The New York Times calls the “compromise” military commissions legislation about to be approved by Congress “a tyrannical law that will be ranked with the low points in American democracy, our generation’s version of the Alien and Sedition Acts.”
“A $75 million project to build the largest police academy in Iraq has been so grossly mismanaged” and “poorly constructed that feces and urine rained from the ceilings in student barracks.” U.S. construction giant Parsons Corp., which oversaw the project, received $1 billion in federal conctracts in Iraq and managed the Big Dig “disaster” in Boston.
Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani said yesterday, “The idea of trying to cast blame on President Clinton [for 9/11] is just wrong for many, many reasons, not the least of which is I don’t think he deserves it.”
“Most of the 9 million uninsured children in the U.S. live in homes where at least one parent works full time,” a new Families USA report finds. “In more than one-quarter of the cases, there are two working parents.”
70: The percentage of Americans who oppose the use of U.S. ground troops in Iran. Only nine percent favored U.S. air strikes on selected targets in Iran, while 45 percent said the U.S. should increase diplomatic our efforts with allies.
A report from the UK Ministry of Defense says the Iraq war has acted as a “recruiting sergeant” for Islamic extremists, and describes the west as being “in a fix.”
“Scientists have uncovered evidence that levels of the greenhouse gas methane will rise sharply in the next few years, warming the planet faster than previously expected.”
John E. Jones III, the district judge who “struck down a Dover, Penn., school board’s decision to teach intelligent design in public schools said he was stunned by the reaction, which included death threats and a week of protection from federal marshals.”
“New explosive devices are now used in Afghanistan within a month of their first appearing in Iraq,” concludes a new United Nations report on Iraq, which “echoe[s] many of the dire predictions in an American assessment.”
And finally: Howard Dean takes a break from 50-strategy to focus on internet backgammon strategy. Matt Bai writes in the New York Times Magazine: “On the morning we left for Alaska, Dean went missing for a good half-hour. It turned out that we was in the business center of the MGM Grand, where he had been trying to figure out how to print out his boarding pass but somehow ended up in an impromptu game of online backgammon with a guy who claimed to be in China.”
What did we miss? Let us know in the comments section.