Sam Brownback on the move to cut off Cheney's funding:
Such a step, said Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., would set a terrible precedent in relations between the executive and legislative branches of government, which have historically let each other set their own budgets.
"This is going to further erode any sort of working relationship back and forth," Brownback said. "This is a patently bad idea."
The White House Wednesday is expected to project a U.S. budget deficit for this year of just over $200 billion, down from prior estimates because of strong tax receipts, Republican sources said.
A deficit for fiscal 2007 in that range would mark a decline from the $248 billion gap recorded last year. The fresh estimate will be unveiled at 1 p.m. ET in the administration's "midsession review" of the budget.
Oh yeah, that other war.
Seventeen civilians, 12 of them children, were killed and 30 others wounded when a suicide bomber blew himself up near a NATO convoy in southern Afghanistan, officials said Tuesday.
NATO's International Security Assistance Force said seven of its soldiers were wounded in the attack, some of them seriously.
A spokesman for the extremist Taliban movement, which is waging an insurgency against the Afghan government with the support of Al-Qaeda-linked operatives, claimed responsibility for the blast in Uruzgan province.
"The Republicans who were most in support of the war continue to believe that weapons of mass destruction have been found and al-Qaeda was in Iraq and Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were in cahoots. They reduce their dissonance by rejecting evidence they were wrong."
Four thousand U.S. service members have died in U.S. President George W. Bush's ``war on terror'' in Iraq and Afghanistan 5 1/2 years after American forces ousted the Taliban in December 2001.
A total of 3,596 have died in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion that removed Saddam Hussein from power. Some 2,957 of that number were killed in action, according to the latest Department of Defense figures. More than 26,500 personnel have been wounded in that conflict, 11,959 of them so seriously they couldn't return to duty.
In Afghanistan, 404 American personnel have died, of which 224 were killed in action. Those deaths include 61 personnel who died in Pakistan and Uzbekistan in support of the operation. Some 1,361 have been injured; 813 of them couldn't return to duty.
In Iraq, an insurgency rages against U.S. and coalition forces. The first six months this year were the deadliest yet for the American military, with more than 580 killed.
President Bush invoked executive privilege Monday to deny requests by Congress for testimony from two former aides about the firings of federal prosecutors.
The White House, however, did offer again to make former counsel Harriet Miers and one-time political director Sara Taylor available for private, off-the-record interviews.
In a letter to the heads of the House and Senate Judiciary panels, White House counsel Fred Fielding insisted that Mr. Bush was acting in good faith and refused lawmakers' demand that the president explain the basis for invoking the privilege.
President Bush spared I. Lewis Libby Jr. from prison Monday, commuting his two-and-a-half-year sentence while leaving intact his conviction for perjury and obstruction of justice in the C.I.A. leak case.It has never been clearer that all Bush cares about is his - by which I mean him and his friends - personal gain and glory. To hell with everyone else. The President has just said that a different set of rules applies to himself and his own than everyone else, and he can get away with it because he is the President. I have never seen such a disgusting lack of understanding and respect for what this country means. We are truly ruled by psychopaths.
