A conservative view on history as we make it

Friday, October 28, 2005



Patrick J. Fitzgerald speaking to reporters today in Washington, DC.

Libby Faces 5 Charges; Resigns

WASHINGTON, Oct. 28 - I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff and one of the most powerful figures in the Bush administration, was formally accused today of lying and obstruction of justice in an inquiry into the unmasking of a covert C.I.A. officer.

A federal grand jury indicted Mr. Libby on one count of obstruction, two counts of perjury and two of making false statements in the course of an investigation that raised questions about the administration's rationale for going to war against Iraq, how it treats critics and political opponents and whether high White House officials shaded the truth. The charges are felonies.

Mr. Libby was not charged directly with revealing the identity of a C.I.A. undercover operative, the accusation that brought about the investigation in the first place.

Monday, October 24, 2005

Hurricane Keeps Up Strength as It Tears Through Florida

NAPLES, Fla., Oct. 24 - Hurricane Wilma lashed the southwest coast of Florida with 125-mile an hour winds today, causing heavy flooding and power outages as it ripped through the Florida peninsula, leaving downed power lines and other destruction in its wake.

At least one death in Florida was blamed on the storm, The Associated Press reported.

By this afternoon, the winds had slowed, modestly, to about 105 miles per hour, leading Wilma to be downgraded from a Category 3 to a Category 2 storm about two-and-a-half hours after it made landfall. By 1 p.m., the storm was about 65 miles northeast of West Palm Beach, moving northeast at 25 miles per hour. "Some continued weakening is likely as Wilma crosses the southern Florida peninsula today," the National Hurricane Center said in an advisory earlier. "On this track, the center will emerge off the east coast of the southern Florida peninsula and move into the Atlantic later today."

Tuesday, October 18, 2005




Police searches backed up traffic for hours at the Fort McHenry Tunnel in Baltimore, Md.

Threat Briefly Closes Tunnels in Baltimore

Authorities in Baltimore briefly closed a major traffic tunnel under the harbor today and restricted access to another tunnel after authorities said they had received a terrorist threat.

Maryland Transit Police Chief Gary McLhinney told reporters at a televised news conference in Baltimore this afternoon that he could not discuss the nature of the threat, but that a search of the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel had yielded nothing out of the ordinary.

He said local, state and federal authorities had been involved.

The Baltimore Harbor Tunnel, which carries Interstate 895 under the water, was closed about 11:40 a.m. local time and was reopened at about 1:15 p.m. Authorities had also restricted traffic at the Fort McHenry Tunnel, a section of Interstate 95, to one lane in each direction.

While Mr. McLhinney would not discuss the threat, The Associated Press reported that it was a threat to detonate explosives inside the tubes.

Sunday, October 16, 2005

Pakistan Toll, at 38,000, Is Expected to Rise

MUZAFFARABAD, Kashmir, Sunday, Oct. 16 - The death toll from the earthquake in South Asia a week ago has risen to 38,000, with 62,000 people injured, as more bodies have been pulled from the rubble, the senior military spokesman for Pakistan, Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, said Saturday.

President Pervez Musharraf warned that the toll was likely to increase even more as recovery teams reached the more remote towns and villages. "I think it will keep rising when we go into the valleys," he said. In India, 1,350 people have died, The Associated Press reported.

Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Bush Reassures Conservatives Once Again on Court Nominee

WASHINGTON, Oct. 12 - President Bush sought again today to reassure conservatives about his Supreme Court nominee, Harriet E. Miers, and he said that Ms. Miers's religion was pertinent to the overall discussion about her.

"People are interested to know why I picked Harriet Miers," Mr. Bush said. "They want to know Harriet Miers's background. They want to know as much as they possibly can before they form opinions.

"Part of Harriet Miers's life is her religion," Mr. Bush went on, in remarks that may be revived during Ms. Miers's confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee several weeks from now. "Part of it has to do with the fact that she was a pioneer woman and a trailblazer in the law in Texas."

The president went on to say, in a brief question-answer session with reporters at the White House, that Ms. Miers was "eminently qualified" to sit on the court, and that she would be a justice who "will not legislate from the bench but strictly interpret the Constitution."

Sorry Mr. President, but this choice is kind of sketchy. Democrats and Republicans want a paper trail. One simply doesn't exist. Either way, I don't think Bush has made a poor choice, however, it seems like he could have thought it through a bit more. With all that's going on in this nation and the world at this time, I can understand that there must be tremendous pressure on the office to get things done. Democratic senators should understand this as well as a more important fact. You're not going to get a liberal judge. The President picks and you decide. If you vote 'no' a hundred times, guess who the next pick will be? Right, another conservative. So you're not going to win. Stop whining and bite your lip, because things aren't going to go your way for at least another three years. Time to wake up.

Sunday, October 09, 2005

Walk-Off Homer Ends Historic 18-Inning Game

HOUSTON (AP) -- Roger Clemens and the Houston Astros gave a whole new meaning to the word "longevity."

The 43-year-old Rocket came out of the bullpen to rescue the Astros and Chris Burke ended the longest postseason game in baseball history with a home run in the 18th inning, lifting Houston over the Atlanta Braves 7-6 Sunday and into the NL championship series.

The Braves took a five-run lead into the eighth, and were poised to send this first-round series back to Atlanta for a decisive Game 5 Monday night. Instead, Lance Berkman hit a grand slam in the eighth and Brad Ausmus tied Game 4 with a two-out homer in the ninth barely beyond Gold Glove center fielder Andruw Jones' outstretched glove.

Then, at 6-all, the Braves and Astros began the real endurance test that wound up lasting 5 hours, 50 minutes. The previous longest postseason game also occurred in Houston -- the New York Mets clinched the 1986 NLCS with a 16-inning win at the Astrodome.

With Clemens pitching three innings in his first relief appearance since 1984 -- and this time atoning for a poor start in Game 2 -- the Astros advanced to play the St. Louis Cardinals in the NLCS starting Wednesday night at Busch Stadium.

What a magnificent game.

Saturday, October 08, 2005

Strong 7.6-Magnitude Earthquake Rocks Southern Asia

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (Oct. 8) - A powerful 7.6-magnitude earthquake near the Pakistan-India border Saturday reduced villages to rubble, triggered landslides and flattened an apartment building. More than 3,000 people were killed in both nations, and a Pakistan army spokesman called the devastation "a national tragedy."

The toll included 250 girls who died when their school in northwestern Pakistan collapsed. Another 500 students were injured, said Ataullah Khan Wazir, police chief in the northwestern district of Mansehra.

In the capitals of Pakistan, India and Afghanistan, buildings shook and walls swayed for about a minute, and panicked people ran from their homes and offices. Tremors continued for hours afterward. Communications throughout the region were cut.

About 1,000 people were killed in Pakistani Kashmir, said Sardar Mohammed Anwar, the top government official in the area. The army said 200 soldiers there were killed.

"This is my conservative guess, and the death toll could be much higher," Anwar told Pakistan's Aaj television station.

He said most homes in Muzaffarabad, the area's capital, were damaged, and schools and hospitals had collapsed.

At least 1,600 people died in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province, said the province's top elected official, Akram Durani.

The U.S. Geological Survey said on its Web site the quake hit at 8:50 a.m. local time and had a magnitude of 7.6. It was centered about 60 miles northeast of Islamabad in the forested mountains of Pakistani Kashmir.

Thursday, October 06, 2005

Bush Stresses Terror Threat and Urges Support for Iraq War

WASHINGTON, Oct. 6 - President Bush used some of his toughest language today to assert that the war in Iraq was vital to a crucial struggle against terrorists who he said intended to build a "totalitarian empire" of global reach.

He said that the United States and its partners had disrupted at least 10 serious Al Qaeda plots in recent years - including three in the United States - and had blocked five attempts to case targets or infiltrate the country.

At the White House, the president's chief spokesman, Scott McClellan, said that "off the top of my head," he thought the president was referring to the arrests of an American citizen, Jose Padilla, in Chicago in 2002, and a Pakistani immigrant, Iyman Faris, in Ohio, in 2003.

Mr. Padilla is accused of conspiring with Al Qaeda to commit various terrorist acts inside the United States. Mr. Faris was accused of planning with Al Qaeda to bomb the Brooklyn Bridge and a shopping mall in Columbus, Ohio, near his home.

Tuesday, October 04, 2005

Bush Tells Far Right How It Is

WASHINGTON, Oct. 4 - President Bush sought today to allay the fears of social conservatives about his latest Supreme Court choice, saying that his selection, Harriet E. Miers, would adhere strictly to the letter of the Constitution. But he also allowed that he could not recall ever discussing one of the most volatile constitutional issues with her - abortion rights.

She's a woman of principle and deep conviction," Mr. Bush said of Ms. Miers, his White House counsel. "She shares my philosophy that judges should strictly interpret the laws and the Constitution of the United States and not legislate from the bench."

The president's remarks, at a news conference called just a day after he announced his selection of Ms. Miers, seemed timed to head off any groundswell of opposition from conservatives, some of whom have expressed keen disappointment that he did not pick a jurist in the mold of Justices Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas, as they believe Mr. Bush indicated he would during the 2000 campaign.

Sunday, October 02, 2005




Natalie Coulter, a tourist from Sydney, sitting near the site of one of the blasts. The Australian foreign minister, Alexander Downer, said that one Australian had been killed but that he feared others could be among the dead.

Bali Bombed... again.

KUTA, Indonesia, Oct. 2 - Three suicide bombers carried out the coordinated terror attacks on crowded restaurants in Bali Saturday night, Indonesian officials said today.

They said this conclusion was based largely on the discovery of three heads severed from bodies, one at Raja's restaurant on a busy street in Kuta, a popular beach resort and tourist area in Bali, and two in the sand among the wooden tables on the beach at Jimbaran, five miles south of Kuta.

In the first 24 hours after the attacks, the police have made striking progress, in part owing to some macabre luck: the blasts did not obliterate the faces of the suspected suicide bombers, leaving the police with vivid pictures, which they displayed at a news conference here this evening.

Earlier today, the police were given a video, shot by a visiting family, that showed an Indonesian man with a backpack and wearing blue jeans walking past a blonde woman on the street and a little girl. It then captures him walking into the back of Raja's restaurant, before the bright flash of the explosion goes off.

Besides the suicide bombers, 19 people were killed in the attacks, the Bali police chief, Made Pastika, said at the news conference here, a revision downward from the figure given by authorities earlier in the day. Fourteen were Indonesians, five were foreigners, Mr. Pastika said. More than 90 were injured, nearly all of them Indonesian.

The only Americans known to have been injured were seven members of a family from San Francisco, who were eating in Raja's restaurant when the bomb went off. They were being treated in the hospital here today and Indonesian officials said they were expected to be released on Monday.

 
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