Who says DC is sleepy in the summertime? With two nuclear energy-related hearings scheduled for 10:00 am, the Hill is a busy place this morning. Click on the links below to view webcasts of the testimony.

Financing for Clean Energy Technology
Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources
Witness List:

    * John Denniston - Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
    * Jeffrey Eckel - President & CEO, Hannon Armstrong
    * Jeanine Hull - Counsel, Dykema Gossett PLLC
    * Alexander Karsner - Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, U.S. Department of Energy
    * Dan Reicher - Director, Climate Change & Energy Initiatives, Google.Org

But critics say the safeguards don't always work. Some blunders in the use of such protections have become public. NewYorker writer Lawrence Wright wrote in January about one such experience. In 2002, while he was researching The Looming Tower, his Pulitzer Prize-winning book on al-Qaida, two members of an FBI terrorism task force arrived at his home. Why, they asked, had his daughter been speaking with someone in the United Kingdom who was in touch with suspected al-Qaida operatives?

It wasn't his daughter, he told them flatly. Wright himself had made the calls. And the person he contacted was a British civil rights lawyer who had asked him not to speak with her clients, some of whom are relatives of Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's chief lieutenant.

"My daughter is no terrorist - she went to high school with the Bush twins," Wright said. "I was taken aback. They were apparently monitoring my phones."

When Ghana had military governments they regulated the price of cocoa. Then the military smuggled cocoa across the border and sold it for higher prices, and officers pocketed the profits. There was no point in most farmers investing much in cocoa, they could not profit on their own. Strengthening the military in the face of the drug trade just provides these same opportunities to make even more money through the same practices that harm the country and enrich corrupt elites. There are passionately patriotic Ghanaians who would oppose this, within the military and without. But there are always plenty of people who are corruptible. It is very difficult to fight corruption when corruption becomes the norm.

In defiance of traditional party labels, Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, may ask the defence secretary of President George W Bush to stay on if he wins the White House.

Obama's top foreign policy and national security advisers are pressing the case for keeping Robert Gates at the Pentagon after he won widespread praise for his performance. The move would be in keeping with Obama's desire to appoint a cabinet of all the talents.

Richard Barlow Was Victim of Smear Campaign after Trying to Ensure Congress was Told the Truth about Pakistan's Nuclear Activities

WASHINGTON, DC - Congresswoman Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY) introduced legislation today to compensate Richard Barlow, a former high-level CIA and Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) counter-proliferation intelligence officer.  In the late 1980's Barlow was essentially forced out of his job after informing his superiors that Congress was being lied to about Pakistan's efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.  Within days after expressing his concerns inside OSD, Mr. Barlow was issued a notice of termination and his security clearances suspended based on allegations that he "intended" to blow the whistle to Congress.  Despite the fact that Barlow was cleared of any wrongdoing after several investigations, he remains unable to collect a government pension.  Rep. Maloney's private relief bill for Barlow (H.R. 6232) would provide him with financial compensation for the some of the losses he has incurred.

He said he was able to convince those workers, from ITC, to just trim the trees, but has had problems with the company, which took over the lines from Edison, since that time. He said the company has notified him that it will be cutting down all of the trees in his backyard, along with "a bunch on the road right of way, which is a road behind our house."

He said it took repeated phone calls and letters to the president of ITC before he was provided any legal documentation showing the company had rights to his land, and now that has come with a threatening letter from an attorney.

Knight said he's received a letter from Dykema Gossett PLLC, attorneys in Bloomfield Hills that are representing ITC. The letter "said essentially that they have the right to come in here, and if we interfere, we'll be trespassing on our own property," Knight said.

Candi Peterson -  DCPS teachers from our closing and restructured schools showed up to the first in a series of teacher transfer fairs on Saturday, May 10, at Eastern Senior High School. As a Washington Teachers Union Board member, I took the opportunity to attend the afternoon session of the transfer fair. It was a challenge to gain entry, given that my name was not among the list of those teachers and related school personnel from closing and restructured schools. I, like many others, were asked to show my ID. When I indicated that I was a WTU Board of Trustee member and flashed my business card, inquiry was made at the security checkpoint whether I was coming to the transfer fair as an observer. I nodded in agreement that I was. Checkpoint staff advised me that I would need an escort to walk down a flight of stairs to the transfer event, which I readily accepted.

The past seven states to hold primaries registered more than 1 million new Democratic voters; Republican numbers mainly ebbed or stagnated. North Carolina and Indiana, which will hold their presidential primaries on May 6, are reporting a swell of new Democrats that triples the surge in registrations before the 2004 primary.

The contest between Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama has engaged enough new voters to change the political makeup of the country, experts say. The next several months -- and the general election in November -- will reveal the extent of the shift. Is it a temporary increase in interest resulting from a close election between historic candidates? Or is it a seismic swing in party realignment that foretells the end of the red-blue stalemate?

The White House would likely veto efforts to link Middle East arms sales to oil prices, said Greg Priddy, an analyst with the Eurasia Group.
Though U.S. lawmakers blame OPEC for soaring oil prices, "the cartel has really lost control of the market at this point," he said.
Tying oil prices to arms sales could motivate Middle East producers to seek cozier arms-for-oil agreements with countries such as Russia and China, said Frank Verrastro, an energy expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Date:              Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Time:             11:30 AM - 6:30 PM

Each year DC residents pay billions of dollars in federal income taxes but are denied a vote in Congress. Our country was founded on the principle that taxation without representation is tyranny - yet for nearly 600,000 citizens of DC, taxation without representation is a fact of daily life.

Next Tuesday, April 15 - "Taxed Without Representation" Day - join DC Vote staff, volunteers and activists to educate citizens about taxation without representation in the nation's capital.

We will circulate postcards and a "wooden nickel" to Senate staffers and visitors to Capitol Hill. See below for our "Taxed Without Representation" day schedule. Please join us!

Gerald E. Connolly, chairman of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, proposed last night using county funds to buy foreclosed properties and then sell them at below-market prices to working families.

Doing so would not only create affordable housing in one of the nation's most expensive communities, but it would also help protect neighborhoods in danger of decline from the exploding number of homes going into foreclosure across Fairfax, Connolly said in his annual State of the County speech at the government center.

"Taking a home out of foreclosure would help restore stability to a neighborhood and restore confidence in the local real estate market," said Connolly, a candidate for Congress. "Workforce housing is in great demand but short in supply."

Then, expecting Clinton to be knocked out in Texas, NBC and some Left blogs were bitterly disappointed and argued Clinton should drop out even though she won both Ohio and Texas (some even float the idea that the Texas caucus results were the true contest in Texas, rather than what they were - proof positive that caucuses disenfranchise voters.)

Indeed, disenfranchisement now becomes the key guiding principle of some Obama supporters - they support it at every turn. My own personal anger is tied up in the attitudes about the Michigan and Florida revotes. Everyone knows that Barack Obama blocked revotes in Florida and Michigan. No one outside of Michigan and Florida seems to care.

Let me put it bluntly, the dirtiest politics practiced in this campaign was Barack Obama's blocking of the Michigan and Florida revotes. There is nothing uglier in politics, nothing dirtier, than blocking voters' chances to vote. The stain on Barack Obama for this will not wash away with me. (BTW, I am not saying Clinton would not have done the same thing, I THINK she would have. But she did not.) Especially since I believe it would have helped Obama in the general election.