A couple of last items in a busy news week. As we noted earlier, the House Republicans held their elections Thursday to replace Tom DeLay as House Majority Leader. You can see the previous leadership in the chart on p. 295 of KTR. The leading candidate for the slot was Roy Blunt but he was beaten yesterday after two ballots by John Boehner (which, as all the papers tell you, is unexpectedly pronounced -- "BAY-ner").
The papers generally see this result as a) surprising, since Blunt was DeLay's protégé and had been telling everyone that he had the votes to win and b) a sign that Republicans are spooked by the scandals that have plagued them of late and wanted a candidate not associated with them. However, Boehner, while not part of these particular scandals, has a history of his own, when he was a part of the leadership structure under former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (see the profile in Ch. 3). And, even now, his relationship with lobbyists is, as he puts it, "cozy" but not "unethical." He seems to have been a compromise between Blunt, who promised business as usual, and a more genuinely reform candidate, John Shaddeg, who lost early on. Everybody covers this, but the two best analyses are in the WaPo, which has lots of insider details (Jim VandeHei and Shailagh Murray, Post-Abramoff Mood Shaped Vote for DeLay's Successor, 2/3/06) and the NYT (Adam Nagourney, A Cry of Concern by Republicans at Voter Unease, 2/3/06).
Also, all the papers note that the Bush administration has asked for $120 billion more for military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, $70 billion of that through 2006. That figure is not part of the $439.3 billion Defense Department budget they are requesting for 2007, a five percent increase over the previous budget; the war expenditures are funded independently. See, for example, David Cloud, $70 Billion More is Sought for Military in War Zones (NYT, 2/3/06).