Alaska's write-in ballot count to begin despite challenge

(CNN) -- Alaska election officials will begin counting write-in ballots Wednesday despite a federal court challenge by the campaign of Republican U.S. Senate candidate Joe Miller, state director Gail Fenumiai said.

The complaint filed in federal court Tuesday afternoon asks Fenumiai's office to "adhere" to state law in the counting of write-in ballots, limiting what the suit called "subjective" voter intent rules that were issued this week.

Miller's campaign has blasted the Division of Elections' standards as "extraordinarily ambiguous."

The suit requests a court hearing Wednesday over the rules and asks for an injunction.

The guidelines say poll workers must consider the voter's intent when determining whether to count a ballot for a write-in candidate.

The Miller suit says, according to state election law, that a write-in vote can't be accepted if the voter did not correctly write either the full name or last name of a candidate; the voter wrote a candidate's name incorrectly, or misspelled it; or the name written on the ballot is not the name used on the candidate's certificate of candidacy.

"The Miller Campaign has consistently maintained that every valid, lawful vote should be counted," campaign attorney Ton Van Flein said in a statement. "We have further held to the expectation that the state laws, as written, should be followed, and that they should not be changed now, after the votes have been cast.

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National Review: Lessons From London On Spending

Poised to take back the House in January, the GOP must think strategically about how to cut spending, but compromise enough with Democrats not to be filibustered. Piotr Brzezinski of the National Review argues that the GOP could take a lesson from Britain, where spending cuts are being sold as necessary, though unpleasant, austerity measures.

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Divided Dems look ahead through 2012

Washington (CNN) -- One week removed from the great "shellacking" of 2010, Democrats at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue are still picking through the ashes of their lost House majority and debating the best way forward.

Rumors of their demise are, of course, exaggerated. Republicans survived midterm massacres in 1974 and 2006; Democrats lived to tell the tale of 1994. Election night exit polls showed the GOP is no more popular among voters than the Democrats.

But any time a party loses at least 60 seats in the House and six in the Senate, recriminations are bound to fly. Angry liberals accuse the White House of selling them out on a range of issues -- public option anyone? -- and demoralizing the base. Diminished Blue Dogs point the finger at Speaker Nancy Pelosi's dismal approval ratings and complain about being saddled with unpopular stimulus and cap-and-trade plans, among other things.

Adding to moderate malaise: Pelosi's unexpected decision to seek another term as her party's House leader. The San Francisco speaker has been holed up in her Capitol Hill office this week, working the phones to stave off any possible challenge.

Her decision means more moderate Maryland Rep. Steny Hoyer and more liberal South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn -- numbers two and three in the current House Democratic leadership -- are left fighting over the position of minority whip for the next Congress.

Some observers warn the Congressional Black Caucus will explode if Clyburn -- a veteran African-American legislator -- doesn't get the nod.

What does all of this mean? Maybe President Barack Obama picked a good time to pack his bags for Asia. But he can't avoid a radically changed landscape for the next two years as he pursues a second term.

Obama may have to further distance himself from House Democrats than Bill Clinton did after Republicans won control of Congress in 1994, Brown University political scientist Wendy Schiller told CNN.

"He's going to have to sell the liberal wing of the Democratic Party down the river in order to get reelected," she predicted, specifically citing negotiations over an extension of the Bush tax cuts.

Faced with a more uniformly liberal Democratic caucus led by Pelosi, Obama's got to "become a solo operator," Schiller said. He has "to step outside of the party box" and "reintroduce himself to the American public."

But Nathan Gonzales, editor of the non-partisan Rothenberg Political Report, warned Obama will rarely attract enough support from the Tea Party-influenced GOP to compensate for the loss of liberal support if he tries too much to position himself as an independent operator.

"The best thing for Obama is to get his party on the same page," Gonzales said. Republicans who may be inclined to strike a deal "are going to face a lot of pressure to resist working with the Democrats." To most conservative activists, "that's viewed as unacceptable. The moment you work with the Democrats, you're at risk of a primary challenge. That's a real threat."

Gonzales cited the example of moderate Maine GOP Sen. Olympia Snowe, who is up for reelection in 2012. The New England Republican has been a favorite of the administration and congressional Democrats looking for bipartisan cover, but is now facing a rising Tea Party threat in her backyard. Her home state, a moderate bastion in recent decades, just elected a sharply conservative Republican governor.

It's an open question how much politicians such as Snowe will be available to work with Democrats over the next two years.

Schiller and Gonzales differed over the impact of Pelosi staying on as the House Democratic leader.

"The president's still the president. He's still the leader of the Democratic Party," Gonzales said. "In the midterms, Pelosi was more of an issue because the president wasn't on the ballot. But 2012 is going to be about Obama and the direction he's taking the country."

Keeping Pelosi as the top House Democrat "means no change and Democrats can't afford that message," Schiller said, largely echoing the views of jubilant Republicans after the speaker announced her intentions last Friday.

Schiller also claimed Democrats may be making a mistake if they dump Clyburn from the party's leadership.

"Hoyer can present a moderate face, but it's unclear that he brings any change because he's been so visible" over the past four years, she argued. He's "indistinguishable from Nancy Pelosi to the average voter."

Clyburn, she contended, is "a smart strategic choice. He's a real southerner. Also, because he's African-American he may insulate the party from the most vitriolic race-based attacks from very conservative Republicans."

The "Democratic and Republican moderate voting base is the holy grail for 2012, and they won't react well to any attack on Clyburn that smacks of racism," she contended.

Hoyer's camp, however, asserts he is successfully convincing other House Democrats he is more of a unifying force than Clyburn. At the moment, Hoyer also has more public endorsements than Clyburn. A letter released late Sunday included the names of 30 House Democrats reflecting a broad cross-section of the Democratic caucus.

Sources close to both Hoyer and Clyburn have each told CNN their candidate will prevail. Other Democrats, meanwhile, are convinced both Hoyer and Clyburn will ultimately remain part of the leadership, with one of them taking the number-three slot of Democratic caucus chairman.

Stay tuned.

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Why U.S. Taxpayers Are Paying Brazilian Cotton Growers

Planet Money is making the most thoroughly explained t-shirt in the history of the universe. Last week, we nailed down the design. Today's task: Buying four bales of cotton.

You can buy cotton from all over the place — Uzbekistan, Australia, Mali. But I started with the U.S., the world's largest cotton exporter.

I visited Dahlin Hancock, a fourth generation cotton farmer in New Home, Texas. We talked about the cotton business, and he showed me around.

Then he started hammering on two points:

  1. We should buy from him.
  2. We should definitely not buy from Brazil.

Point number one is self-explanatory. As for point number two, here's what Dahlin had to say about Brazil:

They lash out at us … They keep coming to the table, coming to the court and always griping and always bitching and complaining.

In other words, the United States and Brazil are in the middle of a war over cotton. It's an emotional and quiet war complete with global retaliation and a $147 million bribe.  It all started with a man named Pedro Camargo.

Pedro is a Brazilian cattle farmer and former trade official. He has huge glasses and a gray bushy mustache. He says the U.S. is cheating.

 

U.S. cotton farmers, Pedro says, get subsidies from the U.S. government that add up to somewhere between $1.5 billion and $4 billion a year.

"We want to compete farmer against farmer," Pedro says. "Not Brazilian farmer and the American farmer with the help of the United States government."

He says the U.S. isn't following the World Trade Organization's rules of global trade — rules that the U.S., Brazil and 151 other countries have agreed to follow.

Pedro became secretary of trade in the Brazilian Agriculture Department in 2000; two years later, Brazil filed a case against the U.S. at the WTO.

Brazil won the case in 2004, but nothing changed. The U.S. kept the subsidies in place almost exactly as they had been.

The U.S. appealed, and the case made the rounds at the WTO for seven years. The U.S. kept losing its appeals, but the subsidies stayed in place. And there wasn't anything the WTO could do about it.

"The WTO has no legal authority to make any sovereign country do anything," says James Baucus, a former WTO judge. "It has no police force; it has no black helicopters."

But Brazil did have one option: Retaliation.

WTO rules let the winning country — in this case Brazil — tax imports from the losing country.

So Brazilian officials decided to threaten some powerful American industries with taxes, in an effort to recruit them into their battle against American cotton.

They made a list of 102 products and got in touch with powerful American business groups. They said the new import tax would apply within 30 days — unless the U.S. government sent a team to Brazil to negotiate the cotton issue.

It worked.

The list turned American wheat growers and shoe makers (among others) into Brazil's allies, and they pressured Washington to send a team to Brazil to try to work things out.

Here is where our story takes it last and final twist.

The American negotiators sat down in Brazil and immediately declared it impossible to get rid of the cotton subsidies right away. But the two sides came to an agreement.

The U.S. would pay Brazilian cotton farmers $147 million a year, and Brazil would drop the threat of retaliation.

To review: The United States was found to be illegally subsidizing U.S. cotton farmers. We are still subsidizing U.S. cotton farmers. Now we're paying Brazilian cotton farmers, too.

"Maybe it's a bribe," Camargo says. "For Brazilian farmers, it's a lot of money."

In the meantime, we still need four bales of cotton for our t-shirts.

We have an excellent mill in North Carolina that will turn our cotton into fabric And for the most part, American mills, thanks to a whole other set of U.S. trade policies, typically only buy U.S. cotton.

So in the end, the choice has already largely been made for us: We're buying U.S. cotton.

Besides, we've already paid for a big chunk of it with our taxes.

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