The Earlybird: Today's headlines

Senate considers tax cut caps, Bush stalls patients' rights, Sharon creates a challenge, layoffs reach eight-year high, California dodges energy bullet, Virginia Senate passes abortion waiting period, Gore and Clinton square off, investigation focuses on Torricelli:

• "Many leading Senate Republicans are coalescing around a strategy of capping this year's tax-cut package at $1.6 trillion," CongressDailyAM reports.
• Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., meanwhile, joined other Democrats in urging a "go-slow" approach, the Washington Times reports.
• "Outlines of a potential congressional deal on school vouchers are emerging," the Los Angeles Times reports, with a bipartisan Senate group focusing on "a plan that would both give students in failing public schools much greater freedom to transfer to other public schools."
• President Bush is "stalling" bipartisan legislation on patients' rights, the New York Times reports.
• The Boston Globe, however, reports that "supporters of a bipartisan patients' rights bill now have majorities in both houses of Congress... putting pressure on President Bush and making it more likely that the heavily contested measure will become law."
• Reuters reports that "conservative Republicans stepped up their fight against the abortion pill RU-486 on Tuesday, promising to push through legislation that could make it harder for doctors to prescribe the drug."
• The Senate "agreed on Tuesday to time limits for the March debate on a plan to overhaul campaign finance laws," Reuters reports.
• Bush has decided he won't keep White House offices on AIDS and race relations, USA Today reports.

• Bloomberg reports that Ariel Sharon "completed his political comeback with a landslide victory over Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who resigned as Labor Party leader and quit parliament."
• President Bush called to congratulate Sharon Tuesday night, the BBC reports, while European leaders have expressed their "misgivings."
• "Sharon's political survival, the future of Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking and even regional stability could hinge on the nature of the coalition that the prime minister-elect forges from the 17 squabbling parties that make up Israel's parliament," the Los Angeles Times reports.
• "Sharon's lopsided win... presents President Bush with a major foreign policy challenge," the Baltimore Sun reports.

• Bush named Richard Haass as the director of policy planning for the State Department, Marc Grossman as undersecretary of state for political affairs and Grant Green as undersecretary of state for management," Reuters reports.
• The Senate yesterday confirmed Robert Zoellick as U.S. trade representative by a vote of 98-0, Reuters reports.

• "Secretary of State Colin Powell said yesterday he is not concerned about China's influence in the Panama Canal," the Washington Times reports.
• "TV execs who worry that a more pious, Republican Washington will somehow fashion a new set of content rules for television needn't worry about the new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission," Inside.com reports.
• "Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told the military's top brass Tuesday that President Bush has decided to stick with the Clinton administration's planned Pentagon budget," the Washington Post reports.

• A new study by the General Accounting Office finds that "even under the best of circumstances, Social Security reform proposals would reduce benefits" for people with disabilities, the New York Times reports.
• "All but one of 32 models of gun locks tested recently by the government could be opened without a key," the Washington Post reports.
• "A trade panel ruled unanimously Tuesday that the United States violated the North American Free Trade Agreement by barring Mexican trucks from most of its highways," AP reports. "But it said the United States can require Mexican truckers to meet U.S. safety standards."
• Layoffs in January reached an eight-year high, the Wall Street Journal reports.

• "California appeared to have dodged yet another energy shock Wednesday when a judge stepped in to order a major power supplier to keep pumping electricity," AP reports.
• The Wall Street Journal reports that "energy-crisis negotiators in California have come up with a plan they say could get the state's nearly bankrupt utilities 'back on their feet' while limiting the state's direct financial exposure."
• The state is "spending at a clip of more than $1 billion a month to buy power," the Los Angeles Times reports.
• A bill in the California legislature would "have the state buy the massive transmission grid that routes power across the state, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.

• "Despite Republican officials urging him to drop out, Jersey City Mayor Bret Schundler said yesterday" that he will remain in the New Jersey gubernatorial race, the Trenton Times reports.
• Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., "has broken the $1 million fund-raising mark for his 2002 re-election campaign," the Portland Oregonian reports.
• Democratic Reps. John Tierney, James McGovern and Michael Capuano of Massachusetts all "ended last year with healthy surpluses in their campaign treasury," the Boston Globe reports.

• The Virginia Senate has passed a bill requiring "a 24-hour waiting period before a woman can get an abortion," the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports. Gov. Jim Gilmore (R) has said he will sign the bill.
• House Majority Leader Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., "is pushing legislation to turn the privately run Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home in Dixon, Ill., into a federally owned historic site," the Chicago Sun-Times reports.

• Bill Clinton and Al Gore had an "uncommonly blunt" debate in the days after Gore conceded the presidential election, the Washington Post reports. "Gore forcefully told Clinton that his sex scandal and low personal approval ratings were a major impediment," while Clinton "responded with equal force that it was Gore's failure to run on the administration's record that hobbled his ambitions."
• On Monday, Gore gave his first lecture at Columbia University in New York, where he "talked about the power of television to shape public perceptions, the rise of news talk shows and the emphasis on what he called 'derivative' news, like journalists' speculations about politicians' methods, motives and electoral chances," the New York Times reports.

• The New York Times reports that the focus of an investigation into New Jersey Sen. Bob Torricelli's (D) 1996 campaign has shifted from illegal contributions to the senator himself.
• Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., is the new chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, the Indianapolis Star reports. Bayh will speak today at the National Press Club. (See Daybook for more D.C. events.)
• The Washington Post reports that "Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has established a political action committee, called HILLPAC, that advisers say she intends to use to help Democrats take back control of the House and Senate."
• "William Daley, the former secretary of commerce and chairman of the Gore-Lieberman presidential campaign, has been elected to the board of Electronic Data Systems," AP reports. Daley will replace Dick Cheney.
• Maria Hsia, a former Democratic fund-raiser linked to the 1996 Buddhist Temple controversy, received a sentence "to spend three months in home confinement in Los Angeles, serve three years on probation and pay a $5,000 fine," the Los Angeles Times reports.
• Inside.com reports that News Corp. head Rupert Murdoch's efforts to acquire DirectTV may be moving forward in a $45 billion deal involving both Microsoft and former TCI chairman John Malone. But Reuters reports that GM, which owns DirectTV, is denying that a deal is imminent.