The Bush administration has declassified and released (pdf) the summary of the National Intelligence Estimate that was partially leaked last week. I’m not sure why Bush thinks this validates his strategy, or demonstrates that the leak was misleadingly narrow. Here’s my summary of the summary.

A friend of mine got some Iranian news sources which reveal a lot of strange theological powers being given to Ahmedinejad, including the fact that he saw a halo around himself and that he might be the next Muslim Prophet. I have a full list here.

The latest USA TODAY/Gallup Poll indicates that the recent string of speeches by the President have improved both his approval ratings and the prospects of the Republican Party to hold control of the House and the Senate. The data adds substantiation to other recent polling that seems to be trending in favor of the GOP. [...]

I wake up to this heads-up from The Walrus Said: Bigger than 9/11 This is the kind of attack Al-Qaeda is threatening against the US, warning all American Muslims to flee New York and Washington. From an interview with Abu Dawood, the newly appointed commander of the al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan, by journalist Hamid [...]

After months of denial, Rep. Robert Ney has pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy and making false statements in the Jack Abramoff scandal. This isn’t a wrist slap, either. The maximum sentence for the two counts is 10 years, but the Justice Department and Ney’s lawyers agreed on a sentencing recommendation of 27 months in [...]

…Richard Armitage. Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was the source who revealed the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame to syndicated columnist Robert Novak in 2003, touching off a federal investigation, two sources familiar with Armitage’s role tell CNN. The sources said Armitage revealed Plame’s role at the CIA almost inadvertently in a [...]

There are more signs that the wheels may be about to fall off the economy and the Federal Reserve seems a bit nervous about how to best insure that doesn’t happen. The prevailing question at the moment centers on whether to continue the long string of rate hikes in order to keep inflation in check [...]

You know, it’s bad enough that my birthday falls the day after Sept. 11; talk about a buzzkiller. Now there’s this: Yisrayl Hawkins, well known Bible scholar and author, reports that the Bible predicts the exact date and the location that nuclear war will begin. Hawkins states that the current crisis in the Middle East [...]

Judge Anna Diggs Taylor’s ruling was in response to an ACLU lawsuit. She said the taps violate free speech and privacy rights. I’m not so sure about the free speech argument. The privacy argument is stronger, though a lot of people argue that the idea of a right to privacy is a myth. In any [...]

A revised US-France ceasefire proposal has been submitted to the UN Security Council. A vote is expected later today. It looks pretty good, to my mind. sources close to the negotiations said the deal would create a 400-square-mile zone inside Lebanon from which Hezbollah militia would be excluded. Under the draft resolution, the number of [...]

Late breaking news on the latest terror plot foiled … A plot to blow up planes in flight from the UK to the US and commit “mass murder on an unimaginable scale” has been disrupted, Scotland Yard has said. It is thought the plan was to detonate explosive devices smuggled in hand luggage on to [...]

The story on Cynthia McKinney. The story on Joe Lieberman. The Lieberman race has gotten a lot of attention as some sort of referendum on the “soul” of the Democratic party. But the McKinney race was another primary involving a high-profile Democrat, and it tells a different story. In the first race, an antiwar upstart [...]

Having lost the Connecticut primary by only about 3 points, Joe Lieberman hits the ground running as an independent centrist, as “a uniter not a divider,” and against the polarizing partisan politics of “insults, not ideas.” He could have taken his playbook straight from Unity08, and I think that movement could both gain and give [...]

I wrote earlier — and disapprovingly — about a suit filed by Texas Democrats to keep Tom DeLay’s name on the ballot. Well, get this: they won. The Texas Republican Party must keep Tom DeLay’s name on the November election ballot, even though the former congressman has dropped his re-election bid, a federal judge ruled [...]

If you wish, you can read about it here.

They got your information back, and it looks like nothing was compromised… WASHINGTON, June 29 â€â€? The government has recovered a stolen laptop computer and external hard drive that contains the birthdates and Social Security numbers for millions of veterans and military personnel, the Department of Veterans Affairs said Thursday. The Federal Bureau of Investigation [...]

The big revelation in today’s papers are that the government has been monitoring a huge international database of financial transactions, looking for evidence of terrorist funding so they can trace it and shut it down. The program is limited, government officials say, to tracing transactions of people suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda by [...]

After four years of being jailed without charge, and multiple attempts by various prisoners, three inmates at Gitmo finally succeeded in hanging themselves over the weekend. That might be controversial enough; I’ll get into the basic implications of the deaths a little later. But the U.S. stoked the flames of world outrage by dismissing the [...]

I wondered what Rep. John Murtha’s motivation could possibly be for taking such an aggressive antiwar stance. Now I know, thanks to The Moderate Voice — he plans to run for Majority Leader (the No. 2 position) if the Dems take back the House. Which probably just made it a little bit likelier that they [...]

Well here’s an interesting development. Wired Magazine has published the full text of some of the documents that Mark Klein has provided against AT&T. The court had placed a gag order on the Electronic Frontier Foundation to prevent the information from being released to the public, ostensibly because it contained proprietary technical information, which, if [...]