US Politics News

In a speech on the House floor Friday afternoon, Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) attacked the idea of a public health care plan, saying “this program of ‘government option’ is being touted as being the panacea, the savior of allowing people to have quality health care at an affordable price is gonna kill people.” He used Canada and the United Kingdom as examples against the public option, claiming that those countries “don’t have the appreciation of life as we do in our society.” What is typical of politicians and many Americans who use such arguments, is that they don't do any homework.

Oh, and doesn't Broun have, ahem, publicly funded healthcare of his own?

Statistically, both Canada and the U.K. have longer lifespans and lower infant mortality rates than ours.

A new survey by the Pew Research center focuses on science. While the survey says Americans like science, it also confirms, by asking scientists themselves, what we already knew: the Bush Administration suppressed any results scientific research which did not comform to its own narrow POV.

California, which began issuing IOUs on July 2nd, tried on Thursday to shore up confidence in those IOUs. These moves came as banks prepared to stop accepting the IOUs, after today.

In an interview with AP on Thursday, Levi Johnston continued his feud with Sarah Palin and her family. His view, he said, on why Palin resigned: money.

Oops again. This time the oops is on the media. While a widely circulated photo (above) seems to implicate both French President Nicolas Sarkozy and U.S. President Barack Obama in an ogling incident, further investigation by MSNBC shows (via video tape) the "look" was taken out of context.

Ooops. Let's hope U.S. President Barack Obama has the same deal with Michelle that I do with my wife: looks are fine. Here's a photo of the Obama and Nicolas Sarkozy apparently checking out the nicely proportioned rear of a 16-year-old Brazilian junior G8 delegate, Mayara Tavares, at the G8 summit yesterday.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the U.N. in 1948, states the following:

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

Apparently, conservatives may not agree.

Some right-wing blogs have been pushing a USA Today analysis — which found that counties that supported President Obama in the election are getting more stimulus money, per person, than counties that backed John McCain — to claim that the stimulus is actually “an Obama-supporter-payoff scheme.” Steve Benen noted, though, that the conservatives crowing about this article clearly didn’t read all of it, as it includes these sections:

Much of [the money] has followed a well-worn path to places that regularly collect a bigger share of federal grants and contracts, guided by formulas that have been in place for decades and leave little room for manipulation…The imbalance didn’t start with the stimulus. From 2005 through 2007, the counties that later voted for Obama collected about 50% more government aid than those that supported McCain, according to spending reports from the U.S. Census Bureau.

GOP senator John Ensign, (R-NV), 51, who in mid-June acknowledged an earlier extramarital affair with a former campaign staffer, has now admitted that his parents gave his mistress and her family nearly $100,000 "out of concern for the well being of longtime family friends during a difficult time."

The federal government's most secure prison has determined that two books written by President Barack Obama contain material "potentially detrimental to national security" and rejected an inmate's request to read them.

The cap-and-trade bill to curb carbon emissions has passed the House of Representatives, but there's "not any way in the world" that it will pass the Senate, Sen. Jim Inhofe tells Newsmax.

The Oklahoma Republican, Ranking Minority Member on the Committee on Environment and Public Works, says the bill — strongly backed by the Obama administration and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — currently has only 34 supporters in the Senate.

Leaders of Cuban and Venezuelan communities across the U.S. have become among the loudest supporters of the military ouster of Honduras' president because they see it as a strike against socialist influence in Latin America.

The Senate wants to force the Homeland Security Department to stick with a proposed Bush administration policy requiring employers to fire immigrant workers whose names don't match their Social Security numbers.

The lead Democrat steering an immigration overhaul through the Senate said Wednesday he expects to have a bill ready by Labor Day that is more generous to highly skilled immigrant workers than those who are lower skilled and is tough on future waves of illegal immigration.

A top Barack Obama aide has invited the head of a terrorist-linked organization to join an administration task force.

Valerie Jarrett, Senior Advisor and Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Engagement, provided a keynote address at the recent Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) national convention in Washington, D.C., which attracted thousands and featured anti-Semitic rhetoric.

Billions of dollars in federal stimulus money targeted to boost local economies have gone overwhelmingly to counties that supported Barack Obama in last year's presidential election.

Rep. Jim Oberstara s ambitious plan to finish a new highway bill before the end of year is running into a roadblock of his partya s own making: the massive overhaul of the nation's healthcare system.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) wants fellow lawmakers who receive classified CIA briefings to submit to polygraph tests.

“We should have a very high standard for those who are briefed by CIA — to make sure the information isn’t compromised and [lawmakers] who are briefed are telling the truth about what they’ve been told,” he said. “Fact-finding and oversight is only as good as the group of people able to do it.”

The director of the CIA admitted that the Central Intelligence Agency lied to and deceived Congress since 2001. This revelation backs up claims which Nancy Pelosi made months earlier about the CIA spreading misinformation to members of Congress. The admission from Leon Panetta comes on the eve of debate of a intelligence spending bill in Congress.

New York's problems in its state senate have made California's woes seem almost (almost!) small in comparison. The month-long Senate stalemate began when a GOP-led group seized power from the Democrats on June 8, but in doing so led to an effective and helpless tie. Richard Ravitch to the rescue (maybe)!