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Al Franken's Blog, page 70
January 8, 2013
KARE11: Sen. Franken outlines his federal spending cuts
GOLDEN VALLEY, Minn. — Senator Al Franken is warning his colleagues not to play chicken with the debt ceiling and also outlining his recommendations for federal spending cuts.
“If we default on our debt, it would wreak tremendous havoc, not just to our economy but probably globally,” warns Sen. Franken. “No good could come out of it so to use it as a hostage so to speak, is just a very very bad idea.”
The remarks came in a sit-down interview with KARE 11 where the senator also shed some light on what spending cuts he will back when Congress reconvenes.
© U.S. Senator Al Franken, Minnesota -- Official Campaign Website, 2013. |
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StarTribune: Franken addresses school safety ideas
Sen. Al Franken visited an Eagan middle school on Monday to talk with administrators, safety experts and counselors on how to improve school safety just three weeks after the Newtown shootings.
The private session included proposals for tighter perimeter security, lockdown drills and more mental health professionals, Franken told reporters afterward. The Minnesota Democrat said he would bring the ideas back to Congress, but didn’t say what recommendations he would make.
“In the wake of the tragedy in Newtown, we are looking at a lot of issues regarding school safety, regarding mental health,” said Franken, who has been working on legislation to bolster funding for mental health services in a variety of areas.
© U.S. Senator Al Franken, Minnesota -- Official Campaign Website, 2013. |
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MPR: Franken: Student mental health key in helping school security
EAGAN, Minn. — Sen. Al Franken met with school officials Monday in Eagan to discuss school safety, three weeks after the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn. The conversation ranged from school security to better monitoring the mental health of students to prevent future violence.
Dakota Hills Middle School, south of the Twin Cities, handles school security like many Minnesota schools. Traffic into the school is tightly monitored, Principal Trevor Johnson said. All non-student visitors who come through the front door must be checked-in by an employee.
“Our doors are locked all the time, every day, except for the front door,” Johnson said.
© U.S. Senator Al Franken, Minnesota -- Official Campaign Website, 2013. |
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MPR: Franken leads Minn. meeting on mental health intervention
ST. PAUL, Minn. — U.S. Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., met with mental health advocates, state officials and members of law enforcement on Saturday to discuss better ways to help people with mental illness stay out of the criminal justice system.
The meeting, at the St. Paul offices of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, was organized by Franken, who plans to introduce a bill that will expand funding for crisis intervention teams, mental health courts and law enforcement training. He co-wrote the bill with Rep. Richard Nugent, R-Fla.
Franken said it’s important to address mental illness in the criminal justice system, especially after the December murders of 20 children and six adults by a gunman at a Connecticut school.
© U.S. Senator Al Franken, Minnesota -- Official Campaign Website, 2013. |
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January 7, 2013
Agriculture.com: Franken: new farm bill to be similar
Senator Al Franken (D-MN) said Friday that he doesn’t expect major changes when the Senate writes a new farm bill this year.
“I think we’re going to pass something very similar to what we passed in June,” Franken told Agriculture.com during a press conference.
Franken said he was disappointed that Congress was unable to pass a five-year farm bill before the fiscal cliff bill was passed, which included an extension of the 2008 farm law.
© U.S. Senator Al Franken, Minnesota -- Official Campaign Website, 2013. |
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New York Times: Their Apps Track You. Will Congress Track Them?
THERE are three things that matter in consumer data collection: location, location, location.
E-ZPasses clock the routes we drive. Metro passes register the subway stations we enter. A.T.M.’s record where and when we get cash. Not to mention the credit and debit card transactions that map our trajectories in comprehensive detail — the stores, restaurants and gas stations we frequent; the hotels and health clubs we patronize.
Each of these represents a kind of knowing trade, a conscious consumer submission to surveillance for the sake of convenience.
© U.S. Senator Al Franken, Minnesota -- Official Campaign Website, 2013. |
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January 4, 2013
Northlands Newscenter: MN and WI Senators Wagering Beer on Saturday Border Battle
Washington, D.C. (NNCNOW.com) — With craft beer now on the line…the stakes have been raised in the Vikings-Packers Wildcard Match-up on Saturday.
U.S. Senators Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken of Minnesota have joined in on a friendly wager with Senators Ron Johnson and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin for the upcoming border battle.
The Wisconsin Senators have wagered a case of Wisconsin craft beer against a case of local Minnesota beer from the Minnesota senators.
© U.S. Senator Al Franken, Minnesota -- Official Campaign Website, 2013. |
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December 20, 2012
Marketplace: Sen. Al Franken’s Location Privacy Protection Act
There are apps that let stalkers track their victims. Now there’s a move in Washington to outlaw them. And while they’re at it, some members of Congress would like us all to have a clear idea of which pieces of software for a smartphone keep track of our physical location. One of the sponsors of new legislation that has just come out of committee is Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota. Why is he pushing his Location Privacy Protection Act?
“I chair a new subcommittee on privacy technology and the law,” says Senator Franken. “In our first hearing we had testimony from the Coalition for Battered Women. There was one woman in Northeast Minnesota who was being abused. She went to the county building where they had a domestic violence program. While she was there on her phone she got a message from her abuser saying ‘why are you in the county building? Are you going to the domestic violence group there?’ Whe went to the courhouse to get a restraining order against the guy and five minutes after she was there she got a message from him. It said ‘why are you at the court house… are you getting a restraining order against me?’”
Franken says some apps advertise themselves as stalking apps, and that his legislation would criminalize them. He also points to numbers from a 2006 Department of Justice study that said 25,000 women were being stalked on an annual basis using simple GPS technology. Fast-forward into the smart phone era, and Franken says we’re dealing with a lot more opportunities for stalkers to take advantage of new technologies. Granted, a lot of consumers welcome apps using the sort of location data that lets them, for instance, navigate, or give their location to help in an emergency. But he says we need more transparency from app makers on not only how they’re using our location data but who they are sharing it with.
© U.S. Senator Al Franken, Minnesota -- Official Campaign Website, 2012. |
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December 19, 2012
Bloomberg: Regulating U.S. Colleges for Student Debts Seen Winning Support
Marco Rubio, the son of a bartender and the first in his family to go to college, just finished repaying more than $125,000 in student-loan debt from the University of Florida and the University of Miami law school.
Now, Rubio, a Florida senator and a rising star in the Republican Party, is embracing a bipartisan bill that would force colleges to give students information about costs and career prospects.
After a decade of resistance from universities, Congress is poised to take on college prices amid a groundswell of anger about tuition outpacing inflation and family incomes, leaving borrowers with $1 trillion in debt. Politicians from both parties are seeking to compel colleges to tell students how much they could be expected to earn from their degrees, spell out fees and debt in plain English, reward schools that keep tuition affordable — and punish those that don’t.
© U.S. Senator Al Franken, Minnesota -- Official Campaign Website, 2012. |
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Star Tribune: Franken bill aims to curb ‘stalking’ apps
WASHINGTON – Scarcely five minutes after a woman from northern Minnesota walked into a domestic violence center, a text message from her alleged abuser popped up on her smartphone asking why she was there.
Moments later, when she sought a protection order, she got another text asking why she had gone to a St. Louis County courthouse. Some tech-savvy advocates quickly determined that the man was monitoring her via a location-tracking application on her phone.
The case, one of tens of thousands nationwide, is helping to spark U.S. Sen. Al Franken’s legislative effort to curb the dark side of Internet location services that are integral to popular smartphone apps such as Twitter, Google Maps and Yelp.
© U.S. Senator Al Franken, Minnesota -- Official Campaign Website, 2012. |
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