Welcome back to Hotline Sort. In today's edition, Minnesota headed to shutdown mode, Glenn Beck leaves Fox, and a Thaddeus is running for president. Here's today's rundown:
9. Former President Bill Clinton told Bloomberg that President Obama will follow in his footsteps, winning a second term because "he's got a better economic record than he's gotten credit for."
Clinton's keys to reviving the stagnant economy? Speeding up hiring, quickening the pace of retrofitting buildings to make them more energy efficient, and streamlining the settlement of bad mortgage debt in order to add millions of jobs to the economy.
8. After Gov. Mark Dayton, D-Minn., and Republican lawmakers failed to reach agreement on a budget deal, Minnesota's state government shut down as the clock hit midnight. Dayton, narrowly elected in 2010 despite the GOP's sweep of the state legislature, has been calling for higher taxes on high-income earners -- which Minnesota Republicans have rejected.
University of Minnesota political science professor Lawrence Jacobs told the New York Times: "It's a state that had a well-earned reputation for being well governed, where, at the end of the day, politics were done in a fair and efficient manner. And it's now on the cusp of ungovernability. There's a new ethic here that compromise is weakness."
Dayton's predecessor, Republican Tim Pawlenty, and Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., a former state senator, are both running for president. Will they weigh in on their home state's budget fight?
7. Make sure to check out Hotline TV writer
Amanda Munoz-Temple's
report on the changes afoot at CBS' "Early Show" -- where network management is putting a higher emphasis on hard news (including politics) over tabloid fodder.
Meanwhile on Fox News, Glenn Beck signed off from the network Thursday afternoon, and will be replaced by a new show, "The Five," that features a rotating panel of political pundits. The new contributors include: Juan Williams, former Bush spokeswoman Dana Perino and, yes, Geraldo Rivera.
6. Rep.
Ron Kind, D-Wis., said he
will decide whether he's running for the Senate later this summer after the state's recall elections. Kind is considered one of the Democrats' leading candidates to succeed retiring Sen. Herb Kohl, D-Wis., with former Sen. Russ Feingold and Rep. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., also viewed as prospective Democratic candidates
5. Democrat
Janice Hahn raised more than five times the cash of Republican
Craig Huey in the final FEC filing period before their July 12 runoff in the special election to succeed former Rep.
Jane Harman, D-Calif.
Hahn brought in $677,000 from April 28 until June 22, while Craig Huey only raised $127,000. But Huey, who's largely self-funding his increasingly competitive bid, also put in $195,000 of his own money. Hahn has $695,000 in the bank for the final stretch, compared to Huey's just $56,500.
A sign that Hahn hasn't put away the race in the heavily-Democratic district: She's launched a new
TV ad charging that Huey ripped off senior citizens through direct mailed that promised investment opportunities and cures for Alzheimer's.
4. Congressman who? Rep.
Thaddeus McCotter, R-Mich,
will be running for president, kicking off his campaign Saturday. Former Iowa House Speaker Chris Rants is expected to sign on as his chief campaign adviser.
3. The White House is now setting a July 22 deadline as the drop-dead date for striking a budget deal, the
Wall Street Journal reports, as they believe it will take at least a week to draft legislation and get it passed through both houses of Congress before August. 2.
And Bloomberg
reported yesterday that Treasury Secretary
Timothy Geithner is looking to leave the administration after negotiations over the debt ceiling fight are completed. Geithner is the last senior member of the president's initial economic team still with the administration.
2. Former Utah Gov.
Jon Huntsman announced he raised $4.1 million in the second quarter for the presidential campaign, but a just under half of that came from his own fortune. It's a respectable figure, given that he entered the race just weeks ago, but it's expected to be a far cry from the tally of frontrunner, former Massachusetts Gov.
Mitt Romney.
But Pawlenty now has a benchmark for his fundraising totals -- if he can't outdistance the more-moderate Huntsman in fundraising despite being in the race much longer, it's not a good sign for the health of his campaign.
1. While every other Republican presidential candidate is focused on one of the early primary states, Romney is in Pennsylvania. Campaigning at a boarded-up steel plant in Allentown on Thursday that Obama once visited to promote his stimulus plan, he called the president's handling of the economy a failure.
Romney's money quote: "The plant here had been open 100 years; it survived the Great Depression. It couldn't survive the Obama economy."
In the 15-minute appearance, Romney never mentioned the names of his Republican primary challengers, further underscoring the point that he wants to be seen as the inevitable nominee -- and is already running a general election campaign against the president.
Obama, meanwhile, attended a nearby fundraiser in Philadelphia, his first stop in the Keystone State since officially announcing his re-election campaign.
-- Jessica Taylor contributed to this report.
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