Because of past changes in Democratic Caucus rules, one of the House's warhorses, Rep. John Dingell, chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee, will not head the subcommittee on oversight and investigations, which had been one of his passions when he led the full panel for 14 years in the 1980s and early 1990s. Instead, Dingell is backing fellow Michigan Democrat Rep. Bart Stupak, who was ranking member on the oversight subcommittee last Congress. Stupak will likely be ratified as subcommittee chair this week.
The caucus of conservative Democrats, the Blue Dog Coalition, has become something of a pet favorite among Democrats. Some of the brightest stars in the freshman Democrat class, like former NFL quarterback Heath Shuler of North Carolina and former Indiana Sheriff Brad Ellsworth, have signed on to the caucus, swelling its ranks to 44 members.
President Bush should take leadership training from the woman running Congress (or one chamber of it, anyway) at the other end of town. If he did, he'd pronounce his profligate spending habits things of the past and put himself in pay-as-you-go prison. Instead, his version of pay-go (as it's referred to on Capitol Hill) is "Pay? No!"
AP - A U.S. airstrike hit targets in southern Somalia where Islamic militants were believed to be sheltering suspects in the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies, Somali officials and witnesses said Tuesday. Many people were reported killed.
AP - President Bush is telling lawmakers he will send thousands more U.S. troops to Iraq's two most troubled regions, in a plan that Democrats are resisting as a major escalation of a 31/2-year-old war.
AP - Residents had only minutes to get out of their homes — or try to get back to them to rescue animals — when a fast-moving but short-lived wildfire raced through an exclusive seaside neighborhood leaving ashes in the footprints of mansions.
In some of the fiercest fighting the Iraqi capital has seen in months, about 1,000 U.S. and Iraqi forces today battled insurgents along Haifa Street in central Baghdad, a stronghold of the Sunni insurgency, CNN's Arwa Damon reported.
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