When we heard about a stunning report on lobbying that was discussed on National Public Radio, we presumed there wouldn’t be much coverage of it in the major media, and we were right. But the Center for Public Integrity, the non-partisan Washington research group that compiled the report made it all fairly visible. We asked Roberta […]

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A Patriotic House—Well, sort of. The House of Representatives voted to strike Section 215 from the notoriously nosy USA Patriot Act, thereby barring searches by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies of citizens’ public library records. The American Library Association says it has found 200 cases in which law enforcement officials made requests for […]

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Tom Halsted is a former longtime Washingtonian who had a career here as a high-level public information officer for the government, specializing in energy, arms control and intelligence issues. That put him in close contact with the working press, and he eventually became a journalist himself. He became a columnist for the Daily Times of Gloucester, Massachusetts, […]

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Out west in Washington state—not in a decisive state like Ohio or Florida—a state-court judge ruled last week that Governor Christine Gregoire, a Democrat and former state attorney general, had actually, and factually, won the governorship seven months ago. She won by a margin of 129 votes after the tallying of nearly 3 million ballots […]

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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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