(John Bolton inspired Halloween attire) On Halloween, John Bolton had a sprawling screed in the Wall Street Journal on all the reasons the Bush administration should start a few new wars, scrap diplomacy with North Korea on its nukes, further isolate Syria, and the like.
Don’t blame Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf for all of the problems in Pakistan. The fact is that governance in a region that is ambivalent about America, Europe and the West in general is becoming more complicated everywhere in the Middle East and South Asia.
(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.