The Los Angeles Times describes yesterday’s immigration rallies as “a sea of U.S. flags, waved cheerfully by people asking to join a country conflicted about their welcome. Other than a Fourth of July on the Washington Mall, it’s hard to think of a more full-throated pledge of allegiance.”
U.S. diplomats are returning from Iraq with post-traumatic stress disorder and other “debilitating, stress-related symptoms that have afflicted many U.S. troops, prompting the State Department to order a mental health survey of 1,400 employees who have completed assignments there.”
The re-enlistment rate of mid-level soldiers in the U.S. army “dropped from 96 percent in 2005 to 84 percent in the first quarter of this year.”
Congressional leaders will meet President Bush at the White House today to open negotiations on new Iraq legislation. “Several Republican leaders said Tuesday that they were likely to support such benchmarks, and White House aides said Tuesday that Mr. Bush…might back such a measure — but only if the benchmarks are nonbinding.”
“Despite the buildup to a possible meeting between senior U.S. and Iranian officials, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her Iranian counterpart are unlikely to hold substantive one-on-one talks at a conference in Egypt on Friday.”
Rudy Giuliani’s law firm “is perhaps the nation’s most aggressive lobbyist for coal-fired power plants, heavy emitters of air pollutants and carbon dioxide, a gas associated with global warming. Environmentalists say the firm played a significant role in persuading the Bush administration to roll back major provisions of the Clean Air Act.”
“The inspector general of the Department of Commerce, the watchdog charged with rooting out wrongdoing at the agency, is himself the subject of three separate government investigations into allegations that he misspent his budget and retaliated against employees who raised concerns about his actions.”
In Nov. 2005, a Senate staffer inserted into the Patriot Act a “provision that would change the rules so that federal prosecutors could live outside their districts to serve in other jobs,” the “second example in which the Justice Department sought to use the renewal of the Patriot Act antiterrorism law to assert tighter control over U.S. attorneys.”
And finally: In Tony Snow’s absence, how did Dana Perino do leading the press briefings? “I think we got through it just fine,” she said, but added that she was “never able to beat” Tony’s performances. ABC News’s Ann Compton praised Perino, stating “She was very quick with e-mail responses. … Her BlackBerry hours were so arduous she ran into pain problems in her right index finger.”
What did we miss? Let us know in the comments section.
Previous in TP Politics
By clicking and submitting a comment I acknowledge the ThinkProgress Privacy Policy and agree to the ThinkProgress Terms of Use. I understand that my comments are also being governed by Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, or Hotmail’s Terms of Use and Privacy Policies as applicable, which can be found here.