Obama set to undo "conscience rule" sm

for healthcare workers who refuse to participate in performing abortions or dispensing birth control methods which disagree with their religious convictions. So now a woman's right to choose whether to abort her unborn child trumps a healthcare professional's right to adhere to their religious convictions? The article even mentions Catholic healthcare facilities as not being exempt, and we know how the Church feels about abortions. Unbelievable!!!

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Just saw on MSNBC they are polling Barack/Hillary agains McCain (who has the bigger leads). Of course they only show PA, Ohio, and Florida (the 3 states she did better in).

New rule - If they are going to show polls, they should show them for all states! Not just the ones where one candidate is doing better than the other.

Homeland Security, the Keystone Stasi, Now Tracks and Enforces Local Police Warrants

June 20, 2006: For many years, those working to create a total surveillance state have employed the salami tactic of taking away our freedoms one slice at a time. Laws that directly challenge constitutional rights, like the USA PATRIOT Act, are the spectacular exception. Agencies like FEMA quietly prepare plans for martial law, and have built a Shadow Government for military rule without need of a written order. The Bush administration for its part has constantly tested the waters, establishing new realities by fiat (as in its creation of the enemy combatant category to justify unlimited detention without charges), or floating test balloons like the Total Information Awareness program (which was withdrawn officially, even as the NSA's telephone surveillance proceeded to implement its spirit behind the scenes).

Now we must all realize that at some point, the salami runs out. It no longer makes sense to say that our government is creating a police state. The fact is, that state has arrived, complete with One Big Database and the establishment of universal jurisdictions. In an editorial published this week in New York Newsday, Ray LeMoine tells a memorable story of how he was detained by Homeland Security for several hours because of outstanding local police warrants relating to his sale of unlicensed T-shirts (Yankees Suck, among others). We dare not dismiss this as a minor matter; it shows that there is nothing about us in electronic form that Homeland Security does not know. Though he is clearly a believer in the official story of 9/11, LeMoine doesn't let his humorous tone hide the true meaning of his story: Homeland Security, the agency set up to combat terrorism after 9/11 has been given universal jurisdiction and can hold anyone on Earth for crimes unrelated to national security... erasing the lines of jurisdiction between local police and the federal state. If we do not fight back, the day when Homeland Security can detain people for being behind on their credit card payments is not far off. A national ID card with a chip of our complete financial, health and criminal records seems almost superfluous. Once again, 9/11 was a useful pretext for those who exploit terror to wage war on freedom. (nl)

The White House says the executive's appeal had no role in changing a measure to protect groundwater. Critics call it a political payoff.

By Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten
Times Staff Writers

June 13, 2006

WASHINGTON � A rule designed by the Environmental Protection Agency to keep groundwater clean near oil drilling sites and other construction zones was loosened after White House officials rejected it amid complaints by energy companies that it was too restrictive and after a well-connected Texas oil executive appealed to White House senior advisor Karl Rove.

The new rule, which took effect Monday, came after years of intense industry pressure, including court battles and behind-the-scenes agency lobbying. But environmentalists vowed Monday that the fight was not over, distributing internal White House documents that they said portrayed the new rule as a political payoff to an industry long aligned with the Republican Party and President Bush.

In 2002, a Texas oilman and longtime Republican activist, Ernest Angelo, wrote a letter to Rove complaining that an early version of the rule was causing many in the oil industry to openly express doubt as to the merit of electing Republicans when we wind up with this type of stupidity.

Rove responded by forwarding the letter to top White House environmental advisors and scrawling a handwritten note directing an aide to talk to those advisors and get a response ASAP.

Rove later wrote to Angelo, assuring him that there was a keen awareness within the administration of addressing not only environmental issues but also the economic, energy and small business impacts of the rule.

Environmentalists pointed to the Rove correspondence as evidence that the Bush White House, more than others, has mixed politics with policy decisions that are traditionally left to scientists and career regulators. At the time, Rove oversaw the White House political office and was directing strategy for the 2002 midterm elections.

Angelo had been mayor of Midland, Texas, when Bush ran an oil firm there. He is also a longtime hunting partner of Rove's. The two men first worked together when Angelo managed Ronald Reagan's 1980 presidential campaign in Texas.

In an interview Monday, Angelo welcomed the new groundwater rule and said his letter might have made a difference in how it was written. But he waved off environmentalists' questions about Rove's involvement.

I'm sure that his forwarding my letter to people that were in charge of it might have had some impression on them, Angelo said. It seems to me that it was a totally proper thing to do. I can't see why anybody's upset about it, except of course that it was effective.

Asked why he wrote to Rove and not the Environmental Protection Agency or to some other official more directly associated with the matter, Angelo replied: Karl and I have been close friends for 25 years. So, why wouldn't I write to him? He's the guy I know best in the administration.

White House spokesmen said Monday that the rule was revised as part of the federal government's standard rule-making process. They said the EPA was simply directed by White House budget officials to make the rule comply with requirements laid out by Congress in a sweeping new energy law passed last year.

The issue has been a focus of lobbying by the oil and gas industry for years, ever since Clinton administration regulators first announced their intent to require special EPA permits for construction sites smaller than five acres, including oil and gas drilling sites, as a way to discourage water pollution.

Energy executives, who have long complained of being stifled by federal regulations limiting drilling and exploration, sought and received a delay in that permit requirement in 2003. Eventually, Congress granted a permanent exemption that was written into the 2005 energy legislation.

The EPA rule issued Monday adds fine print to that broad exception in ways that critics, including six members of the Senate, say exceeds what Congress intended.

For example, the new rule generally exempts sediment � pieces of dirt and other particles that can gum up otherwise clear streams � from regulations governing runoff that may flow from oil and gas production or construction sites.

Sen. James M. Jeffords (I-Vt.), who joined five Democrats in objecting to the rule, wrote in March that there was nothing in the energy law suggesting that such an exclusion of sediment had even entered the mind of any member of Congress as it considered the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Moreover, Jeffords wrote, the rule violated the intentions of Congress when it passed the Clean Water Act 19 years ago.

White House and administration officials disagreed.

At the EPA, Assistant Administrator Benjamin H. Grumbles said the rule responded directly to congressional action. He cited a letter from Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, endorsing it. He added that the rule still allows states to regulate pollution, and that it continues to regulate sediment that contains toxic ingredients.

Lisa Miller, a spokeswoman for another senior lawmaker, Rep. Joe L. Barton (R-Texas), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said Monday that the rule was designed to hold oil companies accountable for putting toxic substances in the soil, but not for dirt that results from storms.

When it rains, storm water gets muddy, regardless of whether there's an oil well in the neighborhood, Miller said. Congress told EPA to do this, and now they have. If there's oil in the water, a producer has to clean it up. If it's nature, they don't.

The change in the rule occurred last year when staffers in the White House Office of Management and Budget began editing an early version drafted by EPA technical staff. The Office of Management and Budget oversees another division, the Office of Information and Regulatory Policy, which critics complain has served as a central hub in the Bush White House for making government regulations more business-friendly.

A spokesman for the White House budget office, Scott Milburn, said Monday that the White House's involvement in making rules was intended to ensure that agencies issue regulations that follow the law.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino rejected the suggestion that Rove was involved in the rule change. Rove frequently receives requests, she said, and that he tries to reply and direct those requests to the appropriate people. She said that for environmentalists to accuse Rove of manipulating the EPA rule was a typical overreach by administration critics.

That is quite an overreach, when it was the United States Congress that passed the Energy Act in a bipartisan way to ask the EPA to undertake this rulemaking, she said.

In their March letter, Jeffords and his Democratic colleagues asked EPA officials whether the correspondence with Rove influenced the final rule.

A response written by Grumbles did not directly address the Rove question. But the Natural Resources Defense Council and other environmental groups assert that they know the answer.

We can't say that Karl Rove walked over to OMB and demanded these changes, said Sharon Buccino, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's land program. But it is clear that there was direction coming from the top of the White House, and this was a result of the thinking of the White House as opposed to environmental experts at EPA.

Buccino called the rule yet another example of the Bush administration rewarding their friends in the oil and gas industry at the expense of the environment and the public's health.

In his letter to Rove, Angelo did not hide his political feelings. He thanked Rove for all you do, and added words of encouragement on another topic: The president has the opposition on the run on the Iraq issue.

His letter appeared to gain notice at the highest levels of the administration. Three months after Angelo sent it, a top EPA official wrote to tell him that the agency had decided to impose the temporary delay on the construction permitting rule for oil and gas companies.

The letter was copied to Rove, White House environmental advisor James L. Connaughton and then-EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman.

Miers' Answer Raises Questions

WASHINGTON � Asked to describe the constitutional issues she had worked on during her legal career, Supreme Court nominee Harriet E. Miers had relatively little to say on the questionnaire she sent to the Senate this week.

And what she did say left many constitutional experts shaking their heads.

At one point, Miers described her service on the Dallas City Council in 1989. When the city was sued on allegations that it violated the Voting Rights Act, she said, the council had to be sure to comply with the proportional representation requirement of the Equal Protection Clause.

But the Supreme Court repeatedly has said the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection of the laws does not mean that city councils or state legislatures must have the same proportion of blacks, Latinos and Asians as the voting population.

That's a terrible answer. There is no proportional representation requirement under the equal protection clause, said New York University law professor Burt Neuborne, a voting rights expert. If a first-year law student wrote that and submitted it in class, I would send it back and say it was unacceptable.

Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan, also an expert on voting rights, said she was surprised the White House did not check Miers' questionnaire before sending it to the Senate.

Are they trying to set her up? Any halfway competent junior lawyer could have checked the questionnaire and said it cannot go out like that. I find it shocking, she said.

White House officials say the term proportional representation is amenable to different meanings. They say Miers was referring to the requirement that election districts have roughly the same number of voters.

In the 1960s, the Supreme Court adopted the one person, one vote concept as a rule under the equal protection clause. Previously, rural districts with few voters often had the same clout in legislatures as heavily populated urban districts. Afterward, their clout was equal to the number of voters they represented. But voting rights experts do not describe this rule as proportional representation, which has a specific, different meaning.

Either Miers misunderstood what the equal protection clause requires, or she was using loose language to say something about compliance with the one-person, one-vote rule, said Richard L. Hasen, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who specializes in election law. Either way, it is very sloppy and unnecessary. Someone should have caught that.

Proportional representation was a focus of debate in the early 1980s. Democrats and liberal activists were pressing for Congress to change the Voting Rights Act to ensure minorities equal representation on city councils, state legislatures and in the U.S. House.

They were responding to a 1980 case in which the Supreme Court upheld an election system in Mobile, Ala., that had shut out blacks from political power. The city was governed by a council of three members, all elected citywide. About two-thirds of voters were white and one-third black, but whites held all three seats.

The Supreme Court said Mobile's system was constitutional, so long as there was no evidence it had been created for a discriminatory purpose.

The equal protection clause does not require proportional representation, the court said in a 6-3 decision. In dissent, Justice Thurgood Marshall said the decision gave blacks the right to cast meaningless ballots.

In response, Congress moved to change the Voting Rights Act to permit challenges to election systems that had the effect of excluding minorities from power. The Reagan administration opposed those efforts, saying they would lead to a proportional representation rule.

Congress adopted a hazy compromise in 1982. It said election systems could be challenged if minorities were denied a chance to elect representatives of their choice�. Provided that nothing in this section establishes a right to have members of a protected class elected in numbers equal to their proportion of the population.

This law put pressure on cities such as Dallas and Los Angeles and many states to redraw their electoral districts in areas with concentrations of black or Latino voters. The number of minority members of Congress doubled in the early 1990s after districts were redrawn.

In Dallas, Miers supported a move to create City Council districts so black and Latino candidates would have a better chance of winning seats.

She came to believe it was important to achieve more black and Hispanic representation, Hasen said. She could have a profound impact as a justice if she brought that view to the court. So from the perspective of the voting rights community, they could do a lot worse than her.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino also emphasized that Miers' experience was more important than her terminology.

Ms. Miers, when confirmed, will be the only Supreme Court Justice to have actually had to comply with the Voting Rights Act, she said.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- As it prepares to leave office, the Bush administration is moving to make it easier for U.S. farming companies to hire foreign field workers, which farmworker groups say will worsen wages and working conditions.

Farm groups said that changes to the H2A visa program, used by the agriculture industry to hire temporary farm workers, were posted on the Labor Department's Web site at midnight Tuesday but have since been taken down.

Labor Department spokesman Terry Shawn said whatever was posted wasn't the final version of the new rule, which Shawn said would be released Thursday and published in the Federal Register on Dec. 18.

The Bush administration published a proposed version of the new rule last Feb. 13 and received nearly 12,000 public comments, Shawn added. The next version will be a final rule and can take effect 30 days after publication. Some of its provisions would take effect in mid-January and others later in the year, the farmworker groups said.

Farm worker advocates and the United Farm Workers union said the version that appeared on the Web site would lead to a flood of cheaper workers.

"The government has decided to offer agriculture employers really low wages, low benefits, no government oversight to bring in foreign workers on restricted visas and thereby convince them they should do this instead of hiring undocumented workers," said Bruce Goldstein, executive director of Farmworker Justice, a group that advocates for farmworkers.

The changes in the posted version would drop a requirement that an employer get the Labor Department to certify it faces a worker shortage before it can get visas for foreign workers; instead, employers would be allowed to simply attest in writing to a shortage. That version of the new rule also would change the method for calculating wage minimums for workers and relieve employers of a requirement to recruit in states or communities where other employers already are hiring farm workers, Goldstein said.

But Assistant Labor Secretary Leon Sequeira said Wednesday evening the agency is not dropping the obligation to obtain certification, which is required by law.

Paul Schlegel, American Farm Bureau public policy director, said many of the changes will make the program a little less burdensome for employers. He said existing laws prevent employers from hiring foreign workers if the jobs can be filled by U.S. workers.

"My members want to make sure they have a legal supply of labor," said Schlegel, who added that he had not reviewed all the proposed changes.

The rule changes are a part of a pattern of last-minute regulatory changes being rushed into effect by the Bush administration before President-elect Barack Obama's Jan. 20 inauguration.

The effect is to make it harder for Obama to change course on some policies favored by Republicans and the business community.

"We are hopeful that the Obama administration would recognize the utter mistake and unfairness of this proposal," Goldstein said. Congress has a procedure for reversing the rules, he said.

Many of the last-minute changes by the Bush administration have come in the area of public lands and the environment, including easing regulations on mining waste and allowing handguns in national parks. Another pending rule would grant greater leeway to railroads to transport hazardous materials through densely populated areas.

Obama has shown great judgment in the people who surround him. He picked a great VP choice, and his wife is impeccable as a helpmate and is a fantastic role model for the American children.

I believe Obama has an awesome political future. He sure is a bright light, and he would be someone I would seriously consider voting for.

Someone I like even better is Rep. Harold Ford from Tennessee. Every time I hear this man speak, I like him more and more and more.

I think there are lots of good candidates out there who don't fit the profiles you outlined, which I also believe to be true, and I think we're well overdue in considering those candidates because, in my opinion, what we've been offered in the last several elections -- on BOTH sides -- has been pretty pitiful. The "box" isn't working, and it's time to look outside of it.

If we get Obama or any of the other candidates we will get more of the same. War and taxes. Empire building. If you like that kind of stuff, vote for any of the candidates EXCEPT.......... RON PAUL. The only candidate for peace, limited government and minding our own business.

Haven't seen any posts here for awhile. Very excited about the outcome of tonight's election. I am so glad to see that people are not buying the "gimmicks" Hillary proposed. Gas tax holiday?...give me a break! Someone needed to ask her, "So what happens when the holiday is over", you charge back up the gas price!

The big joke is that Bill Clinton raised the gas tax in his first year in office. It was included in a package of tax increases that amounted to the biggest tax increase in history. It was raised by 4.3 cents. Not only did he raise the gas tax, but he wanted to raise it even higher.

So you should all get this straight...Hillary is "claiming" she would give drivers 3 whole months (wow - imagine that) 18 cent a gallon cut after her husband forced drivers to pay an extra 5 cents for 15 years.

Unfortunately there were some people who bought into her pandering (which by the way is another word for lying), but thank goodness enough people with an education and most important most of the with common sense could see right through her lies.

Way to go North Carolina - I'm so pleased. And Indiana too. It was a close race thank goodness.

Now she needs to step down. Why? Because its the right thing to do. Do the numbers. There is no way she can win and anyone who believes so needs to wake up. What we need is for her to support Barack Obama (that is if she's telling the truth about the most important thing is nominating a democrat for president). Somehow though I do not believe she has the best interest of the party or the american people in mind. Her goal is to serve herself. She needs to graciously bow out and put all her efforts into getting a democrat in the office.

P.S. - Note to the "ditto heads". Maybe we should rename Limbaugh followers "dumbo heads". Not only did your little plan fail Mr. Limbo, but it failed badly. In a poll taken (and yes I know polls can be misleading), but not only did the republicans change parties to vote for a democrat but the majority of them voted for Obama. Then on top of that over 75% of republicans that voted as democrats said that Obama could be McCain (or as I am hearing him being referred to as McBush), but only around 25% said they believed Hillary could win. So not only does Hillary need to do the math, so does Mr. Limbo.

He's just a talking head, somebody's puppet, aint nothing without his teleprompter and written speeches...gimme a break!