On The Offense

International:
Iraq's 'Excess' Death Toll Has Reached 655,000
Johns Hopkins University has just released this report – the only truly scientific accounting on the matter since their 2004 report on the post-invasion death toll. Here is how President Bush Wednesday described the report: "I don't consider it a credible report".

Yet, if you listen to the press conference, you can see that the process that they used is well documented. The estimate, produced by interviewing residents during a random sampling of households throughout the country, is far higher than ones produced by other groups, including Iraq's government.

It is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech in December. It is more than 10 times the estimate of roughly 50,000 civilian deaths made by the British-based Iraq Body Count research group.

Mexico, US, and Canada as One? (The North American Union)
If you haven’t heard of it yet –you best get familiar with the term. The US Northern Command –aka -
NORTHCOM's area of operations includes the United States, Canada, Mexico, parts of the Caribbean and the contiguous waters in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The commander is responsible for land, aerospace and sea defenses of the United States. NorthCom along w/ NAFTA (that you are already familiar with) has a plan of it’s own…and you thought the 700 mile border fence was about illegal immigration!

Resolutions have now been introduced to the Congress of the United States to take such constitutional action as may be necessary to prevent the Executive Branch of the federal government from unilaterally implementing the NAFTA Superhighway System. Despite having no authorization from Congress, the Bush administration has launched extensive working-group activity to implement a trilateral agreement with Mexico and Canada.

The membership of the working groups has not been published, nor has their work product been disclosed, despite two years of massive effort within the executive branches of the U.S., Mexico and Canada. The groups, working under the North American Free Trade Agreement office in the Department of Commerce, are to implement the
Security and Prosperity Partnership, or SPP, signed by President Bush, Mexican President Vicente Fox and then-Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin in Waco, Texas, on March 23, 2005.

National:
Pray For US!
House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) met Tuesday with his spiritual adviser Kilari Anand Paul, who hoped to persuade Hastert to step down because of the congressional page sex scandal. During the 30-minute meeting at Hastert's home, Paul prayed with Hastert and said he must resign because the Foley scandal is "distracting the country from other issues."

Hastert's choice of Paul as an adviser is worth noting. A self-described "Hindu-born follower of Jesus," Paul is reported to have counseled numerous dictators, including Liberia's Charles Taylor, Yugoslavia's Slobodan Milosevic, and Iraq's Saddam Hussein. The day before their meeting, it was reported that Paul called for voters to "
oust congressional Republican leaders because U.S. foreign policy is delaying the second coming of Jesus Christ."

Flip Flopping?
Ellen Tauscher (D-CA) on the House Armed Services Committee, was on c-span this morning speaking on missile defense (SDI). Originally the Dems seem to have opposed it on the basis that it would unnecessarily accelerate the arms race. They have rarely supported it (if at all). Yet, this morning on the ‘span Tauscher said that “We also need a safety net for the American people, and that is a missile defense system that works, not one that's just deployed, but one that's operational. People know that we have deployed a missile defense system. I supported that, but not one that works, and, you know, we need to have a Congress that's going to hold the administration accountable, not allow it to pull the missile defense system out of the normal testing regime and not one that is an embarrassment right now that we know can't work.”

Can’t help but wonder if this is due to the North Korea nuke-test claim…

Make Up Your Mind, John
After Blaming Clinton For North Korea Nuke, McCain Blasts People ‘Engaging In Finger-Pointing’
Yesterday, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) explicitly blamed the Clinton administration for North Korea’s nuclear weapons test on Sunday: “It is a failure of the Clinton administration policies…that have caused us to be in the situation we’re in today.”

This morning on NBC, “Straight Talk” McCain had a different tune: “I think this is the wrong time for us to be engaging in finger pointing when in this crucial time, we need the world and Americans united.”
Watch the clips back to back
here.

Small plane crashes into NYC high-rise apartment.
Homeland Security officials say that “all indications” are that the crash is an accident. CNN reports that NORAD had scrambled fighter jets to fly over several major U.S. cities until the accident was confirmed.

Federal Deficit Now Lowest in 4 Years
The federal budget deficit, helped by a gusher of tax revenues, fell to $247.7 billion in 2006, the smallest amount of red ink in four years. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects that the deficit for the current budget year will rise to $286 billion.

Over the next decade, the CBO forecasts that the deficit will total $1.76 trillion. The 2006 deficit was the smallest deficit since a $159 billion imbalance in 2002, a shortfall that came after four straight years of budget surpluses, the longest stretch that the government had finished with surpluses in seven decades. Since that time, the government has recorded three of the biggest deficits in history including including an all-time record in dollar terms of $413 billion in 2004.

GOP Privacy Oops!
In a breach of privacy, the Republican National Committee erroneously e-mailed a list that contained the names, races, and Social Security numbers of dozens of top Republican donors — and that identified two of the contributors as Muslim — to this reporter.

The RNC confirmed the slip-up, which raised questions about how the committee handles sensitive personal information and what records it keeps of its supporters.The e-mail was sent to four other addresses, including one with the Secret Service.

The spreadsheet of 76 guests included category headings with Social Security numbers, dates of birth, and "race." The race of all but three were listed as "Caucasian." One was identified as "Asian," and the race of two others, Malik and Seeme Hasan, was listed as "Muslim." [although I thought that was a religion –not a race]

In Other News…

For the first time, more Americans (36 percent) believe the terrorists are winning the "war on terror" than think the United States and its allies are winning (31 percent). Twenty-two percent (22%) say neither side is winning.

70 percent of Americans "are talking politics with family and friends" as the "interest of American voters is at its highest level in more than a decade."

Corruption
The FBI is investigating whether a member of Sen. Arlen Specter's staff [Vicki Siegel Herson] broke the law by helping her husband, a lobbyist, secure almost $50 million in Pentagon spending for his clients. Rep. Charles Taylor (R-NC), who once directed $3.8 million for a park "directly in front" of the "flagship of his financial empire," is "one of at least a half-dozen House members whose public actions in directing special-interest spending known as earmarks have also benefited their private interests or those of business partners."

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid collected a $1.1 million windfall on a Las Vegas land sale even though he hadn't personally owned the property for three years, property deeds show. In the process, Reid did not disclose to Congress an earlier sale in which he transferred his land to a company created by a friend and took a financial stake in that company, according to records and interviews. More here.

From The Right:
Thomas Sowell: Frivolous politics: Part II
Some people say that there is no point voting because there is no difference between the two major parties, and the other parties have no chance of winning. However, there is a difference: the Republicans are disappointing and the Democrats are dangerous.

From The Left:
David Stout: Bush Sees No Need to Change North Korea Policy
President Bush today reaffirmed his faith in tough, multinational diplomacy to deal with North Korea and declared that the United States had no intention whatever of invading that country.

"I believe the commander in chief must try all diplomatic measures," Mr. Bush said at an hour-long news conference, during which he also offered a vigorous defense of his administration's handling of Iraq.

Things To Ponder:
While the government has consistently stated that it did not know where the aircraft were before they struck, this short video clip of the Secretary of Transportation's testimony before the 9/11 Commission shows that Cheney monitored flight 77 for many miles as it approached the Pentagon.

How could one of the most heavily-defended buildings in the world have been successfully attacked, when the Vice President of the United States, in charge of counter-terrorism on 9/11, watched it approach from many miles away?

(Sources: MSNBC, WSJ, USA Today, AP, Rasmeussen Reports, Washington Post, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Johns Hopkins University, StL Indymedia, WorldnetDaily, US Senate, TownHall, NewsMax, C-SPAN, Rush Limbaugh, Think Progress, TruthOut, PoliticalCartoons.com, NY Sun, ST911)