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    Dan Froomkin

    Dan Froomkin

    Independent journalist

  • U.S. Ranks Low In Access To Justice Compared To Other Wealthy Nations

    Access to justice is a core American value. The "Rule of Law Index," released Wednesday by the independent World Justice Project, found that in some categories the U.S. even ranks below some developing nations, such as Botswana and Georgia. In an interview with The Huffington Post, the survey's authors said the problems in the U.S. are primarily due to unequal access to justice based on race and class.

  • After Geithner, Treasury May Need A Woman's Touch

    The best way to make sure that the next secretary of the Treasury is not overly beholden to Wall Street might be to hire a woman. There are several female candidates in the running to take over the job expected to be vacated fairly soon by Tim Geithner. It could also break the financial services industry's extraordinary hold on fiscal policy.

  • Justice, SEC Stand Firm On Foreign Anti-Bribery Laws In Face Of Opposition

    Federal prosecutors and financial regulators on Wednesday reasserted their intention to enforce the law that bans the bribery of foreign officials by U.S. companies, despite a clamorous campaign by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business groups to relax the rules. The chamber had argued that Congress should rewrite the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a law passed more than three decades ago that has been used as a model for recent legislation in a number of other countries. One main argument of the chamber was that the law, as enforced, lacks clarity as to whom exactly U.S. companies are allowed to bribe, and whom they aren't.

  • Cliff, Shmiff: Obama Urged Not To Panic

    Republicans and deficit hawks are raising unnecessary alarm over the so-called "fiscal cliff" to pressure President Barack Obama into a "grand bargain" he shouldn't make, progressive economists and scholars said Tuesday at a symposium. "My professional and personal message at this moment is: Don’t panic," said James Galbraith, a University of Texas economist who organized the event. Automatic tax hikes and spending cuts that Congress previously agreed to -- some of them only because they were so extreme, the idea was they would force the two parties to find a better alternative -- are due to take effect starting in the new year.

  • Romney Transition Website Draft Uncovered

    Mitt Romney really was all ready to go if he'd won the election on Tuesday. The site opened with a quote from Romney: "I'm excited about our prospects as a nation. My priority it putting people back to work." On the home page was a placeholder link to video of Romney's acceptance speech.

  • What Obama Said He'd Do Next

    Now President Barack Obama has some promises to keep. Obama can deliver that fairly easily because the Bush tax cuts expire at the end of the year. Without doing anything, he can restore the top marginal tax rate to 39.6 percent, up from 35 percent, restore the estate tax, and raise the capital gains tax cap from 15 percent to 20 percent.

  • New Evidence Shows Poll Watching Efforts Target Minority Precincts

    Poll watchers from groups ostensibly targeting voter fraud are headed primarily to minority voting precincts on Election Day, lending support to the argument that their real goal is to suppress the African-American and Latino vote. A partial list of precincts targeted by a Pittsburgh Tea Party group working on behalf of the Republican Party shows that nearly 80 percent of the voters in those precincts are African-American, compared to 13 percent countywide, according to civil rights and union groups who on Monday called on the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate. An Ohio political blog is reporting that forms submitted to election officials by Tea Party spin-off group True the Vote in Franklin County -- which includes Columbus -- show poll watchers heading to 28 precincts, where most voters are African-American.

  • Early Voting Experience In N.C. Bodes Ill For Civility On Election Day

    Belligerent citizens demanding the right to personally inspect the voting process and yelling "shut up" at the top of their lungs when election officials tell them that only official poll observers can do that. Long lines, which means that a lot of people end up waiting outside the designated no-electioneering zones, getting harangued by campaign workers. Shouting matches between Republican and Democratic campaign workers -- and sometimes voters standing in line -- that can involve name-calling, threatening gestures, and the summoning of law enforcement.

  • Shame Mailers Stir Outcry Over Privacy Invasion

    Customized mass-mail campaigns from groups on the left and the right are using peer pressure to get out the vote by comparing recipients' voting records with those of their neighbors. A first wave of mailers from a conservative group has spawned complaints about invasion of privacy and intimidation. More than 2 million registered voters around the country recently received flyers in the mail from Virginia-based Americans for Limited Government.

  • Search For Mythical Voter Fraud Leads To False Sighting

    Right-wing activists bent on exposing the alleged epidemic of in-person voter fraud suffered a major misfire over the weekend when anonymous pollwatchers set off alarms over groups of Somalis getting rides to a central Ohio early voting center. Many members of the large Somali community in and around Columbus are U.S. citizens and therefore have the constitutional right to vote. The Human Events story quoted two anonymous pollwatchers complaining of "Somalis who cannot speak English" arriving in groups, being given a slate card by Democratic party workers outside the polling place, then coming in and being instructed by Somali interpreters on how to vote.

  • Texas Poll-Watchers Set Sights On Latino Community

    A Tea Party spinoff group training poll-watchers to either monitor or intimidate voters -- depending on whom you believe -- is now explicitly expanding its reach into Latino communities. True the Vote, a Houston-based group that says it is training thousands of poll-watchers across the country, recently announced a new "Voto Honesto" initiative. "People need to know it's a crime if you try to vote when you're not a citizen," said Adryana Boyne, a conservative activist and Latina spokesperson for the Republican Party of Texas.

  • GOP Voter Fraud Accusations Suddenly Blowing Up In Their Faces

    Republican officials, who have used hysteria about alleged voter fraud as an excuse to support measures that disproportionately block Democratic voters, are furiously trying to distance themselves from a growing number of GOP voter registration drives that either submitted false applications or threw away authentic ones. The incidents might have been overlooked if not for the GOP's clamorous campaign to restrict registration drives, purge voter rolls, roll back early voting, and pass voter ID laws that opponents point out have the effect of depressing the vote among minorities, the poor and other generally Democratic constituencies. The latest drama began to unfold on Oct. 17, when the manager of a Tuesday Morning discount store in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley saw a man throwing a garbage bag into the store's private dumpster.

  • Pro-Romney Firm's Purchase Of Voting Machine Company Raises Alarms

    A private equity company run by fervent supporters of Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney bought the third-largest voting machine company in the country last July, raising concerns about the appearance of impropriety, if not the possibility of impropriety itself. Apprehension that Romney supporters could be literally buying votes has been burbling on left-wing blogs since Freepress.org, an alternative website based in Columbus, Ohio, reported late last month about H.I.G Capital's purchase of Hart Intercivic. H.I.G. Capital is a Miami-based private equity fund that manages $8.5 billion in capital.

  • With Little Mention Of Afghanistan Or Drones In Debate, Obama Ducks Hard Questions

    President Barack Obama managed to escape Monday night's presidential debate on foreign policy without having to defend either his escalation of the war in Afghanistan or his unprecedented use of drones to attack suspected militants -- including American citizens -- in countries where the U.S. is not technically at war. In a battle of optics rather than genuine disagreements, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney vaguely accused Obama of weakness, and Obama depicted Romney as flighty. Romney also applauded Obama's use of drones.

  • High Court Sides With Obama In Huge Election Win

    The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a last-gasp appeal by Ohio Republicans and approved early voting for Ohio residents on the weekend before Election Day. Ohio's Secretary of State John Husted had refused to enforce last week's appellate court decision, in which a three-judge panel came down on the side of the Obama campaign and blocked a law that would have limited early voting.

  • Dirty Tricksters Trying To Suppress Vote With Deceptive Phone Calls

    Some African American, Spanish-speaking and elderly voters in Florida and Virginia are apparently being targeted by anonymous voter-suppression groups trying to trick them or intimidate them into not voting in the November presidential election, according to election officials and voter protection organizations. The Virginia State Board of Elections is warning residents that "some Virginia voters, particularly older Virginians, are receiving phone calls from unidentified individuals informing voters that they can vote over the phone. In Florida, the 866-OUR-VOTE election protection hotline run by the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law has received a report of a similar calls in Florida.

  • Panelist On Voter ID: 'When You Tie It All Together, It's All About The Illegal Alien Vote'

    The head of a major right-wing group accused Democrats Thursday of opposing voter identification laws in order to reap votes from undocumented immigrants. "When you tie it all together, it's all about the illegal alien vote," Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, said at a panel featuring five supporters of measures Republicans have been pushing across the country, saying they are necessary to preserve election integrity. Democrats, civil libertarians and others say the moves are blatantly aimed to suppress minority voting, but Fitton said opponents are the ones with the malicious motives.

  • Remember Iraq? To Romney, The Mess Is Obama's Fault, Not Bush's

    In his major foreign policy speech on Monday, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said the "costly gains made by our troops" in Iraq are now eroding due to President Barack Obama's "abrupt withdrawal." That was largely the extent of his comments on a war many historians consider the most disastrous in modern times and the most significant foreign policy legacy of the last Republican president, George W. Bush. Romney didn't elaborate on the "gains," nor did he address whether he thought the cost was appropriate -- $3 trillion in borrowed money, nearly 5,000 dead U.S. servicemembers; and as many as half a million wounded or otherwise damaged veterans.

  • Obama Victory On Early Voting In Ohio Affirmed

    The injunction stands against a Republican-backed law that would have banned early voting in Ohio during the weekend before Election Day, a prime voting period for minorities in the 2008 election. A panel of three judges from the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday affirmed a lower court's ruling in August blocking the law from taking effect. The Obama presidential campaign and the Democratic Party had sued the state, asking a federal court to restore voting during those last three days on the grounds that Ohioans would not have equal access to the polls otherwise.

  • How GOP Voter Suppression Radicalized 'Seinfeld' Star's Mogul Dad

    Until recently, William Louis-Dreyfus was just another retired multimillionaire, giving his art collection away to charity and watching his actress daughter Julia on TV. "I've never gotten involved in that way," the 80-year-old businessman told HuffPost on Wednesday from his home in New York's Westchester County. Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today.