Day: May 3, 2006

Former New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said that he was seriously exploring whether he has “a chance” of winning the presidency in 2008.

Democrats battling for control of the House of Representatives are concentrating their efforts on defeating Northeast Republicans.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said Tuesday that a Republican proposal in Congress to set up a watchdog over the federal courts is a “really scary idea.”

The Senate voted Tuesday to protect home-state projects added by some of its most senior members to an Iraq war and hurricane relief funding bill as the tide turned against efforts by spending hawks to strip them out.

The Senate’s top Democrat on Tuesday said he is considering a filibuster of two of President Bush’s judicial nominees, saying one may have been involved in the administration’s policy on torture and the other ruled in a case in which he had a clear conflict of interest.

Two years after a prisoner abuse scandal rocked the U.S. military, officials are still wrangling over how best to guide troops on the handling of detainees to ensure that such mistreatment does not happen again.

In absolute terms the poor are just as poor as they were a generation ago, while a middle class family’s annual share of the last quarter century’s worth of economic growth allows it to buy one extra tank of gas every three months. Meanwhile, in relative terms, both groups are far poorer: indeed, compared to the rich, most Americans are now only half as well-off as they were during the Carter presidency.

This is mindless thinkology that stands conservative ideology on its ear. At the very moment that the market-based incentive is working wonderfully, it is to be scrapped. Perhaps angry prospective car buyers may turn away from the hybrids and back to the guzzlers. That will hurt America’s effort to cut consumption of foreign oil — a quest that has become a national security imperative.

The Iraq war has been the war fought on the cheap – not enough body armor, not enough armor on vehicles, not enough night vision equipment.

President Bush and Senate leaders on Tuesday redoubled their efforts on immigration reform, one day after a nationwide boycott riveted political attention to the cause.