Sheldon Whitehouse
No one has a First Amendment right to lie to a federal agency in order to claim an improper tax status in order to avoid legal disclosure requirements on political spending and thereby receive undue tax benefits. That's a criminal false statement and possibly a fraud.Collection: Legal
Any patient who has a serious illness requiring multiple doctors understands the frustration of lost medical charts, repeated procedures, or having to share the same information over and over with different doctors and nurses.Collection: Medical
The fossil fuel industry has taken control of, and powered up, architecture and methods originally built by the tobacco industry and others to attack and deny science.Collection: Architecture
From lying about climate change, to undermining programs that make up our social safety net, to opposing laws that reduce gun violence, to fighting marriage equality, the Kochs' tentacles infiltrate all parts of America's public debates.Collection: Equality
Rhode Island works hard to reduce air pollution in our communities. We passed laws to prohibit cars and buses from idling their engines and to retrofit school buses with diesel pollution controls. But there is only so much a single state can do, particularly against out-of-state pollution.Collection: Car
Fossil fuel companies and their allies are funding a massive and sophisticated campaign to mislead the American people about the environmental harm caused by carbon pollution.Collection: Environmental
The science-denial machinery is a serious adversary, and it has a big advantage over real science: it does not need to win its dispute with real science; it just needs to create a public illusion that there is a dispute.Collection: Science
When counting on learning from innovation, there are great successes but also failures. The Wright Brothers invented the aircraft and started an amazing process of innovation, where we now have planes that carry 500 passengers. Along the way there were some silly looking vehicles that crashed early on.Collection: Amazing
Health IT helps save lives now lost due to preventable medical errors, from incorrect diagnoses and needless infections to drug mix-ups and surgical mishaps.Collection: Medical
These core principles - helping patients, preventing medical errors, promoting best practices and improving quality - are the reasons that health IT is featured in both the 2012 Republican platform and 2012 Democratic platform.Collection: Medical
The Founding Fathers built our judicial system to withstand the special interest pressures that beset the political branches of government.
You can measure the warming oceans with a thermometer. You measure sea level rise with a yardstick. You can measure the dramatic increase in acidification with a simple pH test, and you can replicate what excess CO2 does to seawater in a basic high school science lab.
Republicans aren't cowards. Many will take the side of climate principle in a fair fight. But it is asking a lot of them to take a principled stand on climate when they don't see one corporate friend ready to help them.
In the Internet economy, information is everything: The more a company knows about a consumer, the more carefully it can tailor its advertising to that customer, and the more revenue it can generate in return.
When you don't have accountability, there's no limit to the things that people will say. One of the restraints on the vitriol and the filth that so often is part of the American political debate is that candidates have to stand by their ads.
Protected free speech has boundaries, and one boundary is fraud.
A courtroom is supposed to be a place where the status quo can be disrupted - even upended - when the Constitution or laws may require, where the comfortable can be afflicted and the afflicted find some comfort, all under the shelter of the law.
Citizens United provided unprecedented political weaponry to big special interests. My personal view was it was calculated to do that.
Citizens United is a disgrace of a decision, holding that corporate money is corporate speech and entitled to the same First Amendment protection as human speech. As a result, corporations now can spend unlimited amounts of money to influence our elections - often in secret, without any public disclosure.
The fossil fuel industry has been a particular disgrace, polluting our politics as well as our planet.
If we believe in an all-powerful God, then we must then believe that God gave us this Earth, and we must in turn believe that God gave us its laws of gravity, of chemistry, of physics. We must also believe that God gave us our human powers of intellect and reason.
We are here to do God's work. He's not here to do ours.
How arrogant - how very far from humility - would be the self-satisfied, smug assurance that God, a tidy-up-after-us God will come and clean up our mess? Hope for a nanny God, who will with a miracle grant us amnesty from our folly - that's not aligned with either history or the text of the Bible.
When cyclones tear up Oklahoma and hurricanes swamp Alabama and wildfires scorch Texas, you come to us, the rest of the country, for billions of dollars to recover. And the damage that your polluters and deniers are doing doesn't just hit Oklahoma and Alabama and Texas. It hits Rhode Island with floods and storms.
According to the IRS, the wealthiest 400 Americans, who earned an average of roughly $270 million in 2008, paid an average tax rate of just 18.2 percent that year. That's about the same rate paid by a single truck driver in Rhode Island. It's not right, and we need to restore fairness to our tax code.
We have seen the big loan servicers drag their feet in the Obama administration's well-intentioned mortgage modification program.
Trapped in the bureaucracy nightmare, real families suffer when the big banks and their servicers force foreclosures. The emotional toll on children packing up their rooms and on parents struggling to find a temporary roof is a deep one.
When we breathe it in, soot can interfere with our lungs and increase the risk of asthma attacks, lung cancer and even premature death. The smallest particles can pass into the blood stream and cause heart disease, stroke and reproductive complications.
Five states - Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Illinois and North Carolina - have been identified by the EPA as contributing significantly to Rhode Island pollution. As of 2010, 284 tall smokestacks - stacks over 500 feet - were operating in the United States: needles injecting poison into the atmosphere.
The American people have a right to know the air they breathe is safe.
When Rhode Island Senator Claiborne Pell first proposed the grants that now bear his name, he envisioned a way to help students attend our country's wonderful colleges and universities, so they could share in the American Dream.
Pell Grants aren't 'welfare,' they are a gateway to opportunity for some of our nation's best and brightest students.
The birthers, the fanatics, the people running around in right-wing militia and Aryan support groups, it is unbearable to them that President Barack Obama should exist.
In the long term, a robust health IT network will support personalized treatment that adheres to proven best practices, and adapts to your personal health circumstances. The time will come when, whatever illness you may have, for your body type and health history, there will 'be an app for that' to keep you on your best path to wellness.
I think that it's very, very hard for the NRA to continue to defend the position that people who are on the terrorist watch list should be allowed to buy firearms in this country. That's their position. I don't know how they stand by it.
Most every young man either takes inspiration from his father or wishes he could. I was fortunate in that I could.
I don't believe that there is anybody who denies climate change in the Democratic caucus. Everybody accepts that it is a real problem.
I think people really understand that clean air and clean water and not having factories dumping their emissions into the atmosphere and into the rivers and into the sea has been a very good thing for America. EPA stands watch for very important principles that go all the way back to Teddy Roosevelt.
The Founding Fathers set up the American judiciary as a check on the excesses of the elected branches and as a refuge when those branches are corrupted or consumed by passing passions.
If everyone on the Court always voted for the prosecution against the defendant, for the corporation against the plaintiffs, and for the government against the condemned, a vital spark of American democracy would be extinguished.
When I was sworn in, we had Republican-sponsored climate-change bills all over the place. You had John McCain running for President in 2008 on a strong climate platform. You could see American democracy actually starting to work at solving a difficult problem.
A lot of the Citizens United problem could be solved if we knew where the money came from for all these ads. The companies create these entities with fake names - like 'Citizens for Nice Puppies' - which means that the sources of the money are unaccountable.
As a lawyer, as a former prosecutor, and as a son and grandson of foreign-service officers who tried to represent American democracy in foreign and dangerous places, the idea that this crowd of crooked fossil-fuel types is able to take over and run our democracy like we are a banana republic - I find that repellent.
I think a lot of the people who feel out of step with contemporary society or feel that they've been left back economically or feel disaffected and are drawn to the Republican Party, they are looking for a news source that will tell them something they would like to hear and then is reassuring, emotionally rewarding, and confirming.
To a certain extent, platforms are platitudes that you test when you get to govern. You have to run those priorities up against the opposition and decide what's most important.
When I deliver the message to a cross section of Rhode Island that democracy is broken because special interests have relentless power - which prevents politicians from compromising despite popular support on an issue - I don't have any pushback.
Make your life your work, not your talk.
We'll never move beyond oil until we stop rewarding oil companies with ridiculous taxpayer subsidies and start making them pay for the harm they cause our families and our planet.
Democrats need to stand strong against any efforts to cut benefits to Social Security and Medicare.
At a time when the United States is handing out tax breaks to corporations that ship jobs overseas, corporate jet owners, and millionaires and billionaires, it is ludicrous that we would even be looking at Social Security and Medicare as a solution to our debt crisis.