Interior Dept. Scandal Rocks Drilling Debate

Boehner tells off Hunter, Graves, Terry, others

(NEWSER) - John Boehner has warned several Republican congressmen to stop flirting, dining, partying, and otherwise hanging out with female lobbyists. Boehner told the reps to “knock it off,” sources tell the New York Post , which dutifully tracked down the perpetrators. It caught Lee Terry, for example, chatting up an attractive, giggling lobbyist on Capitol Hill. “Why did you get me so drunk?” he asked, among other personal remarks. More»

Atlantic drilling to open up first time in 20 years

(NEWSER) - President Obama plans to clear the way for drilling for oil and gas in new areas off the Atlantic coast, Alaska, and in the Gulf of Mexico, administration officials say. The proposal—to be unveiled today at a joint press conference with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar—keeps intact the moratorium on new drilling off the Pacific coast and the Atlantic coast from New Jersey north, but lifts it for a vast area off Virginia. More»

Former madam slams university's decision

(NEWSER) - A Harvard University ethics center is hosting a lecture by none other than Eliot Spitzer tomorrow. The disgraced governor will speak about when it's right for the government to intervene in the markets. Despite the intellectual theme, his former madam tells the Daily News that Spitzer is a "man without ethics" who has no place at the university's Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics. More»

Gov will skate past latest allegations unscathed: Nate Silver

(NEWSER) - The latest ethics complaint against Sarah Palin—investigators believe she misused her position to solicit personal legal donations—won’t leave a scratch, writes Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com. Here’s how to predict which scandals will make it big:

• Can it be reduced to a sound bite? Nope. Heck, the AP struggled to summarize it at all.
• Does it cut against a core element of her brand? Nope. McCain’s attempts to paint Palin as an ethics crusader never stuck.

News outlets offered aides a 'friendly' ear

(NEWSER) - No surprise that a lot of media outlets tried to butter up Mark Sanford’s aides in order to win interviews with the governor when he was AWOL in Argentina. But their emails, obtained by the State, show the lengths they were willing to go to, some coming about as close as you can get to promising to put a positive spin on what turned out to be a major scandal. “You know that you will be on friendly ground here!” gushes a Washington Times staffer to a Sanford rep. “I’ve already have calls from others who want to bash,” notes a local TV host. “I’m not doing that!” More»