U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney insisted on Friday that America must not turn its back on Iraq, even as the Bush administration considers a course change in the war after voters vented anger over it in this month's elections.Stay the course and Rummy's a hero. That's what got us in to so much trouble in the first place. Read More......
"Some in our country may believe in good faith that retreating from Iraq would make America safer. Recent experience teaches the opposite lesson," Cheney said in a speech to the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group.
Cheney was speaking publicly for the first time since the November 7 elections in which voter anger over Iraq helped oust President George W. Bush's Republicans from power in Congress.
He praised departing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as a reformer and "one of the great public servants of the age," drawing applause from the audience.
Read More......
I'm not at UCLA anymore. I wish I was. Because buildings should be occupied until there's a response to this. Classes should be disrupted, disobedience constant, the student body lit with fury. This can't happen. And every student, and every person, should be outraged that it did.Read More......
For all the focus on the Democrats, a former Bush official who predicts a coming bloodbath between the White House and disgruntled conservative Republicans brushed off the Pelosi-Hoyer tussle as much ado about process.The reporters, Tom DeFrank and Ken Bazinet, always have very, very good inside GOP sources.
"The Democrats are the sideshow," he said. "Bush self-destructing is the big story in town."
PROTEST POLICE BRUTALITY AT KERCKHOFF STEPSAnd feel free to contact the chancellor of UCLA:
No Taser Guns PLEASE!
Friday, November 17, 2006
12:00pm - 1:00pm
Kerckhoff Steps on BruinWalk
308 Westwood Plaza (map)
Los Angeles, CA
Some commentators had suggested that a Boehner victory would open the door for Shadegg to edge out Blunt, a longtime member of the House leadership and the current majority whip.The GOP House members are staying the course. Read More......
They interpreted heavy Republican losses on Election Day as a call for a new approach, and speculated that House members may choose someone from outside the leadership for the No. 2 position to demonstrate that they understood that message. Instead, the vote could be seen as a continuation of the existing leadership, albeit without Hastert.
"Outside the Beltway, people were expecting us to give ourselves a little more of a wakeup call than this," said Arizona Republican Jeff Flake, a conservative reformer who had backed both Pence and Shadegg. "There simply wasn't the mood to change."
I met with every divisional commander, General Casey . . . General Dempsey . . . And I said, in your professional opinion, if we were to bring in more American troops now, does it add consiberably to our ability to achieve success in Iraq? And they all said no.This response indicates either a shift in administration goals or a difference between administration and military aims. His answer seems to demonstrate that the primary U.S. goal is to hand over Iraq to Iraqis, rather than the loftier (and less likely) aims of establishing basic security or creating a functional democracy. I personally think that handing over Iraq to Iraqis is likely to further those goals indirectly, but until now, that hasn’t been the stated mission of the U.S.
With their new power, Democratic leaders want to craft a constitutional way to stop voters from being flooded with robo-calls peddling deceptive information. They are floating the notion that authorizing calls with fraudulent content should be a crime. "These robo-calls, somehow, constitutionally, we are going to have to find some way to stop this," Reid said.TPM Muckraker reports that incoming Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will include legislation dealing with robo-calls and other campaign scams in the first ten bills he sponsors.
Schumer said he and Rep. Rahm Emanuel -- the boss of the House Democratic campaign committee, who is expected to be elected to a leadership spot today -- made a list of what they consider abusive campaign practices. In some cases, the volume of calls that went out to targeted likely Democratic voters was so heavy as to constitute harassment.
In other examples, the calls peddled disinformation -- whether about a candidate or the location of a polling place. Criticizing the robo-call dirty tricks, Schumer was blunt. "It's despicable" and the perps "should go to jail for 10 years."
Schumer said he and Emanuel are looking at legislation applying criminal penalties to certain kinds of campaigning and creation of a separate unit at the Justice Department to prosecute.
Pentagon guidelines that classified homosexuality as a mental disorder now put it among a list of conditions or "circumstances" that range from bed-wetting to fear of flying.So, now where does your nation's military rate homosexuality? It's lumped in with these conditions:
The new rules are related to the military's retirement practices. The change does not affect the "don't ask, don't tell" policy that prohibits officials from inquiring about the sex lives of service members and requires discharges of those who openly acknowledge being gay.
The revision came in response to criticism this year when it was discovered that the guidelines listed homosexuality alongside mental retardation and personality disorders.
Among the conditions are stammering or stuttering, dyslexia, sleepwalking, motion sickness, obesity, insect venom allergies and homosexuality.You can't make this stuff up. Note to the military: All the branches are chock full of gays and lesbians. They do the job. You need them. Our country needs them.
The analysis of transcripts and records by two lawyers for Guantanamo detainees, aided by more than two dozen law students, found that hearings that determined whether a prisoner should remain in custody gave the accused little opportunity to contest allegations against him.Some of the highlights of the report:
“These were not hearings. These were shams,” said Mark Denbeaux, an attorney and Seton Hall University law professor who along with his son, Joshua, is the author of the report. They provided an advance copy of the report to The Associated Press late Thursday and planned to release it Friday on the Internet.
* The government did not produce any witnesses in any hearing.Read More......
* The military denied all detainee requests to inspect the classified evidence against them.
* The military refused all requests for defense witnesses who were not detained at Guantanamo.
* In 74 percent of the cases, the government denied requests to call witnesses who were detained at the prison.
* In 91 percent of the hearings, the detainees did not present any evidence.
* In three cases, the panel found that the detainee was “no longer an enemy combatant,” but the military convened new tribunals that later found them to be enemy combatants.
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