Kirkpatrick died on Thursday of congestive heart failure at her home near Washington, her son, Stuart Kirkpatrick, said on Friday. A fiery anti-communist crusader, Kirkpatrick was a pioneer of the neoconservative movement that advocated an interventionist foreign policy and has strongly influenced policy-making under President Bush.
A longtime Democrat who worked on former Democratic Vice President Hubert Humphrey s presidential campaign in 1968, Kirkpatrick was initially the only non-Republican on Reagan s cabinet-level team and for a time the only woman.
Republican Sen. Gordon Smith, who voted in favor of the Iraq war and has supported it ever since, now says the current U.S.
war effort is absurd and may even be criminal.
In a major speech on the Senate floor, the Oregon senator called for changes in U.S.
policy that could include rapid pullouts of U.S. troops from Iraq.
He said he would have never voted for the conflict if he had known the intelligence that President Bush gave the American people was inaccurate.
Citing the hundreds of billions of dollars spent and the nearly 3,000 American deaths, Smith said: I for one am at the end of my rope when it comes to supporting a policy that has our soldiers patrolling the same streets in the same way, being blown up by the same bombs day after day. That is absurd.
It may even be criminal. I cannot support that anymore.
(So now even Smith, the Republican warhawk, wants out.
Stay tuned for wingnut attacks on his character. g)
The Bush administration asserted in federal court yesterday that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and three former military officials cannot be held liable for the alleged torture of nine Afghans and Iraqis in U.
S. military detention camps because the detainees have no standing to sue in U.S.
courts.
Deputy Assistant Attorney General C. Frederick Beckner III also argued that a decision by the court to let a trial proceed would amount to an infringement by the judiciary on the president s power to wage war and would open the door to new litigation in U.
S. courts by foreign nationals who feel aggrieved by U.S.
government policies.
ACLU counsel Lucas Guttentag argued that the right to be free from torture is universal and enforceable in a U.S.
court, in war and peacetime. He said Rumsfeld and the military officials were aware of this and knew about the abuses but either approved or failed to prevent them.
His colleagues argued that because the U.
S. military is exempt from laws in Iraq and Afghanistan, only U.S.
courts can enforce anti-torture laws there. Otherwise, one said, Iraq would be a rights-free zone.
Officials trumpeted a U.
S.-India civilian nuclear deal as the centerpiece of the countries new partnership, but India struck a note of caution Saturday over extraneous provisions.
There is broad agreement that the deal, which allows the shipment of nuclear fuel and know-how to India, is reshaping India-U.
S. relations and could alter the global power balance. While India s foreign ministry also called the deal historic, it said the U.
S. legislation contains certain extraneous and prescriptive provisions.
No legislation enacted in a foreign country can take away from us the sovereign right to conduct foreign policy determined solely by our national interests, it said in a statement.
The statement was referring to language in the bill that would require Bush and his successors to determine if New Delhi is cooperating with U.S. efforts to confront Iran about its nuclear ambitions.
Indian officials say they can live with the weakened, nonbinding language that made it into the final bill.
The Republican-led House of Representatives passed a package of trade bills Friday night that includes a measure extending normal trade status to Vietnam. A weekend Senate session still loomed as some senators objected to trade provisions benefiting Vietnam, Haiti and Andean nations, among others.
The House passed the trade bill by a 212-184 vote.
U.S.
environmental regulators are considering removing lead, a heavy metal linked to learning problems in children, from a list of regulated pollutants because past rules have greatly reduced levels of the toxin.
An Environmental Protection Agency staff paper released on Tuesday said the agency would evaluate the status of lead as an air pollutant and assess whether the revocation of the standard is an appropriate option for the Administrator to consider.
The EPA would be cutting a big sweetheart deal for the lead smelter industry if they revoked the listing, said Frank O Donnell, president of Washington, D.
C.-based advocacy group Clean Air Watch. He said the lead assessment was an example of the EPA subordinating the expertise of agency scientists.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday streamlined the way it updates regulations for the nation s worst air pollutants, a move that drew immediate charges that officials are trying to quash scientific review to benefit industry at the expense of public health.
The changes, some of which closely mirror requests by the American Petroleum Institute and Battery Council International industry groups, include shortening what is now an exhaustive scientific review, and replacing recommendations prepared by career scientists and reviewed by independent advisors with a policy paper crafted by senior White House appointees at the agency. The agency regularly misses deadlines for updating health standards, which has led to numerous lawsuits by environmental groups.
Thursday s announcement came two days after the agency announced it would study whether lead should be taken off the list of the most serious pollutants.
It also follows controversial decisions this fall by EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson in which critics said he had ignored scientific counsel on tightening standards for deadly soot.
More Americans than ever say President Bush is doing a pitiful job with the war, and an almost equally overwhelming number of people think Iraq won t turn out to be a stable democracy, a new poll showed Friday. A whopping 71 percent of Americans disapprove of Bush s handling of the war, while only 27 percent say he s done a good job, according to the AP-Ipsos poll.
Just nine percent of Americans believe the U.S. will end up with a clear-cut victory in Iraq, the poll indicated, while 63 percent said they don t think the country will become a stable democracy.
The public opinion was so lousy that even Bush s go-to issue - the economy - took a hit in the latest poll. His oversight of the economy sank to a 38 percent approval rating from last month s 43 percent.
(27% think that the president has done a good job with regard to the Iraq war?
Who are these idiots? g)
A new poll shows that the overwhelming majority of Americans favor allowing the government to negotiate prescription drug prices for the Medicare program, suggesting there will be considerable political pressure on the next Congress to do so. Eight-five percent of the 1,867 adults polled in the Kaiser Family Foundation survey released yesterday said they favored such negotiations, including majorities of Republicans, Democrats and independents.
The Department of Homeland Security violated a congressional funding ban when it continued to develop a computerized program that creates risk assessments of travelers entering and leaving the United States, according to lawmakers and privacy advocates.
Although congressional testimony shows that department officials apparently disclosed some important elements of the controversial Automated Targeting System program to lawmakers in recent months, several key members of Congress said that they were in the dark about the program and that it violated their intentions.
Privacy advocates and members of Congress expressed growing skepticism this week about the legality, scope and effectiveness of the massive data-mining program particularly the creation of risk assessments on Americans that would be retained for up to 40 years whose existence was first disclosed in detail in a Nov.
2 notice in the Federal Register.
As of Nov. 27, the Republican senatorial committee had raised $87 million since the election cycle began in 2005 and ended up about $1.
2 million in debt. By comparison, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which lacked the inherent fund-raising advantage of controlling the Senate, raised $119 million in this election cycle and ended up $5.4 million in debt.
Candidates and parties routinely borrow at the end of close races and then pay down the debt after the election.
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