Really, this is about fighting terrorism: The House approved a bill Thursday that would grant legal status to President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program with new restrictions. Republicans called it a test before the election of whether Democrats want to fight or coddle terrorists. “The Democrats’ irrational opposition to strong national security policies that help keep …
Archives for September 2006
Freedom Isn’t Free
Apparently not. [T]hese days, men with guns are not Iraqi reporters’ only threat. Men with gavels are, too. Under a broad new set of laws criminalizing speech that ridicules the government or its officials, some resurrected verbatim from Saddam Hussein’s penal code, roughly a dozen Iraqi journalists have been charged with offending public officials in …
65-34
The Military Commissions Act of 2006 passed, 65-34: The Senate today passed a bill, backed by the White House, that sets the rules for interrogating and prosecuting detainees in the war on terrorism, allowing the CIA to continue a formerly secret program to extract information from key suspected terrorists and establishing special military tribunals to …
The Do Nothing Party
Once again, Democrats rise to the occasion: The Senate today rejected an amendment to a bill creating a new system for interrogating and trying terror suspects that would have guaranteed such suspects access to the courts to challenge their imprisonment. Go to Election GuideMore Politics NewsThe vote was 51 to 48 against the amendment, which …
A Metaphor
This pretty much says it all about the War in Iraq: $75 million project to build the largest police academy in Iraq has been so grossly mismanaged that the campus now poses health risks to recruits and might need to be partially demolished, U.S. investigators have found. The Baghdad Police College, hailed as crucial to …
Ignorance Is Bliss
Some times you can even pick up interesting bits from Michelle Malkin. For instance, here she points to another one of those liberals-are-from-the-neocortex-conservatives-are-from-the-limbic-system sociology studies: The liberals and conservatives in this study are not radically different species, at least when it comes to sleep and dreaming. People of both political persuasions share a common substrate …
Negative
Michael Van Der Gallen has noticed the explosion of negative ads in America these days. The reason is actually fairly simple. Negative ads make voters disgusted with politics in general. They raise the target’s negative ratings, but usually at the expense of raising the ad buyer’s negatives as well. Endangered incumbents love negative ads specifically …