Its Poetry In Motion

But First, A Middle East update:
Hezbollah fired the largest number of rockets – about 200 — in a single day at Israel. For the first time in nearly a week, Israel struck Beirut and resumed those attacks today. The Lebanese Prime Minister said that more than 900 people, mostly civilians, have been killed and 3,000 wounded since the violence began. 56 Israelis have died — 37 soldiers as well as 19 civilians — due to Hezbollah rocket attacks.

Now, To Rummy
At a press conference yesterday, Secretary Donald Rumsfeld explained that he declined to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee about the status of the Iraq war this morning because "my calendar was such that to do it...would have been difficult." Amidst a firestorm of criticism, Rumsfeld's schedule miraculously cleared up and, just a few hours later, he agreed to testify. It will be the first time Rumsfeld has testified publicly about the war before the committee since February 2006. Since that time, approximately 300 U.S. troops have died in Iraq, 2,530 U.S. troops have been wounded and well over 10,000 Iraq civilians have been killed. Insurgents have conducted an average of 620 attacks per week. In March, there were 7.8 hours of electricity per day in Baghdad (down from 16-24 hours before the war); last month there were 7.6 hours. In March, Iraq produced 2.1 million barrels of crude oil per day (down from 2.5 million barrels per day before the war); last month it produced 2.2 million barrels per day. Last time Rumsfeld testified, there were 133,000 U.S. troops in Iraq; today there are 132,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and plans to raise that number to 135,000. Today, Rumsfeld appeared before the Senate and tried to explain why violence is spiraling out of control, reconstruction is stalled and U.S. troops are unable to "stand down." In short, he tried to explain why we should "stay the course" with an administration strategy that is failing.
Rummy's Quote Of The Day:
“Does that constitute a civil war? I guess you can decide for your ...yourself. And we can all go to the dictionary and decide what you want to call something.”

Taking his advice, we did go to the dictionary

By Rumsfld's terms, todays Army is "Vastly Better Off"
-but vastly better off than who? The Iraqis? Despite the strains of the Iraq war, Rumsfeld said yesterday that "the Army today is vastly better than it was two, four, six or eight years ago." It's not true. As Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-CT) argued on Tuesday, the Army is "very much worse off" than it was in late 1999 "when the military said two of the 10 Army divisions were ranked at the lowest readiness level, C-4." According to a group of defense experts chaired by former Defense Secretary William Perry, "two-thirds of the Army's operating force, active and reserve, is now reporting in as unready, and...there is not a single non-deployed Army Brigade Combat Team in the United States that is ready to deploy." Additionally, the top National Guard general said yesterday that "more than two-thirds of the Army National Guard's 34 brigades are not combat ready, mostly because of equipment shortages that will cost up to $21 billion to correct." Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum told reporters, "I am further behind or in an even more dire situation than the active Army, but we both have the same symptoms, I just have a higher fever."

Now To The Minimum Wage
Following the House's approval of a bill last week that would link large cuts in the estate tax (aka the Paris Hilton Tax) to an increase in the minimum wage, the Senate will now consider the legislation. In a move Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) called "political blackmail," conservative House leaders connected a minimum wage increase with what AFL-CIO lobbyist Bill Samuel called "the mother of all poison pills:" a large cut in the estate tax, which only affects 5 out of every 1,000 estates. Six weeks ago, Senate conservatives voted down a measure that would have raised the minimum wage for the first time in a decade. Now, they will only consider an increase if it is linked to tax cuts for multimillionaires. Unsurprisingly, those conservative Senate leaders pushing hardest for further cuts in the estate tax are multimillionaires themselves. For example, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) boasts assets between $10,584,000 and $39,260,000 in blind trusts. If one were to work a normal 40-hour week for 52 weeks a year for minimum wage, it would take between 988 and 3,665 years to amass Frist's fortune. While Frist has stringently supported large tax cuts for fellow multimillionaire trust babies and annual $3,300 pay raises for himself and his Senate colleagues, he has thus far refused to give a small raise to the nearly 8 million Americans who live on $5.15 an hour. See a list of Senate millionaires who have resisted raising the minimum wage here.

Quickies:
An LATimes/Bloomberg poll found discontent with President Bush’s leadership on a variety of key fronts, “including the war in Iraq, with 60% disapproval, and the economy, with 59% disapproval.”

The military’s top uniformed lawyers…criticized key provisions of a proposed new U.S. plan for special military courts, affirming that they did not see eye to eye with the senior Bush administration political appointees who developed the plan and presented it to them last week.

In a letter this week, Reps. Howard Berman (D-CA) and Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) accused a top State Department official of providing “highly misleading if not intentionally deceptive” testimony on the proposed US-India nuclear deal. The lawmakers charged that the “State Department intentionally kept Congress in the dark about two Indian firms that sold missile parts to Iran.”

President Bush’s vacation, ten days, will be the “shortest summer break of his presidency.” "Last summer, he was not seen as being on top of the job,” says Merle Black, a political scientist at Emory University. “He doesn’t want to be seen taking a whole month off right now. It doesn’t look good.” If that doesn't jive with you either -look a bit deeper; Bush changed his plans when he was notified that Cindy Sheehan had plans to be in Crawford at the same time Bush did. Bush moved his vacation up at the last minute and shortened it to a week so that he would be on the way back as Cindy (and crew) were on the way down to crawford. Cindy has moved her trip up too, and "Camp Casey" will be in effect.

“Amid this country’s strong economic expansion, many Americans simply aren’t feeling the benefits,” Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said recently. “Their increases in wages are being eaten up by high energy prices and rising healthcare costs, among others.” His comments are “a sign that the income inequality may rise higher on the US policy agenda in the years ahead.”

(Sources: Websters Dictionary, NY Times, The Guardian, DefenseLink, Brookings, Washington Post, YahooNews, CEPR, OpenSecrets, ThinkProgress, The Daily News, USA Today)