http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/13/the-early-word-more-nuke-talks/
It’s time for Day Two. President Obama heads back over to the Washington Convention Center today for more action at the nuclear security summit.
Mr. Obama — joined by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. — will speak at a plenary session, with the president then expected to attend a working lunch with other delegation heads. Mr. Obama is also scheduled to meet with leaders from a handful of countries, like Turkey, Argentina and Germany.
According to The Times’s David E. Sanger and Mark Landler, Mr. Obama extracted a promise from Hu Jintao, China’s president, on Monday to at least help negotiate a new set of sanctions against Iran.
Meanwhile, The Times’s Peter Baker and Helene Cooper detail some of the other meetings Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden have had with various foreign dignitaries.
Geithner on Reform: Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner has taken to The Washington Post’s op-ed pages to push for the financial legislation winding its way through Congress.
“As the Senate bill moves to the floor, we must all fight loopholes that would weaken it and push to make sure the government has real authority to help end the problem of ‘too big to fail,’” Mr. Geithner writes.
Sorting Out the Supreme Court: The Wall Street Journal’s Laura Meckler pulls back the curtain a bit on Sidney Thomas, an appeals court judge from Montana and one of the lesser-known names that the White House is batting around for the Supreme Court.
According to lawyers in Montana, the judge hews to the left — though with sympathy to business interests — and has a “remarkably wry sense of humor.”
Meanwhile, The Times’s Charlie Savage lays out how the confirmation battle over a nominee to be an appeals court judge — Goodwin Liu — “could be a harbinger for how a strongly liberal pick to succeed Justice John Paul Stevens would play out.”
And finally, Politico’s Glenn Thrush reports that, once a court pick has been made, Senate Democrats will work to make the nominee’s confirmation hearings “a referendum of sorts on controversial recent decisions by the Roberts court.”
Supreme Court Fallout: The Times’s Eric Lichtblau takes a look at the aftermath of one of the court’s recent big decisions, which said that corporations, and by extension, labor unions, cannot be barred from spending on elections.
Mr. Lichtblau writes that Democrats in both chambers of Congress arefinalizing a plan that would, among other things, force the chief executives of groups primarily sponsoring an ad to appear themselves in the spot.
The Democrats promoting the plan have focused on public disclosure and transparency, Mr. Lichtblau adds, after figuring out they had little chance to fully forbid corporate funds from entering elections.
On a somewhat related note, The Times’s Steven Greenhouse has more onAndy Stern’s decision to step down as president of the Service Employees International Union.
Midterm(ish) Madness: The Times’s Jeremy W. Peters takes a look atAndrew Cuomo’s history of massaging the news media, as New York’s attorney general steps ever closer to announcing a bid for governor.
Mr. Cuomo doesn’t seem to care much for sit-down interviews, but, as Mr. Peters writes, “perhaps no elected official in New York spends more time on the telephone with reporters.” (Off the record, of course.)
Meanwhile, in Florida, voters head to the polls today for a special election to replace former Representative Robert Wexler, a Democrat who left Congress to head up the Center for Middle East Peace and Economic Cooperation. The front-runner in the race appears to be Ted Deutch, also a Democrat.
Health Care Roundup: The Times’s Robert Pear asks about Congress: “If they did not know exactly what they were doing to themselves, did lawmakers who wrote and passed the bill fully grasp the details of how it would influence the lives of other Americans?”
Why? Because it seems the new health care law might remove lawmakers and their staff from the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, which provides insurance coverage that many on Capitol Hill have grown fond of.
Unemployment Benefits: The Senate, with the help of four Republicans, agreed on Monday to consider a temporary extension of unemployment benefits.
As The Times’s Carl Hulse reports, the legislation, which might be approved as early as this week, would extend the benefits through early next month. Democrats in Congress hope to have a more long-term solution in place soon.
(The four Republicans who joined Democrats to pass the extension were Senators Scott Brown of Massachusetts, George Voinovich of Ohio, and Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine.)
First Family Daybook: Michelle Obama heads to America’s neighbor to the south on Tuesday for her first solo trip abroad as first lady. The Washington Post’s Robin Givhan takes a deeper look at Mrs. Obama’s three-day trip to Mexico, finding “she will use it to amplify and articulate a singular message to young people: self-determination.”
Administration Addresses: Several members of Mr. Obama’s cabinet are scheduled to hit the town for speeches today. Eric H. Holder Jr., the attorney general, heads over the Potomac River to Virginia to speak at a United States marshals awards ceremony. Meanwhile, Education Secretary Arne Duncan is scheduled to hit the awards circuit as well — to the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s National Essay Contest awards ceremony, to be exact. And finally, Mr. Geithner sits for a Q-and-A at a conference of newspaper editors.
A Little Hollywood: A pair of actors — Jeff Daniels and Kyle MacLachlan — headline the Arts Advocacy Day celebration on Capitol Hill today. Mr. Daniels and Mr. MacLachlan are also scheduled to testify before a House panel.
No comments:
Post a Comment