July 30th, 2007
Jim Snyder in The Hill reports that some are.
“The only thing that has changed is that everything that was bad got worse,” said Bernadette Budde, political director of the Business Industry Political Action Committee. BIPAC supports business-friendly candidates of both parties, though most of the group’s donations go to Republicans.
If the election were held today, “We’d be lucky to hold our own,” one House Republican said.
Skepticism isn’t universal. Some see hope in Congress’s own low approval ratings. Voters, they argue, are frustrated at the Democrats’ inability to deliver on campaign promises.
But others say leading indicators suggest Democrats will win the White House and both the House and Senate for the first time since 1994. Most sources doubt a repeat of 2006, when Republicans dropped 30 seats in the House.
But a Democratic pick-up of a few seats in the Senate, for example, when coupled with taking the White House, would have serious implications for major issues like global warming, stem cell research and judicial appointments.
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July 29th, 2007
From ABC News:
But last year, at the request of a hired representative for an Australian-owned chemical corporation Nufarm, Senator Barack Obama introduced nine separate bills exempting the company from import fees on a range of chemical ingredients it uses in the manufacture of pesticides and herbicides. Nufarm’s U.S. subsidiary is based in Illinois.
Nufarm wasn’t the only beneficiary of Obama’s efforts to reduce customs fees and duties. In early May of 2006, two Washington lobbyists registered to work on behalf of Astellas Pharma, a Japanese-owned drug company which also has offices in Illinois.
The lobbyists’ task? “Introduce legislation to temporarily suspend customs duties for the importation of a pharmaceutical ingredient,” they wrote on their lobbying forms. Less than three weeks later, the men had earned their $20,000 fee, thanks to Obama. On May 26, he introduced S. 3155, a bill specifically exempting Astellas’ key ingredient from tariff payments. The bill cost the federal government more than $1 million in lost revenue, according to government estimates.
Together, Obama’s obscure measures — known as tariff suspensions — steered more than $12 million away from federal coffers, according to government estimates.
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July 28th, 2007
From the NY Times:
They were high school friends from Park Ridge, Ill., both high achievers headed East to college. John Peavoy was a bookish film buff bound for Princeton, Hillary Rodham a driven, civic-minded Republican going off to Wellesley. They were not especially close, but they found each other smart and interesting and said they would try to keep in touch.
Which they did, prodigiously, exchanging dozens of letters between the late summer of 1965 and the spring of 1969. Ms. Rodham’s 30 dispatches are by turns angst-ridden and prosaic, glib and brooding, anguished and ebullient — a rare unfiltered look into the head and heart of a future first lady and would-be president. Their private expressiveness stands in sharp contrast to the ever-disciplined political persona she presents to the public now.
Clinton writes like an episode of Dawns Creek.
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July 28th, 2007
From CNN:
intern working for Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign was arrested Friday at the Des Moines airport after authorities flagged an outstanding arrest warrant for aggravated battery in Illinois.Derrick Lamon Johnson, 20, of Glen Carbon, Ill., was also charged with fleeing from justice.
Tommy Vietor, Iowa press secretary for the Obama campaign, said Johnson had been working for the campaign for about a month as an unpaid intern. Vietor said Secret Service agents learned of the arrest warrant during a criminal background check after Johnson was scheduled to drive in a campaign motorcade.
Posted in Barack Obama, Election 2008 | 1 Comment »