Source: USA TODAY

Democratic Rep. Ed Markey specifically mentions the mass shooting in Newtown, Conn., in a new TV ad for his Senate campaign in Massachusetts.

Markey criticizes Republican Gabriel Gomez for opposing an assault weapons ban in his campaign commercial.The narrator in the ad says Gomez, a businessman making his first bid for elected office, is “against banning high-capacity magazines like the ones used in the Newtown school shooting.”

Twenty children and six adults died at Sandy Hook Elementary School in the Dec. 14 massacre. The events at Newtown sparked a push for new gun control legislation, but the Senate rejected a measure last month to expand background checks on gun purchasers.

The ad narrator says Markey has taken on the National Rifle Association, which has fought strongly against the gun proposals in Congress.

Gomez fired back at Markey. “I guess after 37 years in Congress you lose your sense of decency,” he said in a statement. “Exploiting a tragedy for political gain is sick.”

Markey, a member of Congress since 1976, and Gomez are vying in a June 25 special election to fill the seat formerly held by secretary of State John Kerry.

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Source: USA TODAY

WASHINGTON – John Edwards said last year after his criminal trial on campaign finance charges that he believed he could still do some good with his life.

Now, it appears as though the ex-Democratic presidential candidate is ready to return to his professional roots, after a federal jury last May acquitted him on one charge of misusing about $1 million in campaign money to cover up an extramarital affair. The judge declared a mistrial on five other charges.

Edwards has reactivated his law license in North Carolina and is being promoted as a featured speaker at a June 6 retreat in Orlando for lawyer clients of PMP, a marketing firm. Analysts say those steps make sense for Edwards, whose ability to win over juries in medical malpractice cases made him a wealthy man before he ran successfully for the U.S. Senate in 1998.

“As much as Edwards’ personal conduct shocked and disappointed the trial lawyers who supported his campaigns, I still think many of them will want to hear what he has to say,” said Hampton Dellinger, a lawyer who served as an analyst for NBC News during the Edwards trial.

“He’s faced juries as an advocate and as a defendant, and succeeded in both roles,” Dellinger told USA TODAY. “His perspective is unquestionably unique.”

Edwards is re-emerging as two other politicians tainted by scandal are in the midst of comebacks. Republican Mark Sanford was sworn in earlier this week to Congress and Democrat Anthony Weiner is said to be on the verge of declaring his candidacy for New York City mayor.

A political career may be out of reach for Edwards, the 2004 Democratic vice presidential nominee whose 2008 presidential bid never really gained much traction amid the Barack Obama-Hillary Clinton rivalry.

“There is no hunger or thirst for him to re-enter politics,” Ferrel Guillory, director of the Program on Public Life at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, said in phone interview. “They way it played out diminished Edwards’ chances for a political comeback more than it diminished Sanford and Weiner.”

Dellinger and Guillory are not surprised Edwards is re-entering the job market by tapping his legal roots. Whether Edwards goes back into the courtroom is not yet clear, but reactivating his law license would be the first step toward such a move.

“The outcome of his criminal trial meant his law license remained valid and I thought he might seek a courtroom return,” Dellinger said. “He surely wants to be remembered as an advocate, not a defendant.”

Edwards, who turns 60 next month, has largely stayed out of the public eye since last year’s trial. He lives outside of Chapel Hill with two of his children, Emma Claire and Jack. Quinn, Edwards’ daughter with campaign videographer Rielle Hunter, lives with her mother.

Wade Smith, an Edwards friend and early mentor in his legal career, told the Associated Press that he recently saw Edwards and that he looked “so much better, more relaxed.”

“He’s got so much ability and talent,” Smith said about Edwards. “Lawyers who saw him in front of a jury will tell you that they never saw anything like him, his ability to connect. That talent is still in there and I think he will find a space to use it. ”

Edwards is scheduled to speak about “Historic Trials of the Century” at the retreat sponsored by PMP Marketing.

Follow Catalina Camia on Twitter@ccamia

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Source: USA TODAY

Former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords has been tapped by President Obama to serve on the board that awards the prestigious Fulbright scholarships to study abroad.

Giffords, a Democrat who represented a Tucson-based district from 2007 to 2012, spent a year in Mexico as a Fulbright scholar in 1993-94 before earning a master’s degree at Cornell University. Giffords is now an advocate for gun control through Americans for Responsible Solutions, the super PAC she and her husband, Mark Kelly, co-founded.

The scholarships are named after J. William Fulbright, the late Arkansas senator and Democrat who was chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. The scholarship board is bipartisan and includes Lisa Caputo, a former aide to Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Anita McBride, who was the first lady’s chief of staff in the George W. Bush administration.

The White House announced the Giffords appointment on Thursday.

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Source: USA TODAY

Former breast cancer charity executive Karen Handel on Friday jumped into the crowded race for an open U.S. Senate seat in Georgia.

Handel announced her candidacy hours before the state’s Republican convention began. GOP congressmen Paul Broun, Phil Gingrey and Jack Kingston are already in the 2014 race for the seat of retiring Sen. Saxby Chambliss.

Handel gained notoriety last year when she resigned from Susan G. Komen for the Cure amid a controversy over cutting funding to Planned Parenthood. Handel, a former Georgia secretary of state, had endorsed the proposed funding cuts but the charity reversed course and she stepped down as vice president for public policy. That move earned Handel praise from social conservatives, who have long opposed Planned Parenthood because it supports abortion rights.

“Georgians want a conservative senator with the courage to take on the status quo, to fight for them and our constitutional ideals, to be accountable to them — and not to Washington,” Handel said in a statement announcing her Senate bid.

The fight for the Senate Republican nomination will be a bruising battle in Georgia, one that will be closely watched to determine whether the eventual winner can run strong statewide campaigns. Republicans are hoping to avoid the gaffes made last year by Republicans Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock that caused them to lose winnable Senate races.

Top Democrats such as Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed and Rep. John Barrow have opted not to run next year. Michelle Nunn, CEO of a volunteer service organization and daughter of former senator Sam Nunn, is considering a Senate bid.

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Source: USA TODAY

Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi slammed Speaker John Boehner, suggesting the Republican who succeeded her in the House’s top job benefits from a double standard because he is a man.

“If he were a woman, they’d be calling him the weakest speaker in history,” Pelosi, D-Calif., said in an MSNBC interview on Monday night.

Pelosi said the GOP-controlled House under Boehner’s leadership has been unable to pass major legislation — except when minority Democrats provide the winning margin. “They’ve never been able to pass anything without our coming to the rescue, except their very nasty, in my view, unprincipled budgets,” she said.

“If a woman was speaker and nothing was happening in this way, they’d say, ‘Oh my gosh, Oh my gosh,’ ” Pelosi told MSNBC. “We get criticized for accomplishing things, they don’t get criticized for not accomplishing things.”

Pelosi is referring to the “Hastert Rule,” an axiom often cited when Republican Dennis Hastert was speaker that said House bills should pass only with the support of the majority of party in power.

There have been three high-profile examples this year of major bills that have passed on the strength of Democratic votes: the measure to avert the “fiscal cliff,” a bill to provide aid to victims of Superstorm Sandy and the extension of the Violence Against Women Act.

The need for votes from the minority party is not unique to Boehner. The Hastert Rule was broken seven times while Pelosi was speaker from 2007 to 2011, according to research done by the Brookings Institution.

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

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WASHINGTON — Mark Sanford and his ex-wife have settled her complaint that he was trespassing at her South Carolina home, so the newly elected congressman will not have to appear in court on Thursday.

Sanford, an ex-governor and Republican making a political comeback, admits in the settlement filed Wednesday with Charleston County Family Court that he was in contempt of their divorce decree on Feb. 3 and on other occasions. Sanford has said he was at Jenny Sanford’s beach house that day to watch the Super Bowl with their youngest son.

Judge Jocelyn Cate agreed to withhold sentencing Sanford, as long as he sticks to the 2010 divorce settlement that says he will not enter his ex-wife’s house without her permission. Sanford also agreed to pay $5,000 for his ex-wife’s fees and court costs.

The family court document was downloaded by Patch.com.

Jenny Sanford’s trespassing complaint was revealed in mid-April as her former husband was locked in a battle for his old House seat against Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch. Mark Sanford’s personal life, including the extramarital affair that ended his marriage in 2010, became fodder for the campaign.

Sanford defeated Colbert Busch by 9 percentage points in a special election Tuesday.

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

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Michelle Obama didn’t exactly come out and say what she thinks about New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s weight-loss surgery, but she tied his long struggle with his heaviness to her quest for children to adopt healthier lifestyles.

In an NBC News interview that aired Wednesday, Obama was asked to comment on Christie’s surprise revelation that he had gastric banding surgery in February. She said it is a “very personal matter” for the governor and his family, adding she doesn’t “comment on people’s personal choices.”

Obama has been promoting her book, American Grown, which she wrote last year to spotlight the White House kitchen garden and the benefits of eating healthy. She is also behind “Let’s Move,” a campaign to get children to exercise and eat right.

“There are millions of people like the governor who struggle with adulthood obesity and that’s one of the reasons why I think ‘Let’s Move’ is so important,” the first lady said on NBC. “Because we want to start working with kids when they’re young, so that they don’t have these direct challenges when they get older.”

Obama did send good wishes to the Republican, calling him “terrific” and his family “wonderful.”

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New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and his team are at it again with a self-deprecating video mocking his possible presidential ambitions and his fleece jacket.

If you watched the Republican governor on TV after the deadly storm, you’ve seen the now-famous jacket: It’s blue and emblazoned with the words “Chris Christie Governor.” The article of clothing silently screams “leader” or maybe “president” when Christie wears it — at least that’s the schtick in the 7-minute video.

Without his beloved jacket, Christie loses his mojo. Those poll numbers that skyrocketed after the storm? They drop. His pal Bruce Springsteen? Blocks him from going backstage at a concert. The love from MSNBC’s Morning Joe hosts? Gone.

Jon Bon Jovi, James Carville, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brezinski, Alec Baldwin and Hillary Rodham Clinton (her picture, anyway) all make cameo appearances in the video as Christie searches for his magic jacket. “There’s that guy again,” Bon Jovi says. “He ain’t nothing without his fleece.”

Spoiler alert: The Carville-Clinton tidbit at about the 5:50 mark would earn the Democratic strategist some kind of Best Supporting Actor award if such a thing existed.

Christie debuted the video Tuesday night at New Jersey’s annual Legislative Correspondents Club show — the Garden State’s equivalent of Washington’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Tuesday was a busy one for the gov: News that Christie secretly underwent weight-loss surgery was quite the talker.

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Former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford said Wednesday he’s moving on and is reading to work with his fellow Republicans who didn’t support his political comeback bid.

“Yesterday is yesterday and today is today, and I look forward to working with them,” Sanford said in an interview on CBS’ This Morning program.

Sanford defeated Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch in a special election for South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District on Tuesday night by about 9 percentage points. Colbert Busch, a businesswoman and sister of comedian Stephen Colbert, kept the race competitive despite the Republican tilt of the district.

Sanford was seeking political redemption after an extramarital affair in 2010 ended his marriage and once-promising political career. He won without the financial support of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), which elects Republicans to Congress.

It was only toward the end of the race that Sanford was endorsed by top Republicans such as Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and both of South Carolina’s GOP senators, Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott.

While Sanford did not make mention of the House GOP campaign committee, his former chief of staff could not resist getting in a dig after the race was called. “Sorry, NRCC. We won anyway,” tweeted state Sen. Tom Davis, R-S.C.

In the CBS interview, Sanford said South Carolina’s voters did not make a judgment that character counts less than policy positions. He tied Colbert Busch to unions and liberals such as House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., even as his personal life once again grabbed headlines.

Character and policy are “equally important,” he said. “I think we have a tradition in the South, in South Carolina, of foregiveness.” Sanford recalled meeting a voter who said to him, “I’m not going to judge you based on your worst day any more than I’ll judge you on your best day. I’m going to look at the totality of your 20 years in politics … and I’m going to make my judgment accordingly.”

Sanford posted a note to his supporters Wednesday on his campaign website offering his “profound thanks” for getting him elected, despite being outspent by Colbert Busch and her Democratic allies.

Sanford’s personal life will be on public view once again Thursday. He is set to appear in Charleston County Family Court to respond to his ex-wife’s complaint that he was trespassing at her home in violation of their divorce agreement. Cameras will be allowed in the courtroom.

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Source: USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — Disgraced ex-South Carolina governor Mark Sanford won his bid for redemption on Tuesday night, defeating Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch for his old seat in Congress.

Sanford, a Republican who admitted an extramarital affair in 2009, was ready to quit politics for good if he was not victorious in South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District. He will replace Republican Tim Scott, who was appointed to the Senate.

The former governor — once a rising GOP star considered presidential material — was an early favorite in the Republican district, which Mitt Romney carried by 18 percentage points in the 2012 election. But the revelation that his ex-wife, Jenny, accused Sanford of trespassing at her home caused the National Republican Congressional Committee to withdraw its financial and logistical support in mid-April and gave Colbert Busch an opening.

Sanford must appear in Charleston County Family Court on Thursday on his ex-wife’s complaint.

Colbert Busch, a businesswoman and sister of comedian Stephen Colbert, stayed competitive but a final Public Policy Polling survey two days before the special election showed a dead heat. A business development officer who worked in the shipping industry, Colbert Busch focused on her plans to create jobs and vowed she would be an independent voice for the district.

“The people have spoken and I respect their decision,” she said Tuesday night to supporters, according to NBC News and other news outlets.

This was the first time Sanford was on the ballot since his admission in 2009 that he was hiking on the Appalachian Trail — when he was actually in Argentina visiting his mistress — became a punch line on late-night TV. He had been open throughout the campaign that he believed to a “God of second chances.”

“I absolutely failed. Period,” Sanford said in an interview earlier Tuesday on CNN, one of several he gave on Election Day. He told MSNBC that “one event does not define your life.”

Sanford urged his friends and neighbors to help him spread the word about his ideas to curb the nation’s debt and to send a message about his Democratic rival. He stressed that Colbert Busch received help from labor unions and Democratic groups from outside the district, and tied her to House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi.

Rep. Greg Walden of Oregon, chairman of the House GOP campaign committee, congratulated Sanford and made no mention of how the organization parted ways with the candidate. “These results demonstrate just how devastating the policies of Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi are for House Democrats in 2014,” he said in a statement. “At the end of the day, running on the Obama-Pelosi ticket was just too toxic for Elizabeth Colbert Busch.”

Rep. Steve Israel of New York, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, congratulated Colbert Busch’s efforts and used her as an example of how the party will stay aggressive in the 2014 elections.

Democrats need a net gain of 17 seats next year to win majority control in the House. Sanford’s election does not change that equation.

“The fact that the Democrat made this competitive is a testament to the strength of Elizabeth Colbert Busch as a candidate and the Republican habit of nominating flawed candidates,” Israel said. “Democrats will be aggressive and drive deep into Republican-held territory this cycle to find districts with flawed candidates where we can compete.”

The House Majority PAC, which spent $450,000 on ads and direct mail to boost Colbert Busch, said the outcome in South Carolina reflects poorly on the GOP.

“The House Republican caucus has added yet another ethically challenged embarrassment who will be an albatross around the neck of every Republican forced to answer for Mark Sanford’s embarrassing and reckless behavior,” said Alixandria Lapp, executive director of House Majority PAC.

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.