Nine American soldiers died yesterday, in “the worst against Americans in Afghanistan in three years.” The killings “illustrated the growing threat of Taliban militants and their associates, who in recent months have made Afghanistan a far deadlier war zone for American-led forces than Iraq.”
As a result of eroding confidence in the nation’s two largest mortgage finance companies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the administration “asked Congress to approve a sweeping rescue package that would give officials the power to inject billions of federal dollars into the beleaguered companies.” Paul Krugman writes that the storm of concern over these lenders “is overblown.”
$4.109: The average price of a gallon of gasoline today, setting a new record. According to AAA, gas prices have risen 40 percent in the last year.
“U.S. and Iraqi negotiators have abandoned efforts to conclude a comprehensive agreement governing the long-term status of U.S troops in Iraq before the end of the Bush presidency.” Instead, the two governments are now working on a “bridge” document that would “allow basic U.S. military operations to continue beyond the expiration of a U.N. mandate at the end of the year.”
On the trail today: Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) will start in Michigan at an event with Mitt Romney and will then travel to San Diego to deliver a speech to the National Council of La Raza conference. Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) will deliver remarks at the NAACP’s 99th annual convention in Cincinnati.
Though Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) frequently exhorts young people to serve “a cause greater than their own self-interest,” McCain “has yet to offer any proposals to expand or transform national service outside of the military.”
The “memorial to an estimated 1,600 fatalities” and “the resting place for 85 bodies that remain unclaimed nearly three years after” Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast has “dissolved into a project that is forgotten, frustrated and delayed — much like the Katrina recovery itself.”
The ACLU will today announce that the federal government has added the millionth name to its terrorist watch list. The estimate “stems from a Justice Department inspector general’s report last year that put the watch list roster — four years after its creation — at more than 720,000 in April 2007, and growing by 20,000 records a month.”
Spending on military construction in the recently approved supplemental funding bill for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars signals that Congress “plans on a long-term military presence in Afghanistan.” Spending for a $62 million ammunition storage facility and $41 million for a 30-megawatt power plant at Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Base are said to be indicators of the U.S.’s long-term intentions in the country.
And finally: Where in the world is Vice President Cheney? Evidently, he’s spending time at pony camps. U.S. News caught Cheney recently at a pony camp in Maryland, where “lots of kids and parents approached him for snapshots and he stayed until everybody got their picture.” (See a photo of Cheney looking sunburnt and posing with campers here.) “It’s quite nice to see that he is just like us sometimes,” said Jeanne Coley, a mom of the campers.
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.