"President Bush, seeking to avert a possible confirmation fight over a more partisan candidate, chose retired federal judge Michael B. Mukasey Monday to replace Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. 'Judge Mukasey is clear-eyed about the threat our nation faces,' Bush said.
"If confirmed by the Senate, Mukasey, who has handled terrorism cases for more than a decade, would become Bush's third attorney general. Bush said that as chief judge of the busy U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Mukasey presided over high-profile national security cases.
"'He knows what it takes to fight this war effectively and he knows how to do it in a manner consistent with our laws and our Constitution,' Bush said, standing next Mukasey in the Rose Garden."
"There is no question that Judge Mukasey, a Reagan appointee who served as the Chief Judge for the Southern District of New York before retiring recently, is close to the far right on the judicial spectrum. He undoubtedly holds many legal and political views which most Democrats would find objectionable, perhaps even intolerable. But that will be true of any nominee Bush selects, and it is true of the current Acting Attorney General, Paul Clement, who will remain in place if no nominee is confirmed.
"I want to highlight one extremely relevant consideration concerning Judge Mukasey -- the impressive role he played in presiding over the Jose Padilla case in its earliest stages. After Padilla was first detained in April 2002 and declared an 'enemy combatant,' he was held incommunicado, denied all access to the outside the world, including counsel, and the Bush administration refused to charge him with any crimes. A lawsuit was filed on Padilla's behalf by a New York criminal defense lawyer, Donna Newman, demanding that Padilla be accorded the right to petition for habeas corpus and that, first, he be allowed access to a lawyer. That lawsuit was assigned to Judge Mukasey, which almost certainly made the Bush DOJ happy.
"But any such happiness proved to be unwarranted. Judge Mukasey repeatedly defied the demands of the Bush administration, ruled against them, excoriated them on multiple occasions for failing to comply with his legally issued orders, and ruled that Padilla was entitled to contest the factual claims of the government and to have access to lawyers. He issued these rulings in 2002 and 2003, when virtually nobody was defying the Bush administration on anything, let alone on assertions of executive power to combat the Terrorists. And he made these rulings in the face of what was became the standard Bush claim that unless there was complete acquiescence to all claimed powers by the President, a Terrorist attack would occur and the blood would be on the hands of those who impeded the President."
"In his address to the nation on Thursday, President Bush singled out progress in Anbar Province as the model for United States success in Iraq. The president’s claims echoed those made earlier in the week by Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, in his Congressional testimony. And they raised a question worth examining: Do United States military alliances with Sunni tribal leaders truly reflect a turning of hearts and minds away from Anbar’s bitter anti-Americanism?
"The data from our latest Iraq poll suggest not.
"Al Qaeda, it should be said, is overwhelmingly — almost unanimously — unpopular in Anbar, as it is in the rest of Iraq. But our enemies’ enemies are not necessarily our friends. The United States, it turns out, is equally unpopular there."
"The controversial interrogation technique known as water-boarding, in which a suspect has water poured over his mouth and nose to stimulate a drowning reflex, has been banned by CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden, current and former CIA officials tell ABCNews.com.
"...'I can say it's a good thing, but the fact remains that the entire program is illegal,' John Sifton of Human Rights Watch told ABCNews.com."
"Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Clinton will roll out a health care reform plan on Monday that would cost the federal government around $110 billion and require all Americans to have health insurance, Clinton campaign sources said."
"Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Sunday he would recommend a veto of a Senate proposal that would give troops more rest between deployments in Iraq, branding it a dangerous 'backdoor way' to draw down forces. Democrats pledged to push ahead with the plan by Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., and expressed confidence they could round up the votes to pass it, although perhaps not by the margin to override a veto."
"Lincoln D. Chafee, who lost his Senate seat in the wave of anti-Republican sentiment in last November's election, said yesterday that he has left the party. Chafee said he disaffiliated with the party he had helped lead, and his father had led before him, because the national Republican Party has gone too far away from his stance on too many critical issues, from war to economics to the environment.
"Yesterday in Iowa, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said that Iraq will 'go down in history as the greatest disaster in American foreign policy. That means that I am acknowledging it is worse than Vietnam.' She added, 'I don’t think I have ever seen the world in such a mess.'"
"After white parents in this racially mixed city complained about school overcrowding, school authorities set out to draw up a sweeping rezoning plan. The results: all but a handful of the hundreds of students required to move this fall were black — and many were sent to virtually all-black, low-performing schools.
"Black parents have been battling the rezoning for weeks, calling it resegregation. And in a new twist for an integration fight, they are wielding an unusual weapon: the federal No Child Left Behind law, which gives students in schools deemed failing the right to move to better ones.
"We're talking about moving children from good schools into low-performing ones, and that's illegal," said Kendra Williams, a hospital receptionist, whose two children were rezoned. "And it's all about race. It's as clear as daylight."
