AP – Automakers are being pushed to build a more fuel-efficient generation of gas-electric hybrids, turbocharged engines and advanced vehicles powered by electricity under tough new standards from the Obama administration.
Politico – Fundraising event in New Orleans will use same GOP talent to draw donors, POLITICO learns.
An eastern Missouri lawmaker is facing an election challenge from her husband, whom she has accused of “physical violence.” Democratic House member Linda Fischer of Bonne Terre is seeking a second term in the Missouri House. Her husband, John Fischer, filed as a Republican for the same seat. They are the only candidates who filed for House District 107.
U.S. Rep. John Spratt confirmed Tuesday he has Parkinson’s disease, a condition he says is evident only in his stooped posture and an occasional tremor in his right hand.
Doctors told the 67-year-old congressman he is in the early stages and should be able to do his job without limitations. [...]
“There are many reasons to run again, but I would never consider it if I did not have the energy, motivation, and ability to do this job to the fullest,” Spratt said.
People who spent time around Spratt recently noticed the shaking in his hand. In his announcement, Spratt said, “there are rumors about my health that I want to resolve.”
All members of the anti-government Hutaree group, who wanted to start a violent revolution against the government…have asked for public defenders!
Long the world’s largest producer of opium, the raw ingredient of heroin, Afghanistan has now become the top supplier of cannabis, with large-scale cultivation in half of its provinces, the United Nations said on Wednesday.
Adult entertainer Stormy Daniels plans to announce on tax day whether she’s moving ahead with a threatened challenge to Louisiana Sen. David Vitter. The AP reports that spokesman Brian Welsh “says Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, believes the timing will highlight the need for tax reform” [...]
Daniels has toyed with the idea of running against Vitter, who was linked to a D.C.-area prostitution ring in 2007, over the last year. She’s disputed suggestions that she might run just to embarrass the incumbent Republican, telling CNN in February of 2009: “I don’t see how I can possibly embarrass him more than he’s already embarrassed himself.”
… the church hierarchy is launching a public relations blitz in the United States and Europe to ease Catholic anger and bolster the pope’s image in sermons and interviews ahead of Easter Sunday.
In the latest sign of Tea Party rancor, the key backer of last month’s national convention at which Sarah Palin spoke is suing the event’s organizer, charging that he reneged on a deal to continue working together on Tea Party business.
— DS
You thought the fight was over for making health insurance reform law? Think again, says the Chamber of Commerce. While they’ve into a specific repeal campaign, they’ll still be contributing to candidates who want to roll back reforms. , they’ll be focusing on how the regulations for this reform are written.
In a major push against the health overhaul, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce plans to spend million this summer and fall to sway election outcomes around the issue. It also plans to devote a team of staff members to shaping thousands of pages of new health regulations.
Thomas J. Donohue, the group’s president and chief executive, sent a letter to the group’s board members late Monday detailing an aggressive strategy to blunt the impact of the new law. Mr. Donohue said the business lobby would seek changes to regulations to “minimize the potentially harmful impacts of this bill on our members and the country.”
If regulators “exceed legislative mandates or try for end-runs around the lawful rulemaking process,” he wrote, the chamber “will take legal action.”
“The Chamber is going to carry a message across the country that says the health care debate is not over,” Mr. Donohue wrote. The law “is a major step in the wrong direction and will prove to be a serious drag on our economy and the nation’s fiscal solvency.”
This is the party line for the Chamber, and they’ll be going all in on the . They’ve had to say good-bye to the double-dip tax break they got on government subsidies in Medicare Part D, and will extract whatever else they possibly can from the regulations in turn.
The chamber plans to assign a team of its most experienced staff “to participate in the years-long process of writing the thousands of pages of federal regulations that will implement the many provisions in the legislation,” Mr. Donohue wrote. While the chamber can’t actually write those provisions, it can lobby for certain language and technical corrections.
It’s just a thought, but perhaps these lobbyists shouldn’t be allowed in any of the rooms where regulatory decisions are being made.
CQPolitics.com – Stan Greenberg, a veteran Democratic pollster, was working in the White House for President Bill Clinton when a political backlash enabled Republicans to take over control of both chambers of Congress in the 1994 elections. So ears perked up at a press breakfast Wednesday morning when he said this year’s midterm elections – the first of Democrat Barack Obama’s presidency – would be much like 1994’s if they were held today.
Texas’ senior Senator, Kay Bailey Hutchison, made an official announcement this morning that she has been foreshadowing for months–she :
U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison said today she will stay in the Senate for the remainder of her term, despite an earlier promise that she would quit this year.
“Something has happened in our country that none of us could have anticipated,” she said, pointing to the policies of President Barack Obama, who was elected a full year before she made her promise to resign after the March primary.
It’s fair to ding KBH for being a little disingenuous here. What happened that “none of us could have anticipated” was that she never got traction in her bid to unseat Governor Rick Perry, and wound up finishing an embarrassingly distant second to the incumbent in the Texas primaries earlier this month. Once considered, at a minimum, even money to unseat the incumbent (whose poll numbers are, at best, middling), she failed to even hold him to a runoff, despite the presence of a teabagger insurgent candidate grabbing nearly 20% of the vote.
You might recall that Hutchison originally was planning to resign in advance of the primary, setting up a potentially perilous special election which was to feature popular former Houston Mayor Bill White for the Democrats.
The writing on the wall became obvious in late 2009, when Hutchison began to hedge on her resignation plans. White, sensing the obvious, jumped from the pending Senate special into the gubernatorial race, where he now is locked in a single-digit race with Perry in one of the better pickup opportunities for the Democrats of the 2010 cycle.
What’s more, Hutchison’s hedging on resignation also gave rise to the growing sense that any momentum she had created for her campaign for Governor had gone into a final and fatal stall. The polls separated further, and the only drama by Election Day was the spectre of a runoff.
What this decision means, in the short term, is that potential candidates like Republican state railroad commissioner Michael Williams and the leading Democrat in the race, former state comptroller John Sharp, will have to stand down for two years, since Hutchison’s term does not expire until 2012.
In the long term, however, they will probably still get their chance at running for the Senate. After all, given the fact that she will be nearly 70 years of age by 2012, to say nothing of the fact that she emerged from the primary against Perry badly damaged, it is hard to imagine her seeking another term in Washington.
Don’t you just hate it when you blame gays for the of more than 7,000 people?
Recall that earlier this month, Ret. General John Sheehan testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in opposition to repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell” and did , but now:
A retired U.S. general has apologized for comments this month linking the defeat of Dutch troops by Serb forces at Srebrenica in July 1995 to the presence of openly gay soldiers in the Dutch military. [...]
Sheehan said he had been told by a Dutch military commander that the Dutch felt the presence of gay soldiers was one of the reasons the peacekeepers were so easily defeated.
But in a letter on Monday to that commander, retired general Henk van den Bremmen, Sheehan acknowledged that Van den Bremmen had said no such thing at the time.
“I am sorry that my recent public recollection of those discussions of 15 years ago inaccurately reflected your thinking on some specific social issues in the military,” Sheehan said in the letter. “To be clear, the failure on the ground in Srebrenica was in no way the fault of the individual soldiers.”
A shorter apology could have gone something like, I lied.
AP – There’s a lot of anger out there. But the alleged plot by Midwestern militants and violent outbursts by scattered individuals don’t signal any coming wave of extremist violence, federal investigators say.
Texas Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison said Wednesday she is staying in the Senate, ending a series of back and forth announcements over the last year on her career plans.