[Rick] Perry, after all, entered the Texas House in 1984 as a Democrat. He won reelection as a Democrat in 1986 and 1988, the same year he served as state chairman of Al Gore?s presidential campaign.
h/t: Dave Weigel.
6:12 PM PT: Josh Nelson has a ton more on this, and points out the irony of Perry having apparently decided to run because of Mitt Romney's acknowledgment that climate change is real.
?You want a fight?? Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.) said during a press conference in the Capitol. ?If anybody in this building wants to take on Social Security ? privatize it, change the benefits by altering the consumer price index or by any other method ? know this: You?ve got a fight on your hands.?...
Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) said the combination of Republican proposals to overhaul Social Security and Medicare benefits would hit seniors doubly hard.
?Seniors get the double whammy ? higher healthcare costs and deeper benefit cuts,? she said. ?It?s a bad formula for anyone.?
Republicans in both chambers have floated proposals in recent weeks to overhaul Social Security in the name of preserving the program and reducing deficits.
In the upper chamber, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) is proposing to shave 1 percentage point from the annual cost-of-living adjustment, or COLA, which is designed to align Social Security payments with inflation.
House Dems are also pushing back hard against an idea floated by both the White House and Sen. Chuck Schumer: extending they payroll tax holiday because of the threat it poses in undermining Social Security's sole funding source. "You can provide tax relief that would serve as a stimulus, without touching the revenue stream dedicated to Social Security," Rep. Ted Deutch (D-Fla.) said. Meeting Social Security obligations with this revenue stream tightened, Garamendi pointed out, would just mean more borrowing, "You simply add it to the deficit."
They are still pushing for the payroll tax cap to be lifted: "Someone who earns $50,000 a year [is] paying 6 percent, but someone who?s earning $5 million per year is paying less than 1 percent," Deutch said. That would solve that basic problem of fairness, but it would also bring the necessary revenue to keep Social Security solvent.
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In August 2005, Donald Bullcoming's car rear-ended a pick-up truck at an intersection in Farmington, New Mexico. The drivers got out of their cars to exchange insurance information, the other driver noticing that Bullcoming?s eyes were bloodshot and that his breath smelled of alcohol. The driver told his wife to call the police; Bullcoming left before the police arrived, but officers found him and performed field sobriety tests, arresting him for a DWI. Bullcoming refused a breathalyzer test, so the police obtained a warrant to draw his blood, which was sent to a state lab for blood-alcohol testing by staffer Curtis Caylor. That test revealed a BAC level sufficient to elevate the charge to aggravated DWI.
When it was time for Bullcoming's trial, the lab analyst who performed the test (Caylor) wasn't called as a witness, having ?very recently [been] put on unpaid leave? for a reason not revealed. "A startled defense counsel objected," the Supreme Court's majority explained today, "The prosecution, she complained, had never disclosed, until trial commenced, that the witness 'out there ? [was] not the analyst [of Bullcoming?s sample].'? The state proposed to introduce the test results as a ?business record? during the testimony of Gerasimos Razatos, another scientist at the lab who had neither observed nor reviewed Caylor?s analysis. The defense objected. The judge overruled and allowed the testimony in; Bullcoming was convicted of aggravated DWI.
In a 5-4 decision today the Supreme Court held that this violated Bullcoming's rights under the Confrontation Clause, because "the accused?s right is to be confronted with the analyst who made the certification, unless that analyst is unavailable at trial, and the accused had an opportunity, pretrial, to cross-examine that particular scientist."
You'll want to see the lineup before proceeding:
Ginsburg, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, except as to Part IV and footnote 6. Scalia, J., joined that opinion in full, Sotomayor and Kagan, JJ., joined as to all but Part IV, and Thomas, J., joined as to all but Part IV and footnote 6. Sotomayor, J., filed an opinion concurring in part. Kennedy, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which Roberts, C. J., and Breyer and Alito, JJ., joined.No, that isn't the alignment you may have expected, I'm guessing.
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Rep. Fred Upton continues to use his tenure as chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee to attempt to strip the Environmental Protection Agency?s ability to regulate toxic substances that threaten the environment.His committee is considering a new bill that would strip the EPA?s authority to regulate the handling of coal ash, a by-product of coal energy production that can contain a wide range of toxic metals and chemicals including arsenic, lead, chromium, and selenium.
"If 1930's German documentary filmmaker ("Triumph of the Will") Leni Riefenstahl had not been called to Valhalla a few years ago, she might have viewed a rough cut of "The Undefeated" and advised Steve Bannon: "You'd do well to temper the propaganda a little bit."
When Palin launched her "One Nation" bus tour on Memorial Day amid a swirl of media attention and excitement from her fervent fan base, many political observers who had once dismissed her were reminded of the jolt that her candidacy could provide to what has thus far been a relatively sleepy GOP nominating fight. [...]Though Palin and her staff never announced a timeline for the remaining legs of her trip, aides had drafted preliminary itineraries that would have taken her through the Midwest and Southeast at some point this month. But those travel blueprints are now in limbo, RCP has learned, as Palin and her family have reverted to the friendly confines of summertime Alaska, where the skies are currently alight for over 19 hours a day and the Bristol Bay salmon fishing season is nearing its peak.
A Washington watchdog group is singling out Sen. David Vitter, accusing the Louisiana Republican of attempted bribery.Vitter last month blocked a proposed pay raise for Interior Secretary Ken Salazar in order to pressure the Obama administration to approve more offshore drilling permits. On Tuesday, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington asked the Senate ethics committee to investigate whether Vitter?s actions amounted to attempted bribery.
Playing the presidential card has paid off for Donald Trump.The real-estate mogul and reality-TV host -- who kept viewers and the NBC network guessing until the last minute whether he would make a serious run at the Oval Office -- got a sizeable pay raise to renew his contract to host "The Celebrity Apprentice" for another two years.
NBC Universal, which was acquired by cable-TV giant Comcast this year, agreed to pay Trump and co-producer Mark Burnett an estimated $160 million over two years, according to sources familiar with the contract.
Servicewomen have died in all of America?s wars, but usually they were support personnel such as nurses and clerks. In Afghanistan, most women who have died were killed in combat situations, as Specialist Snyder was, despite the military?s official prohibition on women in combat jobs.The same has been true in Iraq, where 111 female soldiers have died, according to data compiled by icasualties.org, an independent organization that tracks military fatalities. In both wars, 60 percent of those deaths are classified by the military as due to hostile acts.
Wars with no clear front lines have put women in harm?s way more than ever before, blurring the boundaries between combat jobs that are outlawed for women, and support jobs that are often as dangerous and in some cases even more so.
Penning an autobiography and being the subject of numerous books and films is practically in the job description of a US president. But this weekend Bill Clinton joined only a handful of other Oval Office veterans in being memorialized onstage. Cue the lights, Bill Clinton's life is now an opera!
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