Health case seems likely to proceed

WASHINGTON — A skeptical federal judge grilled Obama administration lawyers Thursday over the House GOP’s health care lawsuit, sounding unlikely to side with the president and dismiss the case.

“You don’t really think that, do you?” U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer asked Justice Department attorney Joel McElvain in the opening moments of his argument, as he tried to assert that the House hadn’t suffered a particular injury from Obama’s health care law and therefore lacks a basis for suing.

“I have a very hard time taking that statement seriously,” Collyer said. At other points she chided McElvain for his responses, saying “You are dodging my question” and “You may disagree with me but I happen to be the judge.”

At issue in the case is some $175 billion the administration is paying health insurance companies over a decade to reimburse them for offering lowered rates for poor people. The House argues that Congress never specifically appropriated that money, and indeed denied an administration request for it, but that the administration is paying it anyway.

The House says this amounts to unconstitutionally co-opting Congress’ power of the purse. The administration insists it is relying on an existing pot of money that it is allowed to use.

Anthrax shipment under investigation

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army’s top general said Thursday that human error probably was not a factor in the Army’s mistaken shipment of live anthrax samples from a chemical weapons testing site that was opened more than 70 years ago in a stretch of desert in Utah.

Samples from the anthrax lot ended up at 18 labs in nine states and an Army lab in South Korea, leading more than two dozen people to get treatment for possible exposure.

Gen. Ray Odierno, the Army chief of staff, told reporters the problem may have been a failure in the technical process of killing, or inactivating, anthrax samples.

Odierno said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is investigating what went wrong at Dugway Proving Ground, the Army installation in Utah where the anthrax originated.

Spill drill turned into the real thing

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. — Firefighters, emergency workers and officials from Plains All American Pipeline had gathered last week at a fire station preparing to train for the worst — an oil spill — when a 911 call came in reporting a noxious smell in the air at a nearby beach.

The Santa Barbara County Fire Department rushed to the shoreline, where they discovered oil flowing across a beach and into the Pacific. What was supposed to be a drill turned real.

“It was very black. You couldn’t see the sand anymore,” fire Capt. Craig Vanderzwaag recalled after arriving at the scene of the leak shortly after noon May 19. “You could see rolling waves with black oil lapping up on the beach.”

By the time the firefighters traced the source of the spill to a ruptured underground pipeline, thousands of gallons of crude oil had escaped.

What was done that day to detect and stop the spill and protect some of the most fabled coastline in California has come under scrutiny, as officials continue cleaning up the mess created by a leak estimated at up to 101,000 gallons while trying to figure out what went wrong.

By The Associated Press