S.V. Dáte
Shirish Dáte is an editor on NPR's Washington Desk and the author of Jeb: America's Next Bush, based on his coverage of the Florida governor as Tallahassee bureau chief for the Palm Beach Post.
Dáte has been a journalist for three decades since graduating from Stanford University. He has written for the Times-Herald Record in Middletown, N.Y., the Orlando Sentinel in Cape Canaveral, where he covered the space program, and finally the Associated Press and the Palm Beach Post in Tallahassee, where he covered the Florida statehouse. He joined NPR in August 2011, and oversees the network's congressional and campaign finance coverage.
Between Tallahassee and Washington were some 15,000 nautical miles aboard Juno, an Alden 44 cutter. Dáte and his two school-aged sons crossed the Atlantic and sailed into the Mediterranean as far as the Aegean islands. They spent just over two years exploring Italy, Greece, Spain, Morocco, the Canary and Cape Verde Islands, the Caribbean and the Bahamas before riding the Gulf Stream north around Cape Hatteras and sailing up the Chesapeake.
Dáte is also the author of Quiet Passion, a biography of former Florida senator Bob Graham, and five novels. His work has appeared in POLITICO Magazine, The Atlantic, National Journal, the Washington Post, The New Republic and Slate.
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Rush Limbaugh has been spending a lot of time calling new immigration overhaul plans little more than "amnesty" for some 11 million undocumented immigrants already in this country. A lot of time, that is, except for the 15 minutes of his extremely deferential interview with one of the plan's authors, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.
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House Republicans agreed to a short-term increase in the debt limit, but their proposal does a whole lot more than that.
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If the tax rate rises for the top 2 percent of wage earners, business owners would generally react by hiring fewer new workers, according to a fundamental Republican argument. But the actual outcome might be a bit murkier, and — in some instances — counterintuitive.
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President Obama has said it over and over — to help balance the federal budget, the wealthiest Americans should pay more in taxes. Republicans frame it a different way and say raising those taxes would hit small businesses, making them less likely to hire new workers.
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Two weeks after Election Day, it appears the partisan makeup of the new House of Representatives will be 234 Republicans and 201 Democrats, although the outcome is not yet official in two states. That would be a gain of eight seats for the minority Democrats.
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If voters were surprised to watch TV networks call the election for President Obama over Republican Mitt Romney minutes after polls closed in California last week, perhaps it was because of earlier statements from some pollsters confident in a Romney romp. A few are now acknowledging mistakes.
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It has been seen for decades as a fundamental premise of campaign finance: The public has an absolute right to know who gave and who got, so it can make an informed judgment as to what those contributors might want, and then hold elected officials accountable. But the rules have changed.
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Karl Rove's tax-exempt Crossroads GPS group said it was interested only in advancing issues, not engaging in electoral politics. But now it's running a minute-long ad telling viewers to vote for Mitt Romney — with no mention of those very issues it had been saying were central to its mission.
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The newly unearthed video of Mitt Romney in 1985 explaining how Bain Capital hoped to "harvest" the firms it invested in seemed at odds with the Republican presidential nominee's suggestion on the campaign trail that creating jobs was a major aim in those days.
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Crossroads GPS, an anti-Obama group co-founded by GOP political strategist Karl Rove, is shifting its ad strategy. It's going from so-called issue ads that purportedly educated voters on why the president was wrong on issues to directly urging for voters to vote against him.