If bets are being placed on what will be the nastiest primary battle of 2010, safe money is on the Democratic Primary for Pennsylvania’s Senate seat which is shaping up as a face-off between party newcomer Sen. Arlen Specter and Rep. Joe Sestak.

Specter’s party switch was a calculated move to help ensure the former moderate Republican’s re-election in an increasingly Democratic state, but Sestak—against the wishes of the national and state Democratic Party establishment—is expected to challenge Specter anyway in the May 2010 primary. (He has not yet officially declared his bid.)

Elected in 1980, Specter has built a reputation as one of the more effective and, well, mean campaigners in politics today. Specter issued his first attack on Sestak Thursday, accusing the junior lawmaker of “flagrant hypocrisy” because, like the senator, Sestak wasn’t always a loyal member of the Democratic Party.

“Congressman Sestak is a flagrant hypocrite in challenging my being a real Democrat when he did not register as a Democrat until 2006 just in time to run for Congress. His lame excuse for avoiding party affiliation, because he was in the service, is undercut by his documented disinterest in the political process,” Specter charged in a statement, citing voting records that show Sestak voted in just 12 out of 35 elections from 1971-2005.

Sestak defended his independent status citing his naval career and the view that “military officers should be nonpartisan.” He fired back: “We’ve learned today that Arlen Specter can abandon his party, but he just can’t quit making Republican swift-boat attacks on the integrity of Democrats who served in our military.”

Specter quickly responded: “I read with amusement Cong. Sestak’s diatribe in response to my brief statement. After going negative against me for months I am a little surprised that Cong. Sestak can dish it out but he can’t take it.”

Expect 10 more months of this.

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The announcement of an $18 million contract to revamp the administration’s stimulus Web site, www.recovery.gov recovery.gov, has been making waves all day, sparking sarcastic blog posts, angry tweets and even an online petition.

The award to Smartronix, a Maryland-based company which does a lot of military work, has been criticized for its size, secrecy, and exclusivity. Smartronix did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.

Smartronix will get $9.5 million to create a “Version 2.0″ of the site, which the White House has promoted heavily as a reason to have confidence in the economic stimulus plan. The company may then get another $8.5 million to continue running the site through January 2014. The money is coming from $84 million set aside in the $787 billion stimulus package for oversight.

The General Services Administration restricted competition for the award to 59 vetted companies. The GSA could not immediately confirm how many companies submitted bids, but Federal News Radio has reported that there were only three.

A copy of the contract wasn’t immediately available from GSA, and transparency campaigners are also complaining that the final details of the competition weren’t publicly circulated either.
Those details are available here.

“It’s a shocking figure for what people expect to have” for a Web site, said Jerry Brito, a technology and transparency expert at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. “The best web development companies in the country are certainly not in these 59 eligible companies. It raises a lot of questions.”

Good government group the Sunlight Foundation, which initially tried to offer to help the administration run the Web site, was also calling for more information about what Smartronix will be providing. “We don’t know what government has bought, whether it’s cheeseburgers or steaks,” said Clay Johnson, director of Sunlight Labs, the foundation’s online transparency project.

“If recovery.gov is meant to track every single dime of the stimulus money, shouldn’t they start with themselves?”

A spokesman for the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, Ed Pound, said the contract reflected the complex requirements of the new site, from which users will be able to download all information about stimulus spending after Oct. 10. He said that the contractor will be required to provide extensive security improvements, support and a backup system as part of the job.

“We’re not going to spend millions of dollars just to make a pretty Web site,” he said.

Illinois Democratic Sen. Roland Burris will not run for a full six-year term next year, according to local Chicago reports.

Burris’s short-lived Senate tenure was ill-fated from the start after he was appointed by scandal-plagued Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who was later impeached and remains under criminal investigation.

Burris could not shake his ties to Blagojevich, and calls for his resignation quickly escalated after it was revealed that his testimony had changed under oath about whether or not he had offered the governor anything in return for the Senate appointment. (State investigators said last month that there wasn’t enough evidence to pursue perjury charges.)

The 2010 Senate race—for President Barack Obama’s former seat—could become competitive for Republicans as a pick-up opportunity as the Democratic field has yet to take shape. The party’s top contender, Attorney General Lisa Madigan, announced Wednesday that she would seek re-election to her current office instead. That same day, moderate Republican Rep. Mark Kirk indicated he intends to run for the seat.

An attorney for Nevada Republican Sen. John Ensign revealed Thursday that the senator’s parents paid $96,000 to a woman the senator admitted he had an extramarital affair with in 2008.

The disclosure comes as renewed focus is placed on Ensign’s affair with Cindy Hampton, a former campaign aide. The senator revealed the affair on June 16.

The woman’s husband, Doug Hampton, gave an interview this week to the Las Vegas Sun offering details of the affair and discussed payments made to his wife by the senator. In response, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, an ethics watchdog, today called on Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate the payments.

CREW has also asked the Federal Election Commission and the Senate Ethics panel to investigate the payments made to Hampton.

In a statement today, Ensign attorney Paul Coggins said the senator’s parents each made four $12,000 payments to Cindy and Doug Hampton and to two of their children.

“The payments were made as gifts, accepted as gifts and complied with tax rules governing gifts,” Coggins said. Ensign’s parents agreed to make the payments “out of concern for the well-being of long-time family friends during a difficult time,” Coggins said, adding that the “gifts are consistent with a pattern of generosity by the Ensign family to the Hamptons and others.”

Coggins stressed that the payments were made from personal funds and no official money was involved. “Senator Ensign has complied with all applicable laws and Senate ethics rules,” he said.

Another senator, Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn, has been brought in to the scandal because he acknowledged that he was aware of the affair and worked to convince Ensign to end it in a February 2008 meeting.

Coburn confirmed to reporters today that he was at that meeting but said he would not discuss his personal conversation with Ensign. “No, and I never will. Not to a court of law, not to the ethics committee, to anybody. Because that is privileged communication that I will never reveal to anybody,” he said.

Next week’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings could be called “This Is Your Life, Sonia Sotomayor,” as Democrats and Republicans have slated witnesses from pivotal periods of the Obama nominee’s career.

Democrats are lining up Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, who hired Sotomayor straight out of Yale Law School and later assigned her to prosecute murder and child pornography cases; former FBI Director Louis Freeh, who served with Sotomayor when both were federal district judges in Manhattan in the early 1990s; and former New York Yankees and Mets pitcher David Cone, a players union leader during the 1994 baseball strike that ended in Sotomayor’s courtroom.

Republicans are calling figures likely to think less warmly of Sotomayor, including Frank Ricci and Ben Vargas, who were among the New Haven, Conn., firefighters who filed suit when the city threw out promotional exam results because African American test takers scored too low to advance. Sotomayor joined colleagues on her current court, the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York, to affirm a lower court that threw out the firefighters lawsuit. Last month, the Supreme Court reversed that decision.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made it clear today that she disagrees with Texas Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee on whether the House should vote on a resolution honoring the life and humanitarian works of pop icon Michael Jackson who died last week at the age of 50.

“Michael Jackson was a great, great performer,” Pelosi told reporters at her weekly press conference. “I don’t think it is necessary for us to have a resolution.”

Pelosi said members could honor him in speeches on the House floor but that a resolution would be a distraction and “would open up two contrary views” on Jackson’s life.

Rep. Peter King, a Republican from Long Island, has blasted the media coverage of Jackson and called the performer a “pervert” and a “pedophile.”

Jackson-Lee spoke at Jackson’s memorial service Tuesday in Los Angeles where she held up a framed copy of her resolution and told the crowd of thousands assembled there that it would be debated and voted on the House floor. The pledge created a minor headache for House Democratic leaders who do not want to use floor time to debate such a resolution.

So far, the resolution has just one co-sponsor, California Democratic Rep. Diane Watson. The House did honor Michael Jackson with a moment of silence on the House floor on June 26.

Iowa Republicans are actively courting Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to headline the state party’s premier fund-raiser, the Ronald Reagan Dinner, held every fall, the Des Moines Register reports.

It is a regular stop for Republicans considering—or rumored to be considering—presidential bids in the nation’s first caucus state. In 2007, Fred Thompson, Mike Huckabee, Tom Tancredo, Duncan Hunter, Ron Paul and John Cox all attended the dinner.

Des Moines local Becky Beach, who has close ties within the GOP and is helping organize the dinner, is doing her part to lock Palin in for the event. “Absolutely, I’m trying to get her here,” Beach told the paper. “It would be a huge event.”

Palin resigns from the governor’s office on July 26, but neither her short nor long term intentions are clear. She is expected to travel in the Lower 48, make speeches, and work on her upcoming book.

Republicans are also hopeful she will work the fund-raising circuit to help candidates across the country.

“I think that appearing on behalf of other candidates is a great thing for her to do,” Fred Malek, who served as the national finance co-chairman for Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign, told Washington Wire recently. “It’s a way to both have a message and be extremely helpful to the party.”

Palin set up a political action committee, SarahPAC, in February and was soliciting donations in the days before she announced her decision to resign.

The Alaska governor has so far had a rocky start when it comes to coordinating with House and Senate campaign operations—as seen in the public back-and-forth over whether she would attend the GOP’s largest annual fund-raiser in Washington, D.C., last month. She ultimately attended but did not speak.

Malek cited the Virginia governor’s race as a place where Palin could have an impact and help raise money for Republican Bob McDonnell. But the Associated Press reported there was wariness about how much she would help on the campaign trail because while she is popular among the conservative base, she is a divisive figure among the general public.

President Barack Obama has threatened to veto a funding bill for intelligence agencies if it includes a provision that expands the number of congressmen that need to be briefed on covert operations, The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder writes. “This seemingly small change to the law is what’s provoked the veto threat. The Obama administration, like all previous administrations of the modern era, believe that the president, and only the president, has the power to determine what constitutes national security information and, even more vitally, what safeguards ought to be in place to protect the information…President Obama believes that the executive branch, and only the executive branch, controls the release of classified information. The bright line they’ve drawn here is not a-historical, but given recent history, it will provoke a clash with Congress, and, down the line, trigger a major Supreme Court case. Congressional sources say that the White House veto threat will be sufficient to persuade House Democrats to remove the provision from the bill, which was scheduled to be debated [Thursday].”

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L’AQUILA, Italy–Among the myriad declarations emanating from the three-day Group of Eight leading nations summit, few messages have loomed as large as the one launched by a small group of homeless earthquake victims.

Giant white letters, plastered over a sheared hillside overlooking the summit venue, proclaim: “YES WE CAMP,” a play on U.S. President Barack Obama’s “Yes We Can” campaign slogan.

The sign is a not-so-subtle reminder that, just a stone’s throw away from the G8’s deliberations, more than 20 thousand earthquake victims are living in tents.

In moving the G8 to L’Aquila from the island of La Maddalena, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi aimed to call attention to the devastation caused by the 6.3 magnitude earthquake that reduced much of the city to rubble and killed nearly 300 people.

Mr. Berlusconi has been pressing his G8 counterparts to pledge funds for the reconstruction of the city, and on Wednesday, the Italian premier took several leaders, including U.S. President Barack Obama, for a tour of the city’s crumbled bell-towers and collapsed domes.

Some of the area’s residents, however, are unmoved by the parade of visiting leaders, and irritation with Mr. Berlusconi is running high.

“This is all an act of window dressing by Berlusconi,” said Alessandro Tettamanti, a 28-year old publicist who helped drag large sheets of white plastic up the hillside to build the bold-lettered sign.

Mr. Berlusconi’s government has pledged to raise 8 billion euros ($11.1 billion) over three years to rebuild the area. A large chunk of the money is expected to come from European Union funds, the government has said.

Mr. Tettamanti, who has been living in a tent since the April earthquake, says the summit preparations are slowing the reconstruction efforts. Running water and electricity remain scarce in large swaths of the city. Roads that serve as key arteries to the area have been blocked for official G8 delegations. The arrival of thousands of journalists and government officials has also stretched the area’s thin supply of structurally-sound lodgings. “You can’t hold a summit in a earthquake zone!” he said.

Others, however, don’t mind the inconveniences caused by the visiting heads of state.
Pio Ludovici, a 32-year-old lawyer, was in the nearby hamlet of Onna on Wednesday when German Chancellor Angela Merkel dropped in to survey the destruction. Onna, just a few miles from L’Aquila, was completely leveled by the quake, which killed Mr. Ludovici’s grandmother and left him living in a tent along with his parents. “We need money to rebuild, not just promises,” Mr. Ludovici said, adding: “To understand the pain we’re in, they need to see it with their own eyes.”