracted to men of the Third World. She ...
OPINION/ANALYSIS One of the key points that contrarian investors make is to not follow the herd. More simply, zig while others are zag to find an investment, be it stocks, bonds, land or some other investment vehicle, that may be overlooked and as such offers an interesting opportunity. Many professional money managers, institutional portfolio managers included, tend to stay focused on larger capitalization stocks while avoiding smaller ones. It stands to reason then that "microcap" stocks may offer some undiscovered opportunities. To help make sense of potential opportunities with very small capitalization stocks, I turned to Steve Kann, a recognized ...
UPDATED: The Senate debate on Majority Leader Harry Reid's health care bill will kick off Friday on the floor and rage until an 8 p.m. Saturday vote that will test the Democrats' 60-member supermajority. That is, unless one Republican senator gets his way. The 2,074-page Senate health care bill would take 34 hours to read cover to cover -- and that's just what Sen. Tom Coburn wants done on the Senate floor. The Oklahoma Republican has threatened to invoke parliamentary rules to force the Senate clerk (or more likely, a team of clerks) to read the massive bill before the ...
Former presidential candidate Sen. John McCain said Thursday he has read Sarah Palin's book and has no regrets about picking her as a running mate. "I felt honored to have Sarah," said Mr. McCain, Arizona Republican. "There's no doubt she energized our party and America. She's doing it today." His praised came one day after defending top campaign advisers Steve Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace, whom Mrs. Palin criticized in her book, "Going Rogue: An American Life." Mr. McCain said during the interview Thursday with The Washington Times' "American's Morning News" radio show that Mrs. Palin is a "political force in ...
UPDATED: The FAA said Thursday the computer outage that resulted in widespread flight delays and cancellations has been traced to a major telecommunications system in Utah. Problems began at about 5 a.m. EST and lasted for roughly four hours, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. Agency officials said the outage was the result of a software-configuration problem at its Telecommunications Infrastructure in Salt Lake City, Utah, that controls air-traffic flow. They also said there is no indication the outage was the result of a cyber attack and that it impacted the National Airspace Data Interchange Network — which relies on ...
KABUL, Afghanistan -- President Hamid Karzai was sworn in for a second full term Thursday, promising to fight corruption but offering little in terms of specifics, as hundreds of foreign dignitaries watched for signs of his determination to rid his government of graft and cronyism. In his speech, Mr. Karzai, 51, also set the ambitious goals of having Afghan forces take over security across the country and ending Afghanistan's reliance on private security companies by the end of his new five-year term. "Corruption is a very dangerous enemy of the state," he said, a day after Secretary of State Hillary ...
Senate Democratic leaders released a 10-year, $849 billion bill to overhaul the nation's health care system on Wednesday, putting new pressure on three undecided, moderate Democrats whose support is needed to ensure President Obama's chief domestic priority gets to a floor debate. The bill, which Majority Leader Harry Reid put together, would cut the federal deficit by $127 billion over 10 years and extend coverage to 94 percent of all Americans. "Many of those who came before us have tried to achieve what we're on the cusp of achieving," said Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, who was acting chairman of the ...
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. let stand Wednesday a claim that confessed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed will remain in U.S. custody even if he is acquitted in the so-called "trial of the century" scheduled for a New York courtroom. The claim arose during a tense Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, at which Mr. Holder defended from a storm of Republican criticism his decision to bring five suspects in the Sept. 11 attacks to trial in New York. "It's my understanding that if [Mohammed] is not convicted, and somehow the judge lets him off on a technicality or something, ...
Arrests of illegal immigrant workers have dropped precipitously under President Obama, according to figures released Wednesday. Criminal arrests, administrative arrests, indictments and convictions of illegal immigrants at work sites all fell by more than 50 percent from fiscal 2008 to fiscal 2009. The figures show that Mr. Obama has made good on his pledge to shift enforcement away from going after illegal immigrant workers themselves - but at the expense of Americans' jobs, said Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, the Republican who compiled the numbers from the Department of Homeland Security's U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE). Mr. Smith, ...
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. | Sarah Palin apparently had a point to make when she chose economically ravaged Michigan as the first stop on her heavily promoted book tour. "We're Americans. We don't give up on each other," she had written in the conclusion of "Going Rogue," which shot to the top of best-seller lists upon its release Tuesday. Breaking out in intermittent cheers of "Palin, Palin, Palin," hundreds stood in line for hours inside the Woodland Mall for a glimpse of the former vice-presidential candidate and Republican superstar. Supporters called her a fierce defender of families with solid potential for ...
|
|
|