President Bush discusses Iran’s nuclear program with Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni during 45-minute meeting at White House, reiterates his administration’s ‘deep’ commitment to Israel’s security.

In talks with Livni on Wednesday, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the US is working Germany, Britain, France, Russia, and China on a draft resolution calling for the imposition of sanctions against Iran. (more…)

Labour officials have banned the grieving families of the Iraq war dead from staging a peaceful protest outside the party’s forthcoming annual conference in Manchester. (more…)

A central thesis of my book, Beyond Chutzpah, is that, whenever Israel faces a public relations debacle, its apologists sound the alarm that a “new anti-Semitism” is upon us. So, predictably, just after Israel faced another image problem due to its murderous destruction of Lebanon, a British all-party parliamentary group led by notorious Israel-firster Denis MacShane MP (Labour) released yet another report alleging a resurgence of anti-Semitism. (more…)

Maureen Stevens says the federal government probably knows who killed her husband. She believes they’re not telling because that might reveal things the government doesn’t want revealed. (more…)

Michael Rivero seems to have a pretty damn good idea who was responsible.

“Today, we are safer, but we are not yet safe,” said Bush, which means he was batting .500 with the truth in just one short statement. Not bad for him. It is undeniably true that we are not yet safe, but to imply that we are safer than we were before Bush turned the world against us is demonstrably false. (more…)

WASHINGTON — Roads and bridges built by U.S. taxpayers are starting to be sold off, and so far foreign-owned companies are doing the buying.

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Voting machine irregularities were questioned, and lots of folks got up and started shouting at the questioners and calling them whiners, and sore losers, and nutjobs. Unfortunately for the blow hards, somebody else put a bunch of smart people in a room and asked them if the machines were as good as the blow hards said, or as vulnerable as the “whiners” said. Smart people like to find things out. They don’t really care about the who, but they damn sure like to know the whys of the world. So Princeton took the machines to task. Here is what they found: (more…)

On election day poll workers found themselves scrambling for emergency paper ballots for voter to use - because the high priced, “high tech” voting machines crashed, shut down, or flat out couldn’t be started up. (more…)

Just three days before Kimveer Gill opened fire on a crowd at Dawson College in Montreal, killing one and wounding 19, he wrote the following in his blog on the gothic website VampireFreaks.com (profile: fatality666):

I wonder why my household has been under surveillance by law enforcement for 6 years now? Makes no sense to me! [entry from September 10, 2006, 05:23am]

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On March 19th, 1979, Le Point, a French magazine published the following Pakistan Airlines advertisement. My jaw dropped after seeing this…

Is this just a bizarre coincidence, or something more? When you consider the evidence of Pakistan’s involveement in 9/11, you can’t help but wonder. (more…)

Nine out of 10 Americans who tried to buy their own health insurance failed, either because the price was too steep or because they were denied coverage due to a current medical problem, a study said on Thursday.

For employers still providing health insurance, more are promoting higher-deductible plans, which is leading to burdensome medical and credit-card debt, the Commonwealth Fund study found.

“People are being squeezed as employer coverage is either not available or contains very high out-of-pocket costs,” said Karen Davis, president of the Commonwealth Fund. (more…)

By a 10-8 vote, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved SB2453, the National Security Surveillance Act (.pdf), which was co-written by committee’s chairman Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania) in concert with the White House.

… Specter’s bill concedes the government’s right to wiretap Americans without warrants, and allows the U.S. Attorney General to authorize, on his own, dragnet surveillance of Americans so long as the stated purpose of the surveillance is to monitor suspected terrorists or spies. (more…)

Interior Department officials realized in 2000 that their offshore lease agreements with oil companies shortchanged American taxpayers, but they covered up their multibillion-dollar mistake for six years, an investigator said Wednesday.

After combing through 11,000 e-mail messages and interviewing 29 current and former Interior Department employees, federal investigators still aren’t ready to say who they think told a staffer to omit contract language that would have forced oil companies operating in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico to pay billions of dollars in royalty payments as energy prices rose. (more…)

“I remember the tactical decisions being made out of the White House during that period of time,” Bush told conservative columnists. “I thought it was a mistake then and I think it’s a mistake now.” (more…)

WRH: Memo to President Bush: the biggest tactical mistake in Viet Nam (aside from the US’s military involvement) was the thought that we could win a land war from the air. We bombed, and bombed, and bombed, but the Viet Cong could always come back, harder. The biggest tactical mistake this administration has made in Iraq(aside from US having invaded it) is thinking that we can win a land war from the air. It is transparently obvious that you have learned absolutely nothing from the Viet NamWar. This administration is making the same idiotic moves all over again, and thinking that somehow, the outcome will be different. One of the clinical definitions of insanity is to keep doing the same thing, and expecting a totally different outcome.

On March 23, 2006, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System will cease publication of the M3 monetary aggregate. The Board will also cease publishing the following components: large-denomination time deposits, repurchase agreements (RPs), and Eurodollars. The Board will continue to publish institutional money market mutual funds as a memorandum item in this release.

WRH: This is the official Federal Reserve Board announcement discontinuing the publishing of the M3 monetary aggregate. Why is this important? The M3 is the total amount of dollars in circulation, both paper and virtual. Changes to the M3 over time are a direct measure of inflation in the economy. That the Federal Reserve has stopped publishing this direct measure suggests to some that our economy is entering a period of hyper-inflation as Bush continues to borrow at record levels to support his wars, while trying to make the economy look good heading into the elections. (more…)