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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bentway who wrote (358077)	11/12/2007 12:57:12 PM
From: longnshort	Respond to of 1575352

Al-Maliki trumpets decline of terror acts By Lauren Frayer November 12, 2007 A U.S. soldier with the 101st Airborne Division stood guard yesterday at an Iraqi oil refinery near Baiji during a search for weapons caches. (Agence France-Presse/Getty Images) BAGHDAD (AP) — Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said yesterday that suicide attacks and other bombings in the Iraqi capital have dropped dramatically since last year's high, calling it a sign of the end of sectarian violence. A top U.S. general here said he thinks the drop is sustainable, as Iraqis turn away from extremists. Mr. al-Maliki said "terrorist acts," including car bombings and other spectacular, al Qaeda-style attacks, dropped 77 percent. He called it a sign that Sunni-Shi'ite violence was nearly gone from Baghdad. "We are all realizing now that what Baghdad was seeing every day — dead bodies in the streets and morgues — is ebbing remarkably," Mr. al-Maliki told reporters at his office in the U.S.-guarded Green Zone. "This is an indication that sectarianism intended as a gate of evil and fire in Iraq is now closed," he said. Before the arrival of nearly 30,000 U.S. reinforcements last spring, explosions shook Baghdad daily — sometimes hourly. Now the sounds of warfare are rare. U.S. troops have set up small outposts in some of the capital's most dangerous enclaves. Locals previously lukewarm to the presence of U.S. troops patrol alongside them. And a historic lane on the eastern banks of the Tigris River is set to reopen later this year, lined with seafood restaurants and an art gallery. Mr. al-Maliki's assessment yesterday matched those of U.S. military officials, and is borne out by AP figures that show a sharp drop in the number of U.S. and Iraqi deaths in the past few months. The number of Iraqi civilians who meet violent deaths dropped from at least 1,023 in September to at least 905 in October, according to an AP count. The number of U.S. military deaths fell from 65 to at least 39 over the same period. Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, commander of U.S. forces south of the capital, said he thought the decrease would hold, because of what he called a "groundswell" of support from regular Iraqis. "If we didn't have so many people coming forward to help, I'd think this is a flash in the pan. But that's just not the case," Gen. Lynch told a small group of reporters over lunch in the Green Zone. He attributed the sharp drop in attacks to the U.S. troop buildup, the setup of small outposts at the heart of Iraqi communities, and help from locals fed up with al Qaeda and other extremists. "These people — Sunni and Shi'ite — are saying, 'I've had enough,' " Gen. Lynch said. The U.S. military has recruited at least 26,000 Iraqis to help pursue militants in Gen. Lynch's area of operations, he said. The religiously mixed area, which includes suburbs of Baghdad and all of Karbala, Najaf and Wassit provinces along the Iranian border, is about the size of West Virginia. About 17,000 of those people, whom the U.S. military calls "concerned local citizens," are paid $300 a month to man checkpoints and guard critical infrastructure in their hometowns, Gen. Lynch said. "They live there, and they know who's the good guy and who's the bad guy," he said.

To: bentway who wrote (358077)	11/12/2007 1:01:53 PM
From: longnshort	Respond to of 1575352

Hog-tied spending bills Donald Lambro November 12, 2007 Despite the Democrats' pledge to get control of their addiction to wasteful spending, their mountain of pork-barrel provisions has prevented Congress from passing its appropriations bills for fiscal 2008. Exhibit A is a Labor, Health and Human Services and Education bill taken up by the Senate last week that was filled to the brim with pork (also known as earmarks). This "minibus" bill was engineered by Democrats attempting to draw just enough votes to make it veto-proof. Last week, Republican Sen. Jim DeMint, South Carolina Republican, one of the stellar anti-pork warriors in Congress, said this about the bill: "The Democrats have made a joke of the ethics bill as they packed this 'minibus' with thousands of pet projects. They have shown their [so-called anti-pork] rules to be laughable and ineffective, as they continue to spend millions on secret earmarks and hide their pork from public scrutiny." All told, this spending package included at least 2,200 earmarks worth more than $1 billion. Among them, a $1 million earmark for the Thomas Daschle Center for Public Service and Representative Democracy at South Dakota State University, named for the former Senate Democratic leader. Democrats often go to great lengths to disguise what their earmarks are actually for, making their intentions sound far more important than they are. A $300,000 item that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, inserted into the Labor-Health and Human Services-Education spending bill for a museum called Exploratorium, which promotes "teacher recruitment, retention, and improvement initiative" (http://www.exploratorium.edu/). But the Exploratorium's Web site describes the museum as "a collage of hundreds of interactive exhibits in the areas of science, art, and human perception" Its mission is "to create a culture of learning through innovative environments, programs and tools that help people nurture their curiosity about the world around them." Mrs. Pelosi's pet project has been given more than $33 million in federal-funding earmarks and grants over the last six years. "Should federal taxpayers be subsidizing a wealthy city's museum during a time of deficit spending?" asked the Senate Republican Conference's Pork Report? In addition to bogus descriptions of what your tax dollars pay for, lawmakers are fond of sticking their earmarked projects into bills that have nothing to do with the bill's purposes. Here's a sampling of the kind of pork found in the Defense Appropriations Act that was uncovered by Citizens Against Government Waste: • $23 million for the National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC) added by Rep. Jack Murtha, Pennsylvania Democrat. It has received more than half a billion dollars since 1992, but the Justice Department, which administers the program, wants to shut it down, calling its work "duplicative." • $4.8 million for the Jamaica Bay Unit of Gateway National Recreation Area sought by Rep. Anthony Weiner, New York Democrat, described as "a wealth of history, nature and recreation." • $3 million for "The First Tee," added by House Democratic Whip James Clyburn of South Carolina. The program's Web site says its mission is to "promote character development and life-enhancing values through the game of golf." • $1.6 million for the Allen Telescope Array, inserted by Rep. Anna Eshoo, California Democrat, whose work is "dedicated to astronomical and simultaneous search for extraterrestrial intelligence observations." So far the Democrats' fiscal 2008 appropriations bills would dish out a total of $24.7 billion for more than 12,000 earmarked expenditures like these. "Democrats can't let go of their pork and keep inventing new ways to stop new earmark disclosure rules and bypass the old ones," Mr. DeMint said last week. "These shameful backroom deals are exactly why Congress continues to earn its lowest approval rating in history," he said. When will it stop? When the voters decide they have had enough. Donald Lambro, chief political correspondent of The Washington Times, is a nationally syndicated columnist.?

To: bentway who wrote (358077)	11/12/2007 1:27:29 PM
From: longnshort	Respond to of 1575352

uh?..the Omen?....Flags come crashing down on Clinton after Veterans Day press conference... drudgereport.com November 12, 2007 ABC News' Report: After a very Presidential-esque news conference - Clinton turned around to leave the reporters and their peppering questions. A staffer swooped open a curtain, and chaos ensued. Four large American flags came crashing in front of Senator Clinton as she headed for the door. ......There were no planted questions to worry about.... but on Veterans Day the flags dropping all around the Senator created quite a stir among the press before Clinton fled the scene.