WASHINGTON - House Speaker Dennis Hastert dropped a bombshell on flood-ravaged New Orleans on Thursday by suggesting that it isn't sensible to rebuild the city.

"It doesn't make sense to me," Hastert told the Daily Herald in suburban Chicago in editions published today. "And it's a question that certainly we should ask."

You heard it first here.

Compassionate Conservatives to refugees: Find somewhere else to live.

And keep in mind, Hastert is in a position to block legislation.

Hastert said that he supports an emergency bailout, but raised questions about a long-term rebuilding effort. As the most powerful voice in the Republican-controlled House, Hastert is in a position to block any legislation that he opposes.

The U.S. government is reviewing 72,000 cases in which veterans have been diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder, claiming that misdiagnosis and fraud have inflated the numbers. Outraged vets say the plan is a callous attempt to cut the costs of an increasingly expensive war. . . .

LaBranche, however, may have to prove to Veterans Affairs a second time what the war has done to his mind. In a recent move that has set off a firestorm among veterans, the Department of Veterans Affairs has decided to go back and review more than 70,000 individual cases of vets who in the past five years have been considered disabled and unemployable because of mental trauma. Veterans like LaBranche now stand to lose some or all of their monthly payments.

There's more, motherfuckers.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Framers of Iraq's constitution will designate Islam as the main source of legislation . . . according to a draft published Tuesday.

The draft states no law will be approved that contradicts "the rules of Islam" . . .

"Islam is the official religion of the state and is the main source of legislation," reads the draft published in the government newspaper Al-Sabah. "No law that contradicts with its rules can be promulgated."

How very Iranian of them. Someone tell Bush the he better get off his bike and do some meddlin' pretty quick. He can ask the war criminals in his cabinent for the specifics of what to do.

The U.S. House passed a bill Thursday night that would make permanent several controversial provisions of the USA Patriot Act, a sweeping anti-terrorism and anti-crime law that Congress passed in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks.

"All we do in the Patriot Act is say, 'Look, if we can go after child molesters sitting in the library and bombers who we need to sneak-and-peek on a warrant, we ought to be able to go after terrorists,'" Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich said.

Its 23-page report -- the most comprehensive public assessment yet by the military establishment of progress in Iraq -- was more than a week overdue. In it, the Pentagon cited progress on political, economic and security fronts. But it did not say how soon Iraqi security forces will be sufficiently trained to defend the country without the direct assistance of American troops.

23 pages? That's, uh, pretty short. Not to mention, the most important part is classified.

U.S. officers have developed a method of calculating the combat readiness of the approximately 76,700 Iraqi Army troops, but the Pentagon said it "should not and must not" publicly disclose specific data. . . .

Democratic critics of Bush administration Iraq policy lashed out at the Pentagon for refusing to publicly release a detailed assessment of the readiness of Iraqi security forces.

New investigations by the Saudi Arabian government and an Israeli think tank -- both of which painstakingly analyzed the backgrounds and motivations of hundreds of foreigners entering Iraq to fight the United States -- have found that the vast majority of these foreign fighters are not former terrorists and became radicalized by the war itself. . . .

The studies, which together constitute the most detailed picture available of foreign fighters, cast serious doubt on President Bush's claim that those responsible for some of the worst violence are terrorists who seized on the opportunity to make Iraq the ''central front" in a battle against the United States . . .

The Republicans have countered with the Frist Amendment. This is totally fucking psycho.

Any federal officeholder who makes reference to a classified Federal Bureau of Investigation report on the floor of the United States Senate, or any federal officeholder that makes a statement based on a FBI agent's comments which is used as propaganda by terrorist organizations thereby putting our servicemen and women at risk, shall not be permitted access to such information or to hold a security clearance for access to such information.

I.e., it's ILLEGAL to talk about:

• Abu Ghraib
  
• Iraqi dissatisfaction w/ our occupation
  
• Iraqi civilian casualties

An Energy Department task force has proposed a radical transformation of the nation's complex for producing nuclear weapons, recommending the manufacturing of a new generation of more flexible warheads at a single site that would consolidate activities previously done at plants across the country . . .

The report, in short, is a blueprint for a large-scale resuscitation of the nuclear weapons production system.

Make no mistake. This is both a "profound shift" from the way we've built nukes for 60 years and a radical, expensive ramping up of nuclear production at a time when we're saturated with nukes and proliferation is a major problem.

Feeling stymied in his investigation of the California National Guard's controversial intelligence unit, a state senator Tuesday persuaded a powerful legislative panel to subpoena documents and one witness to further his probe. . . .

Dunn, D-Garden Grove, has been investigating the National Guard's creation of a special intelligence unit with ``broad authority'' to monitor potential terrorist threats. The unit's existence, first revealed in the Mercury News, has raised concerns that the Guard might be laying the groundwork for a new domestic spying operation.

WellPoint Inc., parent company of Blue Cross of California, agreed Monday to pay $198 million to settle two lawsuits representing 800,000 doctors who said they were underpaid for providing care.

This affects 28 million patients nationwide. But this is about more than just WellPoint and Blue Cross of California.

Monday's settlement is part of ongoing litigation against many of the nation's largest health insurance carriers by doctors who claim the companies in the late 1980s and '90s forced them into unfavorable contracts and manipulated software systems to underpay them.

More on the flip.

Editor and Publisher:

story

Holy fuck. Not only could newspapers "not verify" any of the SBV charges against Kerry--members of Kerry's unit openly contradicted virtually everything the SBVs said.

On the other hand, not one person ever provided factual evidence of any sort to refute the Gannon claims. On the contrary, we were still on the trail when the whole thing was stonewalled into nonexistance by the White House.

It's precisely because rags like the Boston Globe jumped on the SBV bandwagon and completely ignored Gannon that the two storys' trajectories could not be more different.

Salon.com smackdown on the flip.

This is from an interview with a 21-year-old Afghan man whose DoD discharge letter shows that he was detained Dec 2002-May 2004.

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