January 28th, 2006
By Adam Brookes
BBC Pentagon correspondent
A newly declassified document gives a fascinating glimpse into the US military’s plans for “information operations”…Perhaps the most startling aspect of the roadmap is its acknowledgement that information put out as part of the military’s psychological operations, or Psyops, is finding its way onto the computer and television screens of ordinary Americans….It seems to see the internet as being equivalent to an enemy weapons system….The US military seeks the capability to knock out every telephone, every networked computer, every radar system on the planet.
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January 26th, 2006
By Harold Meyerson / Washington Post Op-Ed
It’s the president’s prescription drug plan (Medicare Part D), though, that is his most mind-boggling failure. As was not the case in Iraq or with Katrina, it hasn’t had to overcome the opposition of man or nature. Pharmacists are not resisting the program; seniors are not planting car bombs to impede it (not yet, anyway). But in what must be an unforeseen development, people are trying to get their medications covered under the program. Apparently, this is a contingency for which the administration was not prepared, as it has been singularly unable to get its own program up and running.
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January 26th, 2006
New York Times Editorial
Judge Samuel Alito Jr., whose entire history suggests that he holds extreme views about the expansive powers of the presidency and the limited role of Congress, will almost certainly be a Supreme Court justice soon. His elevation will come courtesy of a president whose grandiose vision of his own powers threatens to undermine the nation’s basic philosophy of government — and a Senate that seems eager to cooperate by rolling over and playing dead.
It is hard to imagine a moment when it would be more appropriate for senators to fight for a principle. Even a losing battle would draw the public’s attention to the import of this nomination.
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January 26th, 2006
BBC News
Preliminary results give Hamas 76 of the 132 seats in the chamber, with the ruling Fatah party trailing on 43.
The win poses problems for efforts to restart peace talks with Israel, say analysts. Israel insists it will not deal with an authority including Hamas.
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January 19th, 2006
Excite News (AP)
Six former heads of the Environmental Protection Agency - five Republicans and one Democrat - accused the Bush administration Wednesday of neglecting global warming and other environmental problems.
…
Carol Browner, who was President Clinton’s EPA administrator, said the White House and the Congress should push legislation to establish a carbon trading program based on a 1990 pollution trading program that helped reduce acid rain.
“If we wait for every single scientist who has a thought on the issue of climate change to agree, we will never do anything,” she said. “If this agency had waited to completely understand the impacts of DDT, the impacts of lead in our gasoline, there would probably still be DDT sprayed and lead in our gasoline.”
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January 16th, 2006
New York Times Editorial
…Both of the offensive theories at work here - that a president’s intent in signing a bill trumps the intent of Congress in writing it, and that a president can claim power without restriction or supervision by the courts or Congress - are pet theories of Judge Samuel Alito, the man Mr. Bush chose to tilt the Supreme Court to the right.
The administration’s behavior shows how high and immediate the stakes are in the Alito nomination, and how urgent it is for Congress to curtail Mr. Bush’s expansion of power. Nothing in the national consensus to combat terrorism after 9/11 envisioned the unilateral rewriting of more than 200 years of tradition and law by one president embarked on an ideological crusade.
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