I've Convinced My Husband 'To Sell The D@mn Plane'

During a conference call with reporters, the Missouri Democrat took responsibility for the failure to pay personal property taxes from 2007 to 2010, insisting it was an unintentional oversight and that monthly sales taxes have been paid on the plane for several years.
...
McCaskill's acknowledgment Monday was the latest of several politically embarrassing revelations about her use of private airplanes. She previously paid the U.S. Treasury $88,000 to cover flight costs. She later acknowledged that one of those 89 trips was for political purposes - when McCaskill traveled from St. Louis to Hannibal for a Democratic conference.
 

Poor baby, as a previous auditor for the State of Missouri, how was she expected to understand all these financial things. Bless her heart.

100 Years Ago The First Aerial Bomb Lands In Libya

Premiums are rising and coverage is shrinking a new norm is taking hold in America: `Unaffordable underinsurance.'  This month, the number of waivers granted to the Obama health law broke 1,000 protecting inadequate insurance plans. The expansion of health insurance to the uninsured is becoming a mirage. The Obama administration has told states they could reduce the number of people covered by Medicaid as well as reduce the services provided....

"'Unaffordable underinsurance' is rapidly becoming the new standard in the United States."  The trend in health insurance is rising premiums and shrinking coverage for many Americans who get their coverage at work as well as on the individual insurance market.

...While some hope the Obama health law will slow premium hikes, Claudia Fegan, MD of Physicians for a National Health Program writes under the Obama heath law "sudden premium hikes are still possible and, in my opinion, quite likely under the new law."

Underinsurance, requiring Americans to pay more of the cost of health care, may become the norm because of the 2010 law. The new law will hasten the current trend toward underinsurance as plans where patients pay an average of 40% of their health care bills qualify to fulfill the employers' obligations to provide coverage rather than pay an assessment. Massachusetts, the model on which the Obama reforms are based, recently found that medical bankruptcies have not decreased with the new law.  The lesson - it is not just health insurance, but the quality of the insurance that matters. After deriding merely adequate insurance as Cadillac Plans," the Obama administration is showing support for high deductibility plans with large out of pocket costs that do not provide financial or health security. link

Leave us not forget just how bad the status quo is.

As weak as it is, there'd be no healthcare reform legislation if the existing system worked for all parties concerned.

It doesn't. It never did. It never will.

But today, a three-judge appellate court dealt a serious blow to the Bush/Obama tactic for shielding government eavesdropping from judicial review (i.e., placing secret executive surveillance above and beyond the rule of law).  The unanimous court ruled that the plaintiffs' fear that they will be subjected to this expanded warrantless eavesdropping is reasonable given the sweeping powers the law vests in the Executive, that these fears substantially impede their work, and that these impediments constitute actual harm sufficient to allow them to challenge the constitutionality of the FISA Amendments Act.

This may sound like a legalistic development but its significance extends far beyond that.  Unlike the bastardized Bush/Obama "state secrets" weapon for avoiding judicial review, "standing" is actually a legitimate and important constitutional restriction on a court's jurisdiction.  The idea is that courts are permitted to resolve only actual disputes between actual parties where the defendant's conduct has uniquely injured the plaintiff in direct ways; we don't want courts to be free-floating, omnipotent tribunals that issue binding answers to every abstract political question.  They are empowered to issue legal rulings only when there is an actual "case or controversy" before them involving parties directly and uniquely harmed by the challenged conduct.

[snip]

Today's ruling puts at least some brakes -- for now -- on that license of lawlessness.  It rejected the Bush/Obama claim that citizens must prove they have been targeted by an illegal presidential program before they have the right to ask a court to declare it illegal.  Instead, a plaintiff's reasonable fear that their rights are being violated due to enactment of an allegedly unconstitutional law  -- combined with actual harm suffered as a result of that fear -- suffices to allow them to challenge the legality of those actions.  It is, of course, possible that the Supreme Court can review and reverse this ruling, but the Second Circuit is a well-regarded court -- situated on the level immediately below the Supreme Court -- and this well-reasoned decision will have significant sway.  At the very least, this is an important ruling in eroding what is easily one of the worst political problems plaguing America in the post-9/11 world: the ease with which Presidents and their underlings can insulate their secret actions from the rule of law.

Don't Call Me, I Won't Call You

NOBODY calls me anymore -- and that's just fine. With the exception of immediate family members, who mostly phone to discuss medical symptoms and arrange child care, and the Roundabout Theater fund-raising team, which takes a diabolical delight in phoning me every few weeks at precisely the moment I am tucking in my children, people just don't call.

"I remember when I was growing up, the rule was, `Don't call anyone after 10 p.m.,' " Mr. Adler said. "Now the rule is, `Don't call anyone. Ever.' "

This might be fun.

"Trump, who has said he will decide on a presidential bid by June, said he is particularly happy with the fact he "screwed" Gadhafi on a past real estate deal.

The U.S. Supreme Court announced today that it would hear an appeal from a death row inmate who is slated for execution in Alabama because of a mix-up in the mailroom of one of New York's most prominent white shoe law firms.

Two associates at the law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell were representing pro bono a client in Alabama named Cory Maples in his death row appeals. An Alabama state court sent the associates two copies of a judicial order in Maples' case, but since the associates no longer worked at S&C, the mailroom staff sent the orders back to the court unopened and stamped "Return to Sender."  By the time Maples had found new counsel, the deadline for appealing from the court's order had passed.  The 11th Circuit Federal Court of Appeals held that it was too late for Maples to appeal, even though the fault was completely that of his attorneys.

SANA, Yemen -- President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen, increasingly isolated amid defections and resignations, clung to power on Tuesday, at one point indicating he would accept an opposition deal for his early departure -- proposed weeks ago -- to head off the deepening crisis in the country.

Sen. Rand Paul tests presidential waters

"The only decision I've made is I won't run against my dad," Rand Paul said.

Ever since a man in Tunisia burnt himself to death in December 2010 in protest at his treatment by police, pro-democracy rebellions have erupted across the Arab world. Our interactive timeline traces key events