-- Harriet Rowan and Mary Bottari
Americans always feel charitable around the holiday season, giving some $300 billion to a diverse array of charities in 2011 alone. Now there is new way Americans can help their neighbors in need, by purchasing and forgiving their debt.
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has refused to implement a state-run health care exchange, defaulting to a federally-run exchange in protest of the federal health care law known as "Obamacare." Tea Party groups had pressured Walker to reject the exchanges.
The Sunlight Foundation has crunched the numbers and calculated the "return on investment" that big-spending Super PACs and "dark money" groups achieved in the 2012 cycle. It reflects how much of the money spent by each group went to support candidates who won (or to oppose candidates who lost) in the general election campaign.
Wisconsin's effort to open the state to predatory lenders using American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) legislation has paid dividends for the ALEC legislators behind it.
After an electoral shellacking and exit polls that show the vast majority of Americans are on Barack Obama's side when it comes to the major issues of the day, Paul Ryan is headed back to Congress convinced that he espouses "very popular ideas" and calling the 2012 results "a very close election."
With this mind-set Ryan is prepping to turn the "fiscal cliff" austerity debate to the advantage of the Social Security bashers and Medicare slashers.
Now that the most expensive election in history is over, an increasing number of Americans are demanding action to reduce the influence of money and corporations in our political system -- and reformers are offering solutions.
Just sixty-one individuals gave $285.2 million to Super PACs in the 2012 elections, contributing the same amount as 1,425,500 small grassroots donors to the major party presidential candidates, according to a new report from Demos and U.S. PIRG.
Wisconsin State Senator Alberta Darling said that Mitt Romney could have won the state if Wisconsin's voter ID law had been in place for the November 6 election, despite zero evidence of voter fraud -- but also admitted she and other Republicans may not be "dealing with the real reality."
As CMD has reported, the fossil fuel industry has been engaging in an aggressive PR and political campaign to convince Americans that drilling for oil and gas domestically is the only way that the nation can break its dependence on foreign oil, bring down prices at the pump, and usher in a new era of economic prosperity. A new report from the DC-based public interest group Food & Water Watch knocks down these claims one by one. While the industry uses the phrase "energy security," the report contends that only industry profits will be secured by the expansion of controversial hydraulic fracturing or "fracking" for shale oil and gas.
Despite Americans overwhelmingly rejecting Mitt Romney and his plans to "repeal Obamacare on day one," an effort to nonetheless thwart the federal health care law on the state level is underway, led by the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity and Cato Institute, with help from American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) model legislation. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is a key holdout and has not indicated whether he will continue to actively block the health care law.
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