Former Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff (R) offered businessman Darl McBride $2 million to persuade him to ditch an effort to get his money back from a failed investment, the Salt Lake Tribune reports.
“McBride recorded the conversation and has turned over a copy to federal agents, part of a wide-ranging investigation into alleged misconduct in the attorney general’s office under Shurtleff and his successor, John Swallow.”
At a congressional hearing on an abortion bill that would ban the procedure after 20 weeks of pregnancy, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) “told a female witness that she should have carried her pregnancy to term even though doctors had discovered the fetus had no brain function,” the Huffington Post reports.
Said Gohmert: “Having my great sympathy and empathy both, I still come back wondering,
shouldn’t we wait, like that couple did, and see if the child can
survive before we decide to rip him apart?”
Wonk Wire highlights economic research showing that the tax cuts passed by President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2003 failed to meet even the administration’s promised results.
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The New York Times reports that Huma Abedin, the wife of New York City mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner (D), “has been a main architect of her husband’s rehabilitative journey, shaping his calculated comeback and drawing on her close ties with one of the country’s most powerful families to lay the groundwork for his return.”
“A surrogate daughter to Bill and Hillary Clinton who has seen firsthand the cleansing power of campaigns, Ms. Abedin has leapt into her husband’s effort, conferring on strategy and helping to hire staff members from her long history with the Clintons: Ms. Abedin worked with Mr. Weiner’s new 30-year-old campaign manager, Danny Kedem, during Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 presidential run.”
Hillary Clinton’s forthcoming memoir has a simple book jacket but no title yet.
It’s scheduled to be released June 1, 2014.
Charlie Cook: “Basically, Republicans are attacking Obama where he is least vulnerable and at a time when they have minimal credibility. It isn’t working. By trying to turn everything into a scandal rather than saying Obama’s policies are wrongheaded–and rather than fixing their own image problems with minority, female, younger, and moderate voters–Republicans are focusing on attacking a guy whose name will never again appear on a ballot.”
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Massachusetts U.S. Senate candidate Gabriel Gomez (R) called opponent Ed Markey (D) “pond scum” during an interview with a reporter.
Said Gomez: “I don’t think there’s anything more offensive. You know I’ve got four young kids, and they gotta sit there and gotta see an ad with their dad — who served honorably, talk to anybody I served with — whether as a pilot or as a SEAL, anybody I worked with. And for him to be as dirty and low, pond scum, like to put me up next to bin Laden, he’s just gotta be called what he is. It’s that simple.”
Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe (D) “knows a thing or two about conservatives like his Republican opponent, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli,” Yahoo News reports.
“That’s in part because his older brother, Joseph McAuliffe, spent two decades as a Republican activist who worked for the evangelical leader Pat Robertson’s presidential campaign, helped found a Christian political group in Florida, and was even arrested in the late 1980s while demonstrating at an abortion clinic.”
In her first interview since her affair with CIA Director David Petraeus became public, Paula Broadwell told WSOC-TV that she was sorry for how her behavior affected others.
Said Broadwell: “I have remorse for the harm that this has caused, the sadness it has caused my family and other families.”
Rep. Steve King (R-IA) said that President Obama would not be president if it weren’t for the 1986 amnesty bill that Ronald Reagan signed into law, The Hill reports.
Said King: “It’s clear to anybody that can do any kind of statistical analysis that Barack Obama wouldn’t be President of the United States without Ronald Reagan’s 1986 amnesty act.”
“King is a leading GOP critic of efforts to pass an immigration reform bill, and has often said on the House floor that Republicans are overreacting to the 2012 election, which some Republicans saw as a sign that the GOP needs to get behind a reform bill.”
Attorney General Eric Holder “signed off on a controversial search warrant that identified Fox News reporter James Rosen as a ‘possible co-conspirator’ in violations of the Espionage Act and authorized seizure of his private emails,” a law enforcement official told NBC News.
The Week: Finally, a smoking gun?
“The Republicans I’m talking to are saying, ‘What the hell are they doing in Virginia?’ Is this, ‘101 ways to lose an election’?”
— Former RNC Chairman Michael Steele, quoted by the Washington Post, on the Virginia GOP ticket.
Anthony Weiner (D) changed his newly unveiled New York mayoral campaign website after criticism it displayed the cityscape of Pittsburgh, The Hill reports.
A new super PAC is launching a campaign to paint Massachusetts U.S. candidate Gabriel Gomez (R) as a “lightweight version of Mitt Romney,” according to a memo obtained by Politico.
Says the memo: “Our message in these various efforts will focus on the fact that Gabriel Gomez is Mitt Lite … More Right Wing, Less Experienced. He is a Bush-Cheney-Romney Republican who is anti-choice, anti-Social Security, pro-assault weapon and pro-Big Oil.”
Fox News chief Roger Ailes sent a memo to all employees at Fox News urging them to fight the intimidation of the Obama administration, the Washington Post reports.
Wrote Ailes: ”The administration’s attempt to intimidate Fox News and its employees will not succeed and their excuses will stand neither the test of law, the test of decency, nor the test of time. We will not allow a climate of press intimidation, unseen since the McCarthy era, to frighten any of us away from the truth.”
The Boy Scouts of America “have decided to allow gay youth to openly join its ranks, reversing a longstanding ban,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“More than 61% of Scouts leaders voted in support of a proposal to open Scouting’s membership to gay youth, but not gay adults in staff or volunteer leadership roles.”
Lois Lerner, the Internal Revenue Service’s director of exempt organizations, has been placed on administrative leave, National Review reports.
At a House oversight-committee hearing yesterday, Lerner invoked her Fifth Amendment right and refused to answer questions posed to her by lawmakers, stating only, “I did nothing wrong.”
Jon Stewart absolutely takes apart former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan.
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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