Congress has passed legislation to make violence against gays and lesbians a category of hate crime.

Los Angeles Times, October 23rd, 2009

The Senate approves the measure, 68 to 29, and Obama is expected to sign it. The legislation, previously passed by the House, is named for Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr.

Reporting from Washington – A bill to make violence against gays and lesbians a federal hate crime cleared the Senate on Thursday and headed to the White House. The 68-29 vote was a victory for civil rights groups that have long sought to expand the federal statute beyond attacks motivated by religion, race, color or national origin. The bill, which President Obama is expected to sign, includes penalties for assaults based on a victim’s sexual orientation, gender, disability or gender identity.

Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr., whose Justice Department would be charged with enforcing the provisions, praised the bill’s passage. “There have been nearly 80,000 hate-crime incidents reported to the FBI since I first testified before Congress in support of a hate-crimes bill 11 years ago,” Holder said.

Recent incidents — such as the June shooting death of an African American security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum by a white supremacist — “demonstrate that there are still those for whom prejudice can translate into violence,” he said. More…

Income Concentration in 2007 Was at Highest Level Since 1928, New Analysis Shows

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, September 9th, 2009

Two-thirds of the nation’s total income gains from 2002 to 2007 flowed to the top 1 percent of U.S. households, and that top 1 percent held a larger share of income in 2007 than at any time since 1928, according to an analysis of newly released IRS data by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez.

During those years, the Piketty-Saez data also show, the inflation-adjusted income of the top 1 percent of households grew more than ten times faster than the income of the bottom 90 percent of households.

The last economic expansion began in November 2001 and ended in December 2007, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, which means the Piketty-Saez data essentially cover that expansion. The last time such a large share of the income gain during an expansion went to the top 1 percent of households — and such a small share went to the bottom 90 percent of households — was in the 1920s More…

Poverty Gap at widest point since Great Depression

Huffington Post, August 18th, 2009

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow went hard after President Obama Monday night for his willingness to give up a public health care option.

Noting that health insurance stocks did great Monday even as the rest of the market slipped, she asked, “How did we get here? how did we get to the foretold death of the public option and UnitedHealth awesome Monday on Wall Street? We got here through a collapse of political ambition and the resultant downgrading of expectations for this once in a lifetime, stars-aligned political shot at fixing the system that accounts for one-sixth of our economy.”

More…

GOP hypocrisy on health plan

Chattanooga Times Free Press, August 3rd, 2009

If there were any doubt where Republicans in Congress stand on health care reform, their position should be abundantly clear by now. But if you haven’t been listening, here’s a hint: They’re all about protecting the big profits of the greedy giants in the medical industry, and not concerned a whit about changing the system to benefit the 90 percent of Americans who struggle with soaring health care costs while their coverage falls off the cliff.

Here’s how you can measure where the Republicans stand:

* They are body and soul for keeping the status-quo that chiefly benefits for-profit insurance giants. This is the industry that has doubled the price of health insurance in the past eight years; that heartlessly denies claims with every technicality they can find; that regularly forces even supposedly well-covered insured patients into medical bankruptcy; that cherry-picks the healthy and charges far more for individual coverage than for group plans; and that has forced health care providers to hire legions of office workers solely to contest insurers’ denials for claims and treatment recommendations. (Then they have the nerve to run scare-talk ads about “bureaucrats controlling your doctor’s decisions.”) More…

The GOP’s New Health-Care Alternative. Join the Line

Time Magazine, August 4th, 2009

House Republicans on Wednesday introduced their official alternative health-care-reform plan. Well, kind of. It’s not the official alternative, but it has the support of the leadership. And sure, some leaders may support other alternative bills out there, but this one also has the support of the top Republicans on the relevant committees. Oh, wait — some of them may also support other bills. But in any case, all this should remind you that the GOP does really stand for something.

Let’s leave aside for the moment that this plan was a four-page exercise in public relations that left out how many of the 47 million uninsured Americans would be covered, how it would be paid for or even how much it would cost. The plan — and the four others introduced by Republicans in the House and five more in the Senate — is indicative of how the GOP is handling Democratic efforts to pass universal health care: death by a thousand paper cuts. More…

Predatory lenders, credit card companies and banks have amassed millions to lobby against federal legislation to aid consumers in understanding and comparing financial contracts.

Huffington Post, July 17th, 2009

TARP Oversight Chair Elizabeth Warren was on the Rachel Maddow show, discussing the ongoing battle to regulate the credit card industry.

MADDOW: Are you worried that the [credit card] industry’s going to be about to kill [credit card reform legislation] in the crib? Reporting is that it’s their top priority to get rid of it.

WARREN: My gosh! I have to tell you, it’s like they’re stampeding in the halls already in Washington. the Gucci loafers. These guys have built up a huge war chest, they’ve been interviewing public relations firms to see who can come up with the next Harry And Louise ad to explain to the American people why they’r better off with credit cards that nobody can read, hundreds of pages of mortgage documents that nobody can read…the idea is you’re better off with how things are…forget all that stuff the happened over the last few years. And we promise to keep things up just like we did before. I just can’t believe theyr’e trying to sell that to the American people.

Huffington Post, July 15th, 2009

Progressive Democrats are taking a hard stand on health care reform, with a majority committing to oppose any health care reform package that doesn’t include a robust public option. On Wednesday, they got an inadvertent assist by an anonymous leak of their “whip list.”

A whip list, which is generally tightly guarded, is used by congressional leaders to keep track of the private pledges made by members before a vote. The list is kept private to encourage frank answers from members so that leadership can gather accurate intelligence.

The whip list was obtained by Joan McCarter, a DailyKos contributing editor. It names fifty members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) who have firmly pledged to oppose any bill that doesn’t meet the group’s standards. Without those fifty votes, Democrats would be unable to pass the reform effort without Republican support. (Once Judy Chu is sworn in, there will be 256 Democrats, and one “closet Democrat”; 218 are needed for passage, leaving Democrats 12 votes short.) More…

New York Times, July 15th, 2009

U.S. Opens Path to Asylum for Victims of Sexual Abuse

The Obama administration has opened the way for foreign women who are victims of severe domestic beatings and sexual abuse to receive asylum in the United States. The action reverses a Bush administration stance on an issue at the center of a protracted and passionate legal battle over the possibilities for battered women to become refugees.

In addition to meeting the existing strict conditions for being granted asylum, abused women need to show a judge that women are viewed as subordinate by their abuser, according to a court filing by the administration, and must also show that domestic abuse is widely tolerated in their country.

The administration laid out its position in an immigration appeals court filing in the case of a woman from Mexico who requested asylum, saying she feared she would be murdered by a common law husband there. According to court documents filed in San Francisco, the man repeatedly raped her at gunpoint, held her captive, stole from her and at one point attempted to burn her alive when he learned she was pregnant. More…

Dodd: A Good Health Care Bill is More Important than a Bipartisan one!

Huffington Post, July 15th, 2009

Kennedy health care bill cleared by Senate committee

The Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee approved a historic overhaul of the health care system on a party-line vote Wednesday morning. The firm push leaves the Senate Finance Committee as the remaining obstacle to reform.

The House is also moving swiftly to overhaul the system. The three committees involved — Ways and Means, Energy and Commerce and Education and Labor — jointly released text of a far-reaching bill Tuesday that would cover some 97 percent of Americans and a cost of slightly more than a trillion dollars over ten years, paid for largely by a tax hike on the very wealthy.

The Senate health committee and the House committees have been able to move forward because they have not insisted on bipartisanship support for their efforts. Democrats alone can move a bill through the House and, with Al Franken making the 60th senator, through the Senate also without Republican assistance.

“There’s a lot of pressure on the Finance Committee to get something done,” said Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.).
The Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee approved a historic overhaul of the health care system on a party-line vote Wednesday morning. The firm push leaves the Senate Finance Committee as the remaining obstacle to reform.

The House is also moving swiftly to overhaul the system. The three committees involved — Ways and Means, Energy and Commerce and Education and Labor — jointly released text of a far-reaching bill Tuesday that would cover some 97 percent of Americans and a cost of slightly more than a trillion dollars over ten years, paid for largely by a tax hike on the very wealthy.

The Senate health committee and the House committees have been able to move forward because they have not insisted on bipartisanship support for their efforts. Democrats alone can move a bill through the House and, with Al Franken making the 60th senator, through the Senate also without Republican assistance.

“There’s a lot of pressure on the Finance Committee to get something done,” said Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.).

What does the bill’s passage say to the Finance Committee?

“It says, ‘Welcome. Come and join us,’” Dodd told the Huffington Post after the vote.

Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) has been working closely with panel Republicans, who have refused to compromise on key issues. He has been reluctant to move forward without them.

Top Obama aides suggested Tuesday, however, that if Republicans didn’t want to be part of health care reform, the president was okay doing it with Democrats alone.

More from Huffington….

And in a related story also on Huffington….

Ted Kennedy hails the health care bill and talks of his brother’s legacy

Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), who is reported to be working several hours a day consulting on health care legislation, released a statement on Wednesday applauding the Senate HELP Committee for passing a comprehensive bill with a public option.

In the statement, the senator — who, following his brain cancer diagnosis, relinquished his duties as chair of the HELP committee to Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) — referred to the legacies of his two older brothers and the sacrifices they made on behalf of the country.

Composing his statement from the same spot in Hyannis Port where both John and Robert Kennedy launched their presidential bids, he wrote, “this room is a special place — and I believe our committee’s actions have added a glorious chapter to the honor roll of history that has been made here.”  More….

Conservatives including Jeff Sessions blast Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund for stands on capital punishment, abortion rights, and advocacy for anti-discrimination laws.

“extremist”, “shocking” Sotomayor not fit for bench, insinuated

Associated Press, July 12th, 2009

NEW YORK (AP) — Cesar Perales has fought his share of critics over the years, in legal battles for minorities denied jobs, bilingual classes in schools and more Latino police officers.

But none of those efforts compares with the tempest his Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund has stirred because of the dozen years that Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor served as one of its board members.

Conservatives have called the group’s stances on capital punishment and abortion rights, as well as its advocacy of affirmative action in worker discrimination cases, “extreme” and “shocking.” Some have suggested Sotomayor’s longtime association with the group is an indication that she is biased and would be unable to render impartial decisions as a Supreme Court justice. More…

So, at last Minnesota gets it’s second Senator

McClatchy Washington Bureau, June 30th, 2009

WASHINGTON — Comedian Al Franken officially won the Minnesota U. S. Senate seat Tuesday, as the state’s Supreme Court ordered that he be certified as the winner of last year’s election and incumbent Republican Norm Coleman conceded.

Franken’s win gives Democrats control of 60 Senate seats, a filibuster-proof majority. That means that Democrats, if they’re unified, will be able to block Republicans from exploiting Senate rules to prevent votes on legislation, enhancing the Democrats’ ability to enact their party’s agenda into law. More…

Senator John Coryn R-TX who declared WORLD WAR III over this issue now says “the courts have spoken and I join Norm…[this decision gives] the American people particularily clear choice next year.”