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TransCanada, owners of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, promised Nebraska state legislators this week to take additional steps to protect environmental safety if the project is approved by the federal government. The Canadian pipeline company made several guarantees to Nebraska lawmakers, including a $100 million bond to ensure adequate funds to clean up after any oil spills, as the state’s legislature considered holding a special session to consider legislation to force the company to change Keystone’s route… In a letter to the Speaker of the Nebraska legislature, Sen.

It’s been an amazing thing: faced with hundreds of pages of documents disclosed last week that explicitly state and thoroughly demonstrate that it’s unknown

Here’s something counterintuitive: the closer a person lives to Washington, D.C., the more likely it is that he or she watched the inauguration on

Daphne pointed out that FBI Director Robert Mueller has some concerns about bringing Guantanamo prisoners into U.S. prisons. What, he doesn’t read Glenn

After a week’s delay, the Senate Judiciary Committee is set to vote this morning on the Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor. Although Sotomayor is

Daphne Eviatar is guest-blogging for Glenn Greenwald today. The following is cross-posted at Salon. Ever since The Los Angeles Times reported last weekend

That’s the question being asked around the country today in response to the $85 billion proposal presented Thursday by Sens. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Charles

He’s a Republican gladiator, not a conservative, said American Conservative Union chairman David Keene.

In stark contrast to the orange chicken canard about the treatment of Guantanamo detainees comes this disturbing Andy Worthington report on malnutrition at

Colorado U.S. Senator Mark Udall at a gay-rights event this weekend in Denver said he supports marriage equality for all Americans. Udall joins a growing list of lawmakers who have gone on record in support of ending the era where the federal Defense of Marriage Act and where constitutional bans like Colorado’s Amendment 43 blocked LGBT couples from the legal protections and advantages provided by the state through marriage

Minnesota members of the U.S.

Today, in Senate dysfunction: Republicans filibustered a long-embattled small-business bill -- designed to create jobs, created with bipartisan input, and

The most succinct and uncontroversial explanation as to just how the recession began is that a massive surge in foreign capital in the early 2000s sent banks

As the United Nations climate talks in Durban progress, they are becoming increasingly combative, offering a soft preview of the kind of political atmosphere destined to prevail in a world where agriculture in vulnerable regions of the planet begins to succumb to catastrophic drought and flooding. The United States and Canada have drawn intense criticism here during the first two days of the conference

Use the initials if you don’t understand, but that was what Gen. Jim Jones, President Obama’s national security adviser, told commanders in Afghanistan would be

As House Bill 1355 made its way through the Legislature, critics railed against provisions that would impose new regulations on groups that register voters, reduce the number of days of early voting and require voters who move between counties to vote by provisional ballot. # But after the bill was signed, new threads of controversy, as well as a pair of court challenges, have touched on the way elections officials have interpreted a less-contested procedural provision: its effective date, which for many of its sections (including some of the most controversial) was the moment it was signed into law by Gov.

The Washington Post is reporting that the House Ethics Committee has closed its probe into former Rep. Eric Massa’s (D-N.Y.) alleged harassment of

This evening, Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) attached an amendment with funding to preserve teachers’ jobs and to provide much-needed Medicaid funding to states to a

Five years ago, Colorado’s GOP Senate candidate Ken Buck refused to prosecute a rape case while acting as Weld County District Attorney, reports our sister site

American people do not want amnesty for illegal immigrants or mass deportation, Melody Barnes, Obama’s chief domestic policy adviser, told the crowd at an

I don’t know what benchmarks the Obama administration wants to place on its aid and commitments to Afghanistan and Pakistan. (Well, more on that in a moment.)

Today, Democratic Sens. Debbie Stabenow (Mich.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.) took to the Senate floor to argue for the Americans Want to Work Act, a bill

Former President George W. Bush’s tax cuts expire in January, and Democrats and Republicans both have committed to extending some, if not all, of the cuts.