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House Dem: Climate change bigger health threat than AIDS, malaria By Andrew Restuccia - 04/06/11 12:25 PM ET Just hours before a vote Wednesday on a GOP plan to block Environmental Protection Agency climate regulations, Rep. Lois Capps (D-Calif.) called climate change a bigger public health threat than AIDS, malaria and pandemic flu. Capps and several other liberal Democrats spoke out Wednesday morning in opposition to the legislation, authored by House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.). The lawmakers, who were joined by officials from the American Lung Association and the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the Upton...

CAIR's Congressional Stooges By: Steven Emerson Investigative Project on Terrorism | Friday, July 31, 2009 Seven House Democrats have written Attorney General Eric Holder invoking a list of grievances from radical Islamist groups and asking that Holder meet with representatives from those groups to hear their concerns.

Seven House Democrats have written Attorney General Eric Holder invoking a list of grievances from radical Islamist groups and asking that Holder meet with representatives from those groups to hear their concerns, the Investigative Project on Terrorism has learned. The grievances include the use of convicted felons as informants in mosques, alleged religious profiling of Somali Muslims in Minnesota and elsewhere and allegations that the FBI is working with foreign governments to question American citizens who are terror suspects. In the letter, the representatives said: "These concerns raise legitimate questions about due process, justice, and equal treatment under the law....

Like many Californians, I was a little surprised to see Republican presidential candidate John McCain campaigning in Santa Barbara the week before last touting his new plan for energy independence — the centerpiece of which focuses on new offshore drilling. As someone who lives in and represents Santa Barbara and witnessed the horrible economic and environmental consequences of the huge 1969 oil spill, I know I have a certain bias against new offshore drilling. But, even so, it seems obvious that President Bush's drilling-heavy energy policy, now being embraced by Sen. McCain, is, in no small part, responsible for today's...

After entering the House of Representatives in 1995, Georgia Republican Bob Barr acquired a reputation as one of the most conservative members of Congress. It was Barr who in 1996 wrote the Defense of Marriage Act, which said states didn't have to recognize gay marriages performed in other states; it was Barr who protested when he learned the military allowed soldiers to practice Wicca. A former federal prosecutor, a firm social conservative, and a strong supporter of the War on Drugs, Barr doesn't fit most people's image of a civil libertarian. But in his eight years in Congress (he failed...

Commemoration of the two-year anniversary of Casey Sheehan's death in Iraq turned into a tirade against President Bush on Sunday at Arlington West, Santa Barbara's oceanside memorial to slain American troops. Army Spc. Sheehan's mother, Cindy Sheehan -- one of the nation's best-known antiwar activists -- told the crowd of about 100 spectators that "we've been lied to. . . . The war has been a disaster of immense proportions." Rep. Lois Capps, D-Santa Barbara, said the Iraq war was "a war of choice that we didn't need to make." And former Democratic Assemblywoman Hannah-Beth Jackson said government leaders are...

The recent publication of some once-censored parts of the 9/11 Commission report reveals that, in 1998, federal intelligence sources had shared their concern that al-Qaeda could be planning to use passenger airplanes as missiles on suicide raids against prominent targets in the United States. This is the first time we've heard that that the possibility of such a suicide mission was raised at the federal level during the Clinton years.

...Gore's work was entirely based on the belief that nobody would commit suicide while hijacking a plane. So the only purpose of CAPPS [Civil Aviation Passenger Protection System] was to assure that these passengers boarded the airplane with their checked baggage — since the feds assumed that the checked bags couldn't have a bomb in if the terrorist was on the plane himself. As naive and shortsighted as this assumption was — and as disastrous as it turned out to be — until now we have only been able to chalk it up to Al Gore's particular brand of myopia....

Northwest Airlines provided information on millions of passengers for a secret U.S. government air security project soon after the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks, raising fresh concerns among some privacy advocates about the airlines' use of confidential consumer data. nation's fourth-largest carrier publicly asserted in September that it "did not provide that type of information to anyone." But Northwest acknowledged Friday it had already turned over three months of reservation data to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Ames Research Center by that point.

If they had been there to discuss anything other than the Bush administration's latest anti-terrorism surveillance plan, the activists who met in Washington on Aug. 25 might have been at each other's throats. On healthcare, tax cuts, affirmative action, the war in Iraq, you name it, these people don't see eye to eye. But here was Hilary Shelton, the NAACP's Washington chief, agreeing with David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, and Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform -- two of the most influential conservatives in D.C. And here was Laura Murphy, the ACLU's legislative director, championing...

(CBS) Precautions in the name of air security are about to taken to a level unimaginable in the United States only a few years ago. The Washington Post reports the Bush administration is expected to order as soon as next month the first step in setting up databases on all air passengers, to be used to color-code each air traveler according to his or her potential threat level. Passengers coded red would be stopped from boarding; yellow would mean additional screening at security checkpoints; and green would mean an only standard level of scrutiny. Airlines and airline reservation companies would...

The skies haven't been friendly lately for David Nelson. Any David Nelson. Throughout Southern California and across the country, men named David Nelson report they have been harassed, questioned by FBI agents, pulled off airplanes, searched and then searched again when attempting air travel. Apparently caught up in a nationwide dragnet for a terrorist by that name, David Nelsons everywhere are being told their names raise red flags on airline screening software. The government, however, maintains that the problem is essentially a computer glitch the airlines must solve. Some David Nelsons in Southern California say they don't care why it's...

<p>WASHINGTON (AP) - Defense contractor Lockheed-Martin will develop a new system to check background information and assign a threat level to all commercial air passengers, the Transportation Department announced.</p> <p>The company, which employed Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta in the mid-1990s, was awarded a five-year contract to administer the program. The first phase of the contract is worth $12.8 million, transportation officials said.</p>

The federal Transportation Security Administration has hired an intelligence official with database expertise to oversee development of the agency's computer profiling system, a proposed network of supercomputers intended to instantly assess every passenger's background for potential ties to terrorism, officials close to the project said yesterday. Ben H. Bell III, who recently served as deputy director of a technology-oriented terrorism task force at the Justice Department, is expected to work out technical and policy kinks that have delayed what some officials regard as the most ambitious domestic data-surveillance system ever begun by the federal government.