News roundup
2004-03-19 21:05:34.503084+00 by Dan Lyke 2 comments
I don't see mention of the 21 page memo on the U.S. Supreme Court website, but according to this AP article on the Scalia memo about the Cheney case, "Big Tony" and I agree on something:
"If it is reasonable to think that a Supreme Court justice can be bought so cheap, the nation is in deeper trouble than I had imagined," Scalia wrote...
Amen to that, brother. Alas it ain't the fault of those asking the question.
In the "weblogs aren't real journalism" department: Yet another reporter has been discovered making up stories out of whole cloth. USA Today fires longtime journalist Jack Kelley for lying.
Interesting Christian Science Monitor article on the state of Iraqis now versus before the war, and an update on Bush administration calls for funding:
On April 23, 2003, Andrew S. Natsios, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, laid out in a televised interview the costs to U.S. taxpayers of rebuilding Iraq. "The American part of this will be $1.7 billion," he said. "We have no plans for any further-on funding for this."
That turned out to be off by orders of magnitude. The administration, which asked Congress for another $20 billion for Iraq reconstruction five months after Natsios made his assertion, has said it expects overall Iraqi reconstruction costs to be as much as $75 billion this year alone.
I'd really like Kerry to come out with a strong statement about not pulling out before reconstruction is finished. Now that we're in, we'd better be in for the long haul, but not getting into another bad situation like this seems like a priority for the next presidential term.