(Colin Powell sings YMCA during 2004 ASEAN summit in Indonesia) Former Secretary of State Colin Powell was in Cleveland on Friday. And in his remarks, he struck a tone about as opposite from Vice President Cheney as one can imagine.
In all of the noise about Iraq, Iran, Mukasey, FISA, and the upcoming Annapolis Peace Summit on Israel/Palestine, I neglected to mention that a vote was taken in the UN General Assembly condeming America’s embargo against Cuba. The vote was 184-4. The four were the United States, Israel, Marshall Islands, and Palau.
Why did Dems take control of the Senate anyway? As I predicted below, Schumer did not prove people like me wrong and has decided, along with Senator Dianne Feinstein, to vote in favor of Michael Mukasey’s confirmation as Attorney General.
I was for confirming Judge Michael Mukasey as Attorney General before his stumbles and somersaults over defining what is and is not torture. The fact is that there are people in the administration — some still serving and some recently departed — who can answer the question on water-boarding far more directly than Mukasey did….
Congresswoman Jane Harman has been pushing a higher wall on FISA than most of her Democratic colleagues because she doesn’t trust the administration’s line on why it wants to wiretap without warrant massive numbers of Americans.
I have just secured a private letter — not yet publicly released — from Senator Chuck Hagel to President Bush and copied to Condoleezza Rice, Robert Gates, and Stephen Hadley. I should add that I did not receive this letter from Senator Hagel but from other sources.
(Senator Chuck Hagel, Steve Clemons, and International Peace Academy Chair Rita Hauser) Yesterday evening, I helped organize a private salon dinner with Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE). I’ll be posting more on the event later today — along with some other interesting news.
We will have this program recorded digitally and posted as an update on this blog post, but for those of you in Washington, this will be an interesting meeting. It takes place from 1 pm – 2:30 pm today.
A loyal TWN reader informed me this morning that Oakley the Amazing Weimaraner now comes up as the “2nd image” when image googling the word “Weimaraner.” It’s just a proud family moment we wanted to share. — Steve Clemons Ed. Note: Thanks to David B.
(But for how much longer?) I have to give credit to Senator John Sununu. He showed up at the Arab American Institute’s National Leadership Conference in Dearborn, Michigan this weekend and openly talked about his search for his Palestinian grandfather’s home in old Jerusalem.
