passed the Senate tonight in a 65-34 vote. The legislation makes it a “crime to take a pregnant girl across state lines for an abortion without her parents’ knowledge” and is opposed by major medical groups and women’s organizations.
Voinovich’s Case for Bolton: ‘The World Is Going Wacko Everywhere’
Last year, President Bush circumvented the United States Senate and installed John Bolton as Ambassador to the U.N. with a recess appointment. This Thursday, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will consider his nomination again.
Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) opposed Bolton last year, delivering a powerful and eloquent indictment of the Bolton nomination. Now, Voinovich supports Bolton’s nomination. Today on Fox, Voinovich explained that Bolton needed to be confirmed because “the world, you know, is going wacko everywhere.” Watch it:
Transcript: Read more
Steele was the mystery source.
Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele (R) has confirmed he was the unidentified source in today’s Washington Post claiming the Iraq war “didn’t work” and criticizing the conservative-controlled Congress. Steele lamented “the spending, the finger-pointing, not getting the bills passed” and counseled: “just shut up and get something done.”
U.S. approves two more weeks of fighting.
“The United States has given Israeli forces between 10 and 14 days to finish dealing Hezbollah ‘a strategic blow,’ a senior Israeli Foreign Ministry official told FOX News, as both Israeli forces and Hezbollah guerrillas continued to volley rockets across the Lebanon-Israel border.”
$55,000 per minute.
Profits for oil giant BP in the second quarter, which totaled $7.27 billion. Profits for BP are up 30% from last year.
Pentagon Approves $11 Billion Contract For Useless Weapons System
In an effort to combat Al Qaeda’s non-existent fleet of stealth fighter jets, the Air Force, following an endorsement by the taxpayer-funded Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), approved a new three-year, $11 billion contract for the F-22.
The F-22 is arguably the Pentagon’s most useless weapon system. Not only is it the world’s most expensive fighter jet, but it was conceived in 1985 to fight a Soviet fighter jet that was never built. As wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kosovo show, U.S. air superiority is not in doubt. So it is perplexing that the independent Institute for Defense Analyses would recommend that the Pentagon continue purchasing a jet that has been plagued by technical problems and cost overruns.
But it turns out that IDA is not so “independent” after all. The Washington Post reported today:
The endorsement came from the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a federally financed research center whose president, Dennis C. Blair, is a member of the board of a subcontractor for the F-22 Raptor fighter program, EDO Corp. EDO developed a missile launcher for the F-22 and has held contracts worth at least $38 million that are part of the program, according to its news releases.
Opposition to the F-22 is bipartisan. In the summer of 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld moved to cancel the plane, backing off only when Secretary of the Air Force James Roche threatened to resign. In a recent piece in Foreign Affairs, conservative Fred Kagan pointed out that a single F-22 could pay for 3,000 additional American troops. As the military struggles to afford the costs of repairing and replacing equipment damaged in Iraq, choosing to waste $11 billion on an unnecessary Cold War relic is an outrage.
– Max Bergmann
Dick Morris: ‘Civil War Is Progress’ In Iraq
On March 16, conservative pundit Dick Morris told Sean Hannity things were going better than people thought in Iraq, arguing “what is going on is not a civil war.”
Now, Morris believes that there is civil war in Iraq but argues that it’s a good thing. Appearing on the O’Reilly Factor last night, Morris said “a civil war is progress, because it means it’s no longer a war against us.” Watch it:
A recent U.N. report found that over 14,000 civilians have been killed in Iraq during the first half of this year.
Transcript: Read more
Are you ready for some football global warming?
Peter King, one of the nation’s top football journalists, writes in Sports Illustrated: “This is not exactly the venue to warn the world about global warming, but all you football junkies readying for your fantasy drafts should do one real-world thing in the next couple of weeks: take two hours to see [An Inconvenient Truth]. I’m not saying you’ll be glad you did, because it’s going to slap you around mentally a bit. But it’s something you need to see. You don’t want to wake up in 15 years with the Earth permanently damaged and huge portions of the Earth’s surface under water, forever.”
Stem cell research described as “killing” embryos.
No, not by President Bush — by the Associated Press.
50%.
Percentage of Americans who believe that Iraq had WMDs when the United States invaded, up 14% since February 2005.
