white house

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) is keeping her focus on the important issues: an amendment that would increase congressional control of “czars.”
Her amendment, which she first tried to attach to an appropriations bill without success, would also require their offices to submit periodic reports about their activities to congressional oversight committees. If they failed to comply, [...]

It’s no mystery that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is the ultimate Wall Street insider. But it seems that more and more Democrats are losing their patience with what they perceive as his protectionism of the finance industry at the expense of consumers and taxpayers. The latest to weigh in is Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), who [...]

Earlier today, Iran sentenced Kian Tajbakhsh, an Iranian-American academic, to 12 years in prison for the “crime” of assisting the dissidents in anti-regime protests earlier this year. The AP reports that Tajbakhsh’s sentence is the “longest prison term yet in a mass trial of more than 100 opposition figures, activists and journalists” since the June [...]

The Washington Post’s story today about liberals who are frustrated that the Obama administration isn’t pressing harder to win confirmation for liberal-leaning judges to the federal courts should also serve as a reminder that there are a whole lot of key Justice Department posts still not confirmed yet, either. Whether that’s because the White House [...]

White House Counsel Gregory Craig, a longtime Washington insider who’s faced mounting criticism for his role in the Obama administration’s plans to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, said on Friday that he has no plans to resign from his post.
“I have no plans to leave whatsoever,” Craig told David Ingram at the National Law [...]

Last month, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ordered the federal government to arrange for the release of Fouad Mahmoud Al Rabiah from the detention center at Guantanamo Bay. The evidence against the 50-year-old Kuwaiti engineer, she wrote in her declassified decision, is “surprisingly bare,” noting that all of his “confessions” appear to have been coerced by threats [...]

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 [...]

After the Justice Department dragged out four different lawsuits seeking public access to White House visitor records, the Obama administration finally agreed yesterday to settle the cases, brought by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), and committed to post visitor records online.
CREW Executive Director Melanie Sloan praised the White House, saying, “The Obama [...]

The announcement is the result of an Obama administration task force’s proposal — first reported by The Washington Independent.

Little evidence backs claims that medical malpractice suits are driving up health care costs.