Political Notebook
As President Obama’s top lawyer, Gregory B. Craig has been at the center of thorny decisions on closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay and revising interrogation and detention policies, problems that have bedeviled the new administration and generated fierce battles inside and outside the White House. And for months now, he has endured a spate of speculation in print and around the White House about whether he is on the way out.
Craig, a former adviser to the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy and President Bill Clinton, said he had no plans to leave his job as White House counsel, and White House officials said the president still had faith in him. But colleagues and Democrats close to the White House said they expected him to move on around the end of the year, and have been talking about possible replacements.
Friends said he was unfairly being made a scapegoat for decisions supported across the administration. “Everybody who’s here in Washington has seen this play before, when internal second-guessing and rivalries burst out into public,’’ said Elisa Massimino, executive director of Human Rights First, an advocacy group that has worked with Craig to reverse President George W. Bush’s policies.
NEW YORK TIMES
McCain vows to hold up labor board nominee
WASHINGTON - Another Obama administration nominee is facing a GOP roadblock over his ties to labor unions.Arizona Senator John McCain said yesterday he would place a hold on the confirmation of union lawyer Craig Becker to join the National Labor Relations Board, saying Becker might try to make labor laws more union friendly without congressional approval.
A Senate panel voted, 15 to 8, yesterday to approve Becker’s nomination, but under Senate rules, a single lawmaker can block a full vote on the floor.
“This is probably the most controversial nominee that I have seen in a long time,’’ McCain said. His remarks echoed complaints by the US Chamber of Commerce and dozens of business groups that say Becker’s views are “out of the mainstream.’’
Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, called Becker “one of the pre-eminent labor law thinkers in the United States’’ and said he was confident Becker would approach the job “with an impartial and open mind.’’
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Obama says men could do more on childrearing
WASHINGTON - President Obama says his family is like a lot of others - in which the men “need to be knocked across the head every once in a while’’ in order to see imbalances between the time moms and dads put into childrearing.“There’s no doubt that our family, like a lot of families out there, were ones in which the men are still a little obtuse about this stuff,’’ Obama said yesterday in an interview with NBC.
He acknowledged things are different now for his wife, Michelle, and him given that they live in the White House with all its creature comforts.
The president said he tried to learn to be better - “to be thoughtful enough and introspective enough that I wasn’t always having to be told that things were unfair - but conceded his efforts weren’t entirely successful. “The truth is that Michelle still had to make sacrifices of the sort that I did not have to make,’’ Obama said.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
N.J. security guard charged with threatening president
NEWARK, N.J. - A private security guard at Newark Liberty International Airport was arrested on charges of threatening President Obama the night before he flew there.A
Obama was in New Jersey yesterday to campaign for Governor Jon Corzine. “We take every threat very seriously,’’ Wiley said. “We don’t have the luxury of ignoring even the allegation of a threat.’’
Brek allowed police to search his Linden home and officers found 43 firearms, Kelly said. The firearms were still being processed, but no illegal guns had been found. Brek’s father, John, told The Star-Ledger of Newark that his son has the guns because he’s an avid hunter.
ASSOCIATED PRESS 
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