This post was archived from createpositivechange.org/. View the original on the Wayback Machine.
Category: Politics
-
Johnson Resigns From Obamas Vp Search Team
This post was archived from createpositivechange.org/. View the original on the Wayback Machine.
-
Ret Gen James L Jones Said to Be on Obamas Veep Short List
This post was archived from createpositivechange.org/. View the original on the Wayback Machine.
-
Member of Obamas Vp Team May Have Gotten Sweetheart
This post was archived from createpositivechange.org/. View the original on the Wayback Machine.
-
Member of Obamas Vp Team May Have Gotten Sweatheart Loans
This post was archived from createpositivechange.org/. View the original on the Wayback Machine.
-
Ubs Investigation Could Bode Ill for Phil Gramm and Mccain Campaign
This post was archived from createpositivechange.org/. View the original on the Wayback Machine.
-
Obama Picks Caroline Kennedy Eric Holder to Join Johnson in Vp Search
This post was archived from createpositivechange.org/. View the original on the Wayback Machine.
-
Obama picks Caroline Kennedy, Holder, Johnson to lead VP search
With the Democratic presidential nomination locked up, Sen. Barack Obama has turned to the next item on his agenda, choosing a vice presidential running mate.
On Wednesday, Obama rounded out his VP search team, selecting Caroline Kennedy and Eric H. Holder Jr. to join James A. Johnson as coordinators of the vetting process.
The additions bring different perspectives to the table, adding a woman who is part of a kind of American royal family and a man who is the son of an immigrant.
The daughter of the late President John Kennedy and the late Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Kennedy, 50, endorsed Obama in an op-ed piece in the Jan. 27 New York Times.
“I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them,” Kennedy wrote. “But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that president — not just for me, but for a new generation of Americans.”
The endorsement, followed quickly by an endorsement from Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Caroline Kennedy’s uncle, gave momentum to Obama’s candidacy.
Married to Edwin Schlossberg, the head of ESI Design, Kennedy is a graduate of Columbia University Law School. An author and the president of the Kennedy Library Foundation, she has helped raise millions for New York City public schools.
Holder, 57, is also a graduate of Columbia Law. He grew up in New York City where his father, an immigrant from Barbados, was a real estate agent and his mother was a homemaker and secretary to an Episcopal priest.
After law school, Holder joined the Department of Justice. In 1976, he was assigned to the Public Integrity section, a group with prosecuted public officials.
In 1988, he was selected by President Ronald Reagan to be an associate judge of the Superior Court for the District of Columbia. In 1993, he became the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. In 1997, President Bill Clinton named him deputy attorney general, the first African-American to hold that position.
Near the end of his time as deputy attorney general, Holder became entangled in the controversy over Clinton’s pardon of financier Marc Rich.
Critics of the pardon said that Holder should have blocked — or at least objected to — the pardon.
Holder told a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that he would have done so if he had known all the details of the case.
A partner in the law firm of Covington & Burling, Holder has had many high-profile clients, including the National Football League. He became a co-chair of Obama’s campaign in August 2007.
Holder and Kennedy are newcomers to the vice-presidential search process, but Johnson, 64, the former head of Fannie Mae, is an old hand. He vetted possible running mates for Sen. John Kerry in 2004 and Walter Mondale in 1984.
The Wall Street Journal speculated today that vice-presidential vetting process might discourage Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton from putting her name forward for consideration as Obama’s running mate.
The problem, according to the Journal, is that Clinton’s husband, the former president, would have to reveal the donors to his presidential library as well as other financial information.
Bill Clinton has so far declined to do this.
-
Coal-mining pals Inhofe, McConnell tie up climate-change bill
The nearly nine-hour detour from a Senate debate on climate-change legislation yesterday – after Republicans insisted the 492-page bill be read aloud -offers a case study in how special interests influence the political process.
Hint: Click in map to explore connectionsStory continues below interactive map
MAP HINTS: Click expands a name. Control+Click centers map on a name. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For advanced tools choose Tools > Options from the menu at top. More help. Not seeing the maps? Please go here to check for the latest version of Java.Leading the opposition to the bill, which would cap the production of greenhouse gases that scientists blame for global warming, is Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Inhofe.
Inhofe, the ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee famously derided global warming as “the second greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” after the separation of church and state.
But the former real-estate developer and insurance executive did not come by such views in a vacuum.
He is a top Congressional recipient of campaign contributions from coal mining interests, both in Oklahoma and nationally, as well as from the gas and oil industries. Since 1989, he has received $1.6 million from the energy/natural resources sector — and just shy of a $1 million from the oil and gas industry alone, according to data compiled by the website, OpenSecrets.org.
How that informs his positions is an open question.
But there is no doubt Inhofe has gone on the offensive against those who have sounded alarms about how carbon emissions are altering the earth’s temperature. In 2005, he demanded six years of tax and membership records from two groups of state and local air-pollution control officials after they testified that clean-air legislation he proposed was too weak, according to a Business Week piece. “Inhofe is to the right of Attila the Hun on climate change,” the Rev. Jim Ball, director of the Evangelical Environmental Network, told Business Week.
In the debate this week, Inhofe went so far as to argue that “everything” in the Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth, featuring his former Senate colleague Al Gore, has ”been refuted many times” by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
But he is not the only big-time recipient of campaign contributions from the fossil-fuel industries involved in the debate.
The No. 1 Congressional recipient of the coal mining industry this past election cycle was Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, according to data compiled by OpenSecrets.org. McConnell was the one who insisted yesterday on the reading of the climate-change bill in its entirety. Later, he said the move was payback for Democrats moving slowly on President Bush’s judicial nominees.
Both men say that imposing mandatory caps on carbon emissions would raise already-high energy prices, while the bill’s supporters counter with studies that show modest cost increases if there is an expansion of alternative energy sources, including solar, wind and carbon-free nuclear power, as well as energy efficiency and conservation.
By Thursday afternoon even advocates of the bill – written by Sens. Joe Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut, John Warner, a Republican from Virginia and amended by Barbara Boxer, a Democrat from California – acknowledged there was little chance of passage this year.
“The unfortunate thing about some of the obstruction and delay that’s happening is that time is of the essence, and it’s important to very rapidly scale up clean energy technology,” said Daniel Dutcher, a project director for the Clean Energy Group, which is not involved in lobbying efforts. “When we have these kinds of arguments and they spend nine hours to read a 400-page bill, that’s one day out of the process that might not be fatal, but might be emblematic of the larger issues we’re facing.”
Still, backers say they hope to build enough support to pass a bill in the next Congress when both potential successors to President Bush – Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain – support mandatory emissions cuts.
To hear Sen. Inhofe’s remarks on Al Gore’s film, click the arrow:
-
Rahm Emanuel Does a Mitzvah for Obama
This post was archived from createpositivechange.org/. View the original on the Wayback Machine.