By Elaine Donnelly
Extending sexual misconduct to combat units
Gun owners who cheered when the Senate failed to pass numerous anti-gun bills last week should temper their enthusiasm. The liberal wing of the Democratic party, led by President Obama and funded by New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, has already started to use the votes to oust pro-Second Amendment senators in 2014.
Republicans held all of their Senate seats left open by retirements and picked off several seats held by Democrats to capture at least six seats in the midterm election, giving them a louder voice in the legislative chamber most likely to shape President Obama's agenda for the next two years.
The marketing firm hoping to convince Delaware voters that Republican Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell is not a witch is no stranger to provocative ads.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's re-election hinges in part on his efforts to stop the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository from being built. But a fellow Democrat, Sen. Patty Murray, could hurt her re-election chances if she can't show that she's trying hard enough to get the project restarted.
Democrats tried to tamp down the controversy over the ground zero mosque and President Obama's comments on it Tuesday, while New York's Democratic governor jump-started his bid to find a new place to build the Muslim community center.
The lobbying office Dan Coats left in February to pursue a return to the U.S. Senate is only about two miles from the Capitol, but the path from the lobbying world back to Congress is rarely traveled.
In 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama's political coattails extended across the country. But heading into this year's elections, Democrats face a tricky task of where to deploy their party chief on the campaign trail as they try to hang onto majorities in both houses of Congress.
Weeks after the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico began, the fundraising arm for Senate Democrats circulated a petition to hold BP "accountable" while accusing Republicans of making excuses for "bad environmental actors."
Former White House speechwriter Michael Gerson has been accused of self-aggrandizement and taking credit for speeches he did not fully write, stealing the lines of others and making them his own. The accusations come from his former speechwriting colleague, Matthew Scully, in the September issue of the Atlantic magazine.
"An emergency funding bill should focus on the emergency needs of the victims, not the needs of politicians," said Indiana Sen. Dan Coats, the senior Republican on Senate Appropriations subcommittee on homeland security. "Loading up a massive $60.4 billion package with unrelated projects and earmarks for other states is not the way we should use taxpayer dollars."
