In an obsucre article buried in the Utah section of today’s Salt Lake Tribune, Julian Hatch is mentioned regarding his challenge to U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch. This is the second time this paper has made mention of our Green Party candidate.
Still nothing, that I’ve seen, in the other major newspaper, the http://deseretnews.com/dn”>Deseret News.
D.C. Notebook: Hatch’s vocational memory slips
By Robert Gehrke and Thomas Burr
Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, was full of righteous indignation the other day when, on the Senate floor, he angrily scolded Democrats backing a “windfall tax” on tens of billions in profits Big Oil earned in the past quarter.
As he railed, he tossed in this tidbit: “I used to be in the oil business. I know how hard it is.”
And again: “I have been in this business. I know doggone well what it takes and how much it takes and how much it costs to develop oil and gas.”
And then, when Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., said Hatch was mistaken about what oil companies do with their profits, Hatch put it most definitively: “No, it wasn’t wrong. I lived in this industry. I understand it.”
Um . . . not precisely.
His official bio mentions he was a lather, janitor, desk attendant at a dormitory, then a lawyer and a senator. No mention of hardscrabble days on the rigs drilling for black gold.
Turns out, “lived in this industry” may have overstated it a tad. His spokesman says the senator did some legal work for a small oil company 30-plus years ago when he was in private practice. He doesn’t remember the name of the oil firm.
Approval rating
President Bush still enjoys his highest approval rating in Utah, where 59 percent of residents polled by SurveyUSA say they approve of the commander in chief. That’s down 2 percentage points from the same poll a month ago, but it’s still much higher than the national rating of 37 percent. The survey is sponsored in part by KSL-TV.
Idaho tied with Utah in the SurveyUSA approval rating, but the Gem State also gives a 1-percentage point higher disapproval rating than Utah’s 38 percent. Rhode Island, by the way, gives Bush his most dismal rating, with just 26 percent approving.
Pay raise
In June, Rep. Jim Matheson, Utah’s only Democrat in Congress, argued unsuccessfully that he and his colleagues should do away with its annual raise. And now that he has lost again. Matheson, who doesn’t take the congressional pay hike until a year after it is doled out, tried to persuade the House on Nov. 18 to agree with the Senate that the pay raise ought to be dropped in light of a soaring federal debt of $8 trillion and mounting bills for rebuilding the Southeast after hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
Matheson’s colleagues disagreed and shot down his attempt to at least get a vote on whether to adopt the raise or not by a vote of 263-152.
So now, nearly all members of Congress will get a $3,100 raise in January, bringing their annual salary to $165,200. Leadership of both parties in the House and Senate get a bigger boost.
Hatch versus Hatch
The Green Party of Utah’s Julian Hatch announced recently that he’s challenging Orrin Hatch and most news media coverage noted the two are “distant cousins.” So how closely are the two related?
Julian Hatch actually has done his research, but it’s still unclear where the lineage of the two cross on the family tree. Julian Hatch says his guess is that it dates back to “just after the Mayflower” and Massachusetts that the two are related.
“It is an interesting question about relationship, but it must be ‘distant cousin’ at this point and probably we will get even more distant with [me] challenging the five-term senator from my home state,” Julian Hatch says.
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Robert Gehrke and Thomas Burr report from Washington for The Salt Lake Tribune.
Deanna Dee-Dee Taylor 