Breaking News

PART 1: A Coast Guard upgrade project, Deepwater, reveals a troubled military contracting system.

Before Mississippians have a chance vote on the criminalization of abortion in the 2011 general election (and before the Mississippi Supreme Court rules whether

Politico’s Morning Money has the text of a memo by Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), outlining his plans for the upcoming conference committee to reconcile the House

Oil spill claims administrator Kenneth Feinberg is set to release the methodology for calculating oil spill claims payments. According to The New York Times , his estimates predict the gulf region will recover by late next year: # Based on the work of environmental scientists, economists and other experts, the report acknowledges that “prediction is not an exact science” but estimates that the gulf should recover by the end of 2012.

Kentucky GOP Senate candidate Rand Paul calls his controversial Maddow interview a poor political decision. Still, Paul leads Kentucky’s Democratic

The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals today affirmed a lower court ruling that the requirement in the federal health care reform law that individuals buy health insurance or face penalties is unconstitutional. It also upheld the lower court’s rejection of an argument by Florida and 25 other states that the law’s expansion of Medicaid is “coercive” to the states. # Today’s ruling holds that the rest of the law can be allowed to stand; the lower court held that the mandate was so integral that the rest of the law should be struck down.

During the Colorado legislative session just passed and during the midterm elections last year, state Republicans embraced Arizona-style anti-illegal immigration policy proposals and harsh rhetoric that alienated Coloradans , including non-white Republican politicians and supporters and, perhaps most dramatically , Latino Republicans. Analysts called that kind of politics a sort of longterm suicide mission given the shifting demographics of the state

The debate over what caused the mortgage mess and how best to fix it is now taking a sharp turn, as new problems surrounding liar’s loans and payment-option

The U.S. military is using economy of force and intimate knowledge of the local population to combat the insurgency in Afghanistan.

Multiple GOP-affiliated groups are calling for presidential candidate and former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson to be invited to an upcoming televised debate in New Hampshire. The debate’s hosts, CNN as well as the New Hampshire Union Leader and WMUR-TV, say they will not include Johnson because he has not received more than 2 percent support in any major national polls.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer yesterday signed a bill that makes abortions “based on the sex or race of the fetus” a felony in the state of Arizona

Jonathan Martin has the first look at an email going out to Family Research Council supporters in which Tony Perkins tells conservatives to close their wallets

Well, it didn’t take long for House Republicans to recognize that having Henry Waxman atop the House Energy and Commerce Committee is a greater threat to the

NPR has a story today on the ties between Arizona’s immigration law, SB 1070, and private prisons that stand to benefit from more illegal immigrants being

Lambda Legal , a New York-based organization committed to winning gay civil rights through the courts, announced in a press release Tuesday that it would challenge New Jersey’s 2006 same sex civil unions law for failing to bring full equality to gay residents of the state. Lambda, which is teaming with New Jersey LGBT group Garden State Equality , will refer to government studies and press investigations that document the way employers have failed to recognize couples entered into a civil union and how civil unions have been ignored or misunderstood by authorities, often in instances involving critical medical decisions. Colorado nearly passed a civil unions bill this spring that its main sponsors, Sen Pat Steadman and Rep Mark Ferrandino, acknowledged fell short of full equality

For the past four years, every time Moqtada Sadr has made this-or-that tactical retrenchment -- standing down from the August 2004 Najaf battle; going to

Glenn Beck-like, I put my head in my hands over the sheer lunacy expressed by the much-disgraced former New York Democratic congressman: • Earlier in the

In Flint, Mich. and some other troubled communities fighting against an onslaught of abandoned and vacant properties, the latest survival tactic is to shrink

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), considered one of the few Republicans to make concrete budget proposals during the current recession, spoke at the Brookings

At The Big Picture, they’re making the best of what promises to be a scary ride on Wall Street today. Here’s a bit of their advice: I assume that readers