The Bush administration last night “declared its opposition to the House Democrats’ proposed cutting of student loan interest rates.” The House bill, to be voted on today, cuts interest rates on some college student loans in half and “would help an estimated 5.5 million students who get need-based federal loans.”
Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) “will join two leading Democrats in introducing a resolution opposing President Bush’s buildup of troops in Iraq, putting a bipartisan stamp on the looming Congressional showdown over the war.”
Yesterday, nearly three weeks after the fact, President Bush said the execution of Saddam Hussein “looked like it was kind of a revenge killing.” On Iraq, Bush said, “I don’t quite view it as the broken egg; I view it as the cracked egg … that — where we still have a chance to move beyond the broken egg.”
“After progress in the early 1990s, the march of global freedom that President Bush advocates has stalled — from countries of the former Soviet Union to parts of Africa and East Asia,” the Freedom House organization declares in a new report, dubbing the trend “freedom stagnation.”
Charles Stimson, the top Pentagon official overseeing U.S. detainees, wrote a letter to the Washington Post apologizing for saying last week that corporate clients should consider ending their business ties with legal firms whose lawyers defend prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. “[T]hose comments do not reflect my core beliefs,” Stimson writes.
One day after the nation observed Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Virginia lawmaker Frank D. Hargrove (R) said that slavery ended nearly 140 years ago with the Civil War and that “our black citizens should get over it.” He added, “Are we going to force the Jews to apologize for killing Christ?”
$1.2 trillion: With the money going to the Iraq war, the United States could set up a universal health care system, provide universal preschool, carry out the recommendations of the 9/11 commission, double cancer research funding, increase funding to Gulf Coast reconstruction, and enact a “global immunization campaign to save millions of children’s lives.”
The United States has allowed just “466 Iraqis to immigrate under refugee status since 2003 — including 202 out of 70,000 slots for refugees last year — in part because of more stringent security screenings,” congressional testimony yesterday revealed. Iraq is “quickly becoming the largest” refugee crisis in the world, with roughly “1.7 million Iraqis displaced from their homes.”
“The botched hanging of Saddam Hussein and two lieutenants in Iraq by its Shiite-led government has helped to accelerate Sunni-Shiite sectarianism across an already fragile Middle East.” “The reality of the current situation is that we are approaching an open Sunni-Shiite conflict in the region,” warned Emad Gad, an international relations specialist based in Egypt.
And finally: Playing it safe, perhaps too safe, at this year’s White House Correspondents Association dinner. In contrast to last year’s performance by Stephen Colbert, a video of which became “one of the year’s most downloaded,” the WHCA has chosen a “less-combative host,” Rich Little. Little, 68, last performed at the event in 1985. “You will never please everyone no matter what you do,” the group’s president said. “My dad loved (Little), and I know he will appeal to an older generation.”
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