BUSH: DEMOCRATS CAN TAKE THEIR 'WE SHOULD CUT AND RUN, DUCK AND HIDE' RHETORIC AND SHOVE IT

President Bush sought to reclaim a public mandate for his Iraq policy Tuesday, telling the American people the war is "vital" to their security and that insurgents there share "the same murderous ideology" as the 9/11 hijackers.

Bush marked the one-year anniversary of the U.S. handover of sovereignty to Iraqis with a nationally televised speech in front of rows of men and women in uniform at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, which is home to airborne and special operations forces. More...

SUGGESTIONS FOR TERRORISTS: MILK

The National Academy of Sciences is proceeding with publication of a study outlining how terrorists could contaminate the U.S. milk supply with botulism -- despite complaints that the article is a "road map for terrorists."

The article theorizes that hundreds of thousands of people could be poisoned if terrorists exploited vulnerabilities in milk processing. More...

READ HIS QUOTE AGAIN. THIS WAS NO ENDORSEMENT.

Addressing his flock for the second night of his final revival tour in New York, Rev. Billy Graham stood side by side with ex-President Bill Clinton and joked that Mrs. Clinton might make a good president.

After joining the Clintons onstage, Graham referred to them as "wonderful friends" and "a great couple," according to the Associated Press - "quipping that the former president should become an evangelist and allow 'his wife to run the country.'" More...

DEMS ARE MAKING FOOLS OF THEMSELVES FOR CALLING FOR ROVE'S RESIGNATION

He has risen to the highest ranks of the White House, carries the title of deputy chief of staff and presides over a broad portfolio of domestic and foreign issues. But even as he has morphed from political operative to policy adviser, Karl Rove retains the instincts of the direct-mail specialist he once was in Texas.

The verbal strike he aimed at liberals and liberalism during a speech to the New York Conservative Party on Wednesday night came straight out of the direct-mail manual: pithy, provocative and designed to energize one side by torching the other.

Rove's flamboyant remarks -- in which he roused conservatives by saying liberals prefer "therapy and understanding" for terrorists instead of retaliation -- has put President Bush's top strategist back on stage. It's a place where he has seemed increasingly comfortable of late. More...

SEEING THE PERSON, NOT THE POLITICIAN

NEW YORK - As his final American revival meeting continued Saturday, a fragile Billy Graham was met onstage by former President Clinton, who honored the evangelist, calling him "a man I love." Clinton spoke briefly before Graham's sermon and recalled how the man known as America's pastor had refused to preach before a segregated audience in Arkansas decades ago when that state was in a bitter fight over school desegregation. More...

MICHAEL MOORE: 'WHAT VULNERABILITY?'

Despite the federal government's expensive efforts to prevent terrorists from smuggling a nuclear weapon into the U.S., the nation remains extremely vulnerable to a catastrophic attack, experts have warned a House committee.


Highly enriched uranium, a crucial ingredient in a nuclear device, could be shielded with less than a quarter-inch of lead, making it "very likely to escape detection by passive radiation monitors," Benn Tannenbaum, a physicist and senior program associate at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, testified at the June 21 hearing of the Homeland Security subcommittee. More...

SO I GUESS THIS MEANS HE'S NOT A PHILANDERER. YOU FOOLS!

The photographer who took the picture in Edward Klein’s new book, The Truth About Hillary, catching Bill Clinton in a moment of P.D.A. with someone other than his wife, says that the book’s use of the photo is a “huge misrepresentation of the event.”


In his first public comments about the salacious picture, photographer Jay L. Clendenin said in an interview with New York Magazine that the picture was one of “dozens” he took at a rally for presidential candidate John Kerry that Bill Clinton attended in Philadelphia on October 25, 2004. He said that Clinton wasn’t at all intimate with the woman. “I was there,” he said. “She kissed him on the cheek. Nothing more. Two seconds out of each other’s lives.” More...

GIVE IT UP ALREADY

More than a quarter of voters, and more than half of black voters, experienced problems at Ohio polling places during the 2004 presidential vote, a Democratic Party report said on Wednesday.

But the problems were not enough to have changed the outcome in the state that put President Bush over the top in his battle for the White House with Democratic Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, it concluded.

The report cited long lines that discouraged voting, poorly trained election officials and difficulties with registration status, polling locations and absentee ballots.

Nearly one quarter of Ohio voters felt their experience in 2004 had left them less confident about the reliability of elections in the state, according to the analysis.

"The data clearly indicates that the system failed far too many Ohio voters," said Donna Brazile, chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee's Voting Rights Institute and the project's leader.

Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman called the report "pure political fiction." More...

BUSH: AMERICA IS STANDING TOUGH - REGARDLESS OF THE PUSSY CAT POSITION DEMS WOULD HAVE US TAKE

President Bush said Saturday that pulling out of Iraq now is not an option, rejecting calls by some lawmakers and many people asked in polls to start bringing U.S. troops home.

"The terrorists and insurgents are trying to get us to retreat. Their goal is to get us to leave before Iraqis have had a chance to show the region what a government that is elected and truly accountable to its citizens can do for its people," Bush said in his weekly radio address.

"We will settle for nothing less than victory" over terrorists there, he said later.

Bush's radio address is part of a series of appearances and speeches in the coming weeks aimed at countering poll ratings that are near their lowest levels on both the Iraq war and the economy. Bush said his administration is committed to success in both areas of concern for Americans. More...

HOW DOES THIS HAPPEN?!

Despite being arrested at least nine times for molesting boys, Dean Arthur Schwartzmiller managed to avoid lengthy prison terms, coach youth football, move in with another convicted sex offender — and be named by authorities as one of the most prolific child molesters in history.

ADVERTISEMENT

Schwartzmiller's criminal record began 35 years ago, but he never registered as a sex offender and spent just 12 years in prison. In his time on the outside, police suspect he molested children as many as 36,000 times in several states, Mexico and Brazil.

Wily, charismatic and "smarter than heck," is how James Kevan, one of his defense lawyers in the mid-1970s, described Schwartzmiller on Friday. "He could write up legal documents better than most lawyers." More...

WHAT A BUNCH OF BABIES

In the Capitol basement yesterday, long-suffering House Democrats took a trip to the land of make-believe.

They pretended a small conference room was the Judiciary Committee hearing room, draping white linens over folding tables to make them look like witness tables and bringing in cardboard name tags and extra flags to make the whole thing look official.

Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) banged a large wooden gavel and got the other lawmakers to call him "Mr. Chairman." He liked that so much that he started calling himself "the chairman" and spouted other chairmanly phrases, such as "unanimous consent" and "without objection so ordered." The dress-up game looked realistic enough on C-SPAN, so two dozen more Democrats came downstairs to play along.

The session was a mock impeachment inquiry over the Iraq war. As luck would have it, all four of the witnesses agreed that President Bush lied to the nation and was guilty of high crimes -- and that a British memo on "fixed" intelligence that surfaced last month was the smoking gun equivalent to the Watergate tapes. Conyers was having so much fun that he ignored aides' entreaties to end the session. More...

DICK.

The Senate's No. 2 Democrat has compared the U.S. military's treatment of a suspected al Qaeda terrorist at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay with the regimes of Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and Pol Pot, three of history's most heinous dictators, whose regimes killed millions.
In a speech on the Senate floor late Tuesday, Minority Whip Richard J. Durbin, Illinois Democrat, castigated the American military's actions by reading an e-mail from an FBI agent.
The agent complained to higher-ups that one al Qaeda suspect was chained to the floor, kept in an extremely cold air-conditioned cell and forced to hear loud rap music. The Justice Department is investigating. More...

CUT & RUN RESOLUTION IN THE WORKS...

Republican congressman Walter Jones says "no one is cutting and running." The North Carolina lawmaker is part of a bipartisan group of House members that wants President Bush to start bringing US troops home from Iraq by October 1st of next year.

The resolution being introduced in the House doesn't set a target date for complete withdrawal from Iraq.

It is the first such resolution being introduced by lawmakers from both parties. Sponsors say they see a shift in sentiment in the country. More...

WHACKO JACKO JURORS DENIED EVIDENCE

Papers released this afternoon in the Michael Jackson case show that during deliberations the jury asked for, but was refused, assistance by Judge Rodney Melville.

On June 6 at 9:35 a.m. PT, the jury sent a note in to the judge that read: "That we be given the entire list of evidence (log) in order so when we need to see an exhibit we can quickly look it up to determine where it might be in this vast amount of evidence." More...

WAS HE CHANTING WITH THEM?

Penn, 44, in Iran on a brief assignment for the San Francisco Chronicle ahead of presidential elections on June 17, may be one of the best known faces in film, but he went unrecognized by the 6,000 faithful at Tehran University. Working with a translator, Penn took copious notes as hardline cleric Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati urged the congregation to vote en masse "to make America angry." More...

WONDER WHY CUBANS ARE RISKING LIFE AND LIMB TO GET HERE?

The four 'taxinauts' that had US visas and were not allowed to leave by the Cuban regime will be allowed to stay. The other ten will be returned to Cuba.
Find out...

DEAN MANIA: THE G.O.P. IS LOVIN' IT

Former presidential contender Howard Dean insisted he is focused on advancing his Democratic Party's political agenda, despite a firestorm over his recent incendiary, anti-Republican comments. More...

DID THE U.N. GO ON ALERT WHEN CLINTON PASSED NUKE SECRETS TO THE CHINESE?

Electronic drawings that give comprehensive details of how to build and test equipment essential for making nuclear bombs have vanished and could be put up for sale on the international black market, according to UN investigators.
The blueprints, running to hundreds of pages, show how to make centrifuges for enriching uranium. In addition, the investigators have been unable to trace key components for uranium centrifuge rigs and fear that drawings for a nuclear warhead have been secreted away and could be for sale. More...

METROSEXUALISM GOES MAINSTREAM?

Macho man is an endangered species, with today's male more likely to opt for a pink flowered shirt and swingers' clubs than the traditional role as family super-hero, fashion industry insiders say. More...

WELL, THAT SETTLES IT: SHE'S RUNNING (HILLARY WARNS OF HOT AIR)

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton criticized the Bush administration's record on unemployment, women's rights and the environment, saying it is "intent upon consolidating and abusing power."

"We are living in a time when the other side doesn't want us to see the facts. Facts are inconvenient _ facts about global warming, facts about mercury in the air, facts about people staying unemployed longer," said Clinton, considered a Democratic contender for the presidency in 2008.

The former first lady spoke Monday at a New York Women for Hillary breakfast, which raised $250,000 for her 2006 Senate re-election campaign. She leads potential GOP Senate opponents 2-to-1 in recent polls. More...

EDWARDS ON DEAN: "HE'S A VOICE. I DON'T AGREE WITH IT"

Former Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards said Saturday that he has not decided whether he will run for president in 2008.

The former U.S. senator from North Carolina said his family is focused on the recovery of his wife, who was diagnosed with breast cancer the day after the 2004 general election.

"Our first priority right now is making sure Elizabeth gets well," Edwards said at an annual state Democratic fundraising dinner. "There's a lot of work left to be done." More...

CNN.COM EDITORS MUST HAVE MISSED THIS ONE: MAJOR PROGRESS IN THE WAR ON THE IRAQI INSURGENCY

U.S. Marines and Iraqi soldiers have uncovered a 503,000 square-foot underground insurgent hideout in central Iraq containing large stores of weapons, ammunition and supplies.

The bunker -- the size of nine American football fields or six soccer pitches -- is the largest found in the past year, the U.S. military said Sunday. More..

IT'S ABOUT TIME.

Significant gaps in security at the nation's airports could be curtailed even at a time of rising passenger traffic by quickly making a wide range of relatively modest changes in screening people and bags, a confidential report by the Department of Homeland Security has concluded.

Fixing serious weaknesses in the nation's aviation security system is critical as passenger traffic rises beyond levels seen before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the report observed. This summer, passengers are expected to take about 200 million trips globally on the nation's airlines, up about 4 percent from last year.

The proposed fine-tuning of airport security includes expanding the use of devices that can detect trace amounts of explosives and stationing more armed guards in secure areas.

"There is increasing pressure to increase the flow of passengers and their property through security checkpoints," the report said. "Unfortunately, our analysis has shown there are significant security gaps at checkpoints as they currently exist." More...

WOULD THE MEDIA BE SO APPALLED IF THE BIBLE WERE 'MISHANDLED'? OH, WAIT, IT IS, AND THEY'RE NOT.

A U.S. military investigation has found four incidents in which guards at the Guantanamo Bay prison mishandled the Quran, but said that it was detainees who threw the Muslim holy book in the toilet.

The report said it confirmed four times when U.S. personnel at the base mishandled the Quran: guards kicked a detainee's Quran; a guard's urine "splashed" a detainee and his holy book and guards in a water balloon fight that resulted in two detainees' Qurans getting wet. More...

'BURY THIS...FAST!' - NY TIMES NEWS EDITOR

U.N. satellite imagery experts have determined that material that could be used to make biological or chemical weapons and banned long-range missiles has been removed from 109 sites in Iraq, U.N. weapons inspectors said in a report obtained Thursday.

U.N. inspectors have been blocked from returning to Iraq since the U.S.-led war in 2003 so they have been using satellite photos to see what happened to the sites that were subject to U.N. monitoring because their equipment had both civilian and military uses. More...

AL QUEDA CAUGHT ON TAPE. MICHAEL MOORE: 'WHAT AL QUEDA?'

Never-before-seen propaganda videos obtained by ABC News showcase the intensely violent fighting and unique difficulties that surround the hunt for Osama bin Laden in the remote tribal areas of northwest Pakistan.

It is a view from al Qaeda's side of the battle. The videotapes were said to be made last year, when the Pakistani army undertook a major offensive into south Waziristan, a mountainous region bordering Afghanistan where the fiercely independent Waziri tribe reside and where bin Laden is believed to be in hiding. More...

CALL ME 'MR.' AND WE'LL RE-THINK OUR NUKE AMBITIONS

North Korea gave rare praise to President Bush on Friday, welcoming his use of the honorific "Mr." when referring to leader Kim Jong Il and saying the softened tone could lead to its return to nuclear arms talks.

The United States wants the North to end its nuclear weapons development, and is working with China, Japan, Russia and South Korea to persuade Pyongyang to return to disarmament talks last held in June 2004. The North has stayed away from the table citing a "hostile" U.S. policy and claimed in February that it had nuclear weapons. More...