Tuesday Top Stories: 12/22-12/28

Wednesday 12/22-

• (HuffPost)- After a filibuster and threats of obstruction by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), the Senate unanimously passed a bill on Wednesday that would provide health care for first responders to the 9/11 terrorist attack. Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer reached a deal with Republican senators to support the bill earlier in the afternoon.
• (NYT)- President Obama on Wednesday declared the lame-duck session of Congress to be the “most productive post-election period that we have had in decades” and promised to continue seeking common ground next year.

Thursday 12/23-

• (Bloomberg)- However history judges the 535 men and women in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate the past two years, one thing is certain: The 111th Congress made more law affecting more Americans since the “Great Society” legislation of the 1960s. For the first time since President Theodore Roosevelt began the quest for a national health-care system more than 100 years ago, the Democrat-led House and Senate took the biggest step toward achieving that goal by giving 32 million Americans access to insurance. Congress rewrote the rules for Wall Street in the most comprehensive way since the Great Depression. It spent more than $1.67 trillion to revive an economy on the verge of a depression, including tax cuts for most Americans, jobs for more than 3 million, construction of roads and bridges and investment in alternative energy; ended an almost two-decade ban against openly gay men and women serving in the military, and today ratified a nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia.
• (PolitcalWire)- Televangelist Pat Robertson said on his show, The 700 Club, that he thinks marijuana should be legalized. Said Robertson: "I'm not exactly for the use of drugs, don't get me wrong, but I just believe that criminalizing marijuana, criminalizing the possession of a few ounces of pot, that kinda thing it's just, it's costing us a fortune and it's ruining young people. Young people go into prisons, they go in as youths and come out as hardened criminals. That's not a good thing."

Friday 12/24:

• (HuffPost)- The Treasury Department has granted nearly 10,000 special licenses to American companies over the past decade so they could sell some types of products in Iran and other countries the U.S. considers terrorist sponsors, The New York Times reported Thursday.Companies such as Kraft Food and Pepsi and some of the largest U.S. banks benefited, the newspaper said. Most licenses were granted under a law allowing trade in humanitarian goods, even if that ended up including products as diverse as cigarettes and chewing gum

Weekend:

• (Chicago Tribune)- Former President Bill Clinton is coming to Chicago in January to campaign for mayoral candidate Rahm Emanuel. Before serving in President Barack Obama's White House and representing the North Side of Chicago in Congress, Emanuel worked in Clinton's administration as a senior adviser for policy and strategy.
• (The Ausralian)- The founder of the WikiLeaks website has signed a deal for his autobiography that will earn him more than $1.5million.  Julian Assange said the money would help his defence against allegations of sexual assault made by two women in Sweden. "I don't want to write this book, but I have to," he said. "I have already spent pound stg. 200,000 ($307,408) for legal costs and I need to defend myself and to keep WikiLeaks afloat."

Monday 12/27:

• (CNN)- As a crucial component of the nation's new health care law requiring all Americans to buy insurance faces an uncertain fate in federal courts, a new national poll indicates that a majority of Americans oppose that provision in the bill Congress passed earlier this year. And a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Monday also indicates that a majority of the public still opposes the new law, but by a smaller margin than earlier this year.

Tuesday 12/28:

• (Anchorage Daily News)- A federal judge today dismissed Republican Joe Miller's federal lawsuit seeking to overturn the results of the Nov. 2 election, clearing the way for U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski to be certified as the winner.
• (WSJ)- The 2012 Senate campaign has its first tea party candidate. Jamie Radtke, head of the Virginia Federation of Tea Party Patriots, has filed federal papers to run for the Republican nomination for the Senate seat now held by Virginia Democrat James Webb.