1. LOBBYING:
The kid from Mud Lake will soon be Big Oil's man in Washington

When Jack Gerard was a kid growing up in Mud Lake, Idaho, he wanted to be a lawyer. He wasn't sure what that meant, except that it might be his ticket out of working in hayfields and helping his dad on the dairy farm. "All I knew was I wanted to get out of Mud Lake," he said in a recent interview. "I was sick most of the time with terrible allergies. I thought, 'There's got to be something different.'" There is, and Gerard found it. He is one of the highest paid lobbyists in Washington, making $2.2 million a year as the head of the American Chemistry Council, according to National Journal. And he is poised to become the chief executive of the American Petroleum Institute on Nov. 1. Go to story #1