Republican Senator Wants 16 Hour Days for Truckers

As if there weren't enough highway fatalities in the United States...

"U.S. Rep. John Boozman, R-Ark., whose district includes Wal-Mart's headquarters in Bentonville, is sponsoring a bill that would allow the longer workday as long as the trucker took an unpaid two-hour break. The bill was expected to be offered as an amendment during debate over the highway spending bill today...Critics of the proposal accuse Wal-Mart of trying to fatten its profits by forcing truckers to spend more time waiting at the loading dock without getting paid."

Bush to UN: Drop Dead

"Just as it looked like George W. Bush might be nudging toward multilateralism, he goes and appoints John Bolton as his ambassador to the United Nations."
(Slate)

MILITARY STILL LACKING ARMOR IN IRAQ

"'It's horrible,' says a Pentagon official. 'They're kind of a broken force.'"
(Time)

CNN Fact Checks Bush On Social Security

"CNN Fact Check: The statement is misleading. The president says the money from the private account is an "add-on" to the traditional plan, which implies that a retiree under this plan would receive the same check he or she would normally get under the current system, and additional money from a private account. That is incorrect."
(CNN)

DNC On Record Fundraising Pace

"The Democratic National Committee (DNC) has raised a record $3.4 million in the three weeks since Governor Howard Dean was first elected DNC Chair. This is more than double the amount raised when compared to the same time period in 2001 - the first year following the last Presidential election."
(DNC)

Forum To Urge Soft-Power Approach to Combatting Terrorism

"Governments afflicted by extremist violence must address its causes if they hope to defeat it, not just strike back as the United States has done, say experts who will take part in a world conference on terrorism in Madrid this week.

Those causes include poverty, religious intolerance and failures to integrate a swelling tide of immigrants."
(AP)

Bush Administration Short-Changing Vets

"In 1945, when he was a 19-year-old soldier fighting in Italy, shrapnel from an enemy shell ripped into his abdomen. His wounds were so severe that he was twice administered last rites. When Brown came home, the government that had promised to care for its wounded veterans instead shorted him."
(Knight Ridder)

Senate Republicans Pushing Effort to Destroy the Arctic Refuge

"The Arctic refuge, a haven for caribou, musk ox, polar bears and other Arctic wildlife, is believed to be potentially rich with oil. A keystone of the Bush administration's energy policy is to open the refuge's 1.5 million-acre (607,000-hectare) coastal plain to oil drilling."
(Reuters)

Debunking Republican Lies About Filibusters

"Myth 2: Judicial filibusters are unprecedented. Republicans insist that judicial filibusters never happened before. Frist put it this way: "In February 2003 the minority radically broke with tradition and precedent and launched the first-ever filibuster of a judicial nominee who had majority support." In truth, no one should understand the legitimacy of judicial filibusters better than Bill Frist. On March 9, 2000, Frist participated in a filibuster of Richard Paez, President Clinton's nominee to the Ninth Circuit. When confronted about his vote late last year, Frist claimed he filibustered Paez for "scheduling" purposes. Not true. A press release by former Senator Bob Smith titled "Smith Leads Effort to Block Activist Judicial Nominees" plainly states that the intent of the filibuster was to "block" the Paez nomination."
(The Nation)

Bush Names Critic of UN to be Ambassador to...the UN!

"Bolton clashed with former Secretary of State Colin Powell and his team, who saw the aggressive, mustachioed lawyer as a neoconservative mole."
(Kansas City Star)

60 MINUTES AIRS SEGMENT ON DELAY'S MISDEEDS

"We're not talking about Mother Teresa here who gets caught for turning right on a red light in a state that doesn’t allow such a thing," says Ornstein. "The history of Tom DeLay in Congress is that he's pushed every envelope. It is often the case that powerful people get their comeuppance because of something that a lot of people would see as a technicality."
(CBS News)


The "Hammer": The Unseemly Tom DeLay

Member of So-Called Liberal Media Supports Bush on the Web

"While reporting on the 2004 presidential campaign for The Boston Globe, technology reporter Hiawatha Bray apparently wrote posts for several weblogs in which he declared his support for President Bush, attacked Sen. John Kerry, and bolstered discredited allegations by the anti-Kerry group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (now Swift Vets and POWs for Truth)."
(Media Matters for America)

O'Reilly Calls ACLU "Terrorists"

"In the past, O'Reilly has called the ACLU "the most dangerous organization in the United States of America right now ... second next to Al Qaeda" and "a fascist organization." He has also said that "Hitler would be a card-carrying ACLU member. So would Stalin."
(Media Matters for America)

Republicans Looking to Stifle Free Expression on Pay TV

"Indecency guidelines that over-the-air broadcasters must follow should be extended to cover cable and satellite broadcasters, congressional Republicans who are influential on telecommunications issues said Tuesday."
(USA Today)

So much for the libertarian roots of the Republican Party...

Bloody Sunday Remembered

"You will be the people that will light a new chapter in the history books of our nation," he said, speaking to the huge crowd that had gathered outside Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church here in Selma at the start of what would become the most celebrated civil rights march in US history. "Walk together, children," he said, "Don't you get weary, and it will lead us to the Promised Land. And Alabama will be a new Alabama, and America will be a new America."
(Christian Science Monitor)

Rendition Story Gaining Steam

"The CIA's inspector general was reviewing the rendition programas one of at least a half-dozen inquiries within the agency of possible misconduct involving the detention, interrogation and rendition of suspected terrorists, according to the report."
(www.xinhuanet.com)

Dems Paint Greenspan As Partisan

"Democrats said the accusation by Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., reflected a real frustration in the minority party with Greenspan. Even before Reid's attack, Democrats say they have been changing their view of Greenspan from one of an above-politics wise man to the Republican partisan he had been in the 1960s and 1970s."
(Buffalo News)

FDR's Grandson Ridicules Bush's Claims

"James Roosevelt Jr., a lawyer and former associate commissioner of Social Security under the Clinton administration, said Monday at a town hall-style meeting organized by Maine's two Democratic congressmen that his grandfather's position on the retirement program was clear."
(New York Lawyer)

Republicans Attempt Smear of Innocent People in Washington State

"The state Republican Party's list of people it claims voted illegally in Washington's ultra-close gubernatorial election is riddled with inaccuracies and "smears the names of innocent people," lawyers for state Democrats said yesterday."
(Seattle Post-Intelligencer)

Sen. Levin Vows to Fight Bush's Attempts to Dismantle Social Security

"Levin says it's wrong to gamble with private Social Security accounts. He says some people will win with their stock market investments, but Bush's plan doesn't address what to do for the losers."
(TV 8, Grand Rapids)