What a week. What a month. What a mess.
Today’s top military leaders (those outside the Pentagon) know that for every month of combat, troops need 2 months off to release the pressure, to detox, to re-enter society.
The drawdown of troops in Iraq without leaving the country and the region in absolute chaos needs one elusive ingredient to succeed — bipartisanship. Without some political detente between Republicans and Democrats and the White House and Congress, the insurgents, terrorists and warring political factions will continue to be emboldened.
Senate Democrats have lost perhaps their last best chance of the year to enact meaningful opposition to the Iraq war.
A bill that would have effectively forced the Bush administration to begin drawing down the troop levels failed in its second try this year, falling four votes short of the 60 necessary to shut off debate.
Now that recession-warning lights have begun to blink, Democrats should give tax hikes a rest.
As tax-happy Democrats might have noticed, the stock market resembles a kindergartner on a swing set: half-giddy, half-scared and hyperactive. Meanwhile, payrolls sagged by 4,000 positions last month. Not since August 2003 has America created no new jobs. Fifty-two economists in Sept. 13’s Wall Street Journal offered a 36 percent average probability of recession by next September.
President Bush on Thursday refused to criticize a U.S. security company in Iraq accused in a shooting that left 11 civilians dead, saying investigators need to determine if the guards violated rules governing their operations.
Bush said he expected Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki would raise the shooting by agents of Blackwater USA when they meet next week at the U.N. General Assembly.
President George W. Bush insisted on Thursday he will be a “strong asset” for Republicans battling for election in 2008, despite shaky opinion poll ratings born of a tumultuous presidency.
Bush, who has 16 months left in his second term, laid out a battle-plan for 2008 Republican candidates, based on a robust ‘war on terror’ policy, support for Iraq and low taxes.
“Strong asset,” Bush said emphatically, when asked at a White House news conference whether he would be an asset or liability for Republicans in presidential and congressional elections next year.
Days after top-tier Democratic fundraiser Norman Hsu was arrested in a 15-year-old fraud case, he contacted the FBI and confessed to making bogus business deals in a sprawling new scheme, prosecutors said.
Hsu was charged Thursday with swindling at least $60 million from investors and using some of his profits to make illegal donations to political campaigns. Prosecutors allege Hsu had engineered a “massive” Ponzi scheme that ensnared investors across the country.
The Senate Thursday crushed a latest, and largely symbolic attempt by anti-war Democrats to cut off funding for most Iraqi combat operations by next June.
Only 28 Senators, all Democrats, including presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama backed the measure, which fell 32 votes short of the 60 vote supermajority it needed to pass.
The bill, co-sponsored by Senate Majority leader Harry Reid and Senator Russ Feingold, would have allowed funding only for a strictly limited US mission, based on training Iraqi forces and targeted counter-terrorism operations.
New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is leading among Democrats in the California presidential primary, while Rudy Giuliani is slightly ahead of his three major Republican rivals, according to a new poll from the Public Policy Institute of California.
Clinton has the support of 41 percent of likely Democratic primary voters, according to the survey, which was taken over a seven-day period following the Labor Day weekend and released Thursday. Her closest rival is Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, who has 23 percent. Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards is at 14 percent.
America has gone childish on us, and not just America, by the way: The whole of the West has to some extent succumbed to a kind of adolescent mode of dealing with things, and there’s grave peril here, such as a lessened ability to stand up to Islamic radicals.