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The new administration has assumed the awkward position of arguing that the case against John Yoo -- whose opinions Obama administration officials have harshly criticized -- should be dismissed.

The Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board voted Tuesday to maintain its current policies regarding disclosure for ballot campaigns. The board’s rulings have come under heightened scrutiny in recent months as the board works to adjust its policies to new laws passed in 2010. The board has been receiving feedback from both anti-gay marriage amendment supporters that want as little disclosure as possible and open government groups that favor full disclosure

President Barack Obama (Pic by The White House, via Flickr) Fifty-six organizations sent a letter to President Obama yesterday asking him to clarify his position on the ability of publicly funded institutions to hire or fire people based on their religion. Catholics for Choice and 55 other religious, civil rights, labor and health groups sent a letter (.pdf) to Obama asking him to comment on remarks he made “at a town hall meeting on July 22 in College Park, MD,” according to the group’s press release . The groups took issue with a the president suggesting “that he supports allowing religious organizations to hire and fire employees in federally funded positions based upon the employee’s religion”: This statement is in direct contradiction to comments he made while campaigning for the presidency.

Mike Allen at Politico reports that President Barack Obama will unveil the Reduce Unnecessary Spending Act of 2010, a presidential check on Congressional

After a pair of Sen. Barack Obama’s advisers published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal today clarifying the presumed Democratic nominee’s tax policy, the

Scott Brown’s 11th-hour fundraising surge was one of the great stories of the Massachusetts special election, a watershed moment when the conservative netroots

Winning his freedom was a big step for Mohammed Jawad, reportedly the youngest prisoner at Guantanamo Bay until he was released in August. But Jawad, who two

State Rep. Scott Plakon, R-Longwood (Pic by Meredith Geddings, via myfloridahouse.gov) This Thursday, a court in Tallahassee will hear a lawsuit filed by numerous educators, religious leaders and civil liberties advocates challenging the constitutionality of a 2012 ballot measure that would repeal Florida’s constitutional ban on taxpayer funding for religious groups. Despite the millions of dollars the state has already given to religious groups in Florida through the years, the GOP-led state Legislature has proposed an amendment that would no longer “threaten” public funding for religious institutions

At long last, former White House counsel Harriet Miers and Bush aide and adviser Karl Rove have agreed to testify before the House Judiciary Committee on their

The two weeks of planned protests against the Keystone XL pipeline ended this weekend with 1,252 people arrested outside the White House in an attempt to convince President Obama to reject a permit to greenlight the project. The group that organized the protests, Tar Sands Action, calls the arrests phase one of a larger movement to convince the U.S. government that the pipeline would harm the environment too much to be approved.

His political career looked dead after his humiliating 2006 campaign for lieutenant governor of Georgia -- he lost the primary by 14 points, dogged by his ties

Two weeks after a deadline for local police departments to count their untested rape kits and report back to the state, fewer than five percent of the agencies

In case there were any lingering doubts as to just how Kafkaesque the U.S. detention policy for Guantanamo Bay prisoners has become, the latest chapter in the

Ben Smith has a rose-colored look at a possible Senate run in New York by Mort Zuckerman, the 72-year-old media mogul and pundit who seems interested in Sen.

Just days after American Forces launched a targeted assault that killed Osama Bin Laden, Colorado U.S. Senator Michael Bennet asked nominees for counterterrorism posts in the Obama Administration how Bin Laden’s death would affect the flow of financing to terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and how terrorist network overlap might complicate U.S

The Minnesota Independent reports that the Al Franken campaign has just claimed its first lead of the Minnesota Senate recount, by a margin of 22 votes. The

The tripartisan Kerry-Graham-Lieberman Senate climate squad made a splash this weekend with its decision to drop cap-and-trade from its (eventual) legislative

In the face of the deepening financial crisis and the largest Wall Street swindle in history, President-elect Barack Obama acted swiftly to fill three key

The state’s second largest power provider – Tri-State Generation and Transmission – has an all-of-the-above approach to energy resources, but that doesn’t mean its interest in a coal plant expansion in Kansas is meant to transform the Westminster-based company into a larger regional power wholesaler. “We serve 44 co-ops in four states over 200,000 square miles,” Tri-State spokesman Jim Van Someren said Thursday

William Kristol, founder and editor of the Weekly Standard, says that he’s been told U.S. Sen. John Thune of South Dakota is reconsidering his decision not to be a Republican candidate in the 2012 presidential race

These days, in their efforts to patch together a bipartisan coalition to pass climate legislation, Democrats have been falling over themselves to kowtow to