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Are you breathing a sigh of relief, job applicants? If a prospective employer runs a background check prior to hiring you, the chances they’ll falsely learn that you’re an armed robber, “a sex offender who [is] in prison at the time” or something similarly misleading are “less than 10 percent” according to an attorney for the National Association of Background Screening Professionals. 

The tax cuts enacted by Congress under George W. Bush in 2001 and 2003 stand as the greatest achievement ever for small government conservatives. While a good chunk of Reagan's historic tax cuts had been cancelled out before he even left office, Bush's tax cuts have lived on and on, draining trillions from the U.S. Treasury.

These cuts have not, as hoped, triggered deep cuts in government spending and "starved the beast." Instead, they have simply fed the debt.

WASHINGTON – A new analysis of data through Election Day from the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and other sources by U.S. PIRG and Demos shows that just 61 large donors to Super PACs giving an average of $4.7 million each matched the $285.2 million in grassroots contributions from more than 1,425,500 small donors to the two major-party presidential candidates.

FULL ANALYSIS & INFOGRAPHICS HERE

NEW YORK -- Today, the Supreme Court of the United States announced that it will review the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a landmark law in the advancement of voting rights. 

In response to this decision, Vice President for Legal Strategies Brenda Wright released the following statement:

Whatever your opinion of the election’s outcome, there seems to be have been a lot of agreement this year with President Obama’s assertion that the voting process itself is something “we have to fix.” One place to get a bird’s-eye view of Election Day chaos—besides your local polling place—was at one of the call centers set up by the Election Protection Coalition, a collection of voting and civil-rights advocates that runs a hotline, 1-866-OUR-VOTE, to help voters on Election Day.

After an election season of climate silence that endured despite record-breaking temperatures and prolonged drought, not to mention Superstorm Sandy, President Obama stated in his victory speech that, we want our children to live in an America, “that isn’t threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet.” While it was a relief to hear the President acknowledge the threats we face from cliamte

It's hard to recall a presidential election in which the Democratic candidate so aggressively called for higher taxes on the affluent. Yes, Obama made similar proposals in 2008, and Gore ran a pretty populist campaign in 2000, but none of that compares to how this year Obama repeatedly hammered the idea that taxes on the rich need to go up, and how his campaign excoriated Romney for not paying his fair share of taxes.

Are there voters out there who didn't know, going into the polling booth, that Obama wants to raise taxes on the rich? I'm sure there were, but not very many.

Tuesday’s race was the first presidential election to take place since Citizens United, and campaign spending this cycle exceeded $6 billion. With fundraising split roughly evenly between the two major parties, it was inevitable that some donors wouldn’t be able to buy the electoral outcomes they were hoping for.

Battery Park City after Sandy. (Flickr/WarmSleepy)