News Headlines Roundup 11 Mar 2010

Dems Dealt Blow on Health Care Reconciliation: (CBS) substantive debate, the fate of the Democrats' health care reform package may rest largely on technicalities.

Senate Republican sources say the Senate parliamentarian -- who essentially acts as the Senate referee -- has shot down the Democrats' latest strategy for passing a final bill, CBS News Capitol Hill Producer John Nolen reports.

Democrats were planning on bypassing Republican obstruction -- as well as reaching a compromise on the legislation within their own party -- with a multi-step process: The House would pass the health care bill already approved by the Senate. Then, both the House and Senate would pass a "fix it" bill that would amend the Senate bill. The "fix it" bill would pass the Senate via a process called reconciliation, which only requires 51 votes.

The strategy was complicated from the beginning, but according to Republicans, the Senate parliamentarian is now saying that President Obama would have to sign a health care bill into law before Congress can amend it with a reconciliation measure.

Senate Democrats had no immediate comment on the matter, Nolen reports.

The parliamentarian ruling could foil Democrats' plans to avoid signing into law the "sweetheart deals" that have tainted the Senate bill, such as Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.)'s provision that exempts the state of Nebraska from having to pay for any expansion of Medicaid. Democrats are divided over a number of other issues, such as the Senate bill's tax on high-end insurance plans, which they planned to revolve through the reconciliation bill...

...Democrats are still moving forward with the plan to pass a "fix it" reconciliation bill, even in light of the parliamentarian's ruling. The Congressional Budget Office is expected to give Congress a cost estimate for their proposed reconciliation bill by this weekend at the latest, Politico reports, and the House Budget Committee will discuss the bill on Monday.



This could affect the speed of how this health care bill plays out:

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Senate Majority Leader - Harry Reid's Wife and Daughter In Car Accident: (CBS) Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's wife Landra Reid, 69, and daughter Lana Reid-Barringer, 48, were involved in a car accident and have been hospitalized for treatment.

Landra Reid's back, neck and nose were broken in the accident, according to Reid's office. Lana Reid sustained neck injury and facial lacerations. Their vehicle, a van, was rear-ended by a semi-truck while they were driving on a highway near Washington DC.

"Both Mrs. Reid and Lana are conscious, can feel their extremities, and according to doctors their injuries are non-life threatening," Reid spokesman Jon Summers said in a statement. "Senator Reid has been to the hospital and appreciates the support he and his family are receiving from Nevadans and his colleagues in the Senate."



Obama donates Nobel Prize money to 10 charities

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Strong Aftershocks Jolt Chile Inauguration: (CBS) A series of strong aftershocks from last month's devastating quake rocked Chile on Thursday as a new president was sworn into office and immediately urged coastal residents to move to higher ground in case of a tsunami.

The strongest aftershock, with a magnitude of 6.9, was nearly as strong as the quake that devastated Haiti's capital on Jan. 12. There were no immediate reports of damages or injuries.

...President Sebastian Pinera was inaugurated at a congressional building in coastal Valparaiso before the building was evacuated as a precaution. The seven aftershocks strongly swayed buildings, shook windows and sent frightened Chileans streaming into the street.

The magnitude-6.9 aftershock is the strongest since the day of the Feb. 27, magnitude-8.8 quake. It occurred along the same fault line, said geophysicist Don Blakeman at the U.S. Geological Survey in Golden, Colorado. The USGS initially estimated the aftershock's magnitude at 7.2.



Mystery Surrounding King Tut's Dad Solved: (CBS/AP) The DNA tests that revealed how the famed boy-king Tutankhamun most likely died solved another of ancient Egypt's enduring mysteries - the fate of controversial Pharaoh Akhenaten's mummy. The discovery could help fill out the picture of a fascinating era more than 3,300 years ago when Akhenaten embarked on history's first attempt at monotheism.

During his 17-year rule, Akhenaten sought to overturn more than a millennium of Egyptian religion and art to establish the worship of a single sun god. In the end, his bold experiment failed and he was eventually succeeded by his son, the young Tutankhamun, who rolled back his reforms and restored the old religion.

No one ever knew what became of the heretic pharaoh, whose tomb in the capital he built at Amarna was unfinished and whose name was stricken from the official list of kings.

Two years of DNA testing and CAT scans on 16 royal mummies conducted by Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, however, gave the firmest evidence to date that an unidentified mummy - known as KV55, after the number of the tomb where it was found in 1907 in Egypt's Valley of the Kings - is Akhenaten's.

The testing, whose results were announced last month, established that KV55 was the father of King Tut and the son of the Pharaoh Amenhotep III, a lineage that matches Akhenaten's, according to inscriptions.


Warning: Ancient Sex on Display in Paris: (AP) The latest show at Paris' Quai Branly museum comes with a warning for visitors: "This exhibition of Moche ceramics shows sexual acts of an explicit nature."

But the extraordinary and graphic testimonial of the ancient Moche civilization of Peru isn't about physical pleasure or procreation, according to the curator.

He says the sexual acts evoke the rituals that accompanied the death of dignitaries, and the human sacrifices that went with them. They tell a story about the power of the elite that he says has parallels with modern life.

"Sex, death and sacrifice in the Moche religion," which opened this week and runs until May 23, brings to Europe for the first time 134 erotic Moche ceramics on loan from the Larco Museum in Lima, Peru.

The Moche lived on what is now the northern coast of Peru between the first and eighth centuries. The ancient Andean people belonged to one of the first societies to organize itself in way that would be recognized as a state, constructing cities with elaborate monuments and specialized centers for the production of textiles, metal and ceramics.

Their culture is on display at the anthropological Quai Branly museum, whose recent exhibits include an exploration of the Teotihuacan people of ancient Mexico and a tribute to African literature and culture...



Workers strike to protest spending cuts in Greece - tens of thousands of walked off the job to protest painful government budget cuts.

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And in my own state of Louisiana I'm glad to see the House go after this guy:


House votes to impeach federal judge from Louisiana: Washington (CNN) -- The House of Representatives voted unanimously Thursday to impeach Judge G. Thomas Porteous Jr. of U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana, making him the nation's 15th federal judge ever impeached.

"Our investigation found that Judge Porteous participated in a pattern of corrupt conduct for years," said U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff, D-California, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Task Force on Judicial Impeachment.

"Litigants have the right to expect a judge hearing their case will be fair and impartial, and avoid even the appearance of impropriety. Regrettably, no one can have that expectation in Judge Porteous' courtroom."

After the impeachment vote, Schiff and Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Virginia, were named the lead impeachment managers for the Senate trial, which will decide whether to remove Porteous from the bench.

"Today's vote marks only the second time in over 20 years that this has occurred," Goodlatte said in a House news release. "However, when evidence emerges that an individual is abusing his judicial office for his own advantage, the integrity of the entire judicial system becomes compromised."

...Last year, the Task Force on Judicial Impeachment held evidentiary hearings that led to unanimous approval of the four articles of impeachment, citing evidence that Porteous "intentionally made material false statements and representations under penalty of perjury, engaged in a corrupt kickback scheme, solicited and accepted unlawful gifts, and intentionally misled the Senate during his confirmation proceedings," the House release said.

Porteous was appointed to the federal bench in 1994.

...An Impeachment Task Force held four hearings late last year that focused on allegations of misconduct by Porteous, including:

-- Involvement in a corrupt kickback scheme

-- Failure to recuse himself from a case he was involved in

-- Allegations that Porteous made false and misleading statements, including concealing debts and gambling losses

-- Allegations that Porteous asked for and accepted "numerous things of value, including meals, trips, home and car repairs, for his personal use and benefit" while taking official actions on behalf of his benefactors

-- Allegations that Porteous lied about his past to the U.S. Senate and to the FBI about his nomination to the federal bench "in order to conceal corrupt relationships," Schiff said in his floor statement as prepared for delivery.


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How an anti-war Senator should act.

George W. Norris, circa 1918

Greeting, all, from Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, where my wife Karen and I are enjoying our annual summer beach getaway.

My beach reading this summer included an oldie but goodie, Profiles in Courage by then-senator and future president John F. Kennedy. And among the great stories in it, one particularly caught my eye this year, the one about George W. Norris, the Progressive Republican Senator from Nebraska, who, among other things, dared to defy mob hysteria in 1917 by taking a lonely stand against American entry into what he considered a pointless, terrible war ... in his case, World War I.

With all the debate today, in 2007, about how Democrats in Congress under Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi should wage their fight against George W. Bush's fiasco in Iraq -- and at what point principle must stand before politics -- Senator Norris and his 1917 stand lays down a good marker.

In January 1917, just two months after having won reelection to the White House on the slogan "he kept us out of war," President Woodrow Wilson already was pushing the country to intervene in the stalemated European contest that already had cost millions of lives since 1914. War fever swept the country, fanned by the recently-released Zimmerman telegram (in which a German diplomat allegedly promised Mexico return of Texas and California in return for its helping it launch attacks against the US) and German submarine warfare on the high seas. President Wilson that month tried to turn the heat up another notch by insisting that Congress pass the Armed Ship Bill, authorizing him to arm American merchant vessels carrying armaments to England, and the House passed it within days on a vote of 403 to 13. Anyone who opposed this measure was labelled a coward, a traitor, or unAmerican.

But Norris smelled a rat. Norris in 1917 was a freshman Senator, one-time school teacher and small-town lawyer old enough to have lost an older brother in the Civil War. To Norris, armed American ships meant provoking the Germans into an incident that could spark war without any sober debate, and he bristled at the broad grants of Presidential authority in the Bill's small print. Behind it, Norris suspected the hand of American financiers and munitions makers who had banked heavily on the Allied side in the war and now saw their investments at risk. And Norris was not willing to shed American blood to bail out corporations.

So Norris and a small band of like-minded Senators, including Wisconsin's Progressive Robert LaFollette, launched a filibuster to kill the Armed Ship Bill. Their strategy was to use the Senate calendar and stall a final vote until noon on March 4, 1917 -- Inauguration Day -- when the Senate would adjourn sine die.

Norris won. The filibuster worked. But there was bloody hell to pay for it. The country screamed treason, stupidity, and arrogance. President Wilson -- who would prove himself no friend of free speech during the War -- led the verbal assaults. The fact is, most Nebraskans, most Americans, even most Progressives disagreed stridently with Norris. Even JKF, writing his book decades leter, felt the need to distance himself from Norris's position: "It is not now important whether Norris was right or wrong," he wrote. "What is now important is the courage he displayed in support of his convictions."

Norris, stunned by the outcry, felt compelled to ask the Governor to a call a special recall election to allow Nebraskans the chance to vote him out of office. At the same time, he went home and called a town hall meeting in Omaha to confront critics. Over three thousand people came and Norris could not find a single friend to share the stage with him. Alone, he stood in front of the mob and said simply "I have come to speak the truth." Then he went on: "Even though you say I am wrong..., has the time come when we can't express our opinions in the Senate, where we were sent to debate such questions, without being branded by the moneyed interests as traitors?"

Norris didn't change any minds about the War, but he won the crowd's respect. Te Governor felt no need for a recall election, and Norris went on to serve many more years in the US Senate. Despite Norris's victory against the Armed Ship Bill, President Wilson quickly asserted executive power to arm US vessels without Congress's permission, and within a few months the country had entered a European bloodbath whose merits even today remain a matter of debate. Wilson called it a struggle "to make the world safe for democracy," but World War I's more immediate fruits were 16 million dead, millions more wounded or displaced, a peace treaty rejected in the US, and the planting of seeds for even more bloodshed 20 years later in World War II.

Now, fast forward to today, September 2007, as Washington, D.C. braces for what promises to be a grueling showdown over the future of America's role in Iraq -- with President Bush showing every sign of intending to stick to his surge-based war plan at least long enough to pass it off to a next president in 2009, and Congressional Democrats in apparent disarray over how to confront him. Where is the George Norris of 2007? Can anyone on Capitol Hill claim to be living up to the standard of courage, skill, and integrity he set in fighting Woodrow Wilson's war plans in 1917? I don't ask this as a rhetorical question. The threat to our country today is as great as it was in 1917, the issues as complex, and the need to cut through double talk on all sides just as urgent.

I hope the roster will be long. JFK published his original edition of Profiles in Courage fifty years ago, in 1955. Perhaps a next edition will include a few names of current members of Congress with the vision and tenacity to lead in confronting today's morass, waiting to make their marks in during the struggles over the next few weeks.

That, at least, is my hope, sitting here at Cape Hatteras on this sunny Labor Day weekend, sipping my cup of coffee, looking out over the sand dunes toward the beach beyond.

Thanks for your patience in reading through this long post. All the best. --KenA