TV News LIES

Twenty subpoenas issued by a special New Jersey committee investigating the "Bridgegate" scandal include key members of Gov. Chris Christie's administration and campaign, ranging from his spokesman to his chief counsel.

A full list of those subpoenaed was officially released Friday by a spokesman for the Assembly Democrats.

NARAL Pro-Choice America released its annual report (PDF) assessing the status of women’s reproductive rights in the United States, saying that elected officials are increasingly making attempts to pass abortion-restrictive policies at the state level by concealing them in broader pieces of legislation because the public doesn’t support them.

“Politicians have learned that their positions are unpopular so they obfuscate their views and move them into bills that are unrelated,” Donna Crane, policy director at NARAL, told reporters during a conference call.

Good news for Virginians living in the 13th district who think that husbands should be allowed to rape their wives: State Senator Richard “Dick” Black has fought for your right to do so. And now he’s running for Congress.

The rabidly conservative Republican was one of the state delegates who argued against criminalizing spousal rape in 2002, asking his fellow assemblymen, “How on earth you could validly get a conviction of a husband-wife rape when they’re living together, sleeping in the same bed, she’s in a nightie, and so forth, there’s no injury, there’s no separation or anything.”

President Barack Obama on Friday will try to put the ongoing surveillance controversy behind him, laying out reforms to U.S. intelligence-gathering activities aimed at reassuring Americans that his administration will right the balance between civil liberties and national security.

But Obama’s powers have significant limits.

Many of the key reforms he’s expected to endorse — including changes to the National Security Agency’s practice of gathering information on telephone calls made to, from or within the U.S. — will require congressional action. Like the public — and seemingly the president himself — lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are divided on what needs fixing and how to do it.

Fifteen years ago, an 88-year-old woman named Dorris Haddock sensed that something was seriously amiss with the way campaigns were financed in the United States. Affixing a sign that said simply “Campaign Finance Reform” to her chest, she embarked on a 3,200 mile walk across 12 states to rally support behind measures to rid the political system of corruption and influence.

Haddock is credited with helping to galvanize public will around the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Act, which was signed into law in 2002. Nonetheless, two months before she died at the age of 100, the Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission decision, which undid many of the limits put in place on campaign finance and heralded a new era in unprecedented spending by special interests and corporations.

What better way to start a governorship than to refuse to attend a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day breakfast and, when the NAACP complains, tell them, on camera, to “kiss my butt”?           

That’s how Maine’s governor, Paul LePage, introduced himself to the nation three years ago, and the Republican Tea Party favorite quickly followed up with a series of intemperate remarks and questionable actions that arguably garnered him more negative national media attention than any Maine politician since Sen. James G. Blaine, the so-called “continental liar from the State of Maine” whose 1884 presidential run was derailed by graft and corruption charges.

LePage’s first major initiatives as governor—to roll back all state environmental laws to weaker federal standards and stop a ban on bisphenol A (BPA), an endocrine disruptor, in baby bottles—were drafted by his special adviser, a registered lobbyist for many of the affected industries.