“There is nothing that’s off the table, including timetables.”

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over an acceptable level of violence. This was the exchange at today’s White House press briefing:

QUESTION: In October of 2004 John Kerry said, “We have to get to the place where we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance.” The president said he couldn’t disagree more. Cheney called this naive and dangerous, and part of the pre-9/11 mindset. So does the president now have a pre-9/11 mindset?

SNOW: No, the president does not have a pre-9/11 mindset. And the fact is — I’ll have to go back and take a look, but my recollection is that there was an attempt to, kind of, minimize some of the security challenges. But I don’t want to put words in Senator Kerry’s mouth without looking back at the 2004 debate.

Watch it:

The Hill reports today that in 2005, Rep. Gary Miller (R-CA) placed several earmarks into the transportation bill that directly benefited his business partner, Lewis Operating. Miller, a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, is currently under investigation by the FBI for land deals with the City of Fontana, CA.

Miller’s interventions on behalf of the company include a provision to close the Rialto Municipal Airport — the first time an airport has been closed by an act of Congress — allowing Lewis Operating to win a contract from Rialto to redevelop the airport property as a planned community.

Miller’s other Lewis Operating-friendly earmarks included:

– $6.8 million for a street extension in the city of Chino that is less than a mile from the Preserve, a Lewis Operating planned community, and less than two miles from Parkside, another Lewis Operating planned community.

– $1.2 million to establish a highway interchange about a half a mile from Parkview, a Lewis Operating planned community.

– $400,000 to widen and realign a highway in the city of Hesperia, where Lewis Operating lists The Promontory as one of its planned communities on its website.

– $4 million for a highway interchange in Rancho Cucamonga immediately adjacent to the city’s largest planned community, Victoria Gardens, which is owned by Lewis Operating.

The 2005 transportation bill was not the first appearance of an ethically-challenged relationship between Miller and Lewis Operating.

In 2004, Miller “took out nearly $7.5 million in promissory notes” from Lewis, “which he used to purchase real estate from the company.” The loan may have violated House ethics rules as it is unclear whether Miller submitted the terms of the loan to the ethics committee for review.

According to his financial disclosure report, in 2005 alone, Miller made $1.1 million to $6 million in profits from real-estate deals involving Lewis Operating in some part of the transaction. The company is also one of Miller’s top campaign contributors. Employees of the company have donated $22,150 to Miller’s campaign committee since his election to Congress in 1998.

Despite his clear record of abusing his seat to benefit himself and his business partners, Miller remains on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

“Months after a politically embarrassing $1 billion shortfall that put veterans’ health care in peril, Veterans Affairs officials involved in the foul-up got hefty bonuses ranging up to $33,000.” In total, the VA dealt out “more than $3.8 million in payments by a financially strapped agency straining to help care for thousands of injured veterans returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan.”

In a letter released today by the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) expressed his support for the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy that bans lesbian, gays, and bisexuals from serving openly in the military. McCain said he staunchly opposes openly gay servicemembers, asserting that “open sexuality within military presents an intolerable risk to morale, cohesion and discipline” and national security:

I believe polarization of the personnel and breakdown of unit effectiveness is too high a price to pay for well intentioned but misguided efforts to elevate the interests of a minority of homosexual servicemembers above those of their units.

Most importantly, the national security of the United States, not to mention the lives of our men and women in uniform, are put at grave risk by policies detrimental to the good order and and discipline which so distinguish America’s Armed Services. … I remain opposed to the open expression of homosexuality in the military.

McCain’s personal beliefs are antiquated and ill-informed. The overwhelming majority of the military supports equal rights for all servicemembers. Last December, a poll of servicemembers in Iraq and Afghanistan found that 73 percent were “comfortable with lesbians and gays.” A 2004 poll found that a majority of junior enlisted servicemembers believed gays and lesbians should be allowed to serve openly in the military, up from 16 percent in 1992. Furthemore, 55 percent of Americans believe “gays and lesbians should be allowed to serve openly in the military.”

McCain claims that permitting gays to serve is detrimental to national security, but since Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was instituted, at least 11,000 servicemembers, hundreds of whom had with key speciality skills such as training in Arabic, have left the military. While McCain vigorously backs the plan to send thousands of troops to Iraq, he should note that the military could attract as many as 41,000 new recruits if gays could serve openly.

Read McCain’s letter HERE.

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Clark Hoyt, who was the Washington editor at Knight Ridder through 2006, will become the New York Times’s third public editor. In an “unusual step,” New York Times executive editor Bill Keller noted to his staff that Hoyt “presided over a body of aggressive reporting in the run up to the war in Iraq — journalism that has been widely praised for sometimes being more skeptical about the pre-war intelligence than bigger news organizations, including our own.”