Politics

Louie and guest co-host, UTEP Political Science professor Gregory Rocha, talk with Congressman Beto O'Rourke about his first 4 weeks in office.  O'Rourke talks about the debt ceiling, committee appointments, immigration reform, assistance for veterans, and gun control.  http://orourke.house.gov/  O'Rourke's El Paso district office is located at 303 N. Oregon St., M-Thu 8:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m., Fri 8:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m.  915-541-1400.  Aired Feb. 2, 2013.

The debate over gun control continues to dominate the headlines. Meanwhile, the U.S. Senate doubles the number of African-American members by welcoming William 'Mo" Cowan. He replaces John Kerry. Host Michel Martin talks politics with Republican strategist Ron Christie and Keli Goff, political correspondent for The Root.

Last week, former Sen. Chuck Hagel faced a very critical confirmation hearing in his quest to become the next secretary of defense, and President Obama and a bipartisan group of senators made the pitch for immigration reform. Weekend Edition Sunday host Rachel Martin speaks with NPR's Mara Liasson about the week in politics.

Host Laura Sullivan talks with The Atlantic's James Fallows about the news this week Chuck Hagel's confirmation hearing, the Chinese cyber-attack of The New York Times, and that newspaper's obituary of former New York City Mayor Ed Koch.

The White House has released proof that President Obama really did shoot skeet — at least once — at the Maryland presidential retreat, last summer.

Of all the individuals in President Obama's first-term Cabinet, physicist Steven Chu was arguably the least likely to be found in official Washington.

The Energy Department secretary, after all, was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist from the University of California, Berkeley, the first science laureate to serve as a Cabinet secretary.

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That attack in Turkey came on Hillary Clinton's last day as secretary of state. She says it's another reminder that we live in complex and dangerous times.

SECRETARY HILLARY CLINTON: But I leave this department confident, confident about the direction we have set.

CORNISH: Employees crammed the State Department's lobby to see her off, and Clinton appeared wistful.

CLINTON: I am very proud to have been secretary of state. I will miss you. I will probably be dialing up just to talk.

(LAUGHTER)

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No one is watching more closely how this latest immigration debate will shake out than our next guest.

Carlos Gutierrez was Secretary of Commerce during George W. Bush's second term. He went on to advise Mitt Romney in his recent run for president. After the election, Gutierrez founded a superPAC called Republicans for Immigration Reform, which gives you a sense of where he's coming from, and he supports Senator Rubio's position.

Former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown will not seek the Republican nomination for Senate in a special election to replace Sen. John Kerry, the Democrat who on Friday was being sworn in as secretary of state.

The decision leaves Republicans in deep blue Massachusetts scrambling to find a candidate who can be competitive in a special election just five months away.

Brown, who won a 2010 special election for the seat of the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, lost the seat in November to Democrat Elizabeth Warren.

The issue in this week's podcast is about follow-through. Yes, there have been hearings on gun legislation, but what will get passed? Yes, there's a bipartisan group of senators working on immigration changes, but what will Congress ultimately do? Plus: John Kerry leaves the Senate and history is made in his (temporary) successor. And two more senators say they've had enough.

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I'm Michel Martin, and this is TELL ME MORE, from NPR News. Coming up, unemployment is up, the GDP is down, but economists are still kind of happy - well, as happy as economists get. NPR's Marilyn Geewax is going to interpret all that for us in just a few minutes. But first, we turn to a debate that our national leaders are finally taking up again over how to fix an immigration system that just about everybody agrees is broken.

Ed Koch, the colorful three-term mayor who led New York City through its financial crisis in the '70s, has died.

George Arzt, a spokesman for the former mayor, tells NPR's Joel Rose that Koch died of congestive heart failure around 2 a.m. ET Friday. The former mayor was 88.

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It's MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.

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And I'm Steve Inskeep. President Obama's nominee for defense secretary is a former senator. He is also a Republican.

MONTAGNE: But neither his party affiliation nor his former membership in the Senate club spared Chuck Hagel from almost eight hours of hard questions yesterday.

INSKEEP: At a Senate hearing, Democrats had many of those questions, and Republicans went on the attack. NPR's David Welna reports.

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It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.

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And I'm Renee Montagne. More signs today of a slow, slow economic recovery. The Labor Department reports the economy added 157,000 new jobs last month. The unemployment rate ticked up slightly, to 7.9 percent. To tell us what's behind these numbers, we're joined by NPR business correspondent Yuki Noguchi, and also our White House correspondent, Scott Horsley. Good morning to both of you.

YUKI NOGUCHI, BYLINE: Good morning.

Hillary Clinton leaves her job Friday as secretary of state with sky-high approval ratings, and there's already a superPAC established urging her to run for president in 2016.

So what did we learn from Secretary of Defense nominee Chuck Hagel's sometimes rocky confirmation hearing Thursday before the Senate Armed Services Committee?

1) We learned that the former two-term Republican senator from Nebraska with the reputation for speaking his mind and not sticking to his party's talking points has through the years said lots of things that could be used against him in such a setting.

And they were. Repeatedly.

President Barack Obama says he hopes that the immigration reform plan designed out by a bipartisan Senate committee will become a bill as soon as March. The president also warned, that this debate will become more heated and emotional as it moves ahead.

The Washington Post's Fact Checker takes on the subject of whether President Obama was shooting straight when he told The New Republic that he has fired a gun and that "we do skeet shooting all the time" at Camp David.

And what does Fact Checker conclude?

"Verdict Pending."

Although the national conversation about immigration policy tends to focus on Latinos, it is Asian-Americans who encounter some of the knottiest challenges facing immigrants and immigration reformers.

Of the five countries with the longest backlogs for visas, four are in Asia.

It's been two years since Hosni Mubarak was ousted as Egypt's President. Today, there's new leadership, but the country is still in turmoil. And some Egyptians wonder if things are changing for the best. Host Michel Martin speaks with NPR Cairo Bureau Chief, Leila Fadel, to learn more about the new Egypt.

Violent protests are breaking out in Egypt, just two years after a massive uprising led to the fall of the former dictator. One of the unexpected driving forces is soccer. Host Michel Martin talks to Dave Zirin, sports editor at The Nation about how the sport affects Egypt's political landscape.

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Responding to those who have questioned his views on Israel, Iran and defense spending, former Sen. Chuck Hagel said Thursday at the opening of a Senate hearing on his nomination to be secretary of defense that: