As predicted yesterday, the Senate Intelligence Committee today confirmed its status as a rubber stamp for the White House. The Committee, led by staunch Bush ally Pat Roberts (R-KS), rejected vice-chairman Jay Rockefeller's call for an investigation of the President's illegal NSA domestic spying program. Bowing to pressure from the White House, Majority Leader Frist […]

Tomorrow is shaping as "Showdown Tuesday" for the Senate Intelligence Committee. On Tuesday, the Intelligence Committee led by Kansas Senator Pat Roberts will decide whether to investigate President Bush's illegal NSA domestic wiretapping. At this point, the vote could go either way. Whether Roberts' committee once again abdicates its oversight role likely comes to down […]

I tend to agree with Kevin Drum over at the Washington Monthly that the Dubai port deal is not necessarily the grave and gathering security risk its opponents decry. (The shocking political tone-deafness is another matter altogether.) But it certainly smells bad, in no small part because of the cronyism and close ties the Bush […]

When it comes to President Bush's illegal domestic spying program, his Republican allies over the last several days have shown that discretion is indeed the better part of valor. From the beginning, the administration's amen corner has aggressive claimed that the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) and the wartime Commander-in-Chief powers […]

Rarely is a precise price tag put on bigotry. But that's just what happened this week, when a University of California commission totaled the costs associated with the Pentagon's indefensible and staggeringly counterproductive "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy regarding gays in the American military. That cost, according to the commission, is $369 million over 10 […]

President Bush has flip-flopped once again. Just 24 hours after Vice President Cheney firmly declared the administration would not more broadly share information with key Congressional committee members regarding Bush's NSA domestic spying program, the White House reversed course - sort of. The seeds of the turnabout were sown with yesterday's challenge from House Intelligence […]

During a break in the Senate testimony by Attorney General Gonzales this morning, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions resorted to the now standard Republican defense of President Bush's illegal domestic spying program. Call it the "Give Me Death" strategy. During brief comments to the press, Sessions referring to the rightness of Bush's domestic spying after 9/11 […]

Faced with negative polls and a pessimistic American nation, President Bush's just completed 2006 State of the Union Address naturally focused on the theme of "the Hopeful Society." But like the stillborn "Ownership Society" vision before it, Bush's 2006 SOTU will be remembered not for its policy program, but for its partisan political purposes. The […]

This past week has been among the most instructive in the annals of the Pentagon's inexcusable "don't ask, don't tell" policy. Among the lessons learned: while the American military has no place for soldiers who pose on gay web sites, the Bush White House press corps is another matter altogether. On Wednesday, the Center for […]

Signs of China's rapid growth into an economic superpower are everywhere. The latest indicator comes in a report from the China National Bureau of Statistics announcing a staggering 9.9% rise in Chinese GDP in 2005. With its $2.26 trillion economy, China has leap-frogged the UK, France and Italy to become the fourth largest in the […]