Salt Lake City demonstrators protest veto House Democrats are about 20 votes short of a veto-proof majority to override President Bush’s veto of the State Children’s Health Insurance Plan, which means that at least 10 Republicans — if not more — would have to change their nay votes. Although there are early indications that some GOP congressfolk are considering doing just that, supporters of the popular program and conservatives (at least the comparatively few who are...

Yaderlin and Alex Jimenez Who would have thunk that among the consequences of the Iraq war are the GIs who in addition to trying to stay alive have to wonder whether their wives or girlfriends will be there when they return home. This is not a “Dear John” situation, but rather spouses who do not have green cards and face deportation at a time when there may be more support for immigration reform than the war. Earlier this year, I wrote about the case of Yaderlin Jimenez, who like her...

Parsing Iraq war statistics – be they sectarian killings, plain-vanilla killings, U.S. killings, goat and other livestock killings, and so on and so forth – is like getting high on opium. Things feel really good for a while and then you wake up. Or so I’m told. As White House and Pentagon mouthpieces and war supporters in the mainstream media and blogosphere never learn, it is axiomatic that there is a dark side to every bright-side statistic that is trotted out because at the...

President Bush After S-CHIP Veto Within hours after George Bush signed the fourth veto of his presidency, rejecting a compromise bipartisan bill expanding the popular State Children’s Health Insurance Program, Democrats and advocacy groups began pushing back. With enough votes in the Senate to override a veto, S-CHIP supporters turned their attention to House Republicans who voted against the bill and may be vulnerable in next year’s election. Because of the popularity of S-CHIP —...

I have no idea what . . . pardon the term, possessed the DF&C and I to watch The Cuckoo’s Nest the other night for the first time since forever, but I must say that the 1975 Milos Forman flick not only has held up well, but seems in some respects like an apt metaphor for our times. By way of refreshing your memory, these are the main characters: Randle Patrick McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher) Taber (Christopher Lloyd) Martini (Danny DeVito) Chief Bromden (Will...

President Bush this morning quietly vetoed a bill with broad bipartisan support that would have expanded the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. Unlike previous vetoes on federally-funded stem cell research and Iraq troop withdrawals, this veto was executed without ceremony or television cameras and behind closed doors. The shyness of a president who seldom misses a photo-op stems from the reality that his veto is a liability for Republicans already facing an uphill fight in the 2008...

And so on the second day of the seventh month of the fifth year of the war in Iraq, the final episode of Ken Burns’ The War ran on PBS. This vivid mosaic of World War II at home and abroad was a big hit by public broadcasting standards, drawing the most viewers since an episode of Antiques Roadshow in 2000, although falling far short of prime-time heavy hitters like CSI and Desperate Housewives. We probably have to take Burns at his word that The War was not intended as a counterpoint to the...

The publicity-shy chairman of military contractor Blackwater USA told a House committee today that his controversial company is the victim of “negative and baseless allegations” surrounding a bloody melee in Baghdad last month in which his employees killed at least 11 people and wounded dozens more. Blackwater chairman Erik Prince, in an opening statement to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, declared that he and his employees are victims of a “rush to judgment”...

As a parent of now-grown children, there perhaps was nothing more terrifying than wondering if they would be able to get health care should I lose my job. That thankfully never occurred. I had health insurance through my employer and could not be considered to be poor. But it is something that parents have to confront today who also are not poor but whose children are among the 9 million in the U.S. who are uninsured. That is the rub of – and a central misunderstanding in — the debate...

As an impressionable fourth grader at the height of the Cold War, the faint sound that was broadcast via Radio Moscow on October 4, 1957 might has well been the shot heard around the world: Beep-beep-beep-beep-beep. Indeed, the sound from the radio transmitters aboard tiny Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, did herald enormous changes. It shocked a complacent U.S. into a paranoia-tinged space race with the Soviet Union and humankind into a new era of science and technology that promised to...

Have you ever tried to throw the discus? Let alone as far as this man did in winning a record four consecutive Olympic gold medals in the same event? More here.

The unintended consequences of the big wet lip-lock that party regulars gave the religious right-wing in inviting them to help tear down the Republican Big Tent a few years ago continue to reverberate. At an emergency meeting in Salt Lake City over the weekend, religious right leaders met behind closed doors to try to resolve the crisis in their midst: None of the current GOP presidential wannabes are extreme enough for them. Worst yet for these Bible thumpers, there is the prospect of pro-choice...

In October 1980, a young pitcher from suburban Philadelphia by the name of Jamie Moyer was among the million or so people on hand to watch a victory parade in honor of the Philadelphia Phillies, who had just won their first World Championship in the nearly century-old history of a Major League baseball franchise inurred to winning and accustomed to disappointing its long-suffering fans year after year after year. On the last day of September 2007, that now 44-year-old pitcher, an old man by baseball...

Car Damaged in Blackwater Shootout It has become grimly obvious as details emerge about an incident in which Blackwater USA bodyguards shot and killed at least eight Iraqis in Baghdad’s Nisour Square that trigger-happy private contractors have no business doing jobs that should be filled by the military. War, of course, can be a terribly messy thing. But once combatants such as for-profit Blackwater mercenaries are relieved of having to take responsibility for improper actions and know that...

Jenna, Barbara and Dad The children of presidents should not be blamed for their fathers’ failures, or for that matter praised for their achievements. Which brings us to Jenna Bush, twin daughter of President George and First Lady Barbara Bush, who at age 25 is shedding her (probably unfair) tabloid image as a party girl and dingbat and is promoting her new book for young adults, Ana’s Story: A Journey of Hope. The book is a true account of the struggles and triumphs of a Latin American...

Another woman soldier is laid to rest When we look back on September 2007, it will be remembered as a month during which a modest downtrend in casualties continued and George Bush lowered his thick head and plowed once again into the brick wall that is the Iraq war. But that’s not where we’re going to focus this roundup. Instead, we will note that the U.S. is closing in on another bloody milestone: The deaths of 100 woman soldiers in Iraq. Please click here for more at Kiko’s House.

I’ve never been to Burma and the nearest I got was Thailand. So I can’t tell stories about how my driver snuck me into clandestine late night anti-government meetings in Yangoon because I’d be lying. This, I suppose, is a rather half-arsed way of saying that I’ve felt a combination of pessimism and impotence over the violent crackdown against peaceful pro-democracy protests by monks and civilians in the South Asian backwater now officially known as Myanmar. Pessimism because...

You can probably put all of the people who actually make a living being poets these days in a broom closet with room left over for the brooms, and improbably one of those poets is Frank Messina. I’ve known Frank for years and have watched the upward arc of his career with a combination of awe and bemusement and, I suppose, a little envy. Frank is the progenitor of “Spoken Motion,” a band and concept that melds lyrical content with jazz and experimental rock music. He has received...

As I noted earlier this month, George Bush has broken the United States Army because of his reckless and never ending adventure in Iraq, and it’s not going to be fixed anytime soon. General George C. Casey confirmed that this week in an extraordinary appearance before Congress. It was extraordinary because the new Army chief of staff wasn’t called up to Capitol Hill because of political grandstanding but because he requested a public hearing. Casey, in his first appearance as CoC, told...

. . . Banana, Fanna, Foe, Fincoln. Feem Fie, Moe, Mincoln. More here, Dear.

Something happened this week in the American power industry that has not occurred in at least 30 years: Applications were filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build new nuclear reactors. The last application was made in 1977, two years before the infamous partial meltdown at Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. (One report says it was 1973.) Nuclear power went into eclipse in the U.S. not because it was an unsafe technology, although it did have its issues, but because the...

More here.

That’s the amount that you and I have spent since 2004 to create a public-relations disaster in Iraq that threatens to eclipse the Abu Ghraib scandal. That disaster is run-amok Blackwater USA contractors, some of whom happen to be outright mercenaries who have transformed duties guarding diplomats and senior U.S. civilians, escorting convoys, protecting military bases and conducting security overflights into a series of bloody embarrassments that have further exacerbated tensions between...

I have a hard time believing much of what President Bush says because so much of it is misleading or downright false, but his claim that the House of Representatives is playing politics by passing a $35 billion expansion of a popular children’s health-insurance program may be a new low in the annals of compassionate conservatism. The vote last night was 265 to 159 with 45 politics-playing Republicans joining Democrats by a broad but not veto-proof margin. (That would take 290 votes.) Meanwhile,...

Bowing to pressure from Democrats and human rights groups, the White House has withdrawn the nomination of John Rizzo to be the CIA’s top attorney after months of controversy over his role in the agency’s interrogation policy. Rizzo, a career CIA lawyer, had drawn fire because of his support for Bush administration legal doctrines permitting so-called “enhanced interrogation” of terrorism detainees in CIA custody. A senior official said Rizzo told President Bush he had decided...