Nearly 2 million pages of documents covering the time Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-New York) spent in the White House as first lady will remain under lock and key in a Little Rock, Arkansas, archive until after the 2008 presidential election, the Los Angeles Times reports. Melissa Walker, chief archivist at the Clinton Presidential Library, said releasing the documents could take years. "We’re processing as fast as we can." Judicial Watch, a public interest law firm, filed suit against the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration to obtain access to the documents after the agency failed to respond to the firm’s April 2006 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Ray McNally, a GOP political consultant, said the files are "the mother lode of opposition research…Opposition researchers would be very hungry to see what’s there."
The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a liberal advocacy group that claims to speak for the poor and minorities but also runs big-money community development corporations, has settled what Washington Secretary of State Sam Reed called "the largest case of voter-registration fraud in the state’s history." ACORN, which tries to change the outcome of elections, agreed to pay $25,000 to escape prosecution on voter fraud charges. ACORN employees were supposed to help eligible voters complete voter-registration cards but instead submitted cards with false names such as boxing champion Leon Spinks. The King County Canvassing Board has already invalidated more than 1,700 ACORN registrations. The Seattle Times editorialized that "ACORN has done some similar things in other states, and it needs to be cleaned up or shut down."
"The American Medical Association, which received $286 million in revenue last year to protect the profession, has served physicians poorly," Manhattan Institute fellow Regina E. Herzlinger argued in a recent Washington Post op-ed. The incomes of medical doctors fell an inflation-adjusted 7% from 1995 to 2003, while academic medical journals routinely churn out studies "that supposedly document the cupidity and ignorance of practicing physicians while lauding the virtues of single-payer health-care systems, such as those in Canada or Britain." Meanwhile, the Harvard Business School professor noted the AMA has "declared war on retail medical clinics, located in places such as CVS and Wal-Mart…[which help] to unclog crowded emergency rooms, and… enable the uninsured to obtain care at reasonable costs." Herzlinger is also the author of Who Killed Health Care? (McGraw-Hill, 2007).
A coalition of liberal pressure groups including the NAACP, the National Education Association, the Center for American Progress’s offshoot group Campus Progress, and the Higher Education Project of Ralph Nader’s U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) is backing the proposed College Cost Reduction Act. The measure, which passed the House of Representatives on a 273-149 vote in July, would cut in half the interest rate on government-subsidized student loans. President George W. Bush has threatened to veto the bill because it makes government support more widely available and doesn’t target only the neediest students.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce reports that the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, which recently renamed itself the American Association for Justice, has convinced more than 10 state-level trial lawyers’ associations to expunge the phrase "trial lawyers" from their names. Then-ATLA president Ken Suggs noted last year, "If our message is about helping lawyers, we lose. On the other hand, if we’re about getting justice and holding wrongdoers accountable, we win." ATLA reportedly increased its communications staff by 200% and hired image makers for the re-branding. Because of frivolous lawsuits pushed by the plaintiffs’ bar, "small business owners are forced to close up shop and doctors move out of state," according to the Chamber. "Removing the words ‘trial’ and ‘lawyers’ from their names won’t erase the harm they’ve caused to working families and consumers every day."
Greenpeace USA has launched a campaign to pressure members of Congress to make global warming legislation a top priority. "Congress is definitely feeling the heat from their constituents as they join Project Hot Seat and speak out," the group says. Greenpeace is urging its followers to send 50,000 postcards to Congress and to "take to the streets."
The National Council of La Raza condemned the Bush administration for its recently unveiled plan to step up enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws, a move it says "could put millions of Americans at risk of losing their jobs." Janet Murguia, president of La Raza, the largest national Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization in the U.S., said the plan "amounts to an assault on the civil rights of all Hispanic Americans…[that] will result in the racial profiling of all working Latinos."
