From this morning's Earlybird:

• Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) "didn't outright oppose" former Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, "a Democrat whose duties will include overhauling the country's healthcare system and overseeing the response to swine flu," McClatchy reports. "But the Alaska governor also said nothing while her supporters on Team Sarah, a Web site affiliated with an anti-abortion group, worked the phones in an effort to derail Sebelius' nomination because she favors abortion rights. The Senate confirmed Sebelius anyway, 65-31."

• "It's hard for competitors to speak with one voice when their industry faces extinction. And that's exactly what competing constituencies within the private student loan industry are discovering as they scramble to preserve the way they do business," Roll Call (subscription) reports. "The industry is responding to the president's proposal in his 2010 budget to switch the federal student loan system entirely to the government's direct student loan program, eliminating the 'middlemen' of banks and lenders that critics say are inefficient and wasteful."

• "Pork producers are pushing back against suggestions from public interest groups that the flu virus popping up across the world may have been caused by factory farms in Mexico," The Hill reports. "If the farms, based in the Mexican province of Veracruz, are determined to be the source of the swine flu, watchdogs expect to argue for increased regulation of concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, to lawmakers on Capitol Hill."

• "Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter's decision to switch political parties and run for re-election as a Democrat in 2010 reverberated down K Street on Tuesday as lobbyists braced for a dramatically new environment around some of the year's most heavily lobbied issues," Roll Call (subscription) reports. "Specter's switch has implications across a broad swath of policy areas as the Obama administration tees up massive governmental reforms on health care, climate change, labor and economic policy."