Gingrich looking past Florida vote MIAMI (AP) — Cheered by new polls, Mitt Romney is all but predicting victory in today’s Republican presidential primary. Newt Gingrich is looking past Florida to regroup, vowing he won’t stay buried long. ADVERTISING “With
Gingrich looking past Florida vote
MIAMI (AP) — Cheered by new polls, Mitt Romney is all but predicting victory in today’s Republican presidential primary. Newt Gingrich is looking past Florida to regroup, vowing he won’t stay buried long.
“With a turnout like this, I’m beginning to feel we might win tomorrow,” an upbeat Romney told a crowd of several hundred at a stop in Dunedin on Monday as he and Gingrich zipped across the state making their final appeals.
Gingrich, in turn, acknowledged that his momentum had been checked but promised not to back down. He characterized Romney as an imposter, and his team started to plot a strategy for upcoming contests.
“He can bury me for a very short amount of time with four or five or six times as much money,” Gingrich said in a television interview. “In the long run, the Republican Party is not going to nominate … a liberal Republican.”
GOP officials in Florida were anticipating a big turnout, more than 2 million voters, up from a record 1.9 million in the Republican primary in 2008. More than 605,000 Floridians had already voted as of Monday, either by visiting early voting stations or by mailing in absentee ballots, ahead of the total combined early vote in the GOP primary four years ago.
In the span of a volatile week, the tables have turned in this potentially pivotal primary state.
Obama tax plans have little hope
WASHINGTON (AP) — Aiming tax increases at millionaires and companies that ship jobs abroad may help frame the fairness theme of President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, but it’s a plan that stands virtually no chance of passing Congress.
Republicans have enough votes in the GOP-run House, and almost certainly in the Democratic-controlled Senate, to kill Obama’s proposals. They say his ideas would discourage investment and job creation and further hurt an already ailing economy.
“He’s got to know that none of those things he proposed really have much of a chance,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee.
Obama offered his plans, with scant detail, in last week’s State of the Union address.
He used the word “fair” seven times to describe tax increases aimed at groups the Occupy movement has branded as the “one percent” of Americans who are doing extremely well while the rest of society struggles.
Getting most attention was his plan to tax incomes above $1 million annually at a rate of at least 30 percent.
Insider-trading ban moves ahead
WASHINGTON (AP) — Congress is rushing to make it absolutely clear to everyone that its members are banned from insider stock trading, hoping to improve their sagging image that has approval ratings at historic lows.
Senators made the first move Monday. Their 93-2 procedural vote cleared the way for Senate passage — possibly later this week — of a bill that would require disclosure of stock transactions within 30 days and explicitly prohibit members of Congress from initiating trades based on non-public information they acquired in their official capacity.
The legislation, at least partly symbolic in nature, is aimed at answering critics who say lawmakers profit from businesses where they have special knowledge.
Pythons wiping out Fla. mammals
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — A burgeoning population of huge pythons — many of them pets that were turned loose by their owners when they got too big — appears to be wiping out large numbers of raccoons, opossums, bobcats and other mammals in the Everglades, a study says.
The study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that sightings of medium-size mammals are down dramatically — as much as 99 percent, in some cases — in areas where pythons and other large, non-native constrictor snakes are known to be lurking.
Scientists fear the pythons could disrupt the food chain and upset the Everglades’ environmental balance in ways difficult to predict.
“The effects of declining mammal populations on the overall Everglades ecosystem, which extends well beyond the national park boundaries, are likely profound,” said John Willson, a research scientist at Virginia Tech University and co-author of the study.
Tens of thousands of Burmese pythons, which are native to Southeast Asia, are believed to be living in the Everglades, where they thrive in the warm, humid climate. While many were apparently released by their owners, others may have escaped from pet shops during Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and have been reproducing ever since.
Burmese pythons can grow to be 26 feet long and more than 200 pounds, and they have been known to swallow animals as large as alligators. They and other constrictor snakes kill their prey by coiling around it and suffocating it.
