2008
The House Oversight Committee announced yesterday
that it will hold hearings on missing White House e-mails. Responding
to White House claims that there is “no
evidence” of missing emails, Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) released “an internal
White House study” identifying “473
separate days in which no electronic messages were stored” by White House offices.
Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee defended South Carolina’s right to display
the confederate flag on public grounds. “You don’t like people from outside
the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag,” he said. “If somebody
came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we’d
tell them what to do with the pole; that’s what we’d do.”
CNN reported yesterday that “lobbyists are working overdrive in Washington
trying to make sure that their cash
cows are not affected by any economic stimulus plan.”
“About 75% of Baghdad’s neighborhoods are now secure, a dramatic
increase from 8% a year ago when President Bush ordered more troops to the capital, U.S.
military figures show.”
Approximately “10%
to 20% of Marines and soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq may have suffered”
traumatic brain injury. Yet according to an Army task force study released yesterday,
there are “major gaps” in identifying and treating the injury that
“were created by a lack of coordination and policy-driven approaches.”
“Because of an unprecedented surge in immigration applications last summer, legal
immigrants will have to wait much longer during the next two years to receive
visas or naturalization papers.” The average wait time is now 18 months, “up
from 7 months or less last year.”
The House Select Committee on Global Warming called
on the Interior Department yesterday “to hold off auctioning oil and gas leases in
northwest Alaska’s Chuckchi Sea until the department decides whether to list
polar bears as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.” “Every time
there is a choice between extinction and extraction in this administration, extraction
wins,” Chairman Edward Markey (D-MA) said.
“The CIA has concluded that members of al-Qaeda and allies of Pakistani
tribal leader Baitullah Mehsud were responsible
for last month’s assassination of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto,”
according to CIA director Michael Hayden. He also said the groups were “behind a new
wave of violence threatening that country’s stability.”
The Washington Post reports that FEMA has reversed course again on
what to do with its Katrina trailers. After originally purchasing 145,000 trailers
and then selling them at steep discounts because communities refused them, FEMA is
now seeking to repurchase them at the original price “because of concerns that the trailers
are tainted with formaldehyde.”
And finally: Yesterday, Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) “launched into a lengthy
question to Ben Bernanke during the Fed chairman’s House testimony.” “Seeing
as how you were the former CEO Of Goldman Sachs,” Kaptur began before being “quickly
stopped by Mr. Bernanke and the laughter in the room.” “I’ve
got the wrong firm?” she asked, before being corrected that she was thinking of
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. Said Mr. Bernanke: “I was the CEO of the Princeton
Economics Department.” (Watch the video here.)
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/01/18/thinkfast-january-18-2008/
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