JimEd Speaks Out

Municipal labor disputes hardly ever have national repercussions, but the contract dispute involving this city's main police union is different, because it has begun to bedevil the Democratic Party and could hurt Senator John Kerry's hopes of achieving party unity in the presidential campaign.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected Congress's latest effort to curb children's access to sexually explicit material on the Internet. But at the same time it gave the Bush administration a second chance to defend the law as a trial on its constitutionality goes forward in Federal District Court in Philadelphia.

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a police interrogation tactic designed to induce suspects to give incriminating statements after purposely delaying Miranda warnings.

President Bush's job approval rating has fallen to the lowest level of his presidency, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. The poll found Americans stiffening their opposition to the Iraq war, worried that the invasion could invite domestic terrorist attacks and skeptical about whether the White House has been fully truthful about the war or about abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison.

Seconds after President Bush received a handwritten note from Condoleezza Rice during a NATO meeting early Monday in Istanbul, telling him that their secret plan to turn over formal sovereignty to the Iraqis two days early had been consummated at 10:26 a.m., he smiled and scrawled a quick response.

"Let freedom reign!" he wrote on it.

Yet for all the quiet celebration of the moment, Mr. Bush's mission is far from accomplished. The transfer represents yet another new start for Mr. Bush in Iraq. It is the president's last, best hope of turning the page, of refocusing America and the world on the possibilities of remaking a broken nation, and of moving beyond the gruesome images of a star-crossed occupation. Several of his own advisers, in their more candid moments, admit they do not know whether that is still possible.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Monday that foreign terrorism suspects at a U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba can use the American legal system to challenge their detention, a major defeat for President Bush.

By a 6-3 vote, the justices ruled that American courts do have jurisdiction to consider the claims of the prisoners who say in their lawsuits they are being held illegally in violation of their rights.

Vice President Dick Cheney won more than a legal victory Thursday as the Supreme Court ruled, in effect, that two Cheney adversaries, the Sierra Club and the gadfly group Judicial Watch, would not any time soon get their hands on documents revealing the workings of the energy task force Cheney headed three years ago.

For candidate Cheney and the man on the top of the Republican ticket, President Bush, the court’s 7-2 ruling amounted to a clear short-term win for their re-election campaign, because it requires further proceedings in a lower court and thus makes very unlikely any release of energy task force documents prior to Election Day.

At this week's NATO summit conference in Istanbul, it will be in the political interest of America's European adversaries — France's Jacques Chirac and Germany's Gerhard Schröder — to appear to cooperate with the coalition helping Iraq complete its liberation.

At the same time, it is in the political interest of George W. Bush and Britain's Tony Blair to appear to be delighted with whatever safe and cheap aid that the Chirac-Schröder bloc allows NATO to offer instead of supplying alliance troops.

In this way, the French and German leaders can tell their nations that no diplomatic cost was attached to their opposition to removing Saddam Hussein. And Bush and Blair can face elections this year and next, able to make two claims: that the prewar split in the Western alliance has happily healed, and that the war was justified by the belated blessing of the leaders who fled from the fight.

The U.S.-led coalition transferred sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government on Monday, speeding up the move by two days in an apparent bid to surprise insurgents who might have tried to sabotage the step toward self rule.

I AM EXTREMELY PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE THAT A NEW TEAM MEMBER HAS AGREED TO JOIN "JIMED SPEAKS OUT," LILITH

Lilith is one of the smartest people I have ever had the the pleasure to know. She is primarily a philosopher. I know she will bring a different, and perhaps more thoughtful view of the world than you are used to seeing here. (I, of course, will continue to be a curmudgen.)

She has a very heavy schedule and it may be a little while before she starts posting. It will be well worth the wait.

Let's all welcome Lilith.

FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE

I'm sorry for not posting recently. Frankly, I've been in the hospital. I seem to be much better and hope to be posting much more in the next week.

The Pentagon is proposing sharp cuts in U.S. forces in Germany, which for more than half a century has been America's biggest military outpost in Europe. It's a bad idea, particularly at a time when the United States is struggling to rebuild its relations with its NATO allies.

Washington is hoping to cut its military presence in Germany — a little more than 70,000 soldiers — roughly in half. Two heavy divisions now based there, and the soldiers' families, would return to the United States. They would be replaced by a much smaller light combat brigade, while other units would be rotated in and out, at considerable cost, for short-term exercises. The Air Force is also thinking of moving some of its F-16 fighter jets from Germany to Turkey, where they would be closer to Middle East trouble spots but subject to restrictions by the host government.

The large American military presence in Germany has long symbolized the understanding at the heart of NATO — Washington's commitment to remain permanently engaged in Europe's security and to integrate its military operations with those of its major European allies. Recent history has only reinforced how important that relationship is to the United States. NATO is the only alliance capable of sharing some of the global military burdens that have now overstretched America's ground forces.

If Tim Berners-Lee had decided to patent his idea in 1989, the Internet would be a different place.

Instead, the World Wide Web became free to anyone who could make use of it. Many of the entrepreneurs and scientists who did use it became rich, among them Jeffrey P. Bezos ( Amazon.com), Jerry Yang ( Yahoo), Pierre Omidyar ( eBay) and Marc Andreessen (Netscape).

But not Mr. Berners-Lee, a British scientist working at a Geneva research laboratory at the time. That is why some people think it is fitting - or about time - that on Tuesday, Mr. Berners-Lee will finally be recognized, with the award of the world's largest technology prize, the Millennium Technology Prize from the Finnish Technology Award Foundation. The prize, valued at 1 million euros ($1.2 million) is supported by the Finnish government and private contributors.

As former President Bill Clinton prepares for a barrage of publicity and a cross-country tour to promote his memoirs, his political advisers are consulting with the Democratic Party and Senator John Kerry's campaign about ways that Mr. Clinton can lend a political hand in the process.

FLAG DAY

Nancy Reagan started her seventh day of mourning Friday bowed over her husband's coffin in the Rotunda of the Capitol. By the time the sun set in California 12 hours later, Mrs. Reagan had attended a state funeral at National Cathedral, a formal send-off at Andrews Air Force Base and, after a cross-country flight aboard an Air Force jumbo jet, Ronald Reagan's burial on a hillside outside Los Angeles.

The State Department acknowledged Thursday that it was wrong in reporting that terrorism declined worldwide last year, a finding the Bush administration had pointed to as evidence of its success in countering terror.

Instead, the number of incidents and the toll in victims increased sharply, the department said. Statements by senior administration officials claiming success were based "on the facts as we had them at the time; the facts that we had were wrong," Richard A. Boucher, the State Department spokesman, said.

Defense Department spent an estimated $100 million for airline tickets that were not used over a six-year period and failed to seek refunds even though the tickets were reimbursable, congressional investigators say.

The department compounded the problem by reimbursing employee claims for tickets bought by the Pentagon, the investigators said.

Sen. Edward Kennedy is trying to file a "friend of the court," or amicus, brief that argues that the recess appointment of Judge William Pryor Jr. was unconstitutional, according to a new court document.

Former President Bill Clinton has privately expressed anger he has apparently been left off the speakers list of Friday's Reagan State Funeral, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday that the Bush administration can skip a lengthy environmental study and open U.S. roadways to Mexican trucks as soon as it wishes.

Today, ironically, many people will tell that the fall of the Soviet Union was a forgone conclusion and that Reagan was just lucky to be around when it happened.

But in actuality, Reagan totally broke with the policies of the predecessors & his every move was opposed every step of the way by the American left & sometimes by even his compatriots on the right.

Here are a few quotes from Ann Coulter's book "Treason" that'll give you a little more perspective on how unrealistic many people thought Reagan's belief that he could bring down the evil empire actually was...

"(In 1976), (Henry) Kissenger proclaimed, "We cannot prevent the growth of Soviet power." -- P. 159

"Again in 1982, (US deputy secretary of state under Clinton) (Strobe) Talbott wearily proclaimed that it was "wishful thinking to predict that International Communism some day will either self-destruct or so exhaust itself in internecine conflict that other nations will no longer be threatened." -- P. 169

"A widely cited 1983 study conducted by thirty-five Soviet experts from Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, and other elite institutions predicted, "The Soviet Union is going to remain a stable state, with a very stable, conservative, immobile government...We don't see any collapse or weakening of the Soviet system." -- P. 169

"The Soviet Union was certainly not behaving like a power in decline when Reagan entered the Oval Office. Soviet hegemony had been advancing steadily advancing for sixty years. More than a billion people lived under Communism. The USSR had nuclear weapons pointed at U.S. soil and outnumber the United States in conventional arms by ratio of about 3:1." -- P. 170

"The Soviets'relentless expansionism and prodigious military buildup, Nixon wrote (in his 1979 book "The Real War"), would force Americans to face "two cold realities for the first time in modern history" in the coming decade: "The first is that, if war were to come, we might lose. The second is that we might be defeated without war." -- P. 170

"Congressional Democrats repeatedly opposed funding anti-Communist rebels, they opposed Reagan's military build-up, they opposed building a shield to protect America from incoming missiles, they opposed putting missiles in Europe. As a rule, Democrats opposed anything opposed by (the) Soviet Union." -- Ann Coulter, P. 171

"(In 1980), The (New York) Times sneered at Reagan's "bluster, bravado, & refusal to recognize that America is no longer, if it ever was, king of the world". -- P. 180

"When an advance copy of Reagan's "Berlin Wall" ("Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!") speech was circulated, it was vehemently opposed by "virtually the entire foreign policy apparatus of the U.S. government," according to the draft's author, speechwriter Peter Robinson." -- P. 184

I think this quote from Coulter sums it up pretty well...

"Reagan took an approach to the Cold War dramatically different from any other US President. To wit, he thought we should win. This was a fresh concept. At the time, it was widely ridiculed as a dangerous alteration of US policy. Only after it worked was Reagan's dangerous foreign policy recast as merely a continuation of the policies of his predecessors." -- P. 158

On Tuesday Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) confirmed that he is considering sponsoring legislation in the Senate to have Reagan's image replace that of Alexander Hamilton, the nation's first treasury secretary, on the $10 bill.

The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has more than 300 open cases of illicit cigarette trafficking -- including several with terrorist links -- up from only a handful five years ago, ATF sources said.

The Bush administration has presented a detailed plan to South Korea for withdrawing one-third of its 37,000 troops on the divided peninsula by the end of next year as part of a wider effort to reposition American forces around the globe, officials in Seoul and Washington said Monday.

Section. 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.(emphasis mine) But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Ronald Reagan, the 40th president of the United States, has died at the age of 93. Reagan, who was a Republican symbol of change, was admired by millions throughout the world.

“This is a stunt by the Republicans to gain sympathy and support.” Says Kerry. “I believe he has been dead for years, and they decided to thaw him due to poor poll numbers.”

Ronald Wilson Reagan, the most successful conservative American politician of modern times, died Saturday at his California home at age 93.

The Army will prevent soldiers in units set to deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan from leaving the service at the end of their terms, a top general said Wednesday.

In an opinion piece in Wednesday’s New York Times, Andrew Exum, a former Army captain who served under Hagenbeck in the 10th Mountain Division in Afghanistan, called the treatment of soldiers under stop-loss programs “shameful.”