Al Franken

The hospitals have pledged more than $150 billion over a decade. Drug makers have chipped in another $80 billion. And the medical device manufacturers’ voluntary contribution to health reform? $0.
Indeed, as The Washington Post reported over the weekend, that failure to lend a financial hand for the sake of fixing the broken health care [...]

Earlier this month, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield of Maine raised plenty of eyebrows when it sued the state for refusing to grant an 18.5 percent premium hike on 12,000 individual policy holders — an increase that would have generated a 3 percent profit margin for the company. Instead, Maine’s insurance superintendent granted a 10.9 [...]

A group of 10 Democratic senators today reintroduced legislation designed to end the sentencing disparity between powder and crack cocaine — a long-standing push that never quite seems to get enacted.
In a statement, the lawmakers cite the reasoning behind the proposal.
Under current law, possession of five grams of crack cocaine (roughly the weight of two [...]

As Daphne pointed out, the insurance industry’s witness at yesterday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing to examine a law exempting health insurers from federal anti-trust rules was none-too-comfortable defending that exclusion from Democratic attacks. But you didn’t have to watch the proceedings to learn that University of Arkansas professor Lawrence Powell, representing the Physician Insurers [...]

The Leahy-Feinstein substitute bill I discussed in my piece this morning about the USA PATRIOT Act was just approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee 13-8, with only minor word changes.
Amendments proposed by Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) that would have required that the target of a National Security Letter have some alleged connection to terrorism, and [...]

On a morning conference call, I got a chance to ask Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-Minn.) about voter registration, voter fraud, and his new PAC’s political adviser Sara Taylor. In the Bush administration, as a White House political director, Taylor got tangled in the scandal over the firing of U.S. attorneys who, the attorneys claim, were [...]

This is some extremely shoddy journalism from Mickey Kaus. The Slate blogger asks if “ACORN chicanery” elected Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), who won a razor-thin 2008 race for the U.S. Senate after eight months of legal challenges. Kaus links a “tactfully phrased Minneapolis Star Tribune story” to argue that fraudulent votes might have stolen the [...]

Just in case he wasn’t familiar with it, Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) decided to read the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution to David Kris, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, who was testifying to the Senate Judiciary Committee today to urge reauthorization of expiring provisions of the USA Patriot Act.
Franken, who [...]

Here’s a brief summary of the day’s health care news.
President Obama is slated to address a joint session of Congress on Sept. 9 to lay out more detailed demands for health care reform, ABC News reported today. The move — which came on the heels of a written invitation from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi [...]

CNN reports that former Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.) will be a fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics in the fall. Six years ago, Al Franken — the man who took Coleman’s job — had a similar gig at Harvard, as a fellow at the Shorenstein Center. Franken used his resources to write “Lies and the [...]