Civil Rights: Ending Discrimination One Inch At A Time

IRAQ — BUSH’S $46 BILLION REQUEST SENDS YEARLY SPENDING IN IRAQ TO ALL-TIME HIGH: Yesterday, President Bush requested an additional $46 billion to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. If approved, Bush’s request would bring the yearly budget for our wars there to an all-time high of $196 billion. “Iraq now consumes almost twice as much funding as is allocated for homeland security, diplomacy, and international assistance combined,” according to an analysis by the Center for American Progress. Bush’s war in Iraq continues to balloon not only in yearly cost, but also in length. Gen. David Petraeus said recently that “historically counterinsurgency operations [like Iraq] have gone nine or 10 years.” With that scenario, the Center for American Progress estimates the total cost of the war in Iraq to be between $1.1 and $1.5 trillion. Including Afghanistan, the cost of U.S. wars waged overseas since Sept. 11, 2001, has already exceeded $806 billion. That total is more than what the United States spent in the Vietnam, Korean, or Gulf Wars. Currently, only 26 percent of Americans approve of the way Bush is handling the war in Iraq.

MILITARY — PETRAEUS MAY RENEGE ON TROOP WITHDRAWAL PLANS NEXT YEAR: In his congressional testimony in September, Gen. David Petraeus announced that he would soon begin to withdraw 30,000 troops from Iraq, stating that progress due to the escalation permitted a reduction to “pre-surge” levels by next summer. In multiple public interviews after his testimony, Petraeus vowed to bring the 30,000 troops home by next summer. “[W]hat I showed on Capitol Hill…will take place,” he said on PBS. “Starting in mid-December and then ending in mid-July, the five Army brigade combat teams and two Marine battalions will redeploy,” he said in an interview with Fox News. But it now appears Petraeus may backtrack from this central tenet of his congressional testimony. “Redeployments of U.S. brigades — even of the surge forces — are dependent on the security situation on the ground in Iraq. If General Petraeus early next year sees the security situation deteriorating, he will have the courage to go back to the president and say he needs to keep forces that he had planned to send home,” said Col. John R. Martin, senior adviser to Petraeus. In the end, President Bush and Gen. Petraeus’s strategy has failed at its primary goal. Nevertheless, Petraeus wants to buy more time for his unsuccessful attempt to quell Iraq’s civil war.

ENVIRONMENT — CHERTOFF DODGES ENVIRONMENTAL LAWS TO PUSH FOR BORDER FENCE: Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff “waived several environmental laws yesterday to continue building a border fence through a national conservation area in Arizona.” An Oct. 10 ruling by a federal judge halted construction of the fence, “finding that the government had failed to carry out the required environmental assessment.” Sean Sullivan of a southeastern Arizona branch of the Sierra Club, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, was frustrated by Chertoff’s decision: “Bulldozing the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area and our important environmental protections is not necessary to manage the border,” he said. Earlier this month, Chertoff defended construction of the fence by arguing it was in fact eco-friendly. “Illegal immigrants really degrade the environment. I’ve seen pictures of human waste, garbage, discarded bottles and other human artifact [sic] in pristine areas,” he said. “And believe me, that is the worst thing you can do to the environment.”

In two new reports, the State Department is “sharply” criticized “for poor coordination, communication, oversight and accountability involving armed security companies like Blackwater USA,” including an audit that shows “the department cannot say ‘specifically what it received’ for most of the $1.2 billion it” paid to one company.

“Tuition and fees at public and private universities have risen this year at more than double the rate of inflation, with prices increasing faster at public institutions, the College Board said in reports released yesterday.” As a result, students and families are being forced to borrow more, driving up the use of private loans.

“With hundreds of thousands of families facing foreclosure in recent months, lawmakers have introduced legislation aimed at protecting consumers against predatory mortgages.” The bill, co-sponsored by Reps. Barney Frank (D-MA), Mel Watt (D-NC), and Brad Miller (D-NC) is “an update from similar legislation filed in 2005.”

After being attacked by the right wing, the Frost family refuses to back down from the fight for children’s health insurance. Yesterday, Graeme Frost’s mother, Bonnie Frost, “stood before a microphone at a Baltimore church, in a peasant shirt and clogs, to make a quiet appeal for broader health coverage in Maryland.”

Senate Judiciary Committee members accused the White House of allowing the Intelligence Committee to review warrantless surveillance documents “in return for agreeing that telecommunications companies should get immunity from lawsuits.” “There is no excuse for the administration to grant access only to those inclined to agree with it,” the Washington Post writes. 

President Bush’s “weakened approval ratings” have forced him to take a “much more personal role in opposing Congress.” Bush “has made 46 veto threats during the first nine and a half months of 2007, compared to 28 such threats” during his first six years. The Progress Report’s Amanda Terkel also notes, “In his first six years, Bush vetoed just one bill. In less than one year under this new Congress, Bush has been forced to issue three.”

New poll finds that in “a 12-month period during which the Taliban insurgency spread in Afghanistan and violence rose in the country’s major cities, Afghans grew increasingly concerned about security and more people came to regard it as the most serious issue facing the nation.”

Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Washington plan to join California’s lawsuit “suing the EPA for stalling on a decision about whether to let California and 11 other states force car makers to produce cleaner vehicles.“

And finally: Montgomery Blair Sibley, the lawyer for DC Madam Deborah Jeane Palfrey, yesterday told a DC court that his client is a victim of the U.S. attorney scandal. Sibley’s exhibits included a blog post from War and Piece and an article from Legal Times, none of which even mentioned Palfrey. Sibley also quoted Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), who once said that the Justice Department was “corrupted by political influence.” Leahy’s office later called Sibley “awfully wacky.”