Friday, Jul 19th
Last update05:01:52 AM GMT
Political Glance
pdate, 5:22 PM EDT: A spokeswoman for Gov. Perry confirmed to Mother Jones that he has called a special session that will begin on July 1. Perry said in a statement, "I am calling the Legislature back into session because too much important work remains undone for the people of Texas.
Through their duly elected representatives, the citizens of our state have made crystal clear their priorities for our great state. Texans value life and want to protect women and the unborn."
A former National Security Agency analyst and a Bush-era whistleblower has revealed that the government’s warrantless wiretappings extended to many high-ranking officials, including then-Senate candidate Barack Obama in 2004.
Russ Tice, speaking on The Boiling Frogs Show, said Wednesday that the NSA had ordered surveillance of a wide range of military officials, lawmakers and diplomats including Obama, The Huffington Post reports.
“Outsiders are coming in and they’re going to try to do to us what they did to Scott Walker in Wisconsin,” North Carolina Republican Governor Pat McCrory said yesterday, in response to the growing “Moral Monday” protest movement.
North Carolina is the new Wisconsin, but not for the reasons McCrory alleges. Like in Wisconsin, a homegrown grassroots resistance movement has emerged—and grown rapidly—to challenge the drastic right-wing agenda unveiled by Republicans in the state. Just like the Koch brothers backed Scott Walker, the Koch’s billionaire ally and close associate Art Pope funded North Carolina’s Republican takeover in 2010 and 2012.
Yesterday, we learned that the NSA received all calling records from Verizon customers for a three-month period starting in April. That's everything except the voice content: who called who, where they were, how long the call lasted -- for millions of people, both Americans and foreigners.
This "metadata" allows the government to track the movements of everyone during that period, and a build a detailed picture of who talks to whom. It's exactly the same data the Justice Department collected about AP journalists.
The White House plans to send some Guantanamo Bay inmates back to Yemen in a new push to close the prison, officials said President Obama will say Thursday.
The president will also announce new limits to unmanned combat drone strikes, the officials said of the program that has been central to White House efforts to combat terrorism.
Obama's 2 p.m. speech at the Defense Department's National Defense University in Washington will lay out how he intends to bring his counter-terrorism policies in line with the legal structure and values he promised four years ago this week.
Richard Scrushy provides his first on-camera interview since serving six years in prison for allegedly bribing Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman. Scrushy told HuffPost Live why believes Siegelman is innocent and the victim of a political prosecution motivated by Karl Rove.
Ex-Alabama Governor Don Siegelman's daughter, Dana Siegelman and former Alabama Congressman, Parker Griffith joined HuffPost Live in December 2012 to discuss the political conflicts of interest and judicial misconduct that they claim played a role in the former governor's conviction on bribery and mail fraud charges.
Rene Carlos Vos, an arms dealer in Alexandria, began hanging around the Washington headquarters of the National Rifle Association in the mid-1980s. The NRA’s staff was intrigued to see the garrulous, backslapping Vos in the group’s seventh-floor suite, home to its lobbying operation and the chief congressional lobbyist, Wayne LaPierre.
Vos and LaPierre struck those who saw them huddle together as an odd couple. Vos took to cowboy boots and neatly pressed western wear.
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