News Roundup, 4/10/2008: Get The World Some Benadryl, Stat

It has been said that when the United States economy sneezes, the world catches a cold. Now might be a good time to start passing out the tissues.

The International Monetary Fund announced yesterday that it was slashing forecasts on economic growth worldwide as a result of the stagnant U.S. economy, whose growth they estimate as tumbling from 2.2% in 2007 to 0.5% this year. They give a 25% probability that, due to this, we will go into a global recession in 2008 or 2009.

We noted yesterday some specific results of the Tuesday runoff election, including that Shelley Sekula Gibbs, who unsuccessfully challenged Congressman Nick Lampson in 2006 for Tom Delay's old House seat in CD 22, had lost the Republican nomination to Pete Olson. CQ is now rating the race as leaning toward a hold for Congressman Lampson.

Speaking of the U.S. House, things were pretty eventful yesterday in that neck of the woods. General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker gave a reprise of their performance in the Senate the day before, which led to few surprises. Possibly more significantly, Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats put the hammer down on George W. Bush's fast-track trade deal authority, which requires that deals not be amended and be voted on within 90 days.

Bush tried to sneak a controversial trade deal with Colombia that excludes key labor and environmental provisions that the White House and Capitol Hill had agreed on before his fast-track authority expired. Pelosi countered that House rules govern the behavior of the House, not the fast-track law, and refused to allow the trade deal to come to a vote.

Finally, Texas Watch Executive Director Alex Winslow writes a piece on Texas energy companies irresponsibly ignoring worker safety concerns via a loophole given to them by a poor Supreme Court decision, and Grace Stevens interviews Central Texas Democratic Women president Tammie Hartgroves in a new edition of On The Record.