The Associated Press stories from The Center for Public Integrity

Democrats expand Senate grip but fail to win House

2012-11-07T15:27:01-05:00

Democrats strengthened their hold on the Senate but failed Tuesday to recapture the majority in the House of Representatives they lost two years ago. President Barack Obama, in his freshly authorized second term, will face the same divided Congress in 2013 that has bedeviled efforts to enact his major legislation.

"Now that the election is over, it's time to put politics aside and work together to find solutions," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., who may have a slightly bigger working majority — but not as big as the filibuster-proof one Obama enjoyed his first two years in the White House.

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, who also gets to keep his job, offered to work with any willing partner, Republican or Democrat, to get things done. "The American people want solutions — and tonight, they've responded by renewing our majority," he told a gathering of Republicans.

But Boehner also said that by keeping Republicans in control of the House, voters made clear there is no mandate for raising taxes. Obama has proposed imposing higher taxes on households earning over $250,000 a year.

The first post-election test of wills could start next week when Congress returns from its election recess to deal with unfinished business — including a looming "fiscal cliff" of $400 billion in higher taxes and $100 billion in automatic cuts in military and domestic spending to take effect in January if Congress doesn't head them off. Economists warn that the combination could plunge the nation back into a recession.

Because of extreme election-year partisanship, a resolution of the matter had been put off until a post-election lame-duck session.

Reid said Wednesday the urgent attention must be given to the fiscal issues when Congress comes back to work. He said he's "not for kicking the can down the road" and that any solution should include higher taxes on "the richest of the rich."

In terms of the general partisanship and political divide on Capitol Hill, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said the voters did not endorse the "failures or excesses of the president's first term," but rather have given him more time to finish the job.

"To the extent he wants to move to the political center, which is where the work gets done in a divided government, we'll be there to meet him halfway," McConnell said.

Sen.-elect Tim Kaine of Virginia said Wednesday he believes Democrats and Republicans will come together to avoid the "fiscal cliff."

Kaine, who defeated Republican George Allen, said in an appearance on NBC's "Today" show that voters sent a message to Washington that they want "cooperative government." But he also said the election results show that the public doesn't want "all the levers in one party's hands" on Capitol Hill.

Newly elected Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren said she will go to Washington believing there is a "lot of room for compromise" on what to do about the deficit and the impending fiscal crisis.

Warren, a leading consumer advocate, told NBC that Congress can find a middle ground on the nation's financial problems that would bring down the deficit by cutting spending while raising revenues.

Speaking on "CBS This Morning," she said that those who voted for her opponent, Sen. Scott Brown, sent a message that people want lawmakers to work together and "I heard that loud and clear."

Rep. Chris Van Hollen, the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee said that Obama is looking forward to working with congressional Republicans. But he also said thee GOP has to get the message voters delivered: Ask wealthier folks to pay more to help cut the deficit.

"It's also important to realize that it was a decisive election," Van Hollen said on CNN Wednesday. "And one of the big issues in this election was whether or not we should take the balanced approach to reducing the deficit the president has talked about; a combination of cuts but also revenue (increases). It's very clear from the exit polling that a majority of Americans recognize that we need to share responsibility for reducing the deficit. That means asking higher income earners to contribute more to reducing the deficit."

In the new Senate, Democrats would hold a 55-45 advantage if two independent senators chose to organize with the Democratic caucus. They picked up another seat Wednesday when Republican Rick Berg in North Dakota conceded his loss to Democrat Heidi Heitkamp.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., won his bid for re-election, and he has aligned himself with the Senate Democrats in the past. In Maine, independent former Gov. Angus King was elected to succeed retiring GOP Sen. Olympia Snowe. But King declined to say Wednesday whether he would line up with Democrats in the Senate.

Democrats picked up Republican-held seats in Indiana and Massachusetts while Republicans snatched a lone Democratic seat in Nebraska. And in Montana, Democratic incumbent Sen. Jon Tester held on to beat GOP challenger Denny Rehberg.

In another Democratic pickup Tuesday, Rep. Joe Donnelly won the Indiana Senate seat held for six terms by Republican Sen. Richard Lugar. Lugar lost earlier this year in a GOP primary to tea party-backed state Treasurer Richard Mourdock. The race had been rocked by the Republican candidate's controversial comments that pregnancy resulting from rape is "something God intended."

And Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., fought back a challenge from Republican Rep. Todd Akin, who severely damaged his candidacy in August when he said women who are victims of "legitimate rape" would not get pregnant.

The Virginia seat that Kaine won opened up when Sen. Jim Webb, a Democrat, decided not to run for re-election.

And former World Wrestling Entertainment executive Linda McMahon lost her bid for a Connecticut Senate seat to Democrat Chris Murphy despite spending $42 million of her own wealth. It was the second time in two years she has lost a Senate race. The seat had been long held by Sen. Joe Lieberman, an independent who caucused with Democrats and was the Democratic vice presidential candidate in 2000.

In Wisconsin, Rep. Tammy Baldwin defeated former Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson.

With all but a handful of the 435 House races called by The Associated Press, Republicans had won 233 seats, were assured another from a December runoff between two Louisiana Republicans, and were leading in one other race in Arizona. That gave them more than the 218 needed for a majority.

Democrats had won 192 seats and were leading in 8 others, ensuring them of modest gains. The GOP controls the current House by 240-190. There are two GOP and three Democratic vacancies.

While GOP Rep. Paul Ryan lost the vice presidency, he did win another term to his Wisconsin House seat.

Former GOP presidential hopeful Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota was narrowly re-elected.

By early Wednesday, Democrats had defeated 12 GOP House incumbents — 10 of them members of the huge tea party-backed freshman class of 2010. Republican losers included four incumbents from Illinois, two each from New Hampshire and New York, and one apiece from Florida, Maryland, Minnesota and Texas.

But Republicans picked up nine previously Democratic seats. Their candidates defeated one Democratic incumbent apiece in Kentucky, New York, North Carolina and Pennsylvania; they picked up one open seat each in Arkansas, California, Indiana, North Carolina and Oklahoma currently held by Democrats who retired or ran for another office.

Four incumbent Democrats from California were defeated by challengers from their own party, including 80-year old liberal Rep. Pete Stark from the East Bay area near San Francisco. Also beaten was Rep. Howard Berman, another liberal, who lost a bitter and expensive Los Angeles-area battle against fellow Democratic Rep. Brad Sherman.

Two other Democrats lost showdowns against fellow incumbents. Republican Jim Renacci defeated Democrat Betty Sutton in Ohio and Tom Latham beat Democrat Leonard Boswell in a battle between two long-term veterans.

In remarks to Democrats, Pelosi said her party would be "fighting for reigniting the American dream, building ladders of opportunity for people who want to work hard and play by the rules and take responsibility."

In a somber statement, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said Republicans "have a period of reflection and recalibration ahead." He added that, "While some will want to blame one wing of the party over the other, the reality is candidates from all corners of our GOP lost tonight."

Follow Tom Raum on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/tomraum.

Re-elected, Obama heads back to divided government

2012-11-08T16:03:01-05:00

WASHINGTON (AP) — One day after a bruising, mixed-verdict election, President Barack Obama and Republican House Speaker John Boehner both pledged Wednesday to seek a compromise to avert looming spending cuts and tax increases that threaten to plunge the economy back into recession.

Added Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.: "Of course" an agreement is possible.

While all three men spoke in general terms, Boehner stressed that Republicans would be willing to accept higher tax revenue under the right conditions as part of a more sweeping attempt to reduce deficits and restore the economy to full health.

While the impending "fiscal cliff" dominates the postelection agenda, the president and Republicans have other concerns, too.

Obama is looking ahead to top-level personnel changes in a second term, involving three powerful Cabinet portfolios at a minimum.

And Republicans are heading into a season of potentially painful reflection after losing the presidency in an economy that might have proved Obama's political undoing. They also have fallen deeper into the Senate minority after the second election in a row in which they lost potentially winnable races by fielding candidates with views that voters evidently judged too extreme.

One major topic for GOP discussion: the changing face of America.

"We've got to deal with the issue of immigration through good policy. What is the right policy if we want economic growth in America as it relates to immigration?" said former Republican Party Chairman Haley Barbour. Obama drew support from about 70 percent of all Hispanics. That far outpaced Romney, who said during the Republican primaries that illegal immigrants should self-deport, then spent the general election campaign trying to move toward the political middle on the issue.

The maneuvering on the economy — the dominant issue by far in the campaign — began even before Obama returned to the White House from his home town of Chicago.

After securing a second term, the president is committed to bipartisan solutions "to reduce our deficit in a balanced way, cut taxes for middle class families and small businesses and create jobs," and he told congressional leaders as much in phone calls, the White House said.

Boehner, whose anti-tax Republicans renewed their House majority on Tuesday, said GOP legislators were "willing to accept new revenue under the right conditions." That means tax reform and economic growth rather than raising rates, he emphasized, and accompanying steps to rein in the government's big benefit programs.

"The question we should be asking is not 'which taxes should I raise to get more revenue, but rather: which reforms can we agree on that will get our economy moving again?" the Ohio Republican said at the Capitol.

While both the president and Boehner sent signals of bipartisanship, there remain wide differences between the two on specifics. At the same time, each man has something of a postelection mandate, given Obama's re-election and the Republicans' successful defense of their House majority.

The reference to a balanced approach to deficit reduction reflected Obama's campaign-long call for higher taxes on incomes above $200,000 for individuals and $250,000 for couples.

That was something Boehner made plain he opposes.

Reid told reporters that any solution should include higher taxes on "the richest of the rich." That was in keeping with Obama's election platform, which calls for the expiration of tax cuts on higher-income earners.

Barring legislation to avoid the "fiscal cliff" by year's end, taxes are on course to rise by more than $500 billion in 2013, and spending is to be cut by an additional $130 billion or so, totals that would increase over a decade. The blend is designed to rein in the federal debt, but officials in both parties warn it poses a grave threat to an economic recovery that has been halting at best.

Obama and congressional leaders in both parties say they want an alternative, but serious compromise talks were non-existent during the fierce campaign season.

That ended Tuesday in an election in which more than 119 million votes were cast, mostly without controversy despite dire predictions of politically charged recounts and lawsuits while the presidency hung in the balance.

Obama won the popular vote narrowly, the electoral vote comfortably, and the battleground states where the campaign was principally waged in a landslide.

The president carried seven of the nine states where he, Romney and their allies spent nearly $1 billion on television commercials, winning Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, Colorado and Virginia.

The Republican challenger won North Carolina, and Florida remained too close to call

Obama also turned back late moves by Republicans in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Minnesota.

Hispanics account for a larger share of the population than the national average in Nevada and Colorado, two of the closely contested battleground states. The president's outsized majority among Hispanics — in the range of 70 percent according to Election Day interviews with voters — helped him against a challenger who called earlier in the year for self-deportation of illegal immigrants.

Other factors in crucial states:

— In Ohio, roughly 60 percent of all voters said they favored the Obama administration's auto bailout, and the president captured nearly three quarters of their votes, according to the survey, conducted for The Associated Press and a group of television networks. He stressed the rescue operation throughout the campaign. Romney opposed it, and in late campaign commercials suggested it had contributed to the loss of U.S. jobs overseas.

— In Virginia, the black vote was roughly half again as big in percentage terms as nationally, also an aid to Obama.

Changes are in store for the victorious administration. The election past, three members of Obama's Cabinet have announced plans to leave their posts: Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Other changes would not be unusual in the second administration of any president.

As for Congress, Democrats improbably gained seats in re-establishing their Senate majority. Their final margin hinged on a decision by independent Sen.-elect Angus King of Maine, who has not yet said which party he will affiliate with.

There were nine House races that remained too close to call, not counting a Louisiana runoff next month that involves two Republicans. Overall, the GOP secured 234 seats and led for one more, a trend that would translate into a net loss of eight from the current lineup.

In defeat, Democrats pointed to races where they turned tea party-backed conservatives out of power as evidence they had stemmed a tide.

___

Associated Press writers Julie Pace in Chicago and Donna Cassata, Larry Margasak and Andrew Taylor in Washington contributed to this story.

Analysis: Both sides see mandate, hard road ahead

2012-11-07T17:00:01-05:00

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama's re-election, coupled with Republicans' continued hold on the House, gives both parties a chance to rethink, and perhaps undo, the bitter partisanship that has gripped Washington for four years and frustrated Americans who see big problems going unsolved.

It won't be easy. Both sides claim, with some justification, a mandate from the voters.

"We'll have as much of a mandate as he will," House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said shortly before the election, correctly anticipating the results.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell was frostier in his post-election remarks. "The voters have not endorsed the failures or excesses of the president's first term," McConnell said.

"Now it's time for the president to propose solutions that actually have a chance of passing the Republican-controlled House," he said, "and deliver in a way that he did not in his first four years in office."

After three straight swing elections, Americans decided to keep Obama in the White House, leave Republicans in control of the House and let Democrats stay atop the Senate, with Republicans still able to block measures with filibusters.

There's an irony, or self-flagellation, there. Americans express exasperation at the partisan sniping and gridlock that pushed the nation to the brink of defaulting on its loans last year, and which might trigger new crises soon. The narrowness of Obama's win accurately reflects the nation's nearly 50-50 partisan divide. It's a split that will make progress on any major issues difficult for at least another two years, and probably longer.

Every newly elected president claims a mandate, and Obama can point to the roughly $1 billion that Mitt Romney and his GOP allies spent trying to oust him. Yet, for all its tactical brilliance, Obama's campaign was built on relatively modest ideas. It focused on helping the middle class, which is a coalition of identity, not ideology.

It may have been a status quo election. But if the White House and congressional Republicans simply stand their ground on taxes and other issues, they run risks — not just for the nation's well-being, but also for the legacies of a barrier-breaking president and a Republican Party that has tapped a deep vein of conservative, almost libertarian emotion.

In many ways, of course, Obama's place in history is assured. The first black to be elected president has now joined eight other men who, since 1900, won the office more than once. His biggest first-term achievement — the "Obamacare" health delivery overhaul — is safe from repeal by a President Mitt Romney.

Obama's other top goals, however, were largely thwarted by a united Republican Party that fought him at almost every turn. Republicans provided not a single House or Senate vote for the health care law. They beat back his efforts to end the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest households.

Obama offered an olive branch in his victory speech early Wednesday. "In the coming weeks and months, I am looking forward to reaching out and working with leaders of both parties to meet the challenges we can only solve together," he said.

McConnell said in 2010 that his top goal was to deny Obama a second term. On Tuesday, he lost, even though the nation's high unemployment seemed to make Obama ripe for defeat. Some, perhaps much, of Romney's loss will be traced to Americans' discontent with an opposition party that refused to compromise on big issues even when it's obvious that neither party can get everything it wants.

Boehner, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and other GOP officials now must decide where to bend and where to keep standing firm. They'll have to tip their hand soon. A package of huge tax hikes and spending cuts — known as the "fiscal cliff," and which both parties deeply dislike — is scheduled to take effect in the new year.

So far, Republicans have adamantly refused to raise taxes, even on the richest Americans, as part of a deficit-reduction package. Obama and other Democrats say such tax hikes must be part of the deal. They will point to Tuesday's election as validation. Boehner will point to his sustained majority.

Democrats think Obama learned some hard lessons in his first four years, including a realization that he must get deeply involved in the sometimes unpleasant business of crafting and negotiating legislation.

"The American people have made it pretty clear that they are sick of gridlock and fighting," said Jim Manley, a former Democratic Senate aide. Boehner and McConnell, he said, "have figured out that the tea party has done enormous damage to their brand, to say nothing about the economy, and that something has to change."

At the same time, Manley said "the president is going to have to play a more forceful role in the legislative process."

Obama signaled some of his second-term goals in a recent Des Moines Register interview. The fiscal cliff's economic threat is so severe, he said, that a congressional compromise is likely.

"It will probably be messy," the president said. "But I am absolutely confident that we can get what is the equivalent of the grand bargain that essentially I've been offering to the Republicans." It calls for $2.50 in spending cuts for every $1 in new revenue.

"The second thing I'm confident we'll get done next year is immigration reform," he said. Perhaps. Or it could prove as difficult as President George W. Bush's bid to partly privatize Social Security right after his re-election.

In recent years, the very idea of bipartisan compromise has come under growing attack, as Americans got fed up with soaring deficits, longstanding threats to Medicare and other problems left unresolved by Congress' old practices. The anger gave birth to the tea party, which boosted candidates who vow not to compromise if they reach Washington.

Passion and ideology drive the tea party. Congressional leaders, historically, are realists. They keep their committee chairmanships and party leadership posts by constantly monitoring the moods and needs of their rank-and-file colleagues.

Some Washington veterans say Boehner is posturing when he claims that his party won as big a mandate as Obama did. When Republicans see that the no-new-taxes argument lost Tuesday, Boehner "is certain to come to the table to begin to deal," said Matt Bennett of the Democratic-leaning think tank Third Way.

"Boehner and McConnell surely know that they cannot continue to be pure obstructionists and that the economic consequences of going over the fiscal cliff would be extreme," Bennett said. But it's not clear they can control their caucuses, he said.

Indeed, the GOP is surely about to engage in some intense self-examination and infighting.

John Feehery, a former top House Republican aide, said Obama's re-election may give the White House less clout than Democratic insiders think.

"Republicans will feel they have just as big a mandate as the president," Feehery said. It's possible that Boehner and Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada "will do the deals and put Obama on mute," he said.

Reid, at least for now, sounds upbeat and bipartisan.

"Democrats and Republicans must come together, and show that we are up to the challenge" of tackling big problems, Reid said after the election was called. "This is no time for excuses."

___

EDITOR'S NOTE — Charles Babington covers Congress and national politics for The Associated Press.

Republicans renew their control of House

2012-11-07T03:48:01-05:00

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republicans recaptured control of the House early Wednesday, besting Democrats in a billion-dollar battle and ensuring that the chamber will be dominated by their conservative agenda. Reacting to President Barack Obama's re-election, House Speaker John Boehner said the voters want both parties to find common ground on repairing the economy.

Past midnight in the East, Democrats had knocked off 12 GOP House members — including 10 members of the huge tea party-backed House GOP freshman class of 2010. Republican losers included four incumbents from Illinois, two each from New Hampshire and New York, and one apiece from Florida, Maryland, Minnesota and Texas.

Republicans nearly matched, picking up nine previously Democratic seats. Their candidates defeated one Democratic incumbent apiece in Kentucky, New York, North Carolina and Pennsylvania and picked up an open seat each in Arkansas, California, Indiana, North Carolina, and Oklahoma currently held by Democrats who retired or ran for another office.

With almost 90 percent of the 435 House races called by The Associated Press, Republicans had won 224 seats and were leading in 15 more. For a majority in the chamber, a party must control 218 seats. Democrats had won 170 seats and were leading in 25 others.

It appeared likely that the two parties' margins in the new Congress would closely resemble the current tally. Republicans control the chamber by 240 to 190, plus five vacancies: two seats once controlled by the GOP and three by Democrats. Early Wednesday, it remained in doubt whether either party would ultimately have a net gain.

Among those re-elected to his seat: Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., the vice presidential candidate on the defeated GOP ticket with Republican presidential challenger Mitt Romney.

Shortly after Obama's re-election was clear, Boehner — re-elected without opposition — spoke of voters' message of compromise. That was a stark departure from the House GOP's general tone over the past two years, which have been marked by numerous bitter clashes with Obama over deficit reduction, taxes and spending.

"If there is a mandate, it is a mandate for both parties to find common ground and take steps together to help our economy grow and create jobs, which is critical to solving our debt," Boehner said in a written statement.

Earlier in the evening, Boehner had seemed more combative.

"The American people want solutions, and tonight they responded by renewing our House Republican majority," he said at a gathering of Republicans in Washington. "The American people also made clear there's no mandate for raising tax rates."

One of the top fights when Congress returns for a postelection session this month will be over the looming expiration of income tax cuts first enacted a decade ago under President George W. Bush. Republicans want to renew them all, while President Barack Obama wants the cuts to expire for the highest-earning Americans.

In remarks to Democrats just blocks from where Boehner spoke, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said Democrats would be "fighting for reigniting the American dream, building ladders of opportunity for people who want to work hard and play by the rules and take responsibility."

Pelosi, who was easily re-elected, has not said definitively whether she will continue to serve as Democratic leader.

Though 10 GOP freshmen were defeated on Election Day, 69 of them were re-elected by early Wednesday in the East. Two others were leading in their races but one was trailing. An exit poll of voters conducted for the AP and the television networks by Edison Research showed that just 21 percent said they backed the tea party, which had fueled the big GOP House gains in 2010.

The GOP victory in the House contrasted with party's performance elsewhere on the national stage. Besides Obama's win, Democrats held control of the Senate and still could add slightly to their numbers there.

Democrats in Illinois controlled the redrawing of congressional districts after the latest Census, and the new lines proved too tough for several incumbent House Republicans. Conservative tea party freshmen Reps. Joe Walsh and Bobby Schilling lost, as did moderate freshman Robert Dold and seven-term veteran Judy Biggert, a social moderate.

Other losing GOP freshmen were Rep. David Rivera of Florida, who was hurt by investigations into his past campaign financing; Ann Marie Buerkle and Nan Hayworth of New York; Francisco Canseco of Texas, Chip Cravaack of Minnesota and both New Hampshire representatives, Frank Guinta and Charlie Bass.

In Maryland Democrats defeated 10-term GOP veteran Rep. Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland in a race that was preordained after Democrats controlling the state legislature added more Democratic suburbs near Washington to his western Maryland district.

Embroiled in an unexpectedly tight re-election race was conservative Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn.

One winner was Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., D-Ill., the Chicago lawmaker who took medical leave from Congress in June and has been at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota for treatment of bipolar disorder. His only campaigning has been by automated phone calls to voters.

Anti-abortion Rep. Scott DesJarlais, R-Tenn., was re-elected, overcoming reports that he had pressured a mistress to seek an abortion.

In Kentucky, GOP attorney Andy Barr defeated Democrat Ben Chandler after losing to him by just 647 votes in 2010. Chandler, among a dwindling number of moderate Blue Dog Democrats, has represented the district in Kentucky horse country surrounding Lexington, since 2004 but faced voters who heavily favored Republican challenger Mitt Romney, who easily carried the state over Obama.

Republicans also ousted Rep. Larry Kissell of North Carolina, a two-term veteran who was among several Democrats in the state who faced far tougher districts due to GOP-controlled redistricting.

In Pennsylvania outside Pittsburgh, Republicans defeated Democrat Mark Critz in what was one of the year's most expensive races, with both sides spending a combined $13.7 million.

Also defeated was Democratic Rep. Kathy Hochul of New York, who won a 2011 special election to her seat by attacking Republicans for trying to revamp Medicare.

There were 62 districts where no incumbents were running at all, either because they had retired or lost earlier party primaries or because the seats were newly created to reflect the census.

When combined with losses by incumbents, the number of new House members in the next Congress was still below the 91 freshmen who started serving in 2011 — a number unmatched since 1993.

Just weeks ago, Democrats had said they could win the 25 added seats they need to wrest control of the House.

As Obama's lead over Romney shrank as Election Day approached, Democrats' expectations for coattails that would boost their House candidates shrunk as well.

Republicans, building off their enhanced control of statehouses, also did a robust job of protecting their incumbents and weakening Democrats when congressional district lines were redrawn after the 2010 census, especially in states like Pennsylvania and North Carolina.

In addition, out of a record $1.1 billion that House candidates and their allies spent in this year's races, more than 60 percent of it went to Republicans.

The economy and jobs dominated the presidential campaign, but there was little evidence either party had harnessed those issues in a decisive way at the House level. Both sides agreed that this year's election lacked a nationwide wave that would give either side sweeping strength — as occurred when Democrats seized control in 2006 and expanded their majority in 2008, and Republicans snatched the chamber back in 2010.

Polls underscored the public sentiment that Democrats had hoped they could use to their advantage.

A CBS News-New York Times poll late last month showed just 15 percent of Americans approved of how Congress was handling its job, near its historic lows. And an Associated Press-GfK poll in August showed that 39 percent approved of congressional Democrats while just 31 percent were satisfied with congressional Republicans.

Democrats maintain control of Senate

Wisconsin,United States — 2012-11-07T17:06:01-05:00

WASHINGTON (AP) — Democrats handily secured a majority in the Senate on Tuesday, snatching Republican-held seats in Massachusetts and Indiana and turning back fierce, expensive challenges in Virginia, Ohio, Wisconsin and Connecticut to maintain the control they've held since 2007.

With a third of the Senate up for election, Republicans were undone by candidate stumbles. GOP hopefuls in Missouri and Indiana uttered clumsy statements about rape and abortion that severely damaged their chances and the party's hopes of taking over. The losses of Senate seats in Massachusetts and Indiana, combined with independent Angus King's victory in the Republican-held Maine seat, put the GOP too far down in their already uphill climb.

Democrats held open seats in Virginia, Wisconsin and New Mexico, and were leading in North Dakota shortly after midnight. The only pickup for the Republicans was Nebraska, where Deb Fischer denied former Democratic Sen. Bob Kerrey's bid to return to the Capitol.

Democrats, once on the wrong side of the political math with 23 seats at risk compared with only 10 for the GOP, suddenly looked like they could increase their numbers. They entered the night with a 53-47 edge, including two independents who caucus with them. After midnight, Democrats controlled 52 seats to the GOP's 44 with three races still outstanding and one newly elected independent, Angus King of Maine, saying he hasn't decided which party he will align with.

In charge again, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Republicans brought defeat on themselves with their preoccupation with denying President Barack Obama a second term.

"Things like this are what happens when your No. 1 goal is to defeat the president and not work to get legislation passed," Reid said. "The strategy of obstruction, gridlock and delay was soundly rejected by the American people. Now they are looking to us for solutions," he said in a separate statement.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said the voters have not endorsed the "failures or excesses of the president's first term," but rather have given him more time to finish the job.

"To the extent he wants to move to the political center, which is where the work gets done in a divided government, we'll be there to meet him half way," McConnell said.

The results were a bitter loss for the GOP and are certain to prompt questions about the promise and peril of the tea party movement that just two years ago delivered a takeover of the House to the GOP. In 2010, three tea party Senate candidates in Nevada, Delaware and Colorado cost Republicans seats they were favored to win. On Tuesday, a tea party-backed candidate in Indiana denied the GOP a seat that the party had been favored to win, while Fischer and tea party-backed Ted Cruz of Texas prevailed in their races.

In a sober statement, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said the GOP has work to do.

"We have a period of reflection and recalibration ahead for the Republican Party. While some will want to blame one wing of the party over the other, the reality is candidates from all corners of our GOP lost tonight," Cornyn said, though he added that the party's "conservative vision is the right one to secure a stronger America for future generations."

Democratic Rep. Joe Donnelly edged out tea party-backed Indiana state treasurer Richard Mourdock in a race rocked by the Republican candidate's awkward remark that pregnancy resulting from rape is "something God intended."

Mourdock also upset some Indiana voters for his decision to sue to stop the federal auto bailout of Chrysler, which means jobs building transmissions to thousands in Kokomo. And he alienated some in his own party with his divisive win over six-term Sen. Richard Lugar in the May GOP primary. Lugar refused to campaign for him.

In Massachusetts, Democrat Elizabeth Warren knocked out Republican Sen. Scott Brown, who had stunned the political world in January 2010 when he won the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's seat. The strong Democratic tilt in the state and President Barack Obama's easy win over former Gov. Mitt Romney helped the consumer advocate in her bid.

The Massachusetts race was one of the most expensive in the country — $68 million — even though both candidates agreed to bar outside spending.

In Missouri, Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill was considered the most vulnerable incumbent, but Republican Rep. Todd Akin severely damaged his candidacy in August when he said women's bodies have ways of avoiding pregnancy in instances of "legitimate rape." GOP leaders, including Romney, called on him to abandon the race. Akin stayed in.

The results ensure plenty of new faces in the Senate, many of them familiar from the House. Republican Rep. Jeff Flake won in Arizona and will join Democratic Reps. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico. In Wisconsin, Democratic Rep. Tammy Baldwin defeated former four-term Gov. Tommy Thompson and will be the first openly gay senator. .

The caustic campaign for control of the Senate in a divided Congress was marked by endless negative ads and more than $1 billion in spending by outside groups on races from Virginia and Florida to Montana and New Mexico. The outcome in Ohio and Virginia was closely linked to the presidential race.

In Maine, independent Angus King prevailed over Republican Charlie Summers and Democrat Cynthia Dill in the race to replace Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe, who blamed partisan gridlock in Washington for her unexpected decision to retire after 18 years in the Senate.

King has resolutely refused to say which party he'd side with if elected. But members of both parties have indicated that they expect the former Democratic governor and Obama supporter to align with Democrats. Reid reached out to him Tuesday night, according to a Senate aide.

In Ohio, Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown survived an onslaught of outside spending, some $30 million, to defeat state treasurer Josh Mandel. In Pennsylvania, Democratic Sen. Bob Casey survived a late scare from businessman Tom Smith, who invested more than $17 million of his own money in the race.

Democratic Rep. Chris Murphy won the Connecticut Senate seat held by Sen. Joe Lieberman, the independent who was the Democratic Party's vice presidential nominee in 2000. Murphy's win marked the second straight defeat for former wrestling executive Linda McMahon, who spent $50 million of her own wealth in a failed effort against Sen. Richard Blumenthal in 2010 and more than $42 million this election cycle.

In Texas, Republican Cruz won the seat held by retiring GOP Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison. Cruz will become the third Hispanic in the Senate, joining Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., and Marco Rubio, R-Fla.

In Florida, Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson triumphed in his bid for a third term, holding off a challenge from Republican Rep. Connie Mack. Republican groups had spent heavily against Nelson early in the race, but the moderate Democrat was a prolific fundraiser with wide appeal among Democrats and some Republicans in the Panhandle.

Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders won a second term in Vermont. Democratic Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse in Rhode Island, Ben Cardin in Maryland and Tom Carper in Delaware were all re-elected. Also cruising to another term were Democratic Sens. Debbie Stabenow in Michigan, Kirsten Gillibrand in New York, Amy Klobuchar in Minnesota, Dianne Feinstein in California, Maria Cantwell in Washington state and Menendez in New Jersey.

In West Virginia, Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin won a full term even though his state went heavily for Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

Tennesseans gave Republican Sen. Bob Corker a second term. Wyoming voters did the same for GOP Sen. John Barrasso, and Republican Roger Wicker captured another term in Mississippi. In Utah, Sen. Orrin Hatch won a seventh term and will be the most senior GOP senator.

Democrats and Republicans in a dozen states faced an onslaught of outside money that financed endless negative commercials and ugly mailings that left voters exasperated. The record independent spending — $50 million in Virginia and $40 million in Wisconsin in addition to $33 million in Ohio — reflected the high-stakes fight for the Senate.

Analysis: Obama wins but Washington unchanged

2012-11-07T04:51:01-05:00

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama's victory means that everything he campaigned upon is alive and about to drive the political conversation with his adversaries. Every legacy of his first term is safe and enshrined to history.

Yet big honeymoons don't come twice and Republicans won't swoon. If Obama cannot end gridlock, his second term will be reduced to veto threats, empty promises, end runs around Congress and legacy-sealing forays into foreign lands.

Obama will push for higher taxes on the wealthy as a way to shrinking a choking debt and to steer money toward the programs he wants. He will try to land a massive financial deficit-cutting deal with Congress in the coming months and then move on to an immigration overhaul, tax reform and other bipartisan dreams.

He will not have to worry that his health care law will be repealed, or that his Wall Street reforms will be gutted, or that his name will be consigned to the list of one-term presidents who got fired before they could finish. Voters stuck with him because they trusted him more to solve the struggles of their lifetime.

America may not be filled with hope anymore, but it told Mitt Romney to keep his change. And voters sure didn't shake up the rest of Washington, either.

They put back all the political players who have made the capital dysfunctional to the point of nearly sending the United States of America into default.

"Progress will come in fits and starts," the president cautioned in his victory speech. "The recognition that we have common hopes and dreams won't end all the gridlock ... or substitute for the painstaking work of building consensus. But that common bond is where we must begin."

The president likely will be dealing again with a Republican-run House, whose leader, Speaker John Boehner, declared on election night that his party has orders from voters, too: no higher taxes.

Obama will still have his firewall in the Senate, with Democrats likely to hang onto their narrow majority. But they don't have enough to keep Republicans from bottling up any major legislation with delaying tactics.

So the burden falls on the president to find compromise, not just demand it from the other side.

He won the electoral vote comfortably, but the popular vote showed the nation he leads — split right in half.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell welcomed Obama with both arms folded.

"The voters have not endorsed the failures or excesses of the president's first term," McConnell said. "They have simply given him more time to finish the job they asked him to do together" with a balanced Congress.

The vanquished Republican, Romney, tried to set the tone on the way off the stage.

"At a time like this, we can't risk partisan bickering," Romney said after a campaign filled with it. "Our leaders have to reach across the aisle to do the people's work."

For now, Obama can revel in knowing what he pulled off.

Obama won despite an economy that sucked away much of the nation's spirit. He won with the highest unemployment rate for any incumbent since the Great Depression. He won even though voters said they thought Romney would be the better choice to end stalemate in Washington.

He won even though a huge majority of voters said they were not better off than they were four years ago — a huge test of survival for a president.

The reason is that voters wanted the president they knew. They believed convincingly that Obama, not Romney, understood their woes of college costs and insurance bills and sleepless nights. Exit polls shows that voters thought far more of them viewed Obama as the voice of the poor and the middle class, and Romney the guy tilting toward the rich.

The suspense was over early because Obama won all over the battleground map, and most crucially in Ohio. That's where he rode his bailout support for the auto industry to a victory that crushed Romney's chances.

The voice of the voter came through from 42-year-old Bernadette Hatcher in Indianapolis, who voted after finishing an overnight shift at a warehouse.

"It's all about what he's doing," she said. "No one can correct everything in four years. Especially the economy."

Formidable and seasoned by life, Romney had in his pocket corporate success and a Massachusetts governor's term and the lessons of a first failed presidential bid.

But he never broke through as the man who would secure people's security and their dreams. He was close the whole time.

"I mean, I looked," said Tamara Johnson of Apex, N.C., a 35-year-old mother of two young children. "I didn't feel I got the answers I wanted or needed to hear. And that's why I didn't sway that way."

The election was never enthralling, and it was fought for far too long in the shallow moments of negative ads and silly comments.

It seemed like the whole country endured it until the end, when the crowds grew and the candidates reached for their most inspiring words.

"Americans don't settle. We build, we aspire, we listen to that voice inside that says 'We can do better," Romney pleaded toward that end.

Americans agreed. They just wanted Obama to take them there.

Incumbents get no transition, so Obama will be tested immediately.

A "fiscal cliff" of expiring tax cuts and budget cuts looms on Jan 1.

If they kick in, economists warn the economy will tank, again. Obama, at least, won the right to fight the fight on his terms.

"If I've won, then I believe that's a mandate for doing it in a balanced way," he said before the election — that is, fixing the budget problem by raising taxes on people instead of just cutting spending. Obama is adamant that he will not agree to extend tax cuts for people making above $200,000 or couples with incomes above $250,000.

He had not even been declared the winner before Boehner offered a warning that the House was still in Republican hands.

"With this vote," Boehner said, "the American people have also made clear that there is no mandate for raising tax rates."

Obama, never one to lack from confidence, is ready to take that fight to Congress.

In his eyes, he just won it, thanks to the voters.

___

EDITOR'S NOTE — Ben Feller has covered the presidencies of Barack Obama and George W. Bush.

___

Follow Ben Feller on Twitter at www.twitter.com/benfellerdc

Obama powers to re-election despite weak economy

Romney Bankshares Inc — 2013-01-22T20:33:19-05:00

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama rolled to re-election Tuesday night, vanquishing former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney despite a weak economy that plagued his first term and put a crimp in the middle class dreams of millions. In victory, he confidently promised better days ahead.

Obama spoke to thousands of cheering supporters in his hometown of Chicago, praising Romney and declaring his optimism for the next four years. "While our road has been hard, though our journey has been long, we have picked ourselves up, we have fought our way back and we know in our hearts that for the United States of America, the best is yet to come," he said.

Romney made a brief, graceful concession speech before a disappointed crowd in Boston. He summoned all Americans to pray for Obama and urged the night's political winners to put partisan bickering aside and "reach across the aisle" to tackle the nation's problems.

Still, after the costliest — and one of the nastiest — campaigns in history, divided government was alive and well.

Democrats retained control of the Senate with surprising ease. With three races too close to call, they had the possibility of gaining a seat.

Republicans won the House, ensuring that Speaker John Boehner of Ohio, Obama's partner in unsuccessful deficit talks, would reclaim his seat at the bargaining table. With numerous races as yet uncalled, the size of the GOP majority was unknown.

At Obama headquarters in Chicago, a huge crowd gathered waving small American flags and cheering. Supporters hugged each other, danced and pumped their fists in the air. Excited crowds also gathered in New York's Times Square, at Faneuil Hall in Boston and near the White House in Washington, drivers joyfully honking as they passed by.

With returns from 88 percent of the nation's precincts, Obama had 55.8 million, 49.8 percent of the popular vote. Romney had 54.5 million, or 48.6 percent.

The president's laserlike focus on the battleground states allowed him to run up a 303-206 margin in the competition for the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House, the count that mattered most. Remarkably, given the sour economy, he lost only two states that he captured in 2008, Indiana and North Carolina.

Florida, another Obama state four years ago, remained too close to call.

The election emerged as a choice between two very different visions of government — whether it occupies a major, front-row place in American lives or is in the background as a less-obtrusive facilitator for private enterprise and entrepreneurship.

The economy was rated the top issue by about 60 percent of voters surveyed as they left their polling places. But more said former President George W. Bush bore responsibility for current circumstances than Obama did after nearly four years in office.

That boded well for the president, who had worked to turn the election into a choice between his proposals and Romney's, rather than a simple referendum on the economy during his time in the White House.

Unemployment stood at 7.9 percent on Election Day, higher than when the president took office. And despite signs of progress, the economy is still struggling after the worst recession in history.

Obama captured Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, Virginia, New Hampshire, Colorado and Nevada, seven of the nine states where the rivals and their allies poured nearly $1 billion into dueling television commercials.

Romney won North Carolina among the battleground states.

Florida was too close to call, Obama leading narrowly in a state where there were still long lines of voters at some polling places long after the appointed closing time.

Romney, who grew wealthy in business and ran the 2002 Olympic Games in Salt Lake City before entering politics, spoke only briefly to supporters, some of whom wept.

"I so wish that I had been able to fulfill your hopes to lead the country in a different direction," he said. "But the nation chose another leader and so Ann and I join with you to earnestly pray for him and for this great nation."

Moments later, Obama stepped before a far different crowd hundreds of miles away.

"Tonight you voted for action, not politics as usual," he said. He pledged to work with leaders of both parties to help the nation complete its recovery from the worst recession since the Great Depression.

Boehner issued a statement of his own, noting that while Obama won, so, too, did his House Republicans "If there is a mandate, it is a mandate for both parties to find common ground and take steps together to help our economy grow and create jobs, which is critical to solving our debt," he said.

By any description, the list of challenges is daunting - high unemployment, a slow-growth economy, soaring deficits, a national debt at unsustainable. To say nothing of the threat of a nuclear Iran and the menace of al-Qaida and other terrorist groups more than a decade after the attacks of Sept., 11, 2001.

There was no doubt about what drove voters to one candidate or the other in the presidential race.

About 4 in 10 said the economy is on the mend, but more than that said it was stagnant or getting worse more than four years after the near-collapse of 2008. The survey was conducted for The Associated Press and a group of television networks.

In the battle for the Senate, Elizabeth Warren turned Republican Scott Brown out of office in Massachusetts, and Rep. Joe Donnelly captured a seat from GOP hands in Indiana.

Deb Fischer picked up a seat for Republicans in Nebraska, defeating former Sen. Bob Kerrey.

In Maine, independent former Gov. Angus King was elected to succeed retiring GOP Sen. Olympia Snowe. He has not yet said which party he will side with, but Republicans attacked him in television advertising during the race, and Democrats rushed to his cause.

In the presidential race, Obama won in the reliably Democratic Northeast and on the West Coast. Pennsylvania was his, too, despite two late campaign stops by Romney.

Romney won most of the South as well as much of the Rocky Mountain West and Farm Belt.

The president was in Chicago as he awaited the voters' verdict on his four years in office. He told reporters he had a concession speech as well as victory remarks prepared. He congratulated Romney on a spirited campaign. "I know his supporters are just as engaged, just as enthusiastic and working just as hard today" as Obama's own, he added.

Romney reciprocated, congratulating the man who he had campaigned against for more than a year.

Earlier, he raced to Ohio and Pennsylvania for Election Day campaigning and projected confidence as he flew home to Massachusetts. "We fought to the very end, and I think that's why we'll be successful," he said, adding that he had finished writing a speech anticipating victory but nothing if the election went to his rival.

Like Obama, Vice President Joe Biden was in Chicago as he waited to find out if he was in line for a second term. Republican running mate Paul Ryan was with Romney in Boston, although he kept one eye on his campaign for re-election to the House from Wisconsin, a race he won.

The long campaign's cost soared into the billions, much of it spent on negative ads, some harshly so.

In a months-long general election ad war that cost nearly $1 billion, Romney and Republican groups spent more than $550 million and Obama and his allies $381 million, according to organizations that track advertising.

According to the exit poll, 53 percent of voters said Obama was more in touch with people like them, compared to 43 percent for Romney.

About 60 percent said taxes should be increased, taking sides on an issue that divided the president and Romney. Obama wants to let taxes rise on upper incomes, while Romney does not.

Other than the battlegrounds, big states were virtually ignored in the final months of the campaign. Romney wrote off New York, Illinois and California, while Obama made no attempt to carry Texas, much of the South or the Rocky Mountain region other than Colorado.

There were 33 Senate seats on the ballot, 23 of them defended by Democrats and the rest by Republicans.

Democratic Rep. Chris Murphy, a Democrat, won a Connecticut seat long held by Sen. Joe Lieberman, retiring after a career that included a vice presidential spot on Al Gore's ticket in 2000. It was Republican Linda McMahon's second defeat in two tries, at a personal cost of $92 million.

The GOP needed a gain of three for a majority if Romney won, and four if Obama was re-elected. Neither Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada nor GOP leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky was on the ballot, but each had high stakes in the outcome.

All 435 House seats were on the ballot, including five where one lawmaker ran against another as a result of once-a-decade redistricting to take population shifts into account. Democrats needed to pick up 25 seats to gain the majority they lost two years ago.

House Speaker Boehner, R-Ohio, raised millions to finance get-out-the-vote operations in states without a robust presidential campaign, New York, Illinois and California among them. His goal was to minimize any losses, or possibly even gain ground, no matter Romney's fate. House Democratic leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California campaigned aggressively, as well, and faced an uncertain political future after her party failed to win control.

Democrats toppled conservative tea party freshman Reps. Joe Walsh and Bobby Schilling in Illinois, as well as another freshman, Robert Dold and seven-term veteran Judy Biggert, a social moderate.

Other GOP casualties included Rep. David Rivera of Florida, who was hurt by investigations into his past campaign financing; Ann Marie Buerkle of New York, who lost to the Democrat she defeated in 2010, Dan Maffei, and New Hampshire Republican Charlie Bass, ousted by Ann Kuster, the Democrat he defeated narrowly two years ago.

Republicans turned Rep. Kathy Hochul out of office in New York, as well as Larry Kissel in North Carolina, Mark Critz in Pennsylvania and Ben Chandler in Kentucky.

In gubernatorial races, Republicans picked up North Carolina, where Pat McCrory won easily. The incumbent, Democratic Gov. Bev Purdue, did not seek re-election.

In a campaign that traversed contested Republican primaries last winter and spring, a pair of political conventions this summer and three presidential debates, Obama, Romney, Biden and Ryan spoke at hundreds of rallies, were serenaded by Bruce Springstein and Meat Loaf and washed down hamburgers, pizza, barbecue and burrito bowls.

Obama was elected the first black president in 2008, and four years later, Romney became the first Mormon to appear on a general election ballot. Yet one man's race and the other's religion were never major factors in this year's campaign for the White House, a race dominated from the outset by the economy.

Over and over, Obama said that during his term the nation had begun to recover from the worst recession since the Great Depression. While he conceded progress had been slow, he accused Romney of offering recycled Republican policies that have helped the wealthy and harmed the middle class in the past and would do so again.

Romney countered that a second Obama term could mean a repeat recession in a country where economic growth has been weak and unemployment is worse now than when the president was inaugurated. A wealthy former businessman, he claimed the knowledge and the skills to put in place policies that would make the economy healthy again.

In a race where the two men disagreed often, one of the principal fault lines was over taxes. Obama campaigned for the renewal of income tax cuts set to expire on Dec. 31 at all income levels except above $200,000 for individuals and $250,000 for couples.

Romney said no one's taxes should go up in uncertain economic times. In addition, he proposed a 20 percent cut across the board in income tax rates but said he would end or curtail a variety of tax breaks to make sure federal deficits didn't rise.

The differences over taxes, the economy, Medicare, abortion and more were expressed in intensely negative advertising.

Obama launched first, shortly after Romney dispatched his Republican foes in his quest for the party nomination.

One memorable commercial showed Romney singing an off-key rendition of "America The Beautiful." Pictures and signs scrolled by saying that his companies had shipped jobs to Mexico and China, that Massachusetts state jobs had gone to India while he was governor and that he has personal investments in Switzerland, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.

Romney spent less on advertising than Obama. A collection of outside groups made up the difference, some of them operating under rules that allowed donors to remain anonymous. Most of the ads were of the attack variety. But the Republican National Committee relied on one that had a far softer touch, and seemed aimed at voters who had been drawn to the excitement caused by Obama's first campaign. It referred to a growing national debt and unemployment, then said, "He tried. You tried. It's OK to make a change."

More than 30 million voters cast early ballots in nearly three dozen states, a reflection of the growing appeal of getting a jump on the traditional Election Day.

Republicans try to pick up more governors' offices

2012-11-07T02:27:01-05:00

ST. LOUIS (AP) — North Carolina voters elected their first Republican governor in two decades Tuesday as the GOP sought to broaden its hold on governor's mansions across the country.

The victory by former Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory came two years after Republicans snatched six governors' offices in the midterm elections. Those victories gave the party 29 governorships to 20 for Democrats and one independent going into Tuesday elections, which were to decide 11 gubernatorial races.

When all the ballots are counted, Republicans could have as many as 32 governorships — a number the party has not achieved since 1990s.

McCrory defeated Democratic Lt. Gov. Walter Dalton to become North Carolina's first GOP chief executive since early 1993. McCrory narrowly lost his gubernatorial bid in 2008 to Democrat Beverly Perdue, who opted not to run this year.

Indiana voters went with Republican Mike Pence, a 12-year congressman who defeated Democrat John Gregg and Libertarian Rupert Boneham to succeed GOP Gov. Mitch Daniels, who is barred by state law from seeking a third term.

Democratic governors are leaving office in North Carolina, Montana, New Hampshire and Washington — a fact that stirred Republican hopes that at least some of those offices could be flipped to the GOP. But New Hampshire's governor's mansion remained in Democratic hands Tuesday, as did those in Missouri, Vermont, Delaware and West Virginia.

Chief executives of conservative North Dakota and Utah stayed in the Republican column with Tuesday's re-elections of popular incumbents. They included Jack Dalrymple, who took over two years ago in North Dakota when John Hoeven resigned to move to the Senate. Dalrymple won his first full term, defeating rancher and Democratic state Sen. Ryan Taylor.

In Missouri, Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon won a second term, turning back a challenge from Republican St. Louis businessman Dave Spence in a race that attracted in millions of dollars from political groups.

Ballots were still being tallied late Tuesday in Montana and in Washington state, where the GOP hasn't occupied the governor's mansion in more than three decades.

While federal elections often can be referendums on the national economy, statewide races are often decided by matters unique to those states, including whether voters like and trust a certain candidate, a national political observer said Monday.

"The races for governor and races for senator are high-profile for each state, and the outcomes will be determined largely by the personalities of those candidates and the issues in those states," said David Yepsen, director of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale.

Kate Hansen, a Democratic Governors Association spokeswoman, said 2012 was a difficult year for Democrats, since they have more seats to defend.

But in at least three states, Democrats easily prevailed. Gov. Peter Shumlin won another term in Vermont, Gov. Jack Markell did the same in Delaware and state Sen. Maggie Hassan was elected to lead New Hampshire.

Some pundits have suggested there isn't necessarily a national tide lifting Republicans in governor's races so much as individual circumstances in a small number of competitive states. Democrats in North Carolina, for example, saw a former governor convicted of a felony in 2010 and the current governor sullied by an investigation that led to charges against her former campaign aides.

Republicans have also been aided by a cash advantage, with the Republican Governors Association raising about twice as much as its Democratic counterpart this election cycle.

Images of the vote, from a school gym to a shelter

2012-11-06T16:06:18-05:00

On a chilly Vermont morning, a voter fills out a ballot at a table near the old wood stove at Calais Town Hall. In Chicago, a woman votes at the Su Nueva Laundromat, surrounded by industrial washers and dryers. In Elizaville, Ky., a few people arrive early at a general store built in 1821 to cast some of the day's first ballots.

Americans who show up at the polls on Election Day all have something in common — they're filling in bubbles, punching holes and touching screens to choose who will represent them in government for the coming years. But the scenery and the imagery vary widely, together painting a portrait of a nation that's diverse in its population, its geography and its culture.

Here's a selection of AP photos offering a taste of what voting looks like around the U.S., from an elementary school gym in Montana to a makeshift shelter in coastal New Jersey

FACT CHECK: Missteps in final presidential debate

2012-10-22T23:28:29-04:00

WASHINGTON (AP) — Voters didn't always get the straight goods when President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney made their case for foreign policy and national security leadership Monday night before their last super-sized audience of the campaign. A few of their detours into domestic issues were problematic too.

A look at some of their statements and how they compare with the facts:

ROMNEY on Syria: "What I'm afraid of is we've watched over the past year or so, first the president saying, 'Well, we'll let the U.N. deal with it.' And Assad — excuse me, Kofi Annan — came in and said we're going to try to have a cease-fire. That didn't work. Then it went to the Russians and said, 'Let's see if you can do something.' We should be playing the leadership role there."

OBAMA: "We are playing the leadership role."

THE FACTS: Under Obama, the United States has taken a lead in trying to organize Syria's splintered opposition, even if the U.S. isn't interested in military intervention or providing direct arms support to the rebels. The administration has organized dozens of meetings in Turkey and the Middle East aimed at rallying Syria's political groups and rebel formations to agree on a common vision for a democratic future after Syrian President Bashar Assad is defeated. And Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton brought dozens of nations together as part of the Friends of Syria group to combine aid efforts to Syria's opposition and help it win the support of as many as Syrians as possible. The U.S. also is involved in vetting recipients of military aid from America's Arab allies like Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

Romney is partly right in pointing out Obama's failure to win U.N. support for international action in Syria. But the Friends of Syria group has helped bring in hundreds of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid and other forms of assistance to Syrian civilians and the political opposition.

In trying to describe the strategic importance of seeing Assad defeated, Romney stumbled in saying Syria was Iran's "route to the sea." Iran has a large southern coastline with access to the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. It has no land border with Syria.

___

ROMNEY: Said that when he was Massachusetts governor, high-school students who graduated in the top quarter "got a four-year, tuition-free ride at any Massachusetts public institution of higher learning."

OBAMA: "That happened before you came into office."

ROMNEY: "That was actually mine, actually, Mr. President. You got that fact wrong."

THE FACTS: Romney was right. The John and Abigail Adams scholarship program began in 2004 when he was governor.

___

ROMNEY: "In the 2000 debates, there was no mention of terrorism."

THE FACTS: There was passing mention of terrorism in the 2000 debates. In the Oct. 17, 2000, debate between Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush, Gore talked about his work in Congress to "deal with the problems of terrorism and these new weapons of mass destruction." And in the vice presidential debate, Democrat Joe Lieberman defended the Clinton administration's record of preparing the armed forces to "meet the threats of the new generation of tomorrow, of weapons of mass destruction, of ballistic missiles, terrorism, cyber warfare." Romney's larger point, that the U.S. did not anticipate anything on the scale of terrorist threat that existed, is supported by the light attention paid to the subject in the debates.

___

OBAMA: "What I would not have had done was left 10,000 troops in Iraq that would tie us down. And that certainly would not help us in the Middle East."

THE FACTS: Obama was suggesting that he had never favored keeping U.S. troops in Iraq beyond the December 2011 withdrawal deadline that the Bush administration had negotiated with the Iraqi government. Actually, the Obama administration tried for many months to win Iraqi agreement to keeping several thousand American troops there beyond 2011 to continue training and advising the Iraqi armed forces. The talks broke down over a disagreement on legal immunity for U.S. troops.

FACT CHECK: Stumbles in latest presidential debate

2012-10-17T00:00:03-04:00

WASHINGTON (AP) — In the rough-and-tumble of a town hall-style presidential debate, the facts took something of a beating Tuesday night.

Mitt Romney wrongly claimed that it took 14 days for President Barack Obama to brand the assault on the U.S. Consulate in Libya a terrorist act. Obama yet again claimed that ending the Afghanistan and Iraq wars makes money available to "rebuild America," even though it doesn't.

A look at some of their claims:

OBAMA: The day after last month's attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, "I stood in the Rose Garden and I told the American people and the world that we are going to find out exactly what happened. That this was an act of terror and I also said that we're going to hunt down those who committed this crime."

ROMNEY: "I want to make sure we get that for the record, because it took the president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror."

OBAMA: "Get the transcript."

THE FACTS: Obama is correct in saying that he referred to Benghazi as an act of terrorism on Sept. 12, the day after the attack. From the Rose Garden, he said: "No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for. ... We will not waver in our commitment to see that justice is done for this terrible act."

But others in his administration repeated for several days its belief that the violence stemmed from protests over an American-made video ridiculing Islam. It took almost a month before officials acknowledged that those protests never occurred. And Romney is right in arguing that the administration has yet to explain why it took so long for that correction to be made or how it came to believe that the attack evolved from an angry demonstration.

___

OBAMA: "Let's take the money that we've been spending on war over the last decade to rebuild America, roads, bridges, schools. We do those things, not only is your future going to be bright, but America's future is going to be bright as well."

THE FACTS: What Obama didn't mention is that much of the money that has been paying for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was borrowed. In fact, the government borrows nearly 40 cents for every dollar it spends. Thus using money that had been earmarked for wars to build schools and infrastructure would involve even more borrowing, adding to the federal deficit.

___

ROMNEY: "As a matter of fact, oil production is down 14 percent this year on federal land, and gas production was down 9 percent. Why? Because the president cut in half the number of licenses and permits for drilling on federal lands and in federal waters."

OBAMA: "Very little of what Governor Romney just said is true. We've opened up public lands. We're actually drilling more on public lands than in the previous administration and my — the previous president was an oilman."

THE FACTS: Both statements ring true, as far as they go. Obama more correctly describes the bigger picture.

According to an Energy Department study published in the spring, sales of oil from federal areas fell 14 percent between 2010 and 2011 and sales of natural gas production fell 9 percent, supporting Romney's point. The lower oil production was a result mainly of a moratorium on offshore drilling imposed by the Obama administration after the April 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history.

According to the same report, though, oil production from federal areas is up 13 percent since Obama took office despite last year's dip, and analysts say Gulf oil production is expected to soon exceed its pre-spill levels.

Natural gas production from federal areas has been declining for years because drillers have found vast reserves of natural gas in formations under several states that are cheaper to access than most federally controlled areas.

___

OBAMA: "For young people who've come here, brought here often times by their parents, have gone to school here, pledged allegiance to the flag, think of this as their country and understand themselves as Americans in every way except having papers, we should make sure we give them a pathway to citizenship. And that's what I've done administratively."

THE FACTS: His administrative actions do not provide a pathway to citizenship. The administration is allowing as many as 1.7 million young illegal immigrants to apply to avoid deportation for up to two years and get a work permit. And the government has begun a policy of prosecutorial discretion under which illegal immigrants with long-standing ties to the U.S. and no criminal history are generally not arrested and deported by immigration authorities. But these steps do not extend legal status or a process resulting in citizenship.

___

ROMNEY: "I know he keeps saying, 'You want to take Detroit bankrupt.' Well, the president took Detroit bankrupt. You took General Motors bankrupt. You took Chrysler bankrupt. So when you say that I wanted to take the auto industry bankrupt, you actually did. And I think it's important to know that that was a process that was necessary to get those companies back on their feet, so they could start hiring more people. That was precisely what I recommended and ultimately what happened."

THE FACTS: What Romney recommended did not happen, and his proposed path probably would have forced General Motors and Chrysler out of business. He opposed using government money to bail out the automakers, instead favoring privately financed bankruptcy restructuring. But the automakers were bleeding cash and were poor credit risks. The banking system was in crisis. So private loans weren't available. Without government aid, both companies probably would have gone under and their assets sold in pieces.

___

OBAMA: "And what I want to do is build on the 5 million jobs that we've created over the last 30 months in the private sector alone."

THE FACTS: As he has done before, Obama is cherry-picking his numbers to make them sound better than they really are. He ignores the fact that public-sector job losses have dragged down overall job creation. Also, he chooses just to mention the past 30 months. That ignores job losses during his presidency up until that point. According to the Labor Department, about 4.5 million total jobs have been created over the past 30 months. But some 4.3 million jobs were lost during the earlier months of his administration. At this point, Obama is a net job creator, but only marginally.

___

ROMNEY: "The proof of whether a strategy is working or not is what the price is that you're paying at the pump. If you're paying less than you paid a year or two ago, why, then, the strategy is working. But you're paying more. When the president took office, the price of gasoline here in Nassau County was about $1.86 a gallon. Now, it's $4.00 a gallon. The price of electricity is up. If the president's energy policies are working, you're going to see the cost of energy come down."

THE FACTS: Presidents have almost no effect on energy prices; most are set on financial exchanges around the world. When Obama took office, the world was in the grip of a financial crisis and crude prices — and gasoline prices along with them — had plummeted because world demand had collapsed. Crude oil prices have since risen even as U.S. oil production has soared in recent years because global demand is reaching new heights as the developing economies of Asia use more oil.

Other energy prices have fallen during Obama's term. Electricity prices, when adjusted for inflation, are down, and homeowners are finding it much cheaper to heat their homes with natural gas. That's because natural gas production has surged, reducing prices both for homeowners and for utilities that burn gas to generate electricity.

___

OBAMA: "What I've also said is, for (those earning) above $250,000, we can go back to the tax rates we had when Bill Clinton was president."

THE FACTS: Not exactly. The Bush tax cuts set the top income rate at 35 percent. Under Obama's proposal to raise taxes on households earning more than $250,000, the president would return the top rate to the 39.6 percent set during the Clinton administration. But he neglected to mention that his health care law includes a new 0.9 percent Medicare surcharge on households earning over that amount — and that tax would be retained. The health care law also imposes a 3.8 percent tax on investment income for high earners. So tax rates would be higher for the wealthiest Americans than they were under Clinton.

___

ROMNEY: "I'm going to bring rates down across the board for everybody, but I'm going to limit deductions and exemptions and credits, particularly for people at the high end, because I am not going to have people at the high end pay less than they're paying now."

THE FACTS: Romney is proposing to cut all income tax rates by 20 percent, eliminate the estate tax and the alternative minimum tax, maintain and expand tax breaks for investment income, and do it all without adding to the deficit or shifting the tax burden from the wealthy to the middle class. He says he would pay for the tax cuts by reducing or eliminating tax deductions, exemptions and credits, but he can't achieve all of his goals it under the budget rules presidents must follow.

The Tax Policy Center, a Washington research group, says in a study that the tax cuts proposed by Romney would reduce federal tax revenues by about $5 trillion over 10 years. The study concludes that there aren't enough tax breaks for the wealthy to make up the lost revenue, so the proposal would either add to the deficit or shift more of the tax burden on to the middle class.

Romney's campaign cites studies by conservative academics and think tanks that say Romney's plan will spur economic growth, generating enough additional money to pay for the tax cuts without adding to the deficit or shifting the tax burden to the middle class. But Congress doesn't recognize those kinds of economic projections when it estimates the budget impact of tax proposals.

___

ROMNEY: "A recent study has shown that people in the middle class will see $4,000 a year in higher taxes as a result of the spending and borrowing of this administration."

THE FACTS: Romney's claim is based on an analysis by the conservative American Enterprise Institute that examines the amount of debt that has accumulated on Obama's watch and in a potential second term and computes how much it would cost to finance that debt through tax increases. Annual deficits under Obama have exceeded $1 trillion for each year of his term.

However, Obama is not responsible for all of the deficits that have occurred on his watch. Most of the federal budget — like Medicare, food stamps, Medicaid and Social Security — runs on autopilot, and no one in a leadership position in Washington has proposed deep cuts in those programs. And politicians in both parties voted two years ago the renew Bush-era tax cuts that have contributed to the deficit. Even under the strict spending cuts proposed by Romney, the debt would continue to rise, just not as fast.

___

Associated Press writers Tom Raum, Jonathan Fahey, Tom Krisher, Stephen Ohlemacher, Andrew Taylor, Bradley Klapper, Matthew Daly, Matthew Lee and Alicia A. Caldwell contributed to this report.

Catholics Biden, Ryan talk abortion in debate

2012-10-11T22:40:45-04:00

DANVILLE, Ky. (AP) — Vice presidential hopefuls Joe Biden and Paul Ryan say their Catholic faith informs their public policy decisions, but they come down on different sides of the abortion debate.

Biden, President Barack Obama's running mate, said his Catholicism teaches that life begins at conception but that he would not impose that belief on people of other faiths. Ryan, the running mate of GOP challenger Mitt Romney, said he opposes abortion but that the policy of a Romney administration would include exceptions in cases of rape, incest or when the life of the mother is at stake.

FACT CHECK: Slips in vice president's debate

2012-10-12T00:45:01-04:00

WASHINGTON (AP) — Anyone who paid attention to a hearing in Congress this week knew that the administration had been implored to beef up security at the U.S. Consulate in Libya before the deadly terrorist attack there. But in the vice presidential debate Thursday night, Joe Biden seemed unaware.

"We weren't told they wanted more security there," the vice president asserted flatly. During a night in which Biden and Republican rival Paul Ryan both drifted from the facts on a range of domestic and foreign issues, that was a standout.

A look at some of their claims:

BIDEN: "Well, we weren't told they wanted more security there. We did not know they wanted more security again. And by the way, at the time we were told exactly — we said exactly what the intelligence community told us that they knew. That was the assessment. And as the intelligence community changed their view, we made it clear they changed their view."

RYAN: "There were requests for more security."

THE FACTS: Ryan is right, judging by testimony from Obama administration officials at the hearing a day earlier.

Charlene R. Lamb, a deputy assistant secretary for diplomatic security, told lawmakers she refused requests for more security in Benghazi, saying the department wanted to train Libyans to protect the consulate. "Yes, sir, I said personally I would not support it," she said.

Eric Nordstrom, who was the top security official in Libya earlier this year, testified he was criticized for seeking more security. He said conversations he had with people in Washington led him to believe that it was "abundantly clear we were not going to get resources until the aftermath of an incident. How thin does the ice have to get before someone falls through?"

He said his exasperation reached a point where he told a colleague that "for me the Taliban is on the inside of the building."

___

RYAN: "Look at just the $90 billion in stimulus the vice president was in charge of overseeing — this $90 billion in green pork to campaign contributors and special interest groups."

THE FACTS: Dismissing an entire package of energy stimulus grants and loans as "green pork" ignores the help that was given to people to make their homes more energy efficient, grants to public entities constructing high speed rail lines and tax credits to manufacturers to install equipment fostering cleaner energy.

To be sure, there were notable failed investments, such as $528 million to the politically connected and now-bankrupt solar power company Solyndra. But Ryan's claim made it sound like every penny went down the drain.

More broadly, economists are nearly universal in saying Obama's $800 billion-plus stimulus passed in early 2009 helped create both public-sector and private-sector jobs, even if they fell short of what sponsors had hoped. Douglas Elmendorf, director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, estimated the stimulus saved or created more than 3 million jobs.

___

BIDEN: "We went out and rescued General Motors."

THE FACTS: Actually, the auto bailout of General Motors and Chrysler began under President George W. Bush. The Obama administration continued and expanded it.

___ RYAN: "And then they put this new Obamacare board in charge of cutting Medicare each and every year in ways that will lead to denied care for current seniors. This board, by the way, it's 15 people, the president's supposed to appoint them next year. And not one of them even has to have medical training."

THE FACTS: Ryan is referring to the Independent Payment Advisory Board, created under President Barack Obama's health care overhaul law. It has the power to force cuts in Medicare payments to service providers if costs rise above certain levels and Congress fails to act. But it doesn't look like the board will be cutting Medicare "each and every year," as Ryan asserts. Medicare costs are currently rising modestly and the government's own experts project the board's intervention will not be needed until 2018 and 2019 at the earliest — after Obama leaves office if re-elected to a second term.

___

BIDEN, when asked who would pay more taxes in Obama's second term: "People making a million dollars or more."

THE FACTS: Obama's proposed tax increase reaches farther down the income ladder than millionaires. He wants to roll back Bush-era tax cuts for individuals making over $200,000 and couples making more than $250,000.

___

RYAN: "We cannot allow Iran to gain a nuclear weapons capability. Now, let's take a look at where we've gone — come from. When Barack Obama was elected, they had enough fissile material — nuclear material — to make one bomb. Now they have enough for five. They're racing toward a nuclear weapon. They're four years closer toward a nuclear weapons capability."

THE FACTS: Ryan's claim is misleading. Iran isn't believed to have produced any of the highly enriched uranium needed to produce even one nuclear weapon, let alone five. That point isn't even disputed by Israel, whose Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu implored the world at the United Nations last month to create a "red line" at enrichment above 20 percent. Iran would have to enrich uranium at much higher levels to produce a weapon. There is intelligence suggesting that Iran has worked on weapon designs, but not that it has developed a delivery system for any potential nuclear warhead.

___

BIDEN: "What we did is, we saved $716 billion and put it back, applied it to Medicare."

THE FACTS: Contrary to Biden's assertion, not all the money cut from Medicare is going back into the program in some other way. The administration is cutting $716 billion over 10 years in Medicare payments to providers and using some of the money to improve benefits under the program. But most of the money is being used to expand health care coverage outside of Medicare.

___

RYAN: "What troubles me more is how this administration has handled all of these issues. Look at what they're doing through Obamacare with respect to assaulting the religious liberties of this country. They're infringing upon our first freedom, the freedom of religion, by infringing on Catholic charities, Catholic churches, Catholic hospitals."

THE FACTS: The requirement under the health care law that most employers cover birth control free of charge to female employees does not apply to churches, houses of worship, or other institutions directly involved in propagating a religious faith. It does apply to church-affiliated institutions such as hospitals and charities that serve the general public.

___

BIDEN: "Romney said 'No, let Detroit go bankrupt.'"

THE FACTS: GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney has gotten endless grief through the campaign for the headline put on his November 2008 opinion essay that he wrote for The New York Times. But his point was never that he wanted the auto industry to go down the tubes.

Romney opposed using government money to bail out Chrysler and General Motors, instead favoring privately financed bankruptcy restructuring. His prescription seemed improbable. Automakers were hemorrhaging cash and the banking system was in crisis, so private money wasn't available. Without the government money, it's likely both companies would have gone out of business. Romney did propose government-guaranteed private loans for both companies after bankruptcy.

___

RYAN: "We should have spoken out right away when the green revolution was up and starting, when the mullahs in Iran were attacking their people. We should not have called Bashar Assad a reformer when he was turning his Russian-provided guns on his own people.

THE FACTS: Neither President Barack Obama nor anyone else in his administration ever considered the Syrian leader a "reformer." The oft-repeated charge stems from an interview Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton gave in March 2011 noting that "many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he's a reformer." She did not endorse that view. The comment was widely perceived to be a knock at senators such as John Kerry of Massachusetts who maintained cordial relations with Assad in the months leading up to his crackdown on protesters.

___

RYAN: "This one tax would actually tax about 53 percent of small-business income."

BIDEN: "Ninety-seven percent of the small businesses in America pay less — make less than $250,000."

THE FACTS: Both are correct, but incomplete, when sizing up the effect on small business of raising taxes for individuals making more than $200,000 and married couples making more than $250,000, as Obama wants to do. Republicans say that would hit small-business owners who report business income on their individual income tax; Democrats say the overwhelming majority of small businesses would not be affected.

According to a 2010 report by the Joint Committee on Taxation, the official scorekeeper for Congress, about 3 percent of people who report business income would face a tax increase under Obama's plan. That support's Biden's point.

The same report says those business owners account for about half of all business income. That supports Ryan.

___

RYAN: Notes that there have been four rounds of U.N. sanctions on Iran to deter its nuclear program, three during the Bush administration and one under Obama. "And the only reason we got it is because Russia watered it down and prevented the sanctions from hitting the central bank. Mitt Romney proposed these sanctions in 2007. In Congress, I've been fighting for these sanctions since 2009. The administration was blocking us every step of the way." He also noted the administration has granted 20 waivers to the sanctions.

THE FACTS: The argument that the administration was watering down or delaying sanctions is misleading. For sanctions to work, they need maximum global agreement and cooperation. Russia watered down U.N. sanctions not only under Obama, but also under Bush. And it's highly unlikely that a Romney administration, particularly led by a candidate who says Russia is the biggest geostrategic threat to the U.S., would be able to get Russia completely on board with what the U.S. wants to — either in Iran or Syria.

The more absolute U.S. sanctions that Ryan and others have pushed in Congress would have punished U.S. allies, including most countries in Europe as well as Japan and South Korea, along with good friends like India and Singapore — without the exemptions that were put in place.

The administration has indeed granted 20 waivers, to countries that made significant reductions in Iranian oil imports. And the sanctions are pinching; Iran has been convulsed over the past week with protests over the collapse of its currency, which most people say is a direct result of the sanctions that the U.S. and others have imposed.

___

Associated Press writers Bradley Klapper, Tom Raum, Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Stephen Ohlemacher, Tom Krisher and Matthew Lee contributed to this report.

Federal produce-testing program spared — for now

2012-07-17T11:51:29-04:00

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The nation's largest produce-safety testing program narrowly escaped closure thanks to a last-minute grudging reprieve from the Agriculture Department, and finding a permanent solution to keep tainted fruits and vegetables from reaching consumers could take an even bigger effort.

Each year, the tiny program screens thousands of produce samples. It has found more than two dozen bacteria-laced examples that prompted recalls of lettuce, tomatoes and other foods from grocery stores.

It was at risk of being scrapped after President Barack Obama's proposed budget slashed the effort's funding earlier this year. But USDA spokesman Justin DeJong said late Monday that although the Microbiological Data Program "does not align with USDA's core mission," it will operate through December, using existing agreements with states to keep testing for salmonella, E. coli and listeria over the next six months.

Public health officials and food safety advocates have long argued that getting rid of the program would leave the country without a crucial tool to investigate outbreaks of deadly foodborne illnesses.

If samples test positive for bacteria, it can trigger nationwide recalls and keep contaminated produce from reaching the public.

Dr. Robert Tauxe, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's top food-germ investigator, has said the program's information can be key to pinpointing foods tied to outbreaks, and it could not easily be replaced by companies' internal tests or more modest federal sampling programs.

The CDC said contaminated fruits and vegetables caused nearly one-third of the major multistate foodborne illness outbreaks last year.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., a longtime food safety advocate, said she would continue to push for the program to stay open beyond the year's end, since the House and Senate have not included any funding for it in their agriculture spending bills.

"I am glad to hear the program will continue, but a temporary reprieve is not enough," she said. "It is unacceptable for this crucial, cost-effective program to be eliminated."

Finding more money for the modest program, which cost $4.3 million to run last year, may be tough in this economic climate. The FDA is already squeezed for food safety dollars, receiving so little money for food inspections that some facilities are only inspected every five to 10 years.

In recent years, industry leaders from United Fresh Produce Association and other major trade groups have repeatedly urged the government to get rid of the USDA program, saying it has cost growers millions of dollars in produce recalls and unfairly targeted farmers who aren't responsible for contaminating the food.

They want the private sector to do more testing, rather than allowing the USDA to take random samples of fruits and vegetables at massive grocery store distribution centers, after produce has already left company control.

Ray Gilmer, a United Fresh spokesman, did not immediately comment Monday. He has said the industry supports funding the FDA to do more scientifically rigorous tests that would help monitor public health.

___

Follow Garance Burke on Twitter at http://twitter.com/garanceburke

Drought now grips more than half of the nation

Illinois,United States — 2012-07-17T11:36:01-04:00

WALTONVILLE, Ill. (AP) — The nation's widest drought in decades is spreading, with more than half of the continental United States now in some stage of drought and most of the rest enduring abnormally dry conditions.

Only in the 1930s and the 1950s has a drought covered more land, according to federal figures released Monday. So far, there's little risk of a Dust Bowl-type catastrophe, but crop losses could mount if rain doesn't come soon.

In its monthly drought report, the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., announced that 55 percent of the country was in a moderate to extreme drought at the end of June. The parched conditions expanded last month in the West, the Great Plains and the Midwest, fueled by the 14th warmest and 10th driest June on record, the report said.

Topsoil has turned dry while "crops, pastures and rangeland have deteriorated at a rate rarely seen in the last 18 years," the report said.

The percentage of affected land is the largest since December 1956, when 58 percent of the country was covered by drought, and it rivals even some years in the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s, though experts point out that this year's weather has been milder than that period, and farming practices have been vastly improved since then.

In southern Illinois, Kenny Brummer has lost 800 acres of corn that he grows to feed his 400 head of cattle and 30,000 hogs. Now he's scrambling to find hundreds of thousands of bushels of replacement feed.

"Where am I going to get that from? You have concerns about it every morning when you wake up," said Brummer, who farms near Waltonville. "The drought is bad, but that's just half of the problem on this farm."

Around a third of the nation's corn crop has been hurt, with some of it so badly damaged that farmers have already cut down their withered plants to feed to cattle. As of Sunday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said, 38 percent of the corn crop was in poor or very poor condition, compared with 30 percent a week earlier.

"This is definitely the epicenter — right in the heart of the Midwest," said climatologist Mark Svoboda with the Nebraska-based National Drought Mitigation Center.

It's all a huge comedown for farmers who had expected a record year when they sowed 96.4 million acres in corn, the most since 1937. The Department of Agriculture initially predicted national average corn yields of 166 bushels per acre this year.

The agency has revised that projection down to 146, and more reductions are possible if conditions don't improve.

The lower projection is still an improvement over the average yields of around 129 bushels a decade ago. But already tight supplies and fears that the drought will get worse before it gets better have been pushing up grain prices, which are likely to translate into higher food prices for consumers, particularly for meat and poultry.

Monday's report was based on data going back to 1895 called the Palmer Drought Index. It feeds into the widely watched and more detailed U.S. Drought Monitor, which reported last week that 61 percent of the continental U.S. was in a moderate to exceptional drought. However, the weekly Drought Monitor goes back only 12 years, so climatologists use the Palmer Drought Index for comparing droughts before 2000.

Climatologists have labeled this year's dry spell a "flash drought" because it developed in a matter of months, not over multiple seasons or years.

The current drought is similar to the droughts of the 1950s, which weren't as intense as those of the 1930s, said Jake Crouch, a climatologist with the National Climatic Data Center. And farming has changed a lot since the Dust Bowl era. Better soil conservation has reduced erosion, and modern hybrids are much more resistant to drought.

But Crouch said it's important to understand that this drought is still unfolding.

"We can't say with certainty how long this might last now. Now that we're going up against the two largest droughts in history, that's something to be wary of," Crouch said. "The coming months are really going to be the determining factor of how big a drought it ends up being."

In northwest Kansas, Brian Baalman's cattle pastures have dried up, along with probably half of his corn crop. He desperately needs some rain to save the rest of it, and he's worried what will happen if the drought lingers into next year.

"I have never seen this type of weather before like this. A lot of old timers haven't either," Baalman said. "I just think we are seeing history in the making."

The federal government is already moving to help farmers and ranchers.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack last week announced plans for streamlining the aid process. A major goal is to cut the time it takes to declare an agricultural disaster area. He also reduced interest rates for emergency loans and made it cheaper for farmers to graze livestock or cut hay on lands otherwise locked up in a conservation program.

Some state governments are stepping in, too. In Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker declared a state of emergency in 42 counties last week to speed up the issuance of permits for temporarily using stream or lake water for irrigation.

During a visit Monday to a southern Illinois corn and soybean farm, Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn announced that drought-affected farmers would be eligible for state debt restructuring and loan programs in addition to the aid the USDA announced last week.

Quinn ventured into a corn field where he spent some time looking for an actual ear of corn. When he found one and peeled off the husk, there were no kernels.

Two-thirds of Illinois is in what's classified as a severe drought or worse. Neighboring Indiana is even worse, with 70 percent in at least a severe drought.

Brummer could normally count on corn yields of 170 bushels per acre. He expects to get just 10 bushels this year, if he gets anything at all.

The top of the cornstalks are an unhealthy pale green, he said. Many of them have no ears, and "if there are there are a few kernels, they don't seem to know if they should die or make a grain."

Crop insurance will cover up to 150 bushels per acre. But no coverage is available for Brummer's livestock, so he figures he'll lose $350,000 to $400,000 on that side of the operation.

Not long ago, Brummer rejoiced along with countless other Midwest growers about getting their crops in the ground early.

"It looked really good until about a month ago," he said. "Then the concerns started, and it's been downhill ever since."

___

Karnowski reported from Minneapolis. Associated Press Writer Roxana Hegeman contributed to this story from Wichita, Kan.

Governors put off health care questions, for now

2012-07-16T10:56:49-04:00

WILLIAMSBURG, Va. (AP) — Millions of uninsured people may have to wait until after Election Day to find out if and how they can get coverage through President Barack Obama's health care law.

More than two weeks after the Supreme Court gave the green light to Obama's signature legislative achievement, many governors from both parties said they haven't decided how their states will proceed on two parts under their control: an expansion of Medicaid, expected to extend coverage to roughly 15 million low-income people, and new insurance exchanges, projected to help an additional 15 million or so purchase private insurance.

In some states, such as Colorado, Oklahoma and Wyoming, governors said they're crunching the numbers to determine what's best for their residents. But in other states, including Virginia, Nebraska and Wisconsin, Republican governors said not to expect a decision before Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney square off in November.

If Romney wins, the argument goes, he'll work to throw out the health care overhaul, and the issue will be moot.

"I don't think I can look the taxpayers of Virginia in the eye and say I'm going to spend a lot of your money building exchanges that four months from now I may not need," Gov. Bob McDonnell, R-Va., said on the sidelines of the National Governors Association meeting.

Although the high court upheld the requirement that individuals either have insurance or pay a fine, the justices undercut Obama's plan to get almost all Americans insured, ruling that states can opt out of the expansion of Medicaid, the government-run insurance plan. People earning up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level qualify for Medicaid under the health care law, except in states that reject the expansion.

The Obama administration said last week that people won't be fined for not having insurance in states that turn down the expansion, meaning Obama's hard-fought overhaul could fall far short of the 30 million or more uninsured he had hoped would get coverage.

Also left to the governors is what to do about the exchanges — Internet-based markets designed to offer one-stop shopping for insurance — that are also part of law. States are supposed to set up their own exchanges, but if they don't, the federal government will run them instead.

About a half-dozen states have announced plans to forgo the Medicaid expansion and relinquish the massive infusion of federal dollars that would come along with it. All have Republican governors, many of whom argued Medicaid is an underfunded entitlement already weighing down their cash-strapped budgets.

Others faulted the Obama administration for failing to provide the specifics that states need to make an informed decision. That sentiment was echoed in a list of 30 questions about the law that the Republican Governors Association sent Obama last week.

The law picks up the entire cost of covering more people for the first three years, and then drops to 90 percent, with states covering the remaining 10 percent. It's a great deal, proponents argue, especially compared to the current Medicaid rates, wherein Washington pays as little as half of the cost in some states.

But a handful of GOP governors attending the NGA meeting said they suspected a bait-and-switch in which states would agree to the expansion only to see Congress cut some or all of the funds, leaving governors on the hook and potentially bankrupting state budgets.

"At any whim they could just pull the money," Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer told The Associated Press. "So yeah, I'm a little gun-shy."

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who survived a recall election in June, said in an interview that governors were grumbling among themselves about the federal government's track record on special education. Congress in 1975 pledged to fund 40 percent of the cost of special education, but routinely has fallen far short of that commitment.

The politics are tricky for governors weighing how to proceed. Just one-third of Americans supported the health care overhaul in Associated Press-GfK poll conducted in mid-June. But because federal tax dollars are covering the Medicaid expansion, states that opt out are essentially consigning their residents to subsidize coverage for those in other states.

Also, Alabama, Pennsylvania, Utah and other states that are still weighing their options were among those that sued the federal government in an attempt to have the law overturned. If they were so opposed then, the law's supporters ask, why are they leaving the door open to implementing it now?

Both the Medicaid expansion and the exchanges don't kick in until 2014, meaning states technically have some breathing room before they need to make a final decision. But governors who've agreed to take the expansion accused their more taciturn colleagues of playing election-year politics at the expense of taxpayers.

"It's not only irresponsible, it's disingenuous," Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin said at a news conference organized by Democratic governors. "To say 'I'm going to criticize the plan, but I won't tell you whether I'm taking the loot until after the election,' that's what breeds cynicism in the American people."

Shumlin didn't back down even when reminded that some Democrats too are taking the wait-and-see approach, including Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper.

"I believe my comments should apply to every governor in the nation, on a bipartisan basis," Shumlin said.

___

Reach Josh Lederman on Twitter at http://twitter.com/joshledermanAP

Visa, MasterCard in $6B settlement over card fees

MasterCard Incorporated — 2012-07-14T12:42:01-04:00

NEW YORK (AP) — Visa, MasterCard and major banks agreed to pay retailers at least $6 billion to settle a long-running lawsuit that alleged the card issuers conspired to fix the fees that stores pay to accept credit cards. As part of the settlement, announced late Friday, stores from Rite Aid to Kroger will be allowed to charge customers more if they pay using a credit card.

The pact, which is being called by lawyers involved in the case the largest antitrust settlement in U.S. history, is seen as a major victory for merchants that have long complained about the billions of dollars in so-called "swipe" or "interchange" fees that they pay to banks for purchases made using plastic. But at a time when shoppers increasingly are using credit and debit cards, merchants will face a dilemma: Whether to charge shoppers extra for using plastic, and if so, how to do so without angering them.

Marilyn Landis, who was last year's chairman of the National Small Business Association, said that the settlement is a victory for small businesses across the country because it could ultimately lead to banks lowering the fees they charge stores for customers' credit card purchases.

Landis, who owns Pittsburgh-based financial services firm Basic Business Concepts, said that would be a big relief. She's now paying 3.75 percent each time a customer pays with a credit card. If bank card companies reduce the fees they charge her to 2.75 percent, she would save a dollar on every $100 in sales.

"That's huge," she said.

According to the National Retail Federation, the nation's largest retail group, swipe fees costs for stores total about $30 billion per year. Mallory Duncan, senior vice president and general counsel for the group, said the settlement is a step in the right direction.

"What we need are changes in the rules that bring about transparency and competition that would be here for years to come," he said.

The dispute between stores and banks dates back to 2005. That's when large retailers, including Kroger Co., Safeway Inc. and Walgreen Co. began filing price-fixing lawsuits against Visa, MasterCard and other banks.

The retailers claimed the credit card issuers worked together to fix the fees that stores pay to accept credit and debit cards. The fees, which vary depending on the type of store and the type of card issues, average about 2 percent of the price of a purchase.

Visa and MasterCard make money on the fees that stores pay for each customer that uses credit or debit cards for their purchases. The fees are set by card processing networks but collected by, and split with, the banks that issue the cards.

The card companies long have defended the fees they charge stores. They say stores benefit from being able to accept credit and debit cards from customers, who often spend more when they're using plastic instead of cash or checks.

Retailers fought to charge customers who use plastic for their purchases extra. They've argued that the ability to charge customers who use plastic more for their purchases would reduce their costs for accepting the cards.

But up until now, Visa and MasterCard have banned stores from charging customers who use credit cards more. Merchants, however, have been allowed to offer customers discounts if they pay with cash. Some gas stations do this, for example.

As part of the settlement, credit card companies have agreed to reduce swipe fees for eight months. The temporary reprieve on fees is valued at $1.2 billion. The settlement does not apply to debit cards, which have grown in popularity for small-value transactions.

"These new rules will give merchants the tools they need to put pressure on the credit card networks to lower interchange or swipe fees, which are the second-or third-highest cost of doing business for many retailers," said Patrick J. Coughlin, senior trial counsel at Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd LLP, and one of the lawyers for the plaintiffs.

Joseph W. Saunders, chairman and chief executive of Visa Inc., said in a statement Friday that he's comfortable with the agreement, which he believes will not affect the company's earnings outlook.

"We believe settling this case is in the best interests of all parties," he said.

Noah Hanft, MasterCard Inc.'s general counsel, said in a separate statement on Friday that the decision to settle "was based on our belief that MasterCard and our stakeholders are best served by an amicable resolution."

"Although we have strong defenses to all claims, a settlement avoids years of litigation and uncertainties that are inherent in such cases," he said. "We believe that today's settlements should resolve all issues with the merchant community."

Visa and MasterCard stock both jumped in after-hours trading. Visa climbed 2.8 percent, and MasterCard rose 3.7 percent.

2 plead guilty in Miss. chemotherapy fraud case

2012-07-13T18:56:46-04:00

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — A cancer doctor and her former billing agent pleaded guilty Friday for their parts in a multimillion-dollar health care fraud case in which prosecutors said old needles were reused, chemotherapy drugs were diluted and public and private insurance was overbilled millions.

Dr. Meera Sachdeva, who founded the Rose Cancer Center in the south Mississippi town of Summit in 2005, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Jackson to one count of health care fraud and two counts of making false statements.

Standing before the judge wearing black-framed glasses and shackles with her long black hair draped over an orange prison jumpsuit, the 50-year-old doctor looked straight ahead while her lawyer denied the most serious allegations that she diluted chemotherapy drugs.

One of her patients, 76-year-old Wayne Spring, watched intently and left the court disappointed. He told The Associated Press that he contracted two bacterial infections from the clinic and now has regular tests for HIV and hepatitis. He beat cancer, but the ordeal left him shaken.

"She liked to have killed me," Spring said. "I'm disappointed in the whole thing."

Sachdeva faces up to 20 years in prison. If convicted on all counts she could have faced up to 165 years in prison and more than $3.2 million in fines.

Spring's son, Kirk, wanted Sachdeva to admit to the more serious allegations and was disappointed most of the charges were dropped.

"She's going to pay her due. No matter what happens in here, she will pay her due one day," he said just outside the courtroom.

Sachdeva's lawyer, Robert McDuff, told the U.S. District Judge Daniel P. Jordan III that his client admits to billing for treatments that happened when she was out of the country, but denied diluting drugs. Doctors are required to be in the office when chemotherapy treatments are given. The bills to Medicaid and Medicare alone were for about $15.1 million.

McDuff had no comment after the hearing.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Scott Gilbert said Sachdeva billed for more drugs than she had bought from suppliers.

The Mississippi Health Department closed the clinic in July 2011 because of "unsafe infection control practices" after 11 patients were hospitalized with the same bacterial infection. The scare led officials to test nearly 300 cancer patients for infections such as HIV. The department has said none of the patients tested had blood-borne viral infections related to the clinic's care. However, a civil lawsuit claims at least one patient died about the time the clinic was shut down from HIV he contracted there.

Sachdeva, a naturalized citizen from India, has been held without bond since her arrest last August because she's considered a flight risk. Prosecutors say she had considerable assets, including bank accounts in her native country, despite the seizure of about $6 million.

Monica Weeks, who handled the clinic's billing from her Ridgeland firm, Medical Billing Group, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit fraud. The prosecutor said she provided Sachdeva with information that was used to falsify nine patients' charts ahead of an audit and lied to investigators about documents she removed from the clinic.

"The conduct to which Monica Weeks pled guilty today involved nine patient charts and less than $20,000," her lawyer, Cliff Johnson said in a statement.

"The facts the government recited to the court as the basis for Monica's plea do not include any action which jeopardized the health or safety of a single patient. Ms. Weeks has accepted responsibility for her actions, and she and her family look forward to putting this entire ordeal behind them," Johnson said.

Sentencing for both women is Oct. 1.

Office manager Brittany McCoskey pleaded guilty May 17 to one count of false statements and awaits sentencing.

___

Follow Mohr at http://www.twitter.com/holbrookmohr.

Obama spends nearly $100 million on campaign ads

Ohio,United States — 2012-07-14T12:03:01-04:00

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama's campaign has spent nearly $100 million on television commercials in selected battleground states so far, unleashing a sustained early barrage designed to create lasting, negative impressions of Republican Mitt Romney before he and his allies ramp up for the fall.

In a reflection of campaign strategy, more than one-fifth of the president's ad spending has been in Ohio, a state that looms as a must-win for Romney more so than for Obama. Florida ranks second and Virginia third, according to organizations that track media spending and other sources.

About three-quarters of the president's advertising has been critical of Romney as Obama struggles to turn the election into a choice between him and his rival, rather than a referendum on his own handling of the weak economy. Obama's television ad spending dwarfs the Romney campaign's so far by a margin of 4-1 or more. It is at rough parity with the Republican challenger and several outside GOP-led organizations combined. They appear positioned to outspend the president and his allies this fall, perhaps heavily.

The latest attack ad, which began airing Friday, accuses the Republican of favoring a 25 percent tax cut for millionaires, tax breaks for oil companies and corporations that move jobs overseas and a tax increase for working families. By contrast, it says, the president wants "the wealthy to pay a little more so the middle class pays less."

Democrats and even some Republicans agree the effort to cast Romney as an unfit steward for the economy shows sign of making some headway. Yet GOP strategists hasten to add that the former Massachusetts governor has ample time to counter, particularly with recent signs of a struggling economy and the fall campaign yet to begin.

"Despite all of the negative advertising from the Obama campaign, polling numbers are exactly where they were before they started this onslaught," the Romney campaign said in a memo distributed this week, referring to a rolling average of polls.

Yet Romney released a scathing ad on Thursday designed to respond to some of Obama's charges, the sort of rebuttal that often can signal concern that an attack is hitting home. In 2008, "candidate Obama lied about Hillary Clinton," the ad said, adding there was no truth to the charges that Romney was associated with companies that outsourced jobs.

Some surveys suggest shifts in the electoral landscape. A recent poll by Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that Romney has lost ground in the past month on the question of which candidate was better able to improve the economy.

"They wanted to define Romney before he could define himself, and by every indication they're doing a very effective job of that" said Jim Jordan, a Democratic strategist who was campaign manager for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004.

According to strategists in both parties, focus groups with voters indicate the public knows relatively little about Romney's background, making the subject generally fertile territory for anyone trying to create an impression.

Romney has twice run for president. But even in this year's Republican primaries, his own campaign spent less money on television ads than Restore Our Future, a superPAC that aided him. Most of the outside group's efforts consisted of attacks on Romney's GOP rivals, rather than testimonials to his own background and character.

While outside groups make a difference, "what campaigns said about the candidates is the most important thing" in a race, said Terry Nelson, a Republican strategist who had a senior position in President George W. Bush's re-election campaign.

Another Republican strategist, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid offending the campaign, said Obama's commercials attacking Romney are quickly defining him and the strategy is effective.

But Carl Forti, one of the strategists involved with Restore Our Future, said Obama's strategy is more defensive than it might appear.

"I don't think he's got a choice. He has to try to change the dynamic now, but the polling indicates it's not working. He doesn't appear to be making any headway in the polls," he said.

There is no dispute about the intensity of the general election ad wars, which began in April with Rick Santorum's withdrawal from the race for the Republican nomination.

"There are more advertisers in fewer markets, spending more money and advertising at a higher frequency than in previous elections," said Elizabeth Wilner, vice president of Kantar Media/CMAG, which monitors advertising.

Wilner said viewers in Columbus, Ohio, "are seeing more ads right now than they were seeing in September of 2008," a period when campaigns traditionally ramp up for the fall. In Iowa, more money has been spent on television ads per electoral vote than in all of 2008, she added.

Obama's campaign has launched four commercials this month, including the attack ad that began during the day.

Two others accuse Romney of having ties to companies that outsource U.S. jobs to low-wage countries overseas. The final one says the former governor supported a law to ban all abortions, including in cases of rape and incest, and wants to end federal funding for Planned Parenthood.

Ads in Ohio, Florida and Virginia account for roughly half of the Obama's campaign ad spending, according to records maintained by groups that track spending and other sources. No Republican has ever been elected president without winning Ohio, and Romney's chances of a victory would be all but extinguished if the president wins either of the two other states.

The Obama campaign also has advertised in Colorado, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, on both broadcast and local cable. In some of those states, it has run Spanish-language commercials.

Auditors say billions likely wasted in Iraq work

Iraq — 2012-07-14T03:54:01-04:00

WASHINGTON (AP) — After years of following the paper trail of $51 billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars provided to rebuild a broken Iraq, the U.S. government can say with certainty that too much was wasted. But it can't say how much.

In what it called its final audit report, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Funds on Friday spelled out a range of accounting weaknesses that put "billions of American taxpayer dollars at risk of waste and misappropriation" in the largest reconstruction project of its kind in U.S. history.

"The precise amount lost to fraud and waste can never be known," the report said.

The auditors found huge problems accounting for the huge sums, but one small example of failure stood out: A contractor got away with charging $80 for a pipe fitting that its competitor was selling for $1.41. Why? The company's billing documents were reviewed sloppily by U.S. contracting officers or were not reviewed at all.

With dry understatement, the inspector general said that while he couldn't pinpoint the amount wasted, it "could be substantial."

Asked why the exact amount squandered can never be determined, the inspector general's office referred The Associated Press to a report it did in February 2009 titled "Hard Lessons," in which it said the auditors — much like the reconstruction managers themselves — faced personnel shortages and other hazards.

"Given the vicissitudes of the reconstruction effort — which was dogged from the start by persistent violence, shifting goals, constantly changing contracting practices and undermined by a lack of unity of effort — a complete accounting of all reconstruction expenditures is impossible to achieve," the report concluded.

In that same report, the inspector general, Stuart Bowen, recalled what then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld asked when they met shortly after Bowen started in January 2004: "Why did you take this job? It's an impossible task."

By law, Bowen's office reports to both the secretary of defense and the secretary of state. It goes out of business in 2013.

Bowen's office has spent more than $200 million tracking the reconstruction funds, and in addition to producing numerous reports, his office has investigated criminal fraud that has resulted in 87 indictments, 71 convictions and $176 million in fines and other penalties. These include civilians and military members accused of kickbacks, bribery, bid-rigging, fraud, embezzlement and outright theft of government property and funds.

Much, however, apparently got overlooked. Example: A $35 million Pentagon project was started in December 2006 to establish the Baghdad airport as an international economic gateway, and the inspector general found that by the end of 2010 about half the money was "at risk of being wasted" unless someone else completed the work.

Of the $51 billion that Congress approved for Iraq reconstruction, about $20 billion was for rebuilding Iraqi security forces and about $20 billion was for rebuilding the country's basic infrastructure. The programs were run mainly by the Defense Department, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

A key weakness found by Bowen's inspectors was inadequate reviewing of contractors' invoices.

In some cases invoices were checked months after they had been paid because there were too few government contracting officers. Bowen found a case in which the State Department had only one contracting officer in Iraq to validate more than $2.5 billion in spending on a DynCorp contract for Iraqi police training.

"As a result, invoices were not properly reviewed, and the $2.5 billion in U.S. funds were vulnerable to fraud and waste," the report said. "We found this lack of control to be especially disturbing since earlier reviews of the DynCorp contract had found similar weaknesses."

In that case, the State Department eventually reconciled all of the old invoices and as of July 2009 had recovered more than $60 million.

The report touched on a problem that cropped up in virtually every major aspect of the U.S. war effort in Iraq, namely, the consequences of fighting an insurgency that proved more resilient than the Pentagon had foreseen. That not only made reconstruction more difficult, dangerous and costly, but also left the U.S. military unprepared for the grind of multiple troop deployments, the tactics of an adaptable insurgency and the complexity of battlefield wounds. It also left the U.S. government short of the expertise it needed to monitor contractors.

Although the audit was labeled as final, a spokesman for Bowen's office, Christopher M. Griffith, said several more will be done to provide additional details on what the U.S. got for its reconstruction dollars and what was wasted.

___

Robert Burns can be followed on Twitter at http://twitter.com/robertburnsAP

___

Online:

The auditor report can be found at http://www.sigir.mil/files/audits/12-017.pdf#view=fit