Posts by Laura McGann

TWI economy reporter Mary Kane breaks some startling news today. In November, mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac quietly slipped a requirement into mortgage modification paperwork that forces homeowners to waive their legal rights in order to be eligible to renegotiate their loans. The broad requirement bars borrowers from bringing suits related to their [...]

Reports are trickling out that President-elect Barack Obama’s choice for treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, may not have paid Social Security or Medicare taxes for “years” and he may have employed an illegal immigrant as a housekeeper, according to Mark Halperin, via the Wall Street Journal. MSNBC just reported the same news.
Things are looking better for [...]

TWI’s legal reporter Daphne Eviatar made an appearance on the Laura Flanders show this week where she talked about the challenges facing President-elect Barack Obama — not only in shutting down the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, but also the prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, where hundreds of war on terror detainees are [...]

Fellow TPM alum, Kate Klonick has joined us to blog the remaking of the Department of Justice, including Eric Holder’s Senate confirmation hearings Thursday. Klonick, who dogged the Troopergate story while the rest of us ignored the arctic scandal when it broke this summer, has already hit the ground running on The Streak. Here’s her [...]

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) tells Politico that he thinks former Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) — convicted on seven felony counts of failing to disclose gifts worth about $250,000 from an Alaska energy firm on his Senate disclosure forms — should not serve jail time.
Reid explains that Stevens, 85, is a throwback from [...]

2009 is poised to be a big year for the Democrats, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to overlook the GOP here at TWI.
I’m pleased to announce that David Weigel has joined our staff to cover the Republican Party and the remaking of the right.
David is formerly of the libertarian magazine Reason, where, as an [...]

First appeared September 8, 2008
WASILLA, Alaska — In my quest to understand Gov. Sarah Palin, I attended services at her church, the Wasilla Bible Church, Sunday morning. I ended up being shooed out of the parking lot — but I’ll get to that in a minute.
It felt a bit like a high-school gym or auditorium, [...]

Toward the end of President Bush’s remarks today announcing his plan to throw GM and Chrysler a lifeline, he included a line about “American workers.”
He said “we’ll show the world American workers can bounce back,” and that “they can meet challenges with ingenuity.”
I’m not going to argue that either of these points isn’t true on [...]

President George Bush announced that General Motors and Chrysler will receive $13.4 billion in loan money from the Wall Street bailout fund, in a move to keep the companies afloat through March. He also wants to see Congress allocate another $4 billion for bridge loans.
By the Spring, the auto makers will need to provide the [...]

At a press conference in Chicago this morning, President-elect Barack Obama responded to attacks from gay-rights advocates who say they his selection of Pastor Rick Warren, a critic of gay rights, to deliver the invocation at his inauguration.
Warren, a leader of the evangelical Saddleback Church in Orange County,Calif., came out in favor of Proposition [...]