37 percent: Number of military-family members who “approve of the job Bush is doing as president,” according to a new Bloomberg/LA Times poll. Just 36 percent of active-duty military, veterans, and their families believe “it was worth going to war in Iraq,” compared to a 2004 survey that found “64 percent of service members and their families supported the war.” VetVoice has more.
President Bush’s mortgage relief plan was “set by the mortgage industry and Wall Street firms. The effort is voluntary and it leaves plenty of wiggle room for lenders. Moreover, it would affect only a small number of subprime borrowers.”
“Senate Republicans are planning to call for a congressional commission to investigate the conclusions of the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran as well as the specific intelligence that went into it.”
“In a sharp rebuke to White House counterterrorism policy,” the Senate and House intelligence committees agreed last night “to require all American interrogators to abide by the Army Field Manual, which prohibits coercive methods,” effectively outlawing harsh techniques used by the CIA.
With just a week before News Corporation takes control of Dow Jones & Company, Rupert Murdoch plans to remove many executives in the “upper echelon at Dow Jones” and replace them with his “trusted lieutenants.”
Late last night, the Senate “passed a one-year fix to the alternative minimum tax (AMT), setting up a potential confrontation with the House, which passed a much different version of the bill earlier.” Due to GOP and White House pressure, the bill that passed does not offset the $50 billion cost of the patch.
The Federal Reserve yesterday revealed that “the amount of equity that U.S. homeowners hold in their homes slipped in the third quarter to the lowest level on record, just above 50 percent.”
“House and Senate votes on the 2008 defense authorization bill could be held as early as next week after conferees agreed Thursday” to strip a provision extending hate-crimes protections to gays from the bill.
“At least 46,600 children along the Gulf Coast are still struggling with mental health problems and other serious aftereffects of 2005 hurricanes, according to a new study by the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University and the Children’s Health Fund.”
And finally: World Bank staffers are “cheering the return of their traditional holiday parties under new President Robert Zoellick.” Reportedly, former president Paul Wolfowitz “pulled the plug on holiday festivities” because they “were unseemly at an institution dedicated to fighting poverty. But the natives of 1818 H Street objected: ‘Many employees groused that the parties had been a rare chance to socialize with colleagues.’”
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