Iraq emerged from a vital conference Friday with a promise from Arab countries to stop foreign militants from joining Iraq’s insurgency. But Baghdad didn’t get the debt relief it wanted, and its Sunni Arab neighbors demand Iraq’s Shiite-led government enact tough political reforms.
The two-day gathering of top diplomats from the region, the United States and around the world was the warmest yet between Iraq and Arab countries, but suspicions remained between the two sides.
“We will see the extent of the seriousness and commitment among these nations to what they signed today,” Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki told reporters. “If these promises are not kept, we will watch it, and there will be no reason to hold any further conferences.”
Baghdad also did not achieve another goal - progress in easing tensions between the United States and Iran, whose disputes Iraqis say are fueling the chaos in their country. Despite urging from the Iraqis, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki did not hold talks - only exchanged wary pleasantries over lunch.
But Rice met with another regional rival of the U.S., Syria. She held a half hour of talks Thursday with its foreign minister, urging Damascus to do more to control its notoriously porous border with Iraq.
Surprise! The NRA wants gun sales to suspected and known terrorists not to be banned. Whoda thunkit?
“…the word ’suspect’ has no legal meaning, particularly when it comes to denying constitutional liberties” -NRA executive director Chris Cox
GEE, YA THINK?!
NRA: Don’t ban gun sales to suspects
WASHINGTON - The National Rifle Association is urging the Bush administration to withdraw its support of a bill that would prohibit suspected terrorists from buying firearms.
Backed by the Justice Department, the measure would give the attorney general the discretion to block gun sales, licenses or permits to terror suspects.
In a letter this week to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, NRA executive director Chris Cox said the bill, offered last week by Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., “would allow arbitrary denial of Second Amendment rights based on mere ’suspicions’ of a terrorist threat.”
“As many of our friends in law enforcement have rightly pointed out, the word ’suspect’ has no legal meaning, particularly when it comes to denying constitutional liberties,” Cox wrote.
[...]
“When I tell people that you can be on a terrorist watch list and still be allowed to buy as many guns as you want, they are shocked,” said Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which supports Lautenberg’s bill.
Public support for the Iraq war is low. Lawmakers are battling the White House over money to pay for the combat. Suicide bombings continue in Baghdad.
Despite it all, J.D. Crouch, who is stepping down from his national security post at the White House, is confident history will prove that invading Iraq was the right thing to do.
Crouch, who has been President Bush’s deputy national security adviser for more than two years, said the President never will be swayed by opposition to the war. Instead, Crouch said, Bush will use his resolve to help convince a broad section of Americans that it’s important to be in Iraq.
“I think it was really the right thing to do, and I think history will bear that out,” Crouch said emphatically in an interview Thursday.
Crouch, 48, said he’s been thinking for months about leaving his job as deputy to the President’s national security adviser, Stephen Hadley. In announcing his resignation on Friday, Bush said Crouch has been “at the forefront in devising and implementing the new strategy to help build a peaceful, stable and secure Iraq.”
The Administration is still far from achieving that goal. But with the latest, top-to-bottom review of the war and another big project on detainees off his desk, Crouch said he thought it was time, for both him and his family, to leave the government for the private sector or academia.
Hadley said he’ll miss Crouch’s self-deprecating humor and the way his work discourages leaks.
“He was able to force people to step up to difficult issues, but do it in a way that everybody felt that they had a hearing and that the process was fair,” Hadley said. “And that’s one of the reasons why I think there has been very little leaking of squabbles of State versus Defense, which you’ve seen from time to time.”
WASHINGTON - The military is putting already’strained troops at greater risk of mental health problems because of repeated deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, a Pentagon panel said Thursday in warning of an overburdened health system.
Issuing an urgent warning, the Defense Department’s Task Force on Mental Health chaired by Navy Surgeon General Donald Arthur said more than one-third of troops and veterans currently suffer from problems such as traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.
With an escalating Iraq war, those numbers are expected to worsen, and current staffing and money for military health care won’t be able to meet the need, the group said in a preliminary report released Thursday.
“The system of care for psychological health that has evolved in recent decades is not sufficient to meet the needs of today’s forces and their beneficiaries, and will not be sufficient to meet the needs in the future,” the 14-member group says.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. has stepped up its pursuit of a deal to buy Yahoo Inc., two newspapers reported on Friday, as the two companies reenter talks to strike a deal amid huge growth from rival Google Inc.
Yahoo shares jumped 14.6 percent to $32.20 in electronic trading on Friday, while Microsoft shares fell 1.4 percent to $30.53.
The two companies have held informal deal talks over the years. But the latest approach comes as Microsoft seeks to ink a deal in the wake of Google’s expansion.
“It’s been talked about for a long time, ever since Google came into the picture. I can’t imagine a more perfect deal,” said Peter Lobravico, vice president of risk arbitrage sales/trading at brokerage Wall Street Access. “You can’t find a stronger buyer than Microsoft and while it would spur a lot of political and regulatory noise, everyone knows in the end that the deal would go through.”
A federal official whose investigations of waste and corruption in Iraq have repeatedly embarrassed the Bush administration is now being investigated himself by an oversight committee with close links to the White House and by the ranking Republican on the House Government Reform Committee.
The investigation of the official, Stuart W. Bowen Jr., originated with a complaint put together by roughly half a dozen former employees who appear to have left his office on unhappy terms, said several officials familiar with the case, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is still going on.
Both the White House and a spokesman for the Republican congressman, Thomas M. Davis III of Virginia, said yesterday that the investigations were not started in retribution for the work undertaken in Iraq by Mr. Bowen, who runs the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.
But the investigations are coming to light just a few months after Mr. Bowen’s office narrowly escaped what amounted to a termination clause tucked away in a large military authorization bill by staff members of another Republican congressman. A bipartisan group of lawmakers later managed to reverse that provision, but the latest action has renewed suspicions that Mr. Bowen - a Republican himself - has come to be seen as a serious political liability by his own party.
May 3, 2007 - Deputy chief of staff Karl Rove participated in a hastily called meeting at the White House two months ago. The subject: The firing of eight U.S. attorneys last year. The purpose: to coach a top Justice Department official heading to Capitol Hill to testify on the prosecutorial purge on what he should say.
Now some investigators are saying that Rove’s attendance at the meeting shows that the president’s chief political advisor may have been involved in an attempt to mislead Congress-one more reason they are demanding to see his emails and force him to testify under oath.
At the March 5, 2007 meeting, White House aides, including counsel Fred Fielding and deputy counsel William Kelley, sought to shape testimony that principal associate deputy attorney general William Moscella was to give the next day before the House Judiciary Committee.
Although the existence of the White House meeting had been previously disclosed by the Justice Department, Rove’s attendance at the strategy session was not-until both Moscella and deputy attorney general Paul McNulty talked about it in confidential testimony with congressional investigators last week. Portions of their testimony were read to Newsweek by a Democratic aide who asked not to be identified talking about private matters.
After any debate, the first and most natural question is “who won?” Last night, the winner was obvious: Ronald Reagan.
Look, I know Reagan is the only president of the 20th century that Republicans really like. And I know that the debate was being held at the Reagan Library in California. But over the course of 90 minutes, the candidates specifically referenced the 40th president 20 times. If you count more oblique references (Gilmore thanked “the president in whose name this library is named”), the number climbs to 25. If you include references to Reagan by debate moderator Chris Matthews, well, we get pretty close to triple digits.
This just isn-t healthy. If this was a drinking game, players would have been three sheets to the wind within the first half hour. Even Peggy Noonan, who is second to no one among Reagan worshipers, explained in her column today that enough is enough.
The media’s fixation with which Republican is the most like Reagan, and who is the next Reagan, and who parts his hair like Reagan, is absurd, and subtly undermining of Republicans, which is why they do it. Reagan was Reagan, a particular man at a particular point in history. What is to be desired now is a new greatness. Another way of saying this is that in 1960, John F. Kennedy wasn-t trying to be the next FDR, and didn-t feel forced to be. FDR was the great, looming president of Democratic Party history, and there hadn-t been anyone as big or successful since 1945, but JFK thought it was good enough to be the best JFK. And the press wasn-t always sitting around saying he was no FDR. Oddly enough, they didn-t consider that an interesting theme.
They should stop it already, and Republicans should stop playing along.
Too bad no one thought to tell them this before last night.
WASHINGTON - The National Rifle Association is urging the Bush administration to withdraw its support of a bill that would prohibit suspected terrorists from buying firearms.