Filibusters Are Busted—In our June 1 FYI we said they weren’t. But then, under a bipartisan agreement, Senate Democrats voluntarily backed down on the decision to filibuster the confirmation of several appellate court judges. The Senate confirmed the judgeships of two conservative women, Janice Rogers Brown, an African-American Justice on the California Supreme Court, and Priscilla R. Owen of […]

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Trumping the Right Wing—Tom “The Hammer” DeLay, the Republican majority leader in the House of Representatives, was already in trouble when he toiled to engineer the controversial congressional intervention into the Terri Schiavo drama. It was an example of “justice DeLayed is justice denied.” Among other discoveries following DeLay’s drive to push Congress to do […]

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Out of Town—But not soon enough? Just when we were exclaiming “at last!” as the 109th Congress was fleeing the Capitol for a two-week Easter recess, some hard-line Republican conservatives, led by Representative Tom Delay of Texas, maneuvered themselves into the life-or-death case of Terri Schiavo. She is the 41-year-old Florida woman now in her […]

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Ask the Internet—“Ask your doctor” is the pitch promoted in all those TV prescription-drug ads. But your doctor may have been influenced to prescribe certain high-priced drugs by the industry’s big-bucks wooing of the medical profession. Among other things, that includes giving doctors free, give-away patient samples of purple pills to encourage expensive drugstore purchases […]

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