“The Obama administration will approve significant oil and gas exploration off America’s coasts” in a move expected to bring widespread opposition from his own party’s environmentalists. “It is not a mechanism that actually fights climate change,” said the Sierra Club’s executive director, Michael Brune, in response to the move. “You don’t make the problem worse in order to solve it.”
Frustration with Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele is growing within the GOP in the wake of the committee’s payments for a visit to an L.A. strip club. One GOP lawmaker said Steele’s relationship with Republican leaders in Congress is “not good at all.” Over the past year, top donors have abandoned the RNC and are instead giving to other GOP campaign arms.
Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) signaled yesterday “that he won’t support the financial regulation reform bill he helped craft.” “I couldn’t support the bill in its current form,” Corker told the Wall Street Journal. “I have no plans to support the current legislation. I hope we’ll get back to the negotiating table.”
Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff is “contemplating” a lawsuit “challenging the federal mandate that states create exchanges, which are marketplaces for purchasing health insurance.” Utah already has an exchange and Shurtleff believes the federal government can’t tell them how to run it. “We think that’s unconstitutional, for elected federal officials to tell state elected officials what to do,” said Shurtleff.
A new investigation by the environmental group Greenpeace has found that U.S. oil company Koch Industries donated nearly $48 million “to climate opposition groups between 1997-2008.” The Greenpeace report also finds that the company spent $5.7 million in donations to political campaigns and $37 million “on direct lobbying to support fossil fuels.”
Shahram Amiri, an award-winning Iranian nuclear scientist, “who disappeared last year under mysterious circumstances, has defected to the CIA and been resettled in the United States.” Officials called the defection an “intelligence coup” in the CIA’s effort to spy on and undermine Iran’s nuclear program.
“Long the world’s largest producer of opium, the raw ingredient of heroin, Afghanistan has now become the top supplier of cannabis, with large-scale cultivation in half of its provinces,” reports the United Nations. “This report shows that Afghanistan’s drug problem is even more complex than just the opium trade,” said Antonio Maria Costa, head of the U.N. drug agency, in a new report.
And finally: The Sarkozys visit Ben’s Chili Bowl, a D.C. institution.
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