Continue reading How To Fill Administration Jobs Faster.
Continue reading 'I've Ended The War On Drugs'.
Of President Obama's three top domestic priorities -- health care, energy and education -- his education proposal is getting the latest start on Capitol Hill. The House Education and Labor Committee is kicking off the debate on Thursday with a hearing on Obama's proposal to end the subsidized private student loan program in favor of government-run direct lending, with private loan companies reduced to service contractors. That change would save an estimated $94 billion over 10 years, which Obama would redirect to Pell Grants for needy students.
Reston, Va.-based Sallie Mae, the largest private student lender, has offered an alternative proposal that its top executives say would save just as much, if not more, while preserving competition for student loan business -- by making the government the main financier of student loans, while letting private companies originate and service loans. The government has in effect been the main financier for a year anyway, since the nation's private-sector credit markets dried up and Congress passed the Ensuring Continued Access to Student Loans Act in May 2008.
With lawmakers worried about rising unemployment at home, Sallie Mae also points out that private lending companies account for 35,000 jobs in 47 states and the District of Columbia. Sallie Mae itself has 8,000 employees and recently announced the return of another 2,000 jobs that the company had previously outsourced overseas. In an interview with National Journal's Brian Friel, Sallie Mae CEO Albert Lord and CFO John Remondi made their case -- and explained why the 37-year-old subsidized private student lending program is destined for change no matter what happens in the coming months. Edited excerpts follow.Continue reading Sallie Mae Seeks Truce.
The man praised by many GOP technorati as the one thing their party had going for it says new chairman Michael Steele never asked him to stay -- although, Cyrus Krohn says, his mind was made up to leave.
Krohn, who had worked at Yahoo and Slate before taking over the RNC's Web efforts in July 2007, is credited with expanding the party's e-mail list from 1.8 million to 12 million while dramatically improving the party's social media outreach.
In his first interview since leaving the Republican National Committee in March, Krohn explained why he quit his job as e-campaign director and returned to the Pacific Northwest and the technology industry. If the party is ever to compete online, Krohn told NationalJournal.com's Lucas Grindley, it needs stability among those fostering its innovation. And, he said, it would help if Steele bit his tongue on occasion.
Continue reading RNC's Web Master: Two Years Is Too Short.
When the five-year war in the Democratic Republic of Congo officially ended in 2003, Chouchou Namegabe Nabintu's quest to end sexual violence and destigmatize rape was just getting started. The 31-year-old radio journalist founded the South Kivu Women's Media Association that year to catalogue past and present tales of rape, which persists amid the political instability and ethnic violence in the eastern part of the country.
While the U.S. may soon take a greater interest in the atrocities -- President Obama is expected to appoint former Rep. Howard Wolpe, D-Mich., to a second stint as special envoy to Africa's Great Lakes region -- the ongoing violence in DRC (more than 5 million have been killed since the war began) has largely stayed off the international media's radar. The West, Nabintu argued, cares more about the environmental impacts of war than the untold human suffering.
"When a gorilla is killed in the mountains, there is an outcry, and people mobilize great resources to protect the animals," she told two Senate Foreign Relations subcommittees in a hearing Wednesday on wartime violence against women. "Yet more than 500,000 women have been raped, and there is silence. After all of this you will make memorials and say 'never again.' But we don't need commemorations; we want you to act now."
NationalJournal.com's David Herbert spoke with Nabintu ahead of her Senate hearing to discuss what lawmakers can do to help. Edited excerpts follow.Continue reading Congo Activist Presses Senators On Violence.
Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., demonstrated to a clutch of reporters on Tuesday that after more than two decades, he can still recount in detail the sting of being a judicial nominee on the losing side of a fight. In 1986, Sessions failed to win the approval of the Senate Judiciary Committee when President Reagan nominated the young U.S. attorney from Mobile to become a federal judge. Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter, then a Republican, voted against him, as did former Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del, who was then the ranking Democrat on the panel. Sessions' detractors complained at the time that the nominee had made a series of racially insensitive remarks, calling the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union "un-American," among other things. But bygones are bygones, Sessions said this week. "We are past that."
Now 62, and in his third term in the Senate, Sessions this week won the support of his GOP colleagues to become the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee after Specter announced he was switching parties. In a plot twist fiction writers could appreciate, Sessions will now lead conservatives' scrutiny of President Obama's nominee to succeed retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter. Sessions agreed that his experience as a nominee will give him him empathy -- among the attributes Obama values and conservatives decry -- although he was quick to say he will object to any Supreme Court pick who would substitute bias or personal preferences for the rule of law. Edited excerpts from National Journal's Alexis Simendinger follow.Continue reading Sessions Says He's Looking For Judicial Restraint.
Continue reading Indiana's Daniels On Changing The 'Party Of No' Image.
