NATIONAL
November 11, 2011 | By Lisa Mascaro, Washington Bureau
With time and compromise slipping out of reach, the congressional "super committee" may punt its toughest deficit decisions to next year rather than strike a deal that would enrage both parties' political bases heading into the 2012 election. The Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction has until Nov. 23 to agree to a package that would reduce deficits by $1.5 trillion over the next decade. Achieving that goal would require painful compromise — both parties would have to give up political weapons they have hoped to wield over the next year.
NATIONAL
August 13, 2011 | By David G. Savage, Los Angeles Times
For the first time since the landmark Voting Rights Act became law in 1965, a Democratic administration in Washington will oversee the high-stakes, once-a-decade political redistricting based on the census. That redistricting is already underway. Under the act, the Justice Department must approve changes to election laws in the South and other areas where racial discrimination once interfered with elections. At issue will be whether the newly drawn congressional and state legislative districts — based on the 2010 census — deny blacks or Latinos their right "to elect representatives of their choice.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
January 31, 2011 | By Rich Connell and Tom Hamburger, Los Angeles Times
Hundreds of environmentalists, union members and liberal activists converged on Rancho Mirage on Sunday to rally against what they see as the influence of two of the nation's leading financial backers of conservative causes. The protestors waved signs condemning "corporate greed," chanted slogans and surged toward a line of helmeted police officers at the entrance to a resort where billionaires Charles and David Koch were holding a retreat for prominent conservative elected officials, major political donors and strategists.
WORLD
April 15, 2009 | Liz Sly and Caesar Ahmed
Disarray and dissent are clouding the formation of Iraq's new provincial councils, which only now are taking shape more than two months after regional elections. Political bickering, as well as Iraq's laborious electoral procedures, has delayed the seating of new councils and their subsequent selection of governors. Many Iraqis had hoped the process would herald a new era of representative government and kick-start the delivery of urgently needed services and economic development.
BUSINESS
April 24, 2008 | Peter G. Gosselin, Times Staff Writer
Nine months into the worst housing crisis in a generation, Congress this week took up the most aggressive government plan so far to break spiraling home foreclosures and tumbling house prices that threaten to pull the economy down. But even as a key House committee began to mark up the bill Wednesday, there were signs that the measure could be caught up in a crippling political crossfire.
NATIONAL
October 3, 2007 | Carol J. Williams, Times Staff Writer
At the opening Tuesday of a federal trial of seven terrorism suspects, jurors were asked to settle a question that has dogged the case since its disclosure 16 months ago: Did the FBI foil a 2006 plot to bomb Chicago's Sears Tower, or did it finance a fictitious plot to serve as an election-year victory in the war on terrorism?