Remarking on Scott McClellan’s resignation announcement yesterday, CNN senior correspondent John Roberts — “after acknowledging that he would likely get ‘in trouble in the liberal blogs’ for saying it — said of McClellan: ‘I think that he is a truth-teller.‘”
$72.49: The price of a barrel of crude oil yesterday, setting a record high for the third day in a row. Said one energy analyst, “The market is sizzling!”
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) is passing the buck to President Bush to stop Trent Lott’s $700 million “railroad to nowhere” project. Frist says Bush should threaten to veto the emergency supplemental bill if it contains too much pork.
19,548: The number of Iraqis who have been kidnapped in 2006 alone, including 4,959 women and 2,350 children, according to the report prepared by a group of 125 non-governmental organisations.
Tens of thousands of recipients of the new Medicare prescription drug benefit received letters warning them they could be “kicked out because their premiums have not been paid.” “But many who received the letters in the past few days insist they have already paid, have signed up for automatic Social Security deductions or qualify for free coverage.”
Genocide update: The Red Cross reports that rampant violence “has made it impossible to reach large areas of the Sudanese region of Darfur.” A spokesman said that Red Cross vehicles are being systematically looted and that “fighting was heavy and confused.”
Annual war spending in Iraq are set to double since the U.S. invasion, having risen from $48 billion in 2003 to $59 billion in 2004 to $81 billion in 2005 to an anticipated $94 billion in 2006. The administration is now spending nearly $10 billion a month in Iraq and Afghanistan, up from $8.2 billion a year ago.
Conservatives in the United Kingdom see things quite differently than their U.S. counterparts. Conservative Party leader David Cameron writes: “Climate change is one of the biggest threats facing the world and we must have a much greater sense of urgency about tackling it.”
Though they agree on little else, House Intelligence Committee co-chairs Peter Hoekstra (R-MI) and Jane Harman (D-CA) both fear that National Intelligence Director John Negroponte is creating “just another blanket of bureaucracy, muffling rather than clarifying the dangers lurking in the world.”
Conservation biologist Don Melnick and Wildlife Trust president Mary Pearl send an urgent warning about the dangers to our country’s natural heritage: “Our forests are the heart of our environmental support system. And yet, in the 36 years that have passed since the first Earth Day, on April 22, 1970, we have lost more than one billion acres of forest, with no end in sight.”
And finally: Rep. Jo Ann Emerson’s (R-MO) letter to constituent Bill Jones “reads like a typical response to a citizen’s question about last year’s testimony of oil executives before the Senate Commerce Committee.” That is, except for the last sentence: “I think you’re an a**hole.” Emerson says “she can’t explain how the offensive language made it into the letter” but has profusely apologized.
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