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The Subprime home mortgage collapse...a Primer. It's ALL about the CRA of 1977 Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977 - This required banks to offer credit throughout their entire market area for “underserved” populations and small businesses. The CRA gave incentives to help low income borrowers become “home owners”. Liberals call this group “low income borrowers”. Conservatives call them a RISK!The CRA was passed by the Carter administration. In 1995 the Clinton administration authorized subprime loans under the CRA. Democrats added these provisions for the securitization of subprime loans and then ENFORCED the lending to high risk individuals. By 2000,...

Former Republican Sen. John E. Sununu announced Wednesday he will not run for New Hampshire’s open Senate seat in 2010, forcing Republicans to continue their search for a top flight candidate. “Representing New Hampshire in the United States Senate is a great honor, but effective public service is much more than just a desire to hold office,” Sununu said in a statement.

Willie Soon, a Harvard University astrophysicist and geophysicist with scores of peer-reviewed papers and books to his credit, said he is “embarrassed and puzzled” by the shallow science in papers asserting the Earth faces a climate crisis caused by global warming. Soon told the second International Conference on Climate Change on March in New York City, “We have a system [of peer reviewing scientific literature] that is truly, truly appalling.” Soon’s criticisms echoed an earlier presentation at the 2-1/2-day conference that was attended by about 700 scientists, economists, and policymakers considering the issue of “Global Warming: Was it ever really...

Rep. Paul Hodes (D) begins his New Hampshire Senate bid with a small lead over a prospective opponent, according to recent poll results. Hodes led former GOP Sen. John Sununu 42 percent to 36 percent, with 22 percent of survey respondents saying they were undecided. Sen. Judd Gregg (R) has announced he is retiring at the end of his term, creating an open-seat contest in 2010. Hodes is the only announced candidate so far in the race. Sununu, who lost re-election in 2008, has not publicly expressed interest in running for Granite State’s other Senate seat, but many local Republicans...

Does John E. Sununu's rapid-fire post-Capitol Hill appointments to three corporate boards and a congressional oversight panel mean he won't run for the open U.S. Senate seat next year?. Not necessarily, says Andrew Smith, an associate political science professor at the University of New Hampshire. "It's not unusual for former politicians to take positions on boards because it allows them to keep their business contacts and make some money, but doesn't put them in a position of having a regular full-time job," Smith said. "It kind of keeps them tied in to political and business circles and allows them to...

WASHINGTON – Former Sen. John Sununu, a member of the government watchdog panel that oversees the financial sector rescue fund, is joining the board of managers of a firm affiliated with a bank that has received $3 billion from the fund. Sununu last week was named to the board of ConvergEx Holdings LLC, the holding company for BNY ConvergEx Group. The Bank of New York Mellon Corp. holds a 33.8 percent stake in BNY Convergex, but it has no control over the company or its board. The bank was one of nine institutions selected by the Treasury Department last fall...

KENTUCKY. US Senator Jim Bunning (R) is already expected to face a tough fight for reelection next year, as leading Bluegrass State Democrats are lining up to run. Over the weekend, Bunning helped to contribute to his reputation for making erratic comments. Speaking at a Lincoln Day event over the weekend, Bunning said that US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg will be dead from pancreatic cancer within the next nine months. Bunning also complained the NRSC isn't doing enough financially to help him and other embattled conservative incumbents. In related news, The Hill reports that State Senate President David...

A new survey of New Hampshire voters from Public Policy Polling finds that Democratic Congressman Paul Hodes is the strongest early Senate candidate for 2010, although the field of commonly discussed candidates is pretty evenly matched. Hodes has the best net favorability of the quarter polled at 42/34. Former Republican Senator John Sununu and Democratic Congresswoman Carol Shea-Porter each receive a +3 rating from state voters with the former at 46/43 and the letter at 43/40. Former Republican Congressman Charlie Bass gets the poorest reviews at 33/37. Hodes leads hypothetical contests against Sununu 46-44 and against Bass 40-37. Shea- Porter...

Ending several weeks of speculation, former Gov. John H. Sununu has made it official: He will try to become the next leader of the state's Republicans. Charging that "Democrats are ruining New Hampshire," Sununu told the New Hampshire Sunday News he has decided to become a candidate for chairman of the Republican State Committee. Current Chairman Fergus Cullen won't seek another term when the state committee meets in January to elect officers. "I am going to step aside and support him," Cullen said. "He's clearly extraordinarily qualified to do the job." There are currently no other candidates for the post.

As New Hampshire Republicans search for a way to rebound from two consecutive devastating defeats in federal and state elections, former three-term Gov. John H. Sununu says he is open to the possibility of leading them.Two decades after he was the state's chief executive and then-President George H.W. Bush's chief of staff, Sununu is "reluctantly considering" becoming a candidate for chairman of the New Hampshire Republican State Committee, he told the New Hampshire Union Leader yesterday."People have asked me to consider that," he said in a telephone interview from his Salem office. "It is clearly an insane idea, but...

JUST MAYBE. Maybe this "draft Sununu for Republican National Chairman" thing isn't a waste of time. It's not something we'd expect Sen. John Sununu to want to get into. Sure, he lost his reelection bid, but he's young, he has a growing family and, politically speaking, he still has a bright future and, with his independent streak, he isn't someone we'd think would want to become the face of the establishment Republican Party, not to mention take part in the very inside baseball game of running for the post. But, surprisingly, Sununu didn't close the door to it yesterday. Sununu...

MANCHESTER – Though still smarting over his re-election defeat, some supporters of U.S. Sen. John E. Sununu are encouraging him to run for chairman of the Republican National Committee. They continue to tout him as a star of the party and its future. One Web site, DraftSununu.com, describes the national chairmanship as a chance for the GOP to return to its roots. It says, "We can select a leader who embraces the status quo or we can select a reformer, a new chairman who is a young, energetic and articulate." Jim Merrill, an attorney experienced in helping Republican candidates in...

John Sununu will no longer be a U.S. Senator come January after having lost his re-election bid against former New Hampshire Gov. Jeanne Shaheen on November 4th. But he might be the Chairman of the Republican National Committee if some of his supporters have anything to say about it. A group of Republican officials and operatives plan to launch a Draft Sununu for RNC Chairman committee as early as Friday, two Republican sources tell Now! Hampshire. The sources asked to remain anonymous. The leaders of the effort are not affiliated with the remnants of Sununu’s unsuccessful reelection campaign. If the...

Former New Hampshire congressman Bill Zeliff spent Saturday campaigning for U.S. Sen. John Sununu (R-Waterville Valley). In 1996, Sununu won Zeliff's 1st Congressional District seat after Zeliff opted out of a re-election campaign to run for governor. Zeliff said he was campaigning for Sununu, whom he has known since 1980, because he wants to get the "smartest guy in the U.S. Senate" re-elected. "I know what his reputation is in Washington," Zeliff, now a senior counselor for The Livingston Group, said in an interview with PolitickerNH.com. "He's a guy that gets things done. He's the smartest guy in the U.S....

CONCORD, N.H. -- Any other year, it might have been a defining moment. At a debate for New Hampshire's U.S. Senate race held in a small town near here last week, a moderator relayed a question from a man called Skip, who wanted to know how the candidates would stand up to their party's leaders. Sen. John E. Sununu, a Republican completing his first term, noted his effort to include more civil liberties protections in the reauthorized version of the USA Patriot Act. But Jeanne Shaheen, the Democratic former governor of the state, struggled to answer even after being pressed...

It's official: Former Democratic Gov. Jeanne Shaheen is poised to beat both George W. Bush and A. Financial Crisis for New Hampshire's Senate seat. John Sununu? Who he? If you want to know why Republican candidates are struggling -- at risk of ceding Democrats unfettered control in Washington -- consider the Granite State. It highlights the new Democratic strategy of turning every race into a referendum on the current administration. Yet it's also proving that GOP reformers like Mr. Sununu are best positioned to fight back. Only a few weeks ago, Mr. Sununu, one of the Senate GOP's bright minds,...

Forty-one is the magic number for GOP Senate seats — if conservatives hope to have any voice in the Senate next Congress by being able to wield the threat of a filibuster. And that number doesn’t account for the stable of moderate Republicans who are unreliable on a whole host of issues, and are unlikely to fight a “Freedom of Choice Act,” especially with all of Washington in Democratic hands — hands that are all-too-happy to twist arms. Senate watchers see at least seven Republican seats potentially being lost — in Colorado, New Mexico, New Hampshire, Oregon, Virginia, Arkansas, and...

When Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, lists the November races that will swell his party's majority, New Hampshire is one of the first he brags about. Here on the ground, it looks a lot less certain that Democrat Jeanne Shaheen will cut short the promising career of Sen. John Sununu, namesake son of a White House chief of staff under the first President Bush. Shaheen, a former governor who lost a close race to Sununu six years ago in an environment much more hospitable to Republicans, was a double-digit favorite early...

CONCORD – Democratic Senate candidate Jeanne Shaheen's once imposing lead over U.S. Sen. John E. Sununu has all but vanished in recent months according to a University of New Hampshire Survey Center poll released today. Shaheen leads Sununu in this poll of likely voters, 46 percent to 42 percent, but the spread is within its margin of error of plus or minus 4.5 percent. Pollster Andrew Smith stressed the race remains wide open since only 22 percent said they had definitely decided upon a candidate. During a telephone interview, Smith said voters are starting to focus more on the choices...

Despite the fact that the 2008 presidential primaries have been anything but uneventful, in terms of other campaigns across the country, it seems as if everyone else is off to an incredibly slow start. Even though it’s already May, there are still many hot-races that haven’t even come close to moving into full swing.

For the third straight month, Democrat Jeanne Shaheen leads Senator John Sununu by eight percentage points in his bid for re-election. The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of New Hampshire voters shows Shaheen attracting 51% of the vote while Sununu earns 43%. A month ago, Shaheen led 49% to 41%.

Manchester – When a piece of chicken got stuck in journalist Al Hunt's windpipe Friday night, Sen. John Sununu came to the rescue. "John was terrific," said Hunt, 65, executive editor for Washington at Bloomberg News. "He quickly jumped up, put his arms around me, did the (Heimlich) maneuver. Within about two seconds, it came out." Hunt and Sununu were sitting next to each other Friday night at the Hanover Street Chop House in downtown Manchester. The table was packed with powerbrokers, politicians and prominent journalists, including columnist Bob Novak, New York Times managing editor Jill Abramson and Hunt's wife,...

Jeanne Shaheen and U.S. Rep. Carol Shea-Porter, two women declaring themselves ready to lead the country to continued Democratic victory...She had originally planned to spend Sunday with her daughter. Instead, Shaheen's husband, Bill, was driving their daughter back to the airport so she could return to her home in the fire-ravaged region of California. "These wildfires are a direct result of this administration's failure to do something about global warming," Shaheen said with passion and to applause as the microphone cut out on her.

New Hampshire Survey of 500 Likely Voters September 16, 2007 Election 2008: New Hampshire Senate John Sununu (R): 43% Jeanne Shaheen (D): 48% Shaheen leads by fifteen points among women while Sununu has a four point edge among men. The former Governor has an eight-point lead among New Hampshire’s unaffiliated voters. While New Hampshire is typically the focus on Presidential campaigns at this time of year, the state is one of several where Democrats hope to pick up Senate seats in 2008. Sununu won his current job by defeating Shaheen in 2002, but the political environment has changed significantly since...

CONCORD – Former Democratic Gov. Jeanne Shaheen's decision to run for the U.S. Senate makes Republican incumbent John E. Sununu an underdog rather than the favorite for re-election in 2008, political analysts said Friday. Sununu's support for an unpopular war in Iraq, Shaheen's likeability and windfall victories for Democrats in the 2006 election install him as perhaps the most vulnerable GOP incumbent in the nation, they said. In 2002, then-Congressman Sununu beat Shaheen by 5 percentage points. Shaheen led Sununu in the most recent polls by more than 20 points. "I always felt Shaheen back then did the best she...

Former Democratic Gov. Jeanne Shaheen made her long-anticipated announcement Friday that she is running for the U.S. Senate. "We have major problems facing this country, and there is an urgent need for real change in Washington," Shaheen said in a statement to supporters. "We’ve proven in New Hampshire that we can work together to get things done. I want to take that common-sense approach to Washington and help get this country moving in the right direction," she said. If she beats the three other Democrats already running for the nomination, Shaheen is expected to face first-term Republican Sen. John Sununu,...

Shaheen, who served as governor from 1997 to 2003, lost to Sununu by a 51 to 47 percent margin five years ago after polls had shown her with a narrow lead heading into the final weekend of the campaign.Former Gov. Jeanne Shaheen will be a candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2008, the New Hampshire Union Leader has learned. The Democratic former three-term chief executive is expected to issue a statement today addressing her political plans. While it's unclear exactly how the statement will be phrased, sources say Shaheen has decided to seek the seat held by Republican John...

N o one doubts that Sen. John Sununu has a fight on his hands when he runs for re-election next year. But if former governor Jeanne Shaheen decides to challenge Sununu to a rematch, a new poll shows he could face a rout. A new Monitor poll has Shaheen, a Democrat, handily beating Sununu, a Republican, 56 percent to 34 percent. But paired against any of the Democrats currently in the race to unseat him, Sununu wins, holding a 46 percent share while the challengers' support ranges from 24 to 32 percent. "It's whether Shaheen wants to make him a...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Last fall, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., came to Connecticut to help Democratic Senate candidate Ned Lamont in his bid to unseat veteran Sen. Joe Lieberman. Lamont is now returning the favor. He and the Massachusetts Democrat are teaming up to target Republican senators they say are blocking efforts to end the Iraq war. Lamont, a political novice whose anti-war views fueled his summer primary win over Lieberman, sent out a fundraising pitch on Friday to about 3 million people on Kerry’s national e-mail list. "Last year, Connecticut Democrats heard my call for an end to the war...

Senator John Sununu (R-NH) has just announced that his office is working on legislation that would prevent the FCC from creating specific technology mandates that have to be followed by consumer electronics manufacturers. What's his target? The broadcast flag. Television and movie studios have wanted a broadcast flag for years. The flag is a short analog or digital signal embedded into broadcasts that specifies what users can do with the content. It would most often be used to prevent any copying of broadcast material, but there's an obvious problem with the plan: it requires recording devices to pay attention to...

WASHINGTON - Key figures in a phone-jamming scheme designed to keep New Hampshire Democrats from voting in 2002 had regular contact with the White House and Republican Party as the plan was unfolding, phone records introduced in criminal court show. The records show that Bush campaign operative James Tobin, who recently was convicted in the case, made two dozen calls to the White House within a three-day period around Election Day 2002 — as the phone jamming operation was finalized, carried out and then abruptly shut down. The national Republican Party, which paid millions in legal bills to defend Tobin,...

The U.S. Senate overwhelmingly voted to end a filibuster and moved closer to renewal of the USA Patriot Act. Senators voted 96-3 Thursday to stop debate regarding a compromise on the Patriot Act. All three of the senators who voted to keep debate going were Democrats ... Some aspects of the act were to expire at the end of 2005 but the White House sought to make the bill permanent. Congress gave the act short extensions, the most recent of which will end March 10.

Energy: Sens. John Sununu and John McCain are right to question America's reliance on foreign fuel. If barriers to U.S. drilling and nuclear power weren't so bad, we wouldn't see such oil-fueled menaces. This must change. Right now, it's easier for big oil companies to drill in faraway places such as Nigeria, Russia and Iran than get a permit to drill in the U.S. That's why we don't have many options when an unbalanced dictator such as Venezuela's Hugo Chavez taunts his No. 1 customer as a "perverse, murderous, genocidal, immoral empire" and calls on the world's leftists to "bring...

Washington, D.C. — Count New Hampshire Sens. John Sununu and Judd Gregg among those supporting Judge Samuel Alito’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. “He understands the law and the Constitution extremely well, and I think one of the abilities he showed was to clearly describe how he ruled, why he ruled, and what factors were critical to particular cases,” said Sununu, a Republican, who met with Alito yesterday. “That’s an indication that his service on the court and his view of the Constitution is rooted in principle.” Gregg, also a Republican, said that throughout the entire nomination process and...

WASHINGTON - Two Democrats who supported Chief Justice John Roberts said Thursday they would oppose Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito in next week's Senate vote. ADVERTISEMENT The conservative judge is expected to be confirmed, but with fewer votes than the 78 Roberts got in September.Democratic Sens. Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Ken Salazar of Colorado both questioned whether Alito would be independent of President Bush and the executive branch in his future rulings. "At a time when the president is seizing unprecedented power, the Supreme Court needs to act as a check and to provide balance," Leahy, the ranking Democrat...

IF TIMING IS everything, U.S. Sen. John Sununu has picked a poor time to spend eight days in the Antarctic. Not that there is anything wrong with such a trip. No one is going to accuse the junior senator of taking a frivolous “junket” when the destination is ice and snow country. Sununu is accompanying Sens. Olympia Snowe of Maine and John McCain of Arizona on a trip looking at environmental issues. That’s fine. But Sununu is also a key reason why the Patriot Act was extended for just five weeks into the new year. It is now set to...

PORTLAND, Maine -- U.S. Sen. Susan Collins and two of her Senate colleagues are headed to Antarctica to meet with leading researchers studying climate change. Collins left Washington Tuesday for what will be an eight-day visit to McMurdo Station. She's joined by fellow Republicans John McCain of Arizona and John Sununu of New Hampshire. <snip>

Concerning Sununu When we suggested in a recent editorial that John Sununu, the Republican senator from New Hampshire, ought at least to “know what he’s talking about” before he takes action that will have the consequence of endangering our national security, we were referring to his apparent failure to inform himself about the Patriot Act. We didn’t realize that Senator Sununu also needs educating on the previously expressed views of . . . Senator Sununu. Sununu’s stated concerns — which would be frivolous even if they were accurate — focus on two investigative tools: Section 215 orders (the erroneously dubbed...

WASHINGTON -- With signs pointing to a resurgent Democratic Party in New Hampshire, the state's all-Republican congressional delegation is becoming increasingly at odds with the national Republican Party in a state that was long a GOP bellwether, according to an analysis of votes and other actions in Congress over the past year. Congressmen Jeb Bradley and Charles Bass voted for expanded stem cell research and opposed drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and Bradley notably declined to endorse Bush's Social Security plan. Senator John E. Sununu opposed Bush's plan for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, joined a filibuster...

-------------------------------------------------------- Larry Craig – IdahoPhone: (202) 224-2752 Email: http://craig.senate.gov/email/Website: http://craig.senate.gov/ -------------------------------------------------------- Chuck Hagel – NebraskaPhone: (202) 224-4224 Email: http://hagel.senate.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=Contact.HomeWebsite: http://hagel.senate.gov/ --------------------------------------------------------Lisa Murkowski – AlaskaPhone: (202) 224-6665 Email: http://murkowski.senate.gov/contact.cfmWebsite: http://murkowski.senate.gov -------------------------------------------------------- John Sununu – New HampshirePhone: (202) 224-2841 Email: http://www.sununu.senate.gov/webform.htmlWebsite: http://sununu.senate.gov/ -------------------------------------------------------- Frist also voted against it in order to keep the option open to hold another future cloture vote.

AT 10:15 a.m. on March 17, Sen. John Sununu was on the telephone with newly installed Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, urging changes in the anti-terrorist Patriot Act. At 3:30 p.m. on April 18, Gonzales was in Sununu's Russell Building office to hear the same message from the senator. To no avail. The Bush administration never took Sununu's message to heart, leading to the current deadlock in the Senate. Sununu, a New Hampshire conservative and one of the Senate's rising Republican stars, joined with three other right-of-center Republicans last week to defeat cloture. They thus prevented a vote on reauthorizing the...

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) could barely conceal his anger. "The Patriot Act expires on December 31, but the terrorist threat does not," he told reporters at the Capitol yesterday. "Those on the Senate floor who are filibustering the Patriot Act are killing the Patriot Act." There was just one problem. Well, four problems, actually. Four of the 46 senators using the delaying tactic to thwart the USA Patriot Act renewal are members of Frist's party. It is a pesky, irritating fact for Republicans who are eager to portray the impasse as Democratic obstructionism, and a ready-made rejoinder for...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend Version December 16, 2005, 5:19 p.m. Sununu’s Folly If New Hampshire Republican Senator John Sununu wants to endanger our national security, shouldn’t he at least know what he’s talking about? Apparently that’s too much to ask of the usually admirable senator, who is helping filibuster the reauthorization of the Patriot Act. Even former Clinton Attorney General Janet Reno has endorsed the Patriot Act; it is the single most important piece of counterterrorism legislation passed post-9/11. If the status quo holds after Friday’s failure to invoke cloture — Republicans got only 52...

The Senate's pre-9/11 mindset Published December 17, 2005 "God forbid that there be a terrorist attack that could have been prevented by the Patriot Act after it has expired," Sen. Jon Kyl said yesterday after the Senate failed to overcome a filibuster of legislation that would have reauthorized the Patriot Act. "If that happens, those who have supported the filibuster will have to answer for it, and the American people will have a very hard time understanding what their objections were."     Got that, Sens. Larry Craig, Chuck Hagel, Lisa Murkowski and John Sununu? As the four Republicans who voted to...

December 16, 2005, 5:19 p.m. Sununu's Folly If New Hampshire Republican Senator John Sununu wants to endanger our national security, shouldn't he at least know what he's talking about? Apparently that's too much to ask of the usually admirable senator, who is helping filibuster the reauthorization of the Patriot Act. Even former Clinton Attorney General Janet Reno has endorsed the Patriot Act; it is the single most important piece of counterterrorism legislation passed post-9/11. If the status quo holds after Friday's failure to invoke cloture — Republicans got only 52 votes when they need 60 — -the 16 provisions of...

WASHINGTON - The Senate on Friday refused to reauthorize major portions of the USA Patriot Act after critics complained they infringed too much on Americans' privacy and liberty, dealing a huge defeat to the Bush administration and Republican leaders. In a crucial vote early Friday, the bill's Senate supporters were not able to get the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster by Sens. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., and Larry Craig, R-Idaho, and their allies. The final vote was 52-47. {end of} Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Republicans congressional leaders had lobbied fiercely to make most of the expiring Patriot Act...

The three unpatriotic GOP Senators who joined the Democrats in snatching defeat from the jaws of victory today, by voting against ending a filibuster of the renewel of the Patriot Act were: Chuck Hagel (Nebraska), Lisa Murlowski (Alasaka) and John Sununu (New Hampshire). These people need to be told in no uncertain terms that we will hold them personally responsible for the terrorist acts that occur as a result of the resurrection of the intelligence walls and investigation restraints that will be put back in place against our terrorism investigations. What is particularly shameful for these so-called GOP Senators is...

THIS WEEK, Congress considers legislation extending the implementation of the U.S.A. Patriot Act. Understandably, the debate surrounding the bill is fraught with emotion.At issue, however, is whether the proposed changes take appropriate steps to protect the civil liberties of innocent Americans. I believe they do not. Given the importance of these individual freedoms, I cannot support the bill in its current form.Ultimately, this debate is about police powers — powers granted by the people to government — and the balance we strike between these forceful tools and the rights of individuals.Provisions written into the Constitution and in laws are designed...

WASHINGTON, Nov. 17 - A tentative deal to extend the government's antiterrorism powers under the law known as the USA Patriot Act appeared in some jeopardy Thursday, as Senate Democrats threatened to mount a filibuster in an effort to block the legislation. "This is worth the fight," Senator Russell D. Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat who serves on the Judiciary Committee, said in an interview. "I've cleared my schedule right up to Thanksgiving," Mr. Feingold said, adding that he was making plans to read aloud from the Bill of Rights as part of a filibuster if necessary. The political maneuvering came...

Manchester — President Bush has divided the country, mismanaged the war in Iraq and was irresponsible in not sufficiently equipping American troops, potential White House hopeful Evan Bayh told a partisan Democratic crowd Saturday night. “It’s painfully obvious that those in charge in Washington today don’t have a clue,” the Indiana senator said during a sold-out state party fundraiser at the Radisson at the Center of New Hampshire. Bayh mixed in his achievements as governor of Indiana before entering the Senate, singled out a slew of local and state officials and made his biggest target the White House. “It’s been...