ABC News reports:

The Senate took a quick break from the Foreclosure Prevention Act Thursday,to vote on a resolution honoring members of the military killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The resolution, which is assumed to get unanimous support and was offered by Sen. Teddy Kennedy, (D-Mass.), is simple enough, reading: “The Senate honors the service and sacrifice of the men and women who have lost their lives in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom and honors their families and loved ones.”

The idea may be simple, yet the text of the resolution goes on for 264 pages; that is how much paper it takes to list the 4,009 names of soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines killed in Iraq and 487 names of American servicemen and women killed in Afghanistan.

See the Senate resolution here.

This week, the Department of Homeland Security announced it will use its authority to bypass several laws and regulations it claims are impeding the completion of 670 miles of border fence, including the National Park Service Organic Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Antiquities Act, the Native American Graves Protection Act “and 31 other laws.”

Subsequently, DHS will not have to conduct detailed reviews on the fence’s impacts on wildlife, water, and vegetation.

Secretary Michael Chertoff believes we must follow the law — except when he wants to waive it. In a small blogger roundtable yesterday, Chertoff said that “whatever happens” with immigration reform in the future, the public must be be legally compliant:

I think people on all ends of the spectrum should realize that it is in everybody’s interest to get this job done at the border, to enforce the law against employers. … We also need to resolve the problem of people who are here illegally, who have got to comply with the law but many of whom have been here for a long time, and we’ve got to figure out a way to deal with that issue.

But the foundation for doing this is living up to our obligation as it is now. And I would say that whatever happens eventually with immigration reform, there’s no excuse for not complying with the law as it’s been set forth.

Watch it:

If Chertoff would only apply those standards to himself. His waiver represents “the biggest use of legal waivers since the administration started building the fence.” Even White House environmental adviser Jim Connaughton acknowledged the fence may “not meet the strict requirements of the law.” Chertoff also admitted that without the waiver, his fence would run into legal trouble:

Although we want to be respectful of the environment, we cannot afford to get enmeshed in the kinds of litigation that have traditionally cost projects decades to complete.

While the administration claims Congress authorized the waiver with the Real ID Act of 2005, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) noted, the “waiver represents an extreme abuse of authority. … It was meant to be an exception, not the rule.”

Yesterday, President Bush tried to prematurely cut off a joint press conference in Romania with the country’s president Traian Basescu, even though “as a matter of courtesy and protocol, the host decides when such an event is over.” Today, the Washington Post’s Peter Baker reports that Bush also left a NATO summit meeting early:

Enough is enough, it seems. With the NATO summit meetings consistently running two hours over schedule most of the day, President Bush abruptly got up and left the last formal session of the day, not bothering to wait for an official summit photograph of all the leaders.

Bush is no fan of windy meetings and evidently had had his fill. He left behind Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to represent him for the rest of the session, which concerned NATO operations in Afghanistan, but his departure was so sudden and unexpected that he left some of his motorcade behind, inculding his press pool, when he got into his car and headed back to his hotel.

Last December, former KBR employee Jamie Leigh Jones alleged publicly that she had been “gang-raped” while working for the company in Iraq. Since then, nearly a dozen women have contacted Jones to say that they too were sexually assaulted by contractors in Iraq. Now, in a new Nation article, another female KBR employee says she was raped in Iraq in January 2008. But, she says she was “told to keep quiet about the incident by a KBR supervisor” and warned that if she spoke up, she would be “in danger.”