Blog Post

By threatening to veto the House's military funding bill, the President is walking away from his promise to the American people. The President has vowed to veto a bill that contains his own reform benchmarks for performance by the Iraqi government, our Defense Department's own standards for troop readiness, and America's promise to our veterans.

With his veto threat, the President offers only an open-ended commitment to a war without end that dangerously ignores the repeated warnings of military leaders, including the commander in Iraq, General Petraeus, who declared in Baghdad this week that the conflict cannot be resolved militarily.

Felicity Barringer, New York Times - March 8, 2007

Internal memorandums circulated in the Alaskan division of the Federal Fish and Wildlife Service appear to require government biologists or other employees traveling in countries around the Arctic not to discuss climate change, polar bears or sea ice if they are not designated to do so.

Today Democrats on the Science Committee respond:

The FBI improperly and, in some cases, illegally used the USA Patriot Act to secretly obtain personal information about people in the United States, a Justice Department audit concluded Friday.

And for three years the FBI underreported to Congress how often it forced businesses to turn over the customer data, the audit found.

Speaker Pelosi released this statement, pledging that Congress will investigate further:

Pelosi Announces Members of Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming

Washington, D.C. -- Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced today the Democratic members of the newly created Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. Congressman Ed Markey of Massachusetts will chair the Select Committee.

Paul Richter, Los Angeles Times - March 9, 2007

Their argument offers the public a choice: Stay indefinitely as Bush urges or shift U.S. soldiers into a secondary role.

The new Democratic proposals for Iraq may eventually be weakened or killed, but in one stroke they have transformed a many-sided debate about the conflict into a sharp-edged argument about the endgame.

Ever since the midterm election signaled deepening public unhappiness with the war, Republicans have urged a push toward victory while Democrats have complained about the administration's course but not gathered around a single alternative.