Harry Coates
The Oklahoman
SEMINOLE ~ More than a year after an affair between a lobbyist and lawmaker tanked a multimillion-dollar project to build a juvenile center, Sen. Harry Coates and Haley Atwood have divorced their spouses, married and opened their home to foster children.
“We can be bitter about it, but what’s happened has happened,” Coates, R-Seminole, said of the scandal and fallout from the affair.
The H
ill
A new poll shows trouble for Democrats in the key battleground state of Missouri, with President Obama down 9 points to GOP candidate Mitt Romney and Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) trailing all three of her possible Republican opponents.
A new Mason-Dixon survey, conducted for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and News 4, finds presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney leading President Obama 51-42 percent among registered voters.
Obama holds a 51 percent unfavorable rating in the state with 34 favorable, challenging numbers three months from election day. Romney holds a 39 percent favorable rating to 27 unfavorable.
Fox News
An Indiana-based medical equipment manufacturer says it’s scrapping plans to open five new plants in the coming years because of a looming tax tied to President Obama’s health care overhaul law.
Cook Medical claims the tax on medical devices, set to take effect next year, will cost the company roughly $20 million a year, cutting into money that would otherwise go toward expanding into new facilities over the next five years.
“This is the equivalent of about a plant a year that we’re not going to be able to build,” a company spokesman told FoxNews.com.
He said the original plan was to build factories in “hard-pressed” Midwestern communities, each employing up to 300 people. But those factories cost roughly the same amount as the projected cost of the new tax.
Fox News
U.N. member states have failed to reach agreement on a new treaty to regulate the multibillion-dollar global arms trade.
Some diplomats and treaty supporters blamed the United States for triggering the unraveling of the month-long negotiating conference.
Hopes had been raised that agreement could be reached on a revised treaty text that closed some key loopholes by Friday’s deadline for action. But the United States announced Friday morning that it needed more time to consider the proposed treaty — and Russia and China then also asked for more time.
A bipartisan group of 51 U.S. senators on Thursday had threatened to oppose the global treaty regulating international weapons trade if it falls short in protecting the constitutional right to bear arms.
In a letter to President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the senators expressed serious concerns with the draft treaty that has circulated at the United Nations, saying that it signals an expansion of gun control that would be unacceptable.
The Constitution’s Second Amendment offers broad protection for weapons ownership by civilians. As recently as 2008, the Supreme Court affirmed it when it struck down a ban on handguns in the District of Columbia, ruling that individuals have a constitutional right to keep guns for self-defense and other purposes.
