Friday, Dec 27th
Last update09:27:41 AM GMT
Congressional Glance
Representative Ron Paul, Texas Republican and author of "End the Fed," will take control of the House subcommittee that oversees the Federal Reserve.
"This is the leadership team that crafted the first comprehensive financial reform bill to put an end to the bailouts, wind down the taxpayer funding of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and enforce a strong audit of the Federal Reserve," Bachus said in a statement.
To keep U.S. warplanes flying over Afghanistan, the Pentagon allowed a "secrecy obsessed" business group to supply jet fuel to a U.S. air base in Kyrgyzstan, turning a blind eye to an elaborate fraud involving fuel deliveries from Russia, according to congressional investigators.
In a report due to be released Tuesday, the House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs hammers the Pentagon and also State Department diplomats for ignoring red flags raised by jet fuel contracts worth nearly $2 billion for the Manas Transit Center, a U.S. base used for in-flight refueling over Afghanistan.
The US Senate has passed bill to end the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, putting the long campaign to end the ban on gay men and lesbians close to its conclusion. The final vote was 65 Senators in favor and 31 opposed to the bill.
This is breaking news.
Speaking at a hearing to explore whether Wikileaks violated the Espionage Act -- which the Obama administration claims its editor-in-chief violated -- Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) said that "America was founded on the belief that speech is sacrosanct" and dismissed calls for censorship of media outlets publishing leaked documents.
"As an initial matter, there is no doubt that WikiLeaks is very unpopular right now. Many feel that the WikiLeaks publication was offensive," Conyers said, according to prepared remarks. "But being unpopular is not a crime, and publishing offensive information is not either. And the repeated calls from politicians, journalists, and other so-called experts crying out for criminal prosecutions or other extreme measures make me very uncomfortable."
For the second time in two years, Congress has approved a major overhaul of GI Bill benefits, this time simplifying the formula for college tuition payments and awarding housing stipends to students attending classes online.
The measure, which passed the House in a 409 to 3 vote Thursday afternoon, would also allow more veterans to use the post-9/11 GI Bill to pay for vocational school and on-the-job training. Veterans groups had lobbied Congress vigorously for that change, saying veterans who were not interested in college classes were too limited under the previous rules.
At last the United States is responding to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's refusal to freeze settlements and re-start negotiations with the Palestinians.
Congressman Howard Berman (D-CA), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, rushed to the House floor with a resolution drafted by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee [AIPAC] condemning the Palestinians for publicly suggesting that, in the wake of Netanyahu's refusal to freeze settlements and negotiate, they will consider a unilateral declaration of statehood.
espite an incredible outpouring of public opposition to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) "Food Safety Modernization Act", or S. 510, the Senate voted 73 to 25 to pass the bill anyway. And data presented by Maplight.org, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization, shows that big industry groups and large food producers spent millions of dollars buying off Congressmen to garner support for it.
According to the site, Senators that ended up supporting the bill received nearly $10 million in political contributions from interest groups that also supported the bill. This amount was more than four times as much as groups opposed to the bill spent on overall contributions.
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