Jason Rosenbaum

It’s criminal investigation week! Not only is the DOJ investigating Goldman Sachs, but the FBI has launched a bribery investigation into Massey Energy, the owner of the Upper Big Branch Mine and a company that regularly condones what amounts to serial murder by negligence.

Don Blankenship, owner of what almost amounts to a company that regularly commits serial murder, Massey Energy, is also on the board of the Chamber of Commerce. In that position, he gets to determine how the Chamber spends its money. One of the things the Chamber spends it on is buying judges. So how compromised are the other judges who signed the amicus brief with Robert Young, a brief that directly benefited Blankenship’s company, Massey Energy?

Back in 2002, the Bush administration gave the phone and cable companies what they wanted and classified broadband outside the normal regulatory framework for two-way communications networks like phones. Fast forward to 2009, when the FCC came down on Comcast for blocking legal traffic on their networks. An appeals court overtuned the lawsuit, basically saying the FCC has no legal standing to regulate the Internet. Which, on its face, is crazy.

All the FCC needs to do to be able to regulate the Internet again is simply reverse Bush’s mistake. And indeed, an earlier Supreme Court ruling on Bush’s original move confirms this – the Court essentially said the FCC is allowed to reclassify services.

To reclassify, the FCC needs to hold a vote of its five member board. And the votes are there – Obama appointee Chairman Genachowski has been a strong supporter of net neutrality and its assumed the other two Democratic chairman would vote with him.

So, will the Chairman and FCC do it? So far, we don’t know.

Tomorrow at 2:30 pm, the Senate Commerce Committee will meet to discuss the administration’s National Broadband Plan. However, given the court ruling last week that the FCC can’t regulate the Internet under its current classification, the focus will be on net neutrality.

Don Blankenship is the head of Massey Energy, the company that runs the Upper Big Branch Mine which just had a horrific “accident” that left 29 dead. Massey’s conduct under Blankenship has been negligent enough to approach criminality, calling into question how much of an “accident” this was — especially since Blankenship and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Chamber and Don Blankenship spent millions to elect judges and get favorable rulings and briefs. This combined effort affects 2010 judicial elections, including the state supreme court in Michigan.

The federal appeals court in D.C. has just ruled in favor of Comcast in their suit against the FCC regarding net neutrality. Before I get into the actual ruling, it’s worth reminding folks what net neutrality is and what current law is.

Josh Mull, who is starting today as The Seminal’s newest Afghanistan Blogging Fellow, has deep experience blogging, reporting, and making political change.

The insurance companies have been taking an incredible amount of heat lately for their stunning rate increases. Anthem kicked things off with their 39% increases in California, but these were not isolated hikes. WellPoint, Anthem’s parent company, is increasing rates by double digits in at least 11 states. And other big insurance companies are hiking rates in at least half a dozen more states.

The idea that insurance rate hikes are driven by increases in the underlying cost of medical care has also been pushed by AHIP, the insurance industry’s top lobbying front group.

Given the health insurance industry’s duplicity on everything having to do with the health care system and their role in it, it shouldn’t surprise anyone to find out that this talking point is a straight up lie.

The White House Health Care Summit has concluded. Unsurprisingly, Republicans continued to hit on tort reform as the way to lower our health care costs all afternoon. And they continued to be wrong. But a few more themes came up that are worth debunking.

Over the past few weeks, House and Senate Democratic leaders have been working to craft a compromise between their two health care bills that were passed over the last few months. Today, President Obama has released what Dan Pfeiffer, Communications Director at the White House, is calling the administration’s “best shot” at bridging the differences between the House and Senate.