Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid today warned President George W. Bush that his plans to send more American troops to Iraq in a “surge and accelerate” plan is both dangerous and against the advice of military experts.
Geraldo at Large, the latest attempt by schlock-broadcaster Geraldo Rivera to claim any serious journalistic credentials, has been axed by Fox after a less-than-stellar run of three months.
According to Neilsen, Rivera’s lame copy of A Current Affair ranked dead last in “magazine/reality genre” ratings, a fitting place for the man who gave away troop positions while reporting from Iraq.
Former Democratic Party boss and Clinton friend Terry McAuliffe is lambasting John Kerry’s unsuccessful presidential campaign, calling his effort to unseat President Bush “one of the biggest acts of political malpractice in the history of American politics.”
In his scrappy memoir, McAuliffe criticizes the 2004 campaign that he was responsible for defending but ultimately lost to what he describes as a more organized Republican machine. McAuliffe calls the Kerry campaign gun-shy, distracted and incompetent.
President Bush nominated an intelligence veteran, former National Security Agency Director Mike McConnell, to be the country’s second national intelligence director. In a reshuffling of his national security team, Bush also chose his former top spymaster, John Negroponte, to be deputy secretary of state.
“Each of them will do good work in their new positions and it is vital that they take up their new responsibilities promptly,” Bush said on Friday.
Bush said he was confident that McConnell would “give me the best information and analysis that America’s intelligence community can provide.”
By DOUG THOMPSON
Good God. Is there not any part of our private lives left that George W. Bush’s goon squads can’t snoop into without a warrant?
In yet another of his infamous “signing statements” attached to a routine piece of postal legislation, Bush said his administration would twist the law to allow “in a manner consistent, to the maximum extent permissible, with the need to conduct searches in exigent circumstances.”
That means the feds can open your mail and mine, without a warrant, simply because Bush has decided he has the power to do so.
For all the talk about the here and now in Congress, the 2008 buzz was loud. With star-powered names like Obama, Clinton and McCain walking the Capitol corridors, the overtones of the next election were unmistakable as Democrats basked in their newfound control of the House and Senate.
Yet, the high-profile presidential wannabees sought to put the focus on their current jobs  rather than the one they want on Jan. 20, 2009.
As Saddam Hussein’s body cools, the controversy over his hanging simmers.
The Sunni side of the Arab street is enraged over the verbal taunts the late Iraqi dictator endured, thanks to Shiite witnesses to his Dec. 30 execution.
One referred to radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose father Hussein killed in 1999. “Go to Hell!” another yelled.
“Please don’t,” a judge pleaded. “The man is facing execution.”
Iraqi authorities have since arrested three witnesses for capturing cell-phone images that revealed these details.
With almost nothing in Washington seeming to work right, many eyes are on Nancy Pelosi to make a difference. Is she up to the challenge?
It probably matters less that she’s the first woman speaker of the House, elected by all 233 Democrats, and more that she’s been around the scene for two decades. But it may matter less that she’s been around for a while and more that she’s been a politician’s politician, lionized from coast to coast for her fund-raising skills.
It was supposed to have been a simple ceremony symbolizing a new bipartisan spirit in Washington:
The outgoing House majority whip, Republican Rep. Roy Blunt of Missouri, was to hand his successor, Democratic Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina, an actual whip that had been on display in Blunt’s leadership office at the U.S. Capitol.
But racial overtones apparently undermined the plan.
As camera flashes popped and video recorders whirled Thursday, Clyburn, a 66-year-old African-American from the South, did not receive the whip from Blunt, a 56-year-old white man from a border state.
The Interior Ministry acknowledged Thursday that an Iraqi police officer whose existence had been denied by the Iraqis and the U.S. military is in fact an active member of the force, and said he now faces arrest for speaking to the media.
Ministry spokesman Brig. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, who had previously denied there was any such police employee as Capt. Jamil Hussein, said in an interview that Hussein is an officer assigned to the Khadra police station, as had been reported by The Associated Press.