This is a good bill that will help every Medicare beneficiary," wrote Tom Scully, the Medicare administrator, in a letter to The New York Times defending the prescription drug bill. That's flatly untrue. (Are you surprised?)
Instead, AARP has thrown its weight behind an effort to ram the bill through before Thanksgiving. And no, it's not urgent to get the bill passed so retirees can get immediate relief. The plan won't kick in until 2006 in any case

Originally Captain Yee was charged with “disobeying an order for allegedly taking classified material from Guantanamo and improperly transporting it.”
Further investigation has revealed offenses far, far, worse than even that — offenses positively Clintonian in their gravity. The chaplain was charged today with having sexual relations outside marriage, making a false statement, and storing pornography on a government computer.

The former lieutenant general said that after learning of the State Department plan in February he had brought in Tom Warrick, a senior planner at the State Department involved in the study. But Garner said he was forced to fire Warrick by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
"Tom was just beginning to get started with us when one day I was in the office with the secretary of defense, and he said 'Jay, have you got a guy named Warrick on your team?' I said, `yes, I do.' He said, 'well, I've got to ask you to remove him.' I said, `I don't want to remove him; he's too valuable.'
"But he said, 'This came to me from such a high level that I can't overturn it, and I've just got to ask you to remove Mr. Warrick.'"
"The international war on terrorism began to be fought in Iraq," he said, with anti-American fighters coming in from other countries.
"That's not all bad," Garner said. "Bring 'em all in there, we'll kill 'em there."

"This will probably be the worst flu season we've had in several decades," said infectious disease specialist Dr. Gregory Poland. "My guess is that we'll be in the 50,000 to 70,000 deaths this year due to this strain."
In an average year, the disease infects up to 20 percent of the U.S. population, killing about 36,000 Americans and hospitalizing 114,000, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Sharon Bush's lawyers questioned Neil Bush closely about the deals, especially a contract with Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp., a firm backed by Jiang Mianheng, the son of former Chinese President Jiang Zemin ), that would pay him $2 million in stock over five years.

Human Rights Watch concluded that US troops were operating "with impunity. The individual cases of civilian deaths... reveal a pattern by US forces of over-aggressive tactics, indiscriminate shooting in residential areas and a quick reliance on lethal force", Human Rights Watch said. "The lack of timely and thorough investigations into many questionable incidents has created an atmosphere of impunity, in which many soldiers feel they can pull the trigger without coming under review."

American's top man in Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer, last week fired 28,000 Iraqi teachers as political punishment for their former membership in the Saddam Hussein-dominated Baath Party, fueling anti-U.S. resistance on the ground,
administration officials have told United Press International.

"The anti-Baath edicts, all of which are ideological nonsense, have been an outright disaster," a State Department official said. "Whatever happened to politics as the art of the possible?"

In a long editorial last Sunday, the New York Times said that the lack of U.S. preparation for a post-war Iraq was "most likely" due to the Defense Department and the president's security advisers (believing) in the assurance of Mr. Chalabi and other Iraqi exiles."

"I think Chalabi's group is permeated with Iranian influence," said former CIA counterterrorism chief Vince Cannistraro.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld even moved to get rid of 16 of 20 State Department people because they were seen to be "Arabists" -- overly sympathetic to Iraqis, U.S. government officials said.

A former Garner team member was quoted in last week's Newsweek as saying the vetting process for Iraqis "got so bad that even doctors sent to restore medical services had to be anti-abortion" -- an article of faith in the Bush administration.

Contrary to initial accounts on Sunday from Mosul, he said the bodies of the men had not been mutilated or pummeled with rocks.
The military official said that while an initial military report had said that the men's throats had been slit, further investigation revealed no evidence of such wounds. Nor were the bodies dragged through the streets, the official said.
At the Pentagon, Defense Department and military officials had no explanation for the conflicting information from the field, except to repeat the usual caution that first reports are routinely incorrect. The initial reports of throats being slashed came from Iraq, and were never confirmed by officials in Washington, they said.

Despite the statements on Monday, important questions remained about the incident. One was why the men were traveling through the streets of Mosul alone. Military rules in Mosul and other parts of Iraq prohibit troops from traveling outside their bases except in a convoy. The Americans who were killed were traveling in an unarmored sport utility vehicle without an escort.

When "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" invited author Michael Wolff on the program, his reputation as a scathing media critic was hardly a secret. Wolff, a columnist for New York magazine, was peddling his new book, "Autumn of the Moguls," which describes said moguls in personal and rather unflattering terms. But the PBS program abruptly killed the taped interview Friday, a week after it was recorded.

Bush only learned recently, and from the King of Jordan, that the Pentagon’s favorite Iraqi is a fugitive from a 22-year old conviction for bank embezzlement?
Such a thing would be possible only if Bush were a man so lazy and incurious that he never read a newspaper. He has claimed to be just such a man, true enough, but I took that to be an expression of contempt for the press. After all, nobody could really be such a glutton for ignorance. On the other hand…

The federal commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks announced on Thursday that it had issued a subpoena to New York City for a variety of police tapes and other material related to the attacks. The panel said the city's refusal to hand over the material had "significantly impeded the commission's investigation."
Aides to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said he intended to challenge the subpoena, raising the prospect of a lengthy court battle with the independent commission.

"It will take a court order to make the city violate the privacy of those we lost," the mayor's office said. "It also is puzzling why the commission is trying to distract the public by focusing on the city's response as opposed to the question we all want answered — how this savage terrorist attack was planned and executed without any warning."
"Phil Zelikow has a very large conflict of interest," said Kristen Breitweiser, whose husband, Ronald, was killed at the World Trade Center, and who is a spokeswoman for the Family Steering Committee, an umbrella group that represents several family organizations. "He is very close friends with Condi Rice, he was on the transition team, and some of these documents are going to pertain to that. It's very disturbing."
"The White House has insisted on a controlling role that is far more intrusive than anything I envisioned," Mr. Lieberman said.