Archive for April, 2010

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama on Friday, in a largely symbolic gesture, promised that no new offshore oil drilling leases will be issued unless rigs have new safeguards to prevent a repeat of the explosion that unleashed the massive spill…

Tommy Sowers conducted counterinsurgency operations in Iraq, leading a team of Green Berets.

The Supreme Court is nearly ready to take up a challenge to a strict Arizona immigration law — not the new measure that authorizes the police to arrest suspected illegal immigrants, but an earlier law that would punish employers who knowingly hire…

Demonstrations in support of immigrants’ rights are scheduled Saturday in at least 20 states, the District of Columbia and two Canadian provinces.

Because our rules are so tough, they occasionally yield unintended consequences.  We attempt to take a common-sense approach to those situations, as we did this week in authorizing the National Security Advisor, General James Jones, to give very brief remarks introducing President Clinton at an Atlantic Council event.  The Atlantic Council is a non-profit 501(c)(3) entity that promotes American leadership and engagement in international affairs.  General Jones had served as the uncompensated, volunteer Board Chair of the group over a year ago.  Because the remarks were public, and because General Jones had long ago resigned, we concluded that the Ethics Pledge was not intended to prevent the short speech and we allowed it.  As always, we are posting the waiver here in the interests of …

Judge Andre Davis has been sworn in to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

The swearing-in took place Friday at the federal courthouse in Baltimore. Among those attending was U.S. Sen. Barbara Mikulski. She recommended Davis to President…

This morning we saw one more sign that our economy is on the path to recovery: new GDP numbers showing that the economy grew 3.2% the first three months of this year. To put it in perspective, during the same period last year the economy shrank by 6.4%.The President spoke on the news in the Rose Garden this morning: “Every three months, the federal government measures the total output of goods and services our businesses, our workers and our government produce.  It determines whether our economy is shrinking or growing -– the single broadest measure of America’s economic health.  At the height of our economic crisis, that measure all too often was delivering grim news.  …

The Affordable Care Act has a number of important measures to promote more consumer choice and control when it comes to health insurance options.  A big part of that will be a web portal that offers American consumers and small businesses the ability to find health coverage options in their states through a clear, easy-to-understand process.
 
The web portal will be a central place to get information about these options — including private insurance plans, high risk pools, CHIP and Medicaid.
  
Of course, before we can present this information to individuals, we need to assemble a national dataset of plans in one central place — something that hasn’t been done before.  So today we have started a process to collect data …