President Barack Obama wrapped up enough support yesterday to win Senate approval for a strategic nuclear arms pact with Russia later this week, a key step in his drive to improve ties with Moscow and curb atomic weapons proliferation.
The new START treaty cleared a procedural hurdle in the US Senate by a vote of 67-28 as 11 Republicans joined Democrats in a decision to limit further debate. The treaty will move to a final vote today after lawmakers deal with a rash of last-minute amendments.
Obama’s Democrats need a two-thirds majority in the 100-member Senate for final approval of the treaty. Senator John Kerry, who led floor debate as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, said he expected 70 senators to ultimately vote in favour of the accord.
Stevens sits in a van outside the US Federal Courthouse in Washington, October 27, 2008.
Former US Senator Ted Stevens, who for several years played a leading role in controlling the nation’s purse strings, died with four other people in a small plane crash in his home state of Alaska, officials said yesterday.
Four people survived the crash two nights ago near Bristol Bay in southwest Alaska. Among them was Sean O’Keefe, North American chief of European aerospace giant and Airbus maker EADS, and a former NASA Administrator who was a former aide and longtime friend of Stevens.
O’Keefe’s son, Kevin, also survived, the company said in a statement, but details of their condition were not disclosed.
Busted: Senator Mike Bennett looks at his computer screen - on which there is an image of topless women - while on the Senate floor during the debate of an abortion bill
'I was bored': Mike Bennett (file photo) claimed the image was in an email that he unwittingly opened from a colleague
In his flimsy defence, he was bored.
Unfortunately for Florida Senator Mike Bennett, that's just not a good enough reason to be looking at pictures of topless women while on the Senate floor.
Especially not while using his state-issued computer.
And especially not while a colleague is arguing that the law currently being debated is 'disrespectful towards women'.
The U.S. Justice Department charged four men on Tuesday with tampering with phones in the New Orleans office of Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu, one of them a conservative filmmaker who last year provoked a scandal involving a liberal grass-roots group.
The FBI said among those arrested on Monday was James O'Keefe, who, posing as a pimp and accompanied by a woman pretending to be a prostitute, filmed workers with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, giving advice on how to flout housing laws.
The film attracted a big audience after being posted on YouTube.
"This is a very unusual situation and somewhat unsettling for me and my staff," Landrieu said in a statement. "I am as interested as everyone else about their motives and purpose, which I hope will become clear as the investigation moves forward."
According to the criminal complaint, two of O'Keefe's associates dressed as telephone repairmen entered the office of the Louisiana senator in the Hale Boggs Federal Building under the pretense of performing repairs.
While O'Keefe used a mobile phone to film them, Robert Flanagan and Joseph Basel "manipulated the telephone system" in the reception area of Landrieu's office, the FBI said.
The men were apprehended by U.S. marshals after Flanagan and Basel tried later to gain access to telephone equipment in the U.S. General Services Administration office in the same building, the agency said.
Flanagan and Basel were dressed in denim work suits, florescent vests, tool belts and hard hats, the FBI said. The two admitted later they were not telephone repairmen, according to the affidavit.
A fourth man, Stan Dai, was arrested for having helped O'Keefe, Flanagan and Basel in "planning, coordination and preparation of the operation," the FBI said in a statement.
Two months ago, few would have heard of the state senator, and rarely has a freshman senator come to the nation's capitol with so much fanfare. But his shocking win has rattled the political world and threatens to topple Democrats' health care agenda, even before he is sworn in.
On the eve of President Obama's State of the Union address and the end of his first year in office, Republican Scott Brown's astonishing win in the Massachusetts special Senate race not only reset politics in that state, but reset politics for the entire nation.
"The entire political community was caught a little bit unawares on that one," White House senior adviser David Axelrod said today on ABC's "This Week" of Brown's win.
After Brown's upset win ended the 60-seat majority in the Senate that Democrats needed in order to push through health care reform without a Republican vote, the White House is adjusting its political operation by bringing in Obama's 2008 presidential campaign manager David Plouffe. The move comes ahead of mid-term elections in the House and Senate this November, where Republicans hope to capitalize on the momentum of Brown's win and pick up more seats, which could further endanger the president's agenda.
White House advisers played down Plouffe's hire, denying an association with Brown's win.
"David Plouffe has been a regular adviser to the president throughout the year," White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett said on NBC's "Meet the Press."
"We have a very strong political operation. What it's a reflection of is that David was working on his book for the last year. He's done with that now. He's enormously talented, as everyone knows, and he brings value added to our operation as we look forward, in terms of strategy and tactics, and he'll be consulting with us on that, and we'll be stronger for it," Axelrod said.
Also back were themes from Obama's presidential campaign.
"This president's never going to stop fighting to create jobs, to raise incomes, and to push back on the special interests' dominance in Washington and this withering partisanship that keeps us from solving problems," Axelrod said.
Axelrod said those same themes propelled Brown to victory.
"This is the Obama who ran for president," he said. "And the themes that he talked about in that campaign were very much echoed by Senator Brown in his campaign, which tells you that the hunger for that kind of leadership is still very strong."
In another throwback to campaign rhetoric, on Friday at a town hall meeting in Elyria, Ohio, Obama used the word "fight" more than 20 times.
White House advisers say the president will continue with his current health care reform push despite Brown's win.
"The underlying elements of it are popular and important. And people will never know what's in that bill until we pass it, the president signs it, and they have a whole range of new protections they never had before," Axelrod said.
Yet Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell argued Americans were against the Democrats' health care reform initiative, citing a recent Washington Post/Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation/Harvard University poll of Massachusetts voters that found that 48 percent opposed the health-care proposals advanced by Obama and congressional Democrats while 43 percent of them said they supported them.
"The people are telling us, 'Please don't pass this bill.' Now, if they get past this arrogant phase that they've been stuck in for about a year that, 'We know best. We don't want to listen to public opinion here, we want to 'make history,' if they can work their way past that and concentrate on the real problem, which is the cost, we're willing to look at it." McConnell said on NBC.
"We see it all over the country in tea parties and town halls. People are alarmed and angry about the spending, the debt, the government takeovers," said Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., on ABC.
Obama's advisers say they understand people are frustrated.
"I think people are angry in this country -- they were angry in Massachusetts -- that we haven't made more progress on the economy," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said on "FOX News Sunday."
"I think we have to stay focused on solving people's problems, and I think the politics will flow from there," Plouffe said in an interview with ABC News.
Obama has an opportunity to address that frustration in his State of the Union address this Wednesday evening, when he can speak directly to the American people.
"He'll be able to set forth his priorities, and they will be focusing on the middle class. Our middle class is struggling out there. they're frustrated, they're angry, they're working hard to try to make ends meet. They're having to make terrible choices between paying their rent and putting food on the table and paying for their health care and sending their kids to college. These are the same principles that the president advocated in the course of the campaign," Jarrett said, previewing the speech.
"I think the reason that you had the victories in Virginia and New Jersey and most improbably in Massachusetts of all places was the American people are saying, 'We want to go in a different direction.' I hope the president will get the message and change direction , and we'll begin to see that next Wednesday night," McConnell said. "
Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn. and Sen. Susan Collins., R-Maine meet with reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington,
Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., right, accompanied by Sen. Susan Collins, Maine meets with reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 15, 2009.
Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn. meets with reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 15, 2009.
Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., right, accompanied by Sen. Susan Collins, Maine meets with reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 15, 2009.
The senator Republicans love and liberals love to hate is at it again.
Sen. Joe Lieberman, who no longer considers himself a Democrat but is holding tight to a coveted chairmanship, thoroughly rattled the Obama administration and his colleagues in the last 48 hours when he threatened to join Republicans in blocking health care overhaul over government-run insurance and an expansion of Medicare.
"Say it ain't so, Joe," Vice President Joe Biden said Tuesday on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." "I think Joe's judgment is wrong."
Don't count me as a "no" vote just yet, Lieberman indicated Tuesday.
As long as any government plan or Medicare expansion stays out of the bill, "then I'm going to be in a position where I can say what I've wanted to say all along: that I'm ready to vote for health care reform," the Connecticut lawmaker told reporters.
Lieberman isn't the typical Democrat the party machinery is primed to appease as President Barack Obama and Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., cobble together the 60 votes required to pass a health care bill.
No, this is Lieberman — Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore's running mate in 2000 but now independent in every sense of the word. Lieberman lost his party's primary in 2006 in part because of his pro-Iraq war votes and won re-election as an Independent.
Then he committed what some Democrats still consider the ultimate apostasy: He endorsed Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona with a rousing speech at the GOP national convention and campaigned heartily for his longtime friend.
Back in the Senate with McCain — after Obama moved into the White House — Lieberman later apologized to his Democratic colleagues. Seething but needing Lieberman to get to the 60 vote-majority required to break filibusters, they allowed him to keep the chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee.
From Obama on down, they vowed to step past the unpleasantness and look to the future.
But there held another chapter in Lieberman's tortured relationship with Democrats.
By Tuesday, Lieberman was telling Obama and his colleagues that the debate has been tough on him. Outside with reporters, he blamed the tussle on Democrats trying to cram too much — namely, any kind of government health insurance — into the overhaul
"What happens then is you run the risk of losing everything," Lieberman told reporters.
That's exactly what Democrats feared was happening on Sunday, when they heard Lieberman call the latest iteration of their bill, a plan to allow people age 55 to 64 to buy Medicare benefits, too costly.
There, potentially, went Reid's 60th vote, a development that unnerved Democrats at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue and must have come in some measure as a surprise to Reid. Only two months earlier, the majority leader had called Lieberman "the least of Harry Reid's problems."
By Monday, Lieberman headed Reid's list of senators who must be accommodated. Democrats circulated a videotaped newspaper interview from September showing Lieberman saying he supports the idea of a Medicare expansion. Lieberman said in a statement later that the details of the bill had changed since then and so had his opinion.
The White House got involved, and by nightfall, the Medicare provision was out. And Lieberman sounded like he was back in.
At a private White House complex meeting with Senate Democrats Tuesday, Lieberman said Obama greeted him warmly.
"He said 'hello, how are you brother?' It was a good conversation," recalled the senator, who in an interview with CNN signaled he could switch parties again. "It's unlikely I'd run as a Republican, but I wouldn't foreclose any possibility. I think the more likely thing is that I'd run as an Independent because that's what I am," he said.
Congressional Democrats, both furious and wary of re-offending their mercurial colleague, began speaking of Lieberman only when asked, mostly in the bland terms.
What was Lieberman thinking?
"I have no idea," Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., said with a polite grin. "Our focus is on 60 votes."
Does he have too much power over the shape of the overhaul?
"That's a Senate matter," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., demurred.
"You're too Lieberman-focused," Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., told reporters afterward.
Lieberman himself said later that he's prepared to live with his opposition to publicly funded insurance, convinced, he said, that it would increase taxes.
It's a truism about the Senate that the end of sensitive negotiations present outsized opportunities for clout and attention for any senator with a request or a demand. Power in this debate has flowed largely to those on the fence or in the middle. But while senators like being courted, the position can be uncomfortable.
Inside Obama's closed-door meeting at the White House complex Tuesday, Lieberman stood.
"I said, 'I haven't really had a lot of fun the last couple of weeks,'" the besieged senator told reporters.
"And then (Ohio Democratic Sen.) Sherrod Brown got up and said, 'I haven't been having fun either,'" Lieberman recalled. "And the president said, 'Why don't we all begin to have some fun? Let's pass the bill."
Senior black Democrats have claimed the intensity of the anger shown by opponents of Barack Obama is largely rooted in racism
Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., with his wife, Roxanne, speaks to reporters on Capitol Hill on Tuesday.
The Democratic-led U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday reprimanded the Republican lawmaker who yelled "You lie!" at President Barack Obama during Obama's speech to Congress last week on healthcare reform.
On a largely party-line vote of 240-179, the House passed a resolution of disapproval against Joe Wilson, who was a relatively obscure congressman from South Carolina until his outburst during Obama's nationally broadcast address.
A resolution of disapproval is the lowest form of punishment in the House and carries no penalty other than being cited for a breach of the chamber's rules of conduct.
Obama's push to reform the $2.5 trillion U.S. healthcare industry has also split Congress largely along party lines
House Republicans rallied to Wilson's side and opposed the resolution. During the vote, many patted him on the back and shook his hand.
They agreed that Wilson had made a mistake in shouting at Obama. But they noted the congressman had promptly apologized to the president in a telephone call to the White House and that Obama had accepted the apology.
Wilson rejected calls by Democrats as well as some Republicans to offer a separate apology in the House.
"It is clear that there are far more important issues facing this nation," Wilson said in a speech before the vote. "It is time to get on with the work of the American people."
While the five-term lawmaker from South Carolina has been widely scorned, he also has emerged as a hero among some conservatives.
Wilson and his Democratic challenger in next year's congressional election, Rob Miller, each claim to have raked in more than $1.5 million in campaign contributions since the Wilson yelled at Obama.
A USA Today/Gallup Poll released on Tuesday found that 68 percent of respondents said they oppose what Wilson did, while 21 percent said they support it.
Former President Carter see racism in outburst
“I think it’s based on racism,” Mr. Carter said at a town-hall-style meeting at his presidential center in Atlanta. “There is an inherent feeling among many in this country that an African-American should not be president.”
“Those kind of things are not just casual outcomes of a sincere debate on whether we should have a national program on health care,” he said. “It’s deeper than that.”
Mr. Wilson’s spokesman was not immediately available for comment. But his eldest son, Alan, defended him, saying, “There is not a racist bone in my dad’s body.”
The hollerer was Wilson, a four-term Republican from South Carolina and former aide to the late Sen. Strom Thurmond. A lawyer with four sons who have served in the military, two in Iraq, Wilson has long aspired to statewide office. "I think Joe's very confrontational," said House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn. Wilson held his first health-care town hall forum last month in Clyburn's district, three blocks from his home.
It was a perfect storm of hot buttons that evoked an utterance of such negativity that it turned heads. President Barack Obama was giving a speech to Congress and he started talking about healthcare and illegal immigrants and money, and unexpectedly, Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina spoke up.
"You lie!" the Republican congressman blurted out on the floor of the House immediately after the president said: "the reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally."
It was Rep. Wilson who had been reinforcing the belief that the healthcare reform would include the so-called Death Panels. He called it an "end-of-life counseling program, which has been correctly highlighted by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as a program which could lead to seniors being encouraged to seek less care in order to protect the government´s bottom line."
Minutes before Wilson's wail, the president had debunked the theory that grandma's plug would be pulled in order to save federal dollars. "It's a lie, plain and simple," he said, which brought most of the attendees to their feet.
After the speech, the criticism for Wilson was bipartisan. "I've never seen anything like that before," said Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-N.D.) "We do not invite the president of the United States into the House of Representatives and hurl insults."
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said the outburst was "totally disrespectful" and demanded that Rep. Wilson apologize to the president. "No place for it in that setting or any other, and he should apologize for it immediately," McCain told Larry King on CNN.
Wilson apologized shortly after the speech for how he acted out: “This evening I let my emotions get the best of me when listening to the president’s remarks regarding the coverage of illegal immigrants in the healthcare bill. While I disagree with the president’s statement, my comments were inappropriate and regrettable. I extend sincere apologies to the president for this lack of civility.”
Stepping into a fray that still threatens to kill plans for national health care overhaul, President Barack Obama declared Wednesday that "the time for bickering is over" and outlined principles for Congress to follow in the debate:
• People who have coverage through their employers should be able to keep it; at least, there's nothing in his proposal that would force that to change.
• People who don't have coverage would have to get it, and they'd have the option of buying through an exchange set up to increase competition and hold down rates.
• Insurers couldn't cap benefits, throw people off rolls once they get ill or exclude them for preexisting conditions.
• Plan would not insure illegal immigrants
• Federal funds would not pay for abortions
•Would not cause Death Panel where end of life counseling program will encourage old folks to seek less care to protect government bottom line.Will encourage "Grandma plug" to be pulled to save Federal money.
