THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Well, I don't think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president,

// posted by montag @ 7:20 AM 0 Comments

The Defense Department, the nation's biggest polluter, is resisting orders from the Environmental Protection Agency to clean up Fort Meade and two other military bases where the EPA says dumped chemicals pose "imminent and substantial" dangers to public health and the environment.

The Pentagon has also declined to sign agreements required by law that cover 12 other military sites on the Superfund list of the most polluted places in the country. The contracts would spell out a remediation plan, set schedules, and allow the EPA to oversee the work and assess penalties if milestones are missed.

// posted by montag @ 7:12 AM 0 Comments

A group of American advisers led by a small State Department team played an integral part in drawing up contracts between the Iraqi government and five major Western oil companies to develop some of the largest fields in Iraq, American officials say.

The disclosure, coming on the eve of the contracts’ announcement, is the first confirmation of direct involvement by the Bush administration in deals to open Iraq’s oil to commercial development and is likely to stoke criticism.

In their role as advisers to the Iraqi Oil Ministry, American government lawyers and private-sector consultants provided template contracts and detailed suggestions on drafting the contracts, advisers and a senior State Department official said.

It is unclear how much influence their work had on the ministry’s decisions.

// posted by montag @ 6:52 AM 0 Comments

Newsweek is reporting that John and Cindy McCain failed to pay taxes on a California property for the past four years. This is especially odd considering that the McCains are worth an estimated $100 million, and could easily afford to pay the bill.

After a reporter inquired about the bill with the McCain campaign, they immediately sent San Diego County a check for $6,744.42 -- and even then, they're still short by $1,742.

// posted by montag @ 4:47 PM 0 Comments

More than 20 years ago, I conducted a study of firearm-related deaths in homes in Seattle and surrounding King County, Washington. Over the study's seven-year interval, more than half of all fatal shootings in the county took place in the home where the firearm involved was kept. Just nine of those shootings were legally justifiable homicides or acts of self-defense; guns kept in homes were also involved in 12 accidental deaths, 41 criminal homicides and a shocking 333 suicides. A subsequent study conducted in three U.S. cities found that guns kept in the home were 12 times more likely to be involved in the death or injury of a member of the household than in the killing or wounding of a bad guy in self-defense.

According to the Justice Department, far more guns are lost each year to burglary or theft than are used to defend people or property. In Atlanta, a city where approximately a third of households contain guns, a study of 197 home-invasion crimes revealed only three instances (1.5 percent) in which the inhabitants resisted with a gun. Intruders got to the homeowner's gun twice as often as the homeowner did.

// posted by montag @ 1:39 PM 0 Comments

Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.

Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of “high-value targets” in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.

The former official said that, a few weeks later, a meeting took place in the Vice-President’s office. “The subject was how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington,” he said.

The commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards warned that Tehran would respond to an attack against it by barraging Israel with missiles and controlling a key oil passageway in the Persian Gulf, said a newspaper report published Saturday.

The report in the conservative Jam-e-Jam newspaper comes after the disclosure of a recent Israeli military exercise over the Mediterranean Sea that was seen as sending a message to Iran to curb its nuclear ambitions.

Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari said there were strong deterrents against striking Iran, including the country’s missile power, the vulnerability of Israeli and U. S. forces in the region and the low probability of a successful attack.

// posted by montag @ 12:31 PM 0 Comments

“The Army, as the service primarily responsible for ground operations, should have insisted on better Phase IV planning and preparations through its voice on the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” the study noted. “The military means employed were sufficient to destroy the Saddam regime; they were not sufficient to replace it with the type of nation-state the United States wished to see in its place.”

// posted by montag @ 6:48 PM 0 Comments

I stopped beating my wife just a couple of weeks ago

// posted by montag @ 6:03 PM 0 Comments

"Conservatives say if you don't give the rich more money, they will lose their incentive to invest. As for the poor, they tell us they've lost all incentive because we've given them too much money."

// posted by montag @ 12:33 PM 0 Comments

Many people in Zimbabwe faced a peculiar choice on Friday: cast their ballots for President Robert Mugabe, the only candidate left in the presidential runoff, or be beaten up and perhaps killed.

// posted by montag @ 10:18 PM 0 Comments

American soldiers fatally shot three Iraqi bank employees Wednesday as their car passed a convoy near Baghdad International Airport, according to an Interior Ministry official and Yarmouk Hospital, where the bodies were brought.

The attack was one of two bloody episodes on Wednesday in which the American military and Iraqi officials offered sharply different accounts of what had happened.

Iraqi authorities said at least eight civilians had been killed by American soldiers. American military officials said that in each case they opened fire after coming under attack, and that they were unaware of any civilian deaths.

The military also reported on Wednesday that four American soldiers had died in unrelated events. They brought the death toll of American service members this month to 26.

// posted by montag @ 6:47 AM 0 Comments

Republican presidential candidate John McCain said Tuesday that he cannot see the U.S. returning to a military draft unless there is an “all-out” world war.

Asked during a town hall meeting about prospects for a return to conscription, McCain, an Arizona senator who is ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said: “I don’t know what would make a draft happen except, perhaps, an all-out World War III.”

// posted by montag @ 7:28 PM 0 Comments

Dallas billionaire T. Boone Pickens has rejected contentions from 10 men who served in Vietnam with John Kerry that information in the controversial Swift Vets and POWs for Truth ads during the 2004 presidential campaign were false.

That means Mr. Kerry’s crewmates won’t be paid the $1 million that Mr. Pickens offered last fall to anyone who could prove that the ads contained falsehoods.

“Unfortunately, key aspects of my offer of $1 million have not been accurately reported,” Mr. Pickens wrote. “My offer, reiterated in a letter to Senator Kerry not long after the challenge was made, was to pay $1 million for information that would prove any of the ads — which I helped fund — inaccurate. In reviewing your material, none of the information you provide speaks specifically to the issues contained in the ads, and, as a result, does not qualify for the $1 million.”

“I guess now we know the ‘T’ in T. Boone doesn’t stand for ‘truth,’’’ said Del Sandusky, one of the crewmen who signed the letter to Mr. Pickens. “His response is slicker than an oil spill. I really hoped we could’ve taken him at his word, but now he’s … running away from his own bet. … Mr. Pickens hasn’t heard the last from us. We won’t rest until he admits the truth that he bankrolled a big lie.”

// posted by montag @ 6:33 PM 0 Comments

My daughters, Grace and Christina, are six and three. They are growing up in a time of two great conflicts: one between our nation and its enemies, and another, between what is best and worst in our American soul. And someday soon, I know I am going to hear that question: “What did you do?” I want, more than anything else, to give the right answer.

That question is coming for every single one of us in this body. Every single one of us will be judged by a jury from whom there’s no hiding: our sons, our daughters, our grandchildren. Someday soon, they’ll read in their textbooks the story of a great nation, one that threw down tyrants and oppressors for two centuries; one that rid the world of Nazism and Soviet communism; one that proved that great strength can serve great virtue, that right can truly make might.

And then they will read how, in the early years of the 21st century, that nation lost its way.

We do not have the power to strike that chapter. No, Mr. President—we can’t go back.

We can’t un-destroy the CIA’s interrogation tapes. We can’t un-pass the Military Commissions Act. We can’t un-speak Alberto Gonzales’s disgraceful testimony. We can’t un-torture innocent people. And perhaps, sadly, shamefully, we cannot stop retroactive immunity. We can’t un-do anything that has been done in the last six years for the cause of lawlessness and fear.

We cannot blot out that chapter. But we can begin the next one, even today. Let its first words read: “Finally, in June 2008, the Senate said: ‘Enough.’

// posted by montag @ 6:13 PM 0 Comments

``I think the mortgage industry has done more to hurt this country than al-Qaeda ever did,''

// posted by montag @ 6:06 PM 0 Comments

Three U.S. soldiers and an interpreter were killed by a roadside bomb in Ninewa Province on Tuesday night in the second large explosion to strike the Mosul region in a day and further evidence that Sunni Arab guerrillas remain very active in the northern city despite recent Iraqi military operations.

Few details of the attack were released by the American military, which said that an improvised explosive device killed the soldiers and interpreter about 10:45 p.m. At least 25 American service members have been killed in Iraq this month, compared to 19 in May, according to Icasualties.org, a Web site that tracks deaths.

// posted by montag @ 7:24 AM 0 Comments

This was Rove’s take on Obama to Republicans at the Capitol Hill Club Monday, according to Christianne Klein of ABC News:

“Even if you never met him, you know this guy. He’s the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by.”

Actually, that sounds more like W.

Rove’s mythmaking about Obama won’t fly. If he means that Obama has brains, what’s wrong with that? If he means that Obama is successful, what’s wrong with that? If he means that Obama has education and intellectual sophistication, what’s wrong with that?

Many of Obama’s traits are the traits that people in the population aspire to.

It looks as if Rove is on the verge of realizing his dream of creating a permanent position for the Republicans.

Unfortunately for him, it’s in the minority.

// posted by montag @ 6:52 AM 0 Comments

according to McCain's chief strategist, Charlie Black. The assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December was an "unfortunate event," says Black. "But his knowledge and ability to talk about it reemphasized that this is the guy who's ready to be Commander-in-Chief. And it helped us." As would, Black concedes with startling candor after we raise the issue, another terrorist attack on U.S. soil. "Certainly it would be a big advantage to him," says Black.

// posted by montag @ 6:15 PM 1 Comments

Getting a story on the evening news isn’t easy for any correspondent. And for reporters in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is especially hard, according to Lara Logan, the chief foreign correspondent for CBS News. So she has devised a solution when she is talking to the network.

“Generally what I say is, ‘I’m holding the armor-piercing R.P.G.,’ ” she said last week in an appearance on “The Daily Show,” referring to the initials for rocket-propelled grenade. “ ‘It’s aimed at the bureau chief, and if you don’t put my story on the air, I’m going to pull the trigger.’ ”

// posted by montag @ 7:16 AM 0 Comments

An Iraqi-Canadian translator goes on trial before a U.S. military court Sunday for allegedly stabbing a fellow contractor in the first such military prosecution since the Vietnam War.

Alaa “Alex” Mohammad Ali has been charged with aggravated assault for allegedly stabbing another contractor four times during a fight Feb. 23 on a base near Hit, 85 miles west of Baghdad.

// posted by montag @ 6:45 PM 0 Comments

After the last devastating flood in the Midwest 15 years ago, a committee of experts commissioned by the Clinton administration issued a 272-page report that recommended a more uniform approach to managing rising waters along the Mississippi and its tributaries, including giving the principal responsibility for many of the levees to the Army Corps of Engineers.

But the committee chairman, Gerald E. Galloway Jr., a former brigadier general with the Corps of Engineers, said in an interview that few broad changes were made once the floodwaters of 1993 receded and were forgotten.

And after Hurricane Katrina destroyed levees protecting New Orleans in 2005, Congress passed a bill setting up a program to inventory and inspect levees, but it failed to provide enough money to carry that out, Dr. Galloway said. “We don’t even know where some of these levees are,” he said.

// posted by montag @ 6:19 PM 0 Comments

The candidate endorsed by Republican leaders to run for a Congressional seat being vacated by Representative Vito J. Fossella died on Sunday morning at his home in Staten Island,

// posted by montag @ 6:11 PM 0 Comments

This reporter's choice was a Vespa, the sleek Italian-made scooter that seems to exemplify the phrase "Ciao bella!"

Of course, in a city where driving is considered a blood sport, tooling around on a 216-pound, 50 cc scooter might seem like a death wish. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and this fearless reporter wondered if saving a few bucks on gas is worth risking life and limb.

She set off last week with a full tank and a mission: to cruise the sometimes unfriendly streets of Boston, confronting obstacles, traffic, and the elements.

// posted by montag @ 1:50 PM 0 Comments

The latest in a wave of female suicide bombers killed 15 people and wounded more than 40 others on Sunday near a heavily fortified courthouse and government outpost in central Baquba, Iraqi security officials said. Seven of the dead and 10 of the wounded were Iraqi policemen.

The bomber wore billowing clothes that concealed a vest padded with powerful explosives and laced with small projectiles — apparently iron ball bearings, the officials said. The magnitude of the blast immediately raised questions about the sophistication of the bomb, which witnesses described as unusually strong.

“The explosion was huge, like it was a car bomb,” said Adnan Majid, a 29-year-old library worker who was wounded in the arm. The bodies of at least three policemen were torn to pieces by the force of the detonation, security officials said.

// posted by montag @ 1:16 PM 0 Comments

The interrogator, Deuce Martinez, a soft-spoken analyst who spoke no Arabic, had turned down a C.I.A. offer to be trained in waterboarding. He chose to leave the infliction of pain and panic to others, the gung-ho paramilitary types whom the more cerebral interrogators called “knuckledraggers.”

Mr. Martinez came in after the rough stuff, the ultimate good cop with the classic skills: an unimposing presence, inexhaustible patience and a willingness to listen to the gripes and musings of a pitiless killer in rambling, imperfect English. He achieved a rapport with Mr. Mohammed that astonished his fellow C.I.A. officers.

A canny opponent, Mr. Mohammed mixed disinformation and braggadocio with details of plots, past and planned. Eventually, he grew loquacious. “They’d have long talks about religion,” comparing notes on Islam and Mr. Martinez’s Catholicism, one C.I.A. officer recalled. And, the officer added, there was one other detail no one could have predicted: “He wrote poems to Deuce’s wife.”

// posted by montag @ 12:48 PM 0 Comments

And now – bingo – Sarkozy has done it again. This time it's Bashar al-Assad, another presumed "sponsor of world terror" – this twaddle comes from Washington, of course – who will (if he accepts the invitation française) be in Paris on Bastille Day to take his place in the reviewing stand at the end of the Champs Elysées. The man whom millions of Lebanese believe plotted the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri in Beirut on 14 February 2005 will thus be receiving one of France's highest honours: to stand beside the French president as he reviews his military forces.

Le Canard Enchaîné, my favourite French newspaper, carried a wonderful cartoon this week in which an extremely good likeness of Bashar asks Sarkozy and the gorgeous Carla: "What is it exactly, your 14 July?" And Carla replies: "It's the end of a tyrant." And Sarkozy, almost lost for words, then adds: "Er – a king." Well quite. And both apply to Bashar, whose succession after his father's death in 2000 did rather suggest that Syria was now a caliphate (as Egypt will become if Uncle Hosni is succeeded by his son Gamal Mubarak). But seriously, how did Bashar, a hate-figure of the United States and an adjunct to Bush's crazed notion of the "axis of evil", get on the guest list? Sure he's been asked to attend France's spanking new "Union of the Mediterranean" (along with Ehud Olmert), but there's more to it than that.

For one thing, both he and Sarkozy smell American failure. The American disaster in Iraq – and in Afghanistan (a movie coming to your local cinema soon) – and its total failure to produce a peace between Israel and the Palestinians and the loss of Lebanon as its protégé (now that the pro-Syrian Hizbollah can veto America's friends in the parliamentary majority once there's a cabinet) means that France can move in among the wreckage for a second crack at le mandat français.

The tribunal to judge Hariri's murderers still does not exist and even Walid Jumblatt, my favourite Druze nihilist, has been in Saudi Arabia to ask the king to keep pushing for the court. He did the same in Washington, chatting to Bush and Gates and the rest along the same lines. But the United States has failed in the Middle East.

// posted by montag @ 7:24 PM 0 Comments

Israel carried out a large-scale military exercise in the Mediterranean earlier this month as a warning to Iran that it has the capacity to make an air strike on its nuclear facilities, Pentagon sources confirmed yesterday.

More than 100 Israeli F-16s and F-15s flew more than 900 miles, roughly the distance from Israel to Iran's Natanz nuclear plant. They were accompanied by refuelling planes and helicopters for rescuing any downed crews.

The rise in oil prices has only added to the anxiety: crude oil for July delivery settled up $2.69, to $134.62 a barrel, on Friday.

// posted by montag @ 7:04 PM 0 Comments

The "terrorism is crime/terrorism is war" squabbling is as silly as the "great taste/less filling" fights depicted in the old Miller Lite ads. Most Americans know that "terrorism" takes many forms, and we need to be flexible in response. Prosecutions in federal courts make sense when we're talking about suspects far removed from battlefields; military force makes sense when U.S. troops are confronting fighters in Afghanistan or Iraq.

Here's the saddest thing about this week's dust-up. Not too long ago -- before he decided that becoming the Republican presidential nominee required him to cozy up to his party's most demagogic extremists and play politics with 9/11 -- McCain was the champion of a common-sense, values-based approach to terrorism.

It was McCain who refused to sanction torture. It was McCain who said Guantanamo detainees "have rights under various human rights declarations. And one of them is the right not to be detained indefinitely." It was McCain who advocated moving Guantanamo detainees to Kansas' Ft. Leavenworth, where they would come under the certain jurisdiction of federal courts. It was McCain who insisted that we respect the basic rights even of enemies who "don't deserve our sympathy" because "this isn't about who they are. This is about who we are."

// posted by montag @ 1:22 PM 0 Comments

Senior lawyers inside and outside the Bush administration repeatedly warned the White House that it was risking judicial scrutiny of its detention policies in Guantanamo Bay if it did not pursue a more pragmatic legal strategy that considered the likely reaction of the Supreme Court. But such advice, issued periodically over the past six years, was ignored or discounted, according to current and former administration officials familiar with the debates.

In August 2006, for example, the top lawyer at the State Department told senior officials at the White House that unless they won a congressional mandate that broadly supported their system of detaining terrorism suspects, their goal of keeping the detainees locked up was in jeopardy. "I can virtually guarantee you, without a legislative basis, federal courts are not going to be willing to uphold the indefinite detention of unlawful combatants," John B. Bellinger III warned in an e-mail.

The e-mail, disclosed by former White House officials familiar with the intense internal debates over detainee policy, was one of several red flags for the White House in its fierce battle to keep the detention facility in Cuba free of judicial oversight.

The result, they said, has been a series of losses at the Supreme Court, including last week's 5 to 4 ruling that detainees at Guantanamo have a constitutional right to a review of their detention in federal courts -- a ruling that holds out the prospect of heavy litigation and close judicial scrutiny of decision-making that the administration has long argued is best left to the president.

// posted by montag @ 12:24 PM 0 Comments

By regulation — and no doubt by the design of those who appointed him — Taguba could not investigate any uniformed or civilian official whose rank was higher than his own two stars.

Taguba and his investigators sifted and probed and assessed the blame as high as they were permitted to go. Taguba believed — no, he KNEW — that the responsibility for this outrage went much higher. He knew it reached to the office of then Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and likely beyond to the lawyers who served President George W. Bush and perhaps even to the president himself.

But the brass, military and civilian, wanted Taguba and those who ran 16 other Army investigations of the Abu Ghraib scandal only to get to the bottom of the situation, not to the top.

// posted by montag @ 7:51 PM 0 Comments

A Canadian newspaper reported Thursday that Friday's scheduled $100-a-plate luncheon speech by Sen. John McCain in Ottowa was organized in part by U.S. Ambassador David Wilkins, a former South Carolina lawmaker whom President Bush appointed in 2005.

Democrats pointed out the article late Thursday night, and alleged that Wilkins's actions could be construed as a violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits many kinds of political activities by government employees.

The Hatch Act circumscribes political activity for government employees. According to the American Foreign Service Association Web site, the State Department's ethics office prohibits fundraising activities for its presidential appointees.

The Web site for the association prints Cable No. 035610, the guidelines from the ethics division of the Department of State Legal Adviser's Office.

"In particular, you may not sell tickets for or otherwise promote fundraising activites such as political dinners for a partisan candidate or political committee," the cable says.It adds that the rules are for anyone "on duty," and that "the legislative history suggests that ambassadors may be considered to be on duty twenty-four hours a day while they are at post."

// posted by montag @ 6:50 PM 0 Comments

So why would Mr. McCain associate himself with these characters? The answer, presumably, is that it’s a cynical political calculation.

I’m reasonably sure that Mr. McCain’s advisers realize that offshore drilling would do nothing for current gas prices. But they may believe that the public can be conned. A Rasmussen poll taken before Mr. McCain’s announcement suggests that the public favors expanded offshore drilling, and believes (wrongly) that this would lower gasoline prices.

And Mr. McCain may also hope to shore up his still fragile relations with the Republican base. As anyone who has read what’s in his inbox after publishing an article on oil prices can testify, there are many people on the right who believe that all our energy problems have been caused by sanctimonious tree-huggers. Mr. McCain has just thrown that constituency some red meat.

// posted by montag @ 6:51 AM 0 Comments

The deals, expected to be announced on June 30, will lay the foundation for the first commercial work for the major companies in Iraq since the American invasion, and open a new and potentially lucrative country for their operations.

The no-bid contracts are unusual for the industry, and the offers prevailed over others by more than 40 companies, including companies in Russia, China and India. The contracts, which would run for one to two years and are relatively small by industry standards, would nonetheless give the companies an advantage in bidding on future contracts in a country that many experts consider to be the best hope for a large-scale increase in oil production.

There was suspicion among many in the Arab world and among parts of the American public that the United States had gone to war in Iraq precisely to secure the oil wealth these contracts seek to extract. The Bush administration has said that the war was necessary to combat terrorism. It is not clear what role the United States played in awarding the contracts; there are still American advisers to Iraq’s Oil Ministry.

// posted by montag @ 7:10 AM 0 Comments

“It is code; there is no question it is,” Ed Rollins, a Republican strategist who helped lead President Ronald Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign, said when age surfaced as an issue. “They are trying to raise doubts.”

MSNBC host Joe Scarborough repeatedly argued on his show last week that the Obama campaign was portraying McCain as a “doddering, old, confused fool. He needs to go to Miami Beach and play checkers.”

// posted by montag @ 7:06 PM 0 Comments

“I looked out at my neighborhood and sort of had an epiphany that I had to bring my skills to bear in the place that made me,” she says in the interview. “I wanted to have a career motivated by passion and not just money.”

Eventually, she started the Chicago chapter of a training program called Public Allies. One day, looking for young leaders, she might knock on doors at Cabrini-Green, a public housing project so violent and neglected it would later be mostly demolished. Another day, she discovered Jose A. Rico, a young Mexican so alienated that he insisted on remaining an illegal immigrant rather than pursue citizenship. What is your goal? he recalled her asking.

To open a high school for Latinos, he replied. Mrs. Obama nodded: Good, tell me exactly how you would do it.

“Michelle was tough, man; she let nothing slide,” said Mr. Rico, now principal of Multicultural Arts High School in Chicago, which he helped start.

// posted by montag @ 6:09 PM 0 Comments

The bill is not a compromise. The final details are being worked out, but all indications are that many of its provisions are both unnecessary and a threat to the Bill of Rights. The White House and the Congressional Republicans who support the bill have two real aims. They want to undermine the power of the courts to review the legality of domestic spying programs. And they want to give a legal shield to the telecommunications companies that broke the law by helping Mr. Bush carry out his warrantless wiretapping operation.

The new bill has other problems. It gives the government too much leeway to acquire communications in the United States without individual warrants or even a showing of probable cause. It greatly reduces judicial review, and it would remain in force for six years, which is too long.

If Congress cannot pass a clean bill that fixes the one real problem with FISA, it should simply extend the temporary authorization. At a minimum, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, should oppose FISA expansion and pledge to revisit it next year. If any significant changes are going to be made, they should be made under the next president.

// posted by montag @ 6:51 AM 0 Comments

A car bomb set to explode during the busiest time of day killed at least 51 people and wounded 75 Tuesday evening as shoppers were strolling through a Shiite neighborhood market in Baghdad. It was the deadliest attack in the Iraqi capital in more than three months.

The blast struck a crowded bus terminal near a market in Huriya, a northwest Baghdad district that once had a large population of Sunnis but after the American-led invasion saw horrific ethnic cleansing by Shiite militias and death squads, who killed or drove thousands of Sunnis out.

Survivors and relatives of the victims in the Tuesday blast were enraged and on edge. One man lost 11 relatives, including five female cousins. At a courtyard in front of the Kadhimiya Hospital morgue, people screamed, wept and shrieked. Some cursed the government for allowing the blast to happen while others called on God for revenge.

// posted by montag @ 7:22 PM 0 Comments

"These are the same guys who helped to engineer the distraction of the war in Iraq at a time when we could have pinned down the people who actually committed 9/11," the presumed nominee told reporters aboard his campaign plane. "This is the same kind of fear-mongering that got us into Iraq ... and it's exactly that failed foreign policy I want to reverse."

Obama told reporters that Osama bin Laden is still at large in part because President Bush's strategy toward fighting terror has not succeeded.

// posted by montag @ 6:15 PM 0 Comments

A McClatchy investigation found that instead of confining terrorists, Guantanamo often produced more of them by rounding up common criminals, conscripts, low-level foot soldiers and men with no allegiance to radical Islam — thus inspiring a deep hatred of the United States in them — and then housing them in cells next to radical Islamists.

// posted by montag @ 7:16 AM 0 Comments

The official, Charles M. Smith, was the senior civilian overseeing the multibillion-dollar contract with KBR during the first two years of the war. Speaking out for the first time, Mr. Smith said that he was forced from his job in 2004 after informing KBR officials that the Army would impose escalating financial penalties if they failed to improve their chaotic Iraqi operations.

Army auditors had determined that KBR lacked credible data or records for more than $1 billion in spending, so Mr. Smith refused to sign off on the payments to the company. “They had a gigantic amount of costs they couldn’t justify,” he said in an interview. “Ultimately, the money that was going to KBR was money being taken away from the troops, and I wasn’t going to do that.”

But he was suddenly replaced, he said, and his successors — after taking the unusual step of hiring an outside contractor to consider KBR’s claims — approved most of the payments he had tried to block.

// posted by montag @ 6:50 AM 0 Comments

Police may have ignored a warning years ago that a woman with five dead spouses was trying to hire a hit man to kill one of the men, investigators in North Carolina said Monday.

Neumar has been married five times since the 1950s, but each union ended with the death of her husband. Investigators want authorities elsewhere to look into the deaths. Williams said investigators have uncovered a common link among the victims: They all had military experience.

// posted by montag @ 7:33 PM 0 Comments

American soldiers herded the detainees into holding pens of razor-sharp concertina wire, the kind that's used to corral livestock.

The guards kicked, kneed and punched many of the men until they collapsed in pain. U.S. troops shackled and dragged other detainees to small isolation rooms, then hung them by their wrists from chains dangling from the wire mesh ceiling.

Former guards and detainees whom McClatchy interviewed said Bagram was a center of systematic brutality for at least 20 months, starting in late 2001.

According to Afghan officials and a review of his case, Gul wasn't a member of al Qaida or of the extremist Taliban regime that ran Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. At the time he was detained, he was working as a fuel depot guard for the U.S.-backed Afghan government.

When U.S. soldiers raided the house he was visiting, acting on a tip from a tribal rival who was seeking revenge against another man, they apparently confused Gul with a militant with a similar name — who was also imprisoned at Guantanamo, according to an Afghan intelligence official and Gul's American lawyer.

// posted by montag @ 6:05 PM 0 Comments

A poison pill, in corporate jargon, is a financial arrangement designed to protect current management by crippling the company if someone else takes over.

As I read the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center’s analysis of the presidential candidates’ tax proposals, I realized that the tax cuts enacted by the Bush administration are, in effect, a fiscal poison pill aimed at future administrations.

True, the tax cuts won’t prevent a change in management — the Constitution sees to that. But they will make it hard for the next president to change the country’s direction.

// posted by montag @ 6:51 AM 0 Comments

The McCain campaign is strongly denying the paper's reporting that in 2005, a White House National Security Council staffer called John McCain's Senate office to complain that Rick Davis' lobbying firm was "undercutting American policy on Ukraine" by representing a Kremlin-backed politician.

If the account of the NSC staffer's call is true, it suggests McCain should have known about the work by Davis' business -- but installed him as campaign manager anyway. McCain's campaign, which had earlier referred a New York Times reporter to McCain's Senate office, now disputes that such a phone call ever happened.

// posted by montag @ 4:14 PM 1 Comments

On the supply side, U.S. foreign policy can have a major impact on global oil prices. Obvious example: Iraq has the world's fourth-largest oil reserves, but the U.S. war in Iraq caused oil production there to plummet, from a prewar level of 2.6 million barrels a day to below 1.5 million a day in 2004. This contributed to rising oil prices over the last few years. In May, Iraqi oil production finally returned to prewar levels, but the Iraqi oil industry remains vulnerable to continuing insecurity.

In other parts of the globe as well, U.S. foreign policy decisions have helped spur increases in the price of oil. In Nigeria, continued tensions about the share of oil profits that should go to local development have fueled ongoing militant attacks on oil production facilities, repeatedly disrupting the flow. On May 4, for instance, attacks on Royal Dutch Shell installations disrupted production; the next day, global oil prices were up by $3.65 a barrel. But the Bush administration has shown little interest in pushing the Nigerian government to adopt the political and economic reforms necessary to defuse the crisis.

In Venezuela (the world's fifth-largest oil supplier), the Bush administration backed a failed 2002 coup against President Hugo Chavez, effectively eliminating our diplomatic leverage with the Venezuelan government. Since then, Chavez has nationalized all oil production sites in Venezuela formerly under the control of foreign companies, a move that has further raised global oil prices. In Russia, too, ham-handed U.S. policies alienated Moscow, which has nationalized oil and gas companies and shown a distinct willingness to manipulate energy supplies for political purposes. Partly because of Russian government policies, Russian oil production has recently declined.

And global anxiety about U.S. bellicosity toward Iran -- which has the world's third-largest oil reserves -- continues to cause intermittent spikes in oil prices, as investors brace for the production disruptions a conflict with Iran would cause. (Last week, for instance, when an Israeli Cabinet minister said that an Israeli military strike against Iran -- backed, he appeared to imply, by Washington -- might be "unavoidable," global oil prices made their biggest-ever one-day jump.)

// posted by montag @ 1:30 PM 1 Comments

Both Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain are finally beginning to campaign as though the composition of the Supreme Court actually matters. And that's a good thing, because -- the American public's lack of interest notwithstanding -- the court counts as much as almost every other issue facing the voters in November. Assuming that you work, worship, vote, parent, own property the government might covet or occasionally have sex, the high court will intimately affect your life. This is particularly true now that the average justice is older than Mount Rushmore and the next president may well have two or three new court picks in the space of a few years.

// posted by montag @ 1:11 PM 0 Comments

McClatchy's interviews are the most ever conducted with former Guantanamo detainees by a U.S. news organization. The issue of detainee backgrounds has previously been reported on by other media outlets, but not as comprehensively.

McClatchy also in many cases did more research than either the U.S. military at Guantanamo, which often relied on secondhand accounts, or the detainees' lawyers, who relied mainly on the detainees' accounts.

// posted by montag @ 12:32 PM 0 Comments

Britain's Princess Eugenie has been reprimanded by her school after being caught frolicking naked on college grounds, it was reported Saturday.

The 18-year-old daughter of Prince Andrew, Duke of York, and Sarah Ferguson, was apprehended for her involvement in end of term "high jinks" at the exclusive Marlborough College, west of London, the UK Press Associated said.

A royal source told the Press Association: "It was nothing more than high jinks at the end of term in May. A group of them were reprimanded and that's the end of the matter."

The tabloid Sun newspaper reported that a college staff member was woken by playful shrieks and found several young women dancing around without clothes.

// posted by montag @ 4:39 PM 0 Comments

But the mauves and purples of population-proportionate America remind us that there are married, churchgoing, rural DemocratS; that the American genius is for perpetual reinvention; that your country still retains that spirit of doing the impossible, which not only irrigated southern California but also desegregated the south.

So your lasting contribution to American politics may be something quite unthinkable a year ago: its first black president.

// posted by montag @ 1:41 PM 0 Comments

The Bush administration's Iraq policy suffered two major setbacks Friday when Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki publicly rejected key U.S. terms for an ongoing military presence and anti-American Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr called for a new militia offensive against U.S. forces.

During a visit to Jordan, Maliki said negotiations over initial U.S. proposals for bilateral political and military agreements had "reached a dead end." While he said talks would continue, his comments fueled doubts that the pacts could be reached this year, before the Dec. 31 expiration of a United Nations mandate sanctioning the U.S. role in Iraq.

sovereignty means that, it's sovereign. It's — you're a — you're a — you've been given sovereignty, and you're — viewed as a sovereign entity.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki raised the possibility that his country won't sign a status of forces agreement with the United States and will ask U.S. troops to go home when their U.N. mandate to be in Iraq expires at the end of the year.

Maliki made the comment after weeks of complaints from Shiite Muslim lawmakers that U.S. proposals that would govern a continued troop presence in Iraq would infringe on Iraq's sovereignty.

"Iraq has another option that it may use," Maliki said during a visit to Amman, Jordan. "The Iraqi government, if it wants, has the right to demand that the U.N. terminate the presence of international forces on Iraqi sovereign soil."

// posted by montag @ 1:02 PM 0 Comments

President Bush accused Iran on Saturday of rejecting a new set of incentives to stop enriching uranium, only hours after the proposal received a cold shoulder when it was delivered by Western diplomats in Tehran.

“I am disappointed that the leaders rejected this generous offer out of hand,” Mr. Bush said during a joint news conference here with President Nicolas Sarkozy of France. “It is an indication to the Iranian people that their leadership is willing to isolate them further. Our view is we want the Iranian people to flourish and to benefit.”

// posted by montag @ 12:45 PM 0 Comments

"The United States Supreme Court yesterday rendered a decision which I think is one of the worst decisions in the history of this country."

// posted by montag @ 12:34 PM 0 Comments

An analysis of autopsies in 2007 released this week by the Florida Medical Examiners Commission found that the rate of deaths caused by prescription drugs was three times the rate of deaths caused by all illicit drugs combined.

// posted by montag @ 11:35 PM 0 Comments

With the Republican Party in need of money for the November elections, former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani has offered to appear at fund-raisers around the country for G.O.P. candidates. But there is a catch: He wants some cash out of the deal.

Mr. Giuliani’s aides have told the National Republican Congressional Committee and Congressional candidates that if he makes an appearance, he wants the candidates to help him get rid of his presidential campaign debt.

Mr. Giuliani’s move has irritated some of his Republican colleagues, who say that the arrangement would put an additional strain on candidates who in many cases are struggling to raise money. Some say rather than making a generous gesture, the former mayor is seeking to tap local candidates’ donors.

“In a year when our candidates are struggling to raise money, this is just another burden,” said a leading Republican Party strategist, who was briefed about the mayor’s request. “This is not about helping the party. This is about helping Rudy Giuliani.”

// posted by montag @ 11:19 PM 1 Comments

Double-billing. Bribes. Kickbacks. Military contracts are big targets for serious crimes — and there aren’t nearly enough investigators to catch them all.

The Army’s contracting budget has exploded since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began — from $46 billion in 2002 to $112 billion in 2007. Yet the number of people who hunt down crooked companies and corrupt officials has stayed about the same, according to Associated Press interviews and research.

Army investigation chiefs told the AP they need a dramatic increase in agents to fight contract fraud.

In combat zones, deals can be made quickly, often with foreign companies in countries where bribes are a routine part of doing business. Yet to monitor those billions in contracts, just under 100 civilian agents are assigned to the Army Criminal Investigation Command’s procurement fraud office.

// posted by montag @ 7:33 PM 0 Comments