Conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh announced during his radio program Friday that he is addicted to painkillers and is checking into a rehab center to "break the hold this highly addictive medication has on me."

Iraq has become the central front in the war on terror.

There's also no containing a terrorist state that secretly passes along deadly weapons to a terrorist network.

The first to see this doctrine in application were the Taliban, who ruled Afghanistan by violence while turning the country into a training camp for terrorists. With fine allies at our side, we took down the regime and shut down the Al Qaida camps.

Our work there continues, confronting Taliban and Al Qaida remnants, training a new Afghan army and providing security as the new government takes shape. Under President Karzai's leadership, and with the help of our coalition, the Afghan people are building a decent and just society, a nation fully joined in the war on terror.

In Iraq, we took another essential step in the war on terror. The United States and our allies rid the Iraqi people of a murderous dictator and rid the world of a menace to our future peace and security.

He also had an established relationship with Al Qaida, providing training to Al Qaida members in the areas of poisons, gases, making conventional bombs.

Saddam built, possessed and used weapons of mass destruction.

Both Mr. Wilson and Mrs. Plame are also active Democrats. He worked for both Bill Clinton and Al Gore, and donated money — the maximum allowed by law — to Mr. Gore's 2000 presidential campaign, as did Mrs. Plame. They certainly were entitled to do so, though Mrs. Plame's donation was risky, at best.

All political contributions require the donor to list his or her employer's name, which then becomes a matter of public record accessible instantly on the Internet. Mrs. Plame listed her "employer's" name, all right. It just happened to be a company that apparently operated as a CIA front, which Mrs. Plame's political contribution has now exposed to the world.

The frequency of Americans’ misperceptions varies significantly depending on their source of news. The percentage of respondents who had at least one or more of the three misperceptions listed above is shown below.

No Misperceptions

Fox -- 20%
CBS -- 30%
ABC -- 39%
NBC -- 45%
CNN -- 45%
Print -- 54%
PBS/NPR -- 77%

WHILE WE'RE ON the subject, there is one problem facing the Schwarzenegger administration that might be beyond solving: The man's name won't fit in newspaper headlines. At 14 letters, it far exceeds the limits of the standard one-column headline, unless reduced to the type size used for stories about bus accidents in Malaysia.

This has been a problem for leaders ever since the coming of daily newspapers, before which time they could have names such as Nebuchadnezzar or Suleiman the Magnificent or whatever they pleased -- there was plenty of room on the scroll.

The modern American practice has been to reduce our presidents to their initials or a very short nickname: JFK, FDR, Ike. Alexander the Great would in our time be known to readers of The Washington Post as ATG and to readers of the New York Post as Big Al. Mr. Schwarzenegger and his handlers unfortunately have only a brief window for producing a salable headline persona of their own before some desperate copy editor does it for them. We'd suggest that they avoid movie titles and anything involving an umlaut.

CITIZEN: Do you have Prince Albert in a can?

RECEPTIONIST: I'm sorry. I don't know what you're talking about.

CITIZEN: I was just reading in Salon about Representative Delay's prank-call tactics with Moveon.org over the FCC debate, and I thought it might be fun to call the majority leader's office and ask if you had Prince Albert in a can.

RECEPTIONIST: ...

Just wondering

The big whoop about the whole CIA leak scandal is that Ambassador Wilson's wife's name was revealed, right?

So......how come Ambassador Wilson's official bio names his wife????

[P]rinting up and circulating Recall Arnold petitions is still worth considering, for two reasons. As a general rule, Democrats should not hesitate to deploy any technique or technicality used by Republicans, including badly drawn constitutional procedures like the California recall. More specifically, a million ready-to-file recall petition signatures could provide some useful discipline to the gang of Wilson retreads surrounding Schwarzenegger, not to mention the governor-elect himself. Who knows what these people have in mind? Aside from abolishing the car tax, they didn't reveal much about their plans.

The petitions don't have to be filed if that seems unwise at the time. But why not have them handy, just in case they're needed? The prospect of a Democratic-dominated recall election might discourage Schwarzenegger from assaulting the state Legislature in his Hummer.

"Today's recall election in California was not about Gray Davis or Arnold Schwarzenegger. This recall was about the frustration so many people are feeling about the way things are going. All across America, George Bush's massive tax cuts for the wealthy are undermining state budgets, causing cutbacks in services and increases in local property taxes. Were recalls held in every state, it's quite possible that 50 governors would find themselves paying the price for one president's ruinous national economic policies. Tonight the voters in California directed their frustration with the country's direction on their incumbent governor. Come next November, that anger might be directed at a different incumbent...in the White House."

The case, Frew v. Hawkins, No. 02-628, began in 1993 as a class-action lawsuit on behalf of Medicaid recipients who accused Texas of failing to provide required services for children. The litigation ended in 1996 when Texas agreed in a federal consent decree to make improvements in its Medicaid program.

Two years later, the plaintiffs went back to court to argue that Texas was not living up to its agreement. The court held that while the state itself was immune from the enforcement suit, the officials themselves could be sued and be held to the terms they had agreed to. But the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, disagreed and found that the officials could not be required to take any steps that went beyond the precise boundaries of the federal law.

The Bush administration joined the plaintiffs in challenging that ruling, and there appeared to be a clear majority in the argument on Tuesday for overturning it. If state officials could not be bound by a consent decree, why would the other side ever agree to settle a case, Justice Scalia asked R. Edward Cruz, the Texas solicitor general. "That's crazy," Justice Scalia added. "You're telling them that they accomplished nothing and that they have to re-initiate the whole thing."

About a mile off the twisting, two-lane road to the south of Central City, Pa., set back in the woods along a private road, past the truck scales and the raw-coal stockpile, invisible from the highway, is the Shade Creek processing plant of PBS Coals Inc. There freshly mined coal is washed, the sulfur, rock, ash and other impurities removed and the cleaned coal carried by an overhead conveyor belt across the dusty road. It goes into a building on the other side that is operated by a second company, Central City Synfuels. Another belt comes out of that building—off limits to the public—carrying what looks a lot like the same coal back across the road and dumps it on a stockpile. Then it's loaded into railcars and shipped to electric utilities.

Except it isn't coal any longer.

Forget that it looks like coal. And will burn like coal. It's now called "synthetic fuel." As such, the coal-like product, along with roughly 50 million tons of similar stuff from more than 50 similar plants in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Alabama and other states, is worth more than $1 billion a year in federal income-tax credits, a corporate giveaway protected by a bipartisan group of supporters in Congress. Those who have profited from the system range from fast-buck artists to giant corporations. They include one of the nation's largest hotel operators, a commodities trader barred from the industry for fraudulent practices, a chain of electronics stores, an electric utility that unplugged the lights during the great blackout of 2003, technology firms run by friends of influential lawmakers, limited partnerships of wealthy investors and scores of individuals and businesses preferring to keep their identities secret.

[edit]

What happens inside [the plants]? To alter coal's chemistry so it qualifies as a synthetic fuel even though it looks and burns like regular coal, some plants merely spray newly mined coal with diesel fuel, pine-tar resin, limestone, acid or other substances. Others mix coal waste with chemicals, coat it with latex and blend it with untreated coal to form briquettes. And plant operators in some extreme cases do nothing at all. Whatever the process, it's still coal.

[edit]

If the process seems flimsy, keep in mind that the real product is not synfuel but tax credits. And lots of people are cashing in.

[edit]

The hotel chain Marriott International Inc., which has 2,500 lodging properties worldwide, bought four synfuel plants in October 2001. The next year, the fIRSt full year of production, Marriott's new synthetic-fuel operations generated $159 million in tax credits. Marriott had paid $46 million in cash for the facilities, meaning the tax credits gave the company a return of 246% on its investment in just one year. It was a welcome boost for the company at a time when the average room revenue from Marriott's traditional lodging business fell 4.8%. Moreover, the company's effective income tax rate plunged to 6.8% in 2002 from 36.1% in 2001, "primarily due to the impact of our synthetic-fuel business," according to its annual report. Consequently, Marriott paid federal income taxes at a rate below that paid by individuals and families earning less than $20,000 a year.

[edit]

The credit is so generous that some investors can't take full advantage of it each year because they don't pay enough taxes on their other income. Rather than let the credit go to waste, they sell a portion of their synfuel operations to another group of investors who are looking for ways to reduce their taxes—a sort of perpetual tax-avoidance machine that never stops giving.

Throughout the day, White House employees streamed into Room 214 of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building bearing materials that they have been asked for by the Justice Department. The department is investigating whether administration officials illegally disclosed the name of the officer, Valerie Plame, who is married to a former ambassador, Joseph C. Wilson IV.

[edit]

Administration officials said that before the materials were turned over to the Justice Department they would be reviewed by lawyers in the White House counsel's office to determine if they were relevant. The officials left open the possibility that the counsel's office might assert executive privilege on some materials or withhold all or parts of others for national security reasons.

[edit]

Government officials said they expect the White House to begin turning over the most relevant documents almost immediately, but that the Justice Department may not get all the records for a week or two, under a schedule agreed to by the White House.

While [CIA Director William] Casey was trying to protect himself by suggesting that the NSC staff was to blame for whatever had gone wrong, [Attorney General Ed] Meese was moving to take control of the administration response. He saw himself as Reagan's protector in time of need .... Even though he had been warned by [Assistant Attorney General Charles] Cooper that the 1985 arms sale to Iran raised possible violations of the Arms Export Control Act, Meese saw the problem in political terms. After meeting with top advisors at the Justice Department on Friday morning, November 21, which included a briefing by Cooper on the discrepancies in the various recollections of the HAWK shipment, Meese decided to propose that he gather the facts so that the administration could speak with a single voice. Meese called [National Security Advisor John] Poindexter and asked him to set up a meeting with Reagan. As Meese saw it, he was now acting as "legal adviser to the president."

[After the meeting] Meese returned to the Justice Department and calmly told his team that Reagan had authorized him to "get his arms around the Iranian initiative." Poindexter meanwhile was informing Oliver North of the inquiry and telling him that Meese would be sending investigators to review documents. North hopped a cab to Michael Leeden's suburban Maryland home, where Leeden was meeting with [Former National Security Advisor Robert] McFarlane. North warned them both that Meese was now looking into the arms sales transactions. McFarlane gave North a ride back to the White House in his car. During the drive North said he was going to have a "shredding party" that weekend ....

North moved quickly, but Meese did not. Meeting with FBI Director William Webster on an unrelated matter that afternoon, Meese told him that Reagan had authorized him to gather information on the arms sales. Webster asked if he needed FBI help. Meese declined, saying there was no reason to believe that any crime had been committed. Webster agreed, but did not have the benefit of Meese's warning from Cooper that the 1985 arms sales may have violated the Arms Export Control Act. Had the FBI been called in at this time and the records sealed, most of the material that was destroyed during the next two days could have been preserved. Instead, North, assisted by his deputy Robert Earl and his secretary Fawn Hall, began a systematic destruction and alteration of documents relating to the Iran covert action and the still-undiscovered diversion of the proceeds to the contras.

When it comes to President Bush, you either love him or hate him - or so it seems, in this nation's highly charged political climate.

Americans may still feel under threat of terrorism, but for Bush, the political respite of 9/11 - the sky-high approval ratings born of strong support from voters of both parties - has ended.

By mid-September, Bush had matched President Reagan for the widest gap ever in job-approval rating between Republicans and Democrats, 86 percent vs. 16 percent, in the history of the Gallup poll. (Reagan hit the 70-point gap twice, late in 1984, as he ran for reelection.)

Bush's role as a polarizer continues where President Clinton left off. Clinton was, in his time, the most polarizing president to date, as was Reagan before him.

The first President Bush was less polarizing than the others, in part because he was more willing to go against party orthodoxy. He sometimes angered his own party and pleased the opposition, as with his decision to raise taxes after pledging that he would not.

And in that, there may be a lesson: Polarizers Reagan and Clinton both won reelection; the first President Bush did not. The additional lesson seems to be, keep your core voters happy and don't worry about compromising with the other party. On most issues, the current President Bush is doing just that.

...the really significant losers are Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Bill Clinton invested quite a bit of time in the California race. He personally campaigned for Gray Davis. And Davis has admitted that Clinton was his key adviser.

Davis apparently listened to the ex-president. Davis went on a campaign jihad against “the vast right-wing conspiracy” and the “evil Republicans.” This is all out of the Clinton playbook.

[edit]

I believe Davis could have beaten off the recall. Had the gracious Davis we saw conceding last night been the Davis Californians saw during the recall race, he would have remained governor of California.

But he embraced Clinton. He listened to Clinton.

The second MoveOn message, sent on Tuesday morning, was about DeLay's efforts to block a vote on a resolution that would roll back the Federal Communications Commission vote to loosen media ownership rules. A similar resolution passed the Senate by 55-40, but DeLay is working with the White House to preserve the FCC's attempt at deregulation. Thus he and House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., are refusing to bring the resolution to the House floor. MoveOn e-mailed its members urging them to contact DeLay and Hastert and ask them to allow a vote.

Pariser is more surprised by DeLay's stunt, not because he expects better from the former Texas bug-killer, but because, as he says, "This is the guy who's the majority leader. He has a responsibility not just to members of Congress, but to the whole country."

DeLay's office doesn't see it that way. As a MoveOn member wrote in an e-mail to Pariser, "I was also able to reach Rep. DeLay's office. There, I was interrupted in the middle of my first sentence, asked if this was about the FCC, and placed on hold. After a few seconds someone else answered and I learned that Rep. DeLay's office had forwarded my call to MoveOn.org. Evidently, they have no interest in the opinions of a citizen." Pariser has since changed the message on his cellphone, urging callers to try DeLay again.

According to DeLay spokesman Stuart Roy, MoveOn is getting what it deserves. "They like to generate the phone calls but they don't like to receive them," he says. "It seems to me that public debate is a two-way street." He dismissed the notion that, as citizens, MoveOn's members deserve to have their opinions heard by their government, noting that none of the calls came from constituents in DeLay's home district.

But since DeLay holds one of the most powerful positions in the United States government, doesn't he have an obligation to all Americans? Roy's response was a non sequitur. "Do you have an obligation to all Americans at Salon.com?" he asked.

The answer to Roy's question, clearly, is no, since Salon is an online magazine with a responsibility to its readers, and not a high-ranking official in a representative democracy. But the question of whether DeLay has any responsibility to hear the views of dissenting citizens rather than play tricks on them remains open.

If you want to ask him yourself, his office number is (202)225-4000.

In an emphatic end to an extraordinary campaign, Californians voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday to recall Gov. Gray Davis and chose as his replacement Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Austrian-born bodybuilder and movie actor making his first run for office.

President Bush said Tuesday he has "no idea" whether the Justice Department will catch the person who disclosed an undercover CIA officer's identity. "This is a large administration," Bush said.

McClellan firmly ruled out any role by three administration officials in the leak: political adviser Karl Rove; Vice President Dick Cheney 's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby; and National Security Council official Elliott Abrams. The spokesman said he had spoken to all three officials about the leak.

Bush said he insulates himself from the "opinions" that seep into news coverage by getting his news from his own aides. He said he scans headlines, but rarely reads news stories. "I appreciate people’s opinions, but I’m more interested in news," the president said. "And the best way to get the news is from objective sources, and the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what’s happening in the world."—The Associated Press, September 22.

9:57 p.m.: Shortly before the President’s bedtime, Vice-President Dick Cheney arrived at the White House to read him the day’s installment of "Beetle Bailey," in the Washington Post. The Vice-President said that in the first panel of the strip the character Sarge is dining at a fancy restaurant. A snooty waiter is holding a wine bottle and asks Sarge, "Would you like to sniff the cork, sir?," to which Sarge replies, "Let me have it." In the next (and last) panel, Sarge offers the cork to his dog, Otto, and says, "I brought my professional sniffer." The President said that this was not a particularly good one, and asked the Vice- President what happened in "Marmaduke."

The United Nations is a failure and America should withdraw its membership or taxpayer-funded support until the U.N. more closely mirrors American interests, two Central Florida Republican congressman said Monday.

"The U.N. is useless," said U.S. Rep. Tom Feeney, R-Oviedo, who joined fellow U.S. Rep. Dave Weldon, R-Palm Bay, in mostly berating the global aid and peacekeeping body. "It's more useless than it's ever been."

[edit]

Feeney and Weldon, a Republican seeking an U.S. Senate seat next year, bemoaned among other things the U.N.'s inability to handle peacekeeping ventures in Somalia, Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.

Comptroller General David M. Walker on Monday disputed as "flat false" President Bush's forecast that economic growth spurred by tax cuts will help shrink the federal government's annual deficits.

The nation must make "tough choices" on taxes and spending over the next eight years before baby boomers begin to retire and start collecting Social Security benefits, said Walker, head of the congressional watchdog Government Accounting Office.

Bush has argued that by 2006, growth prompted by his $1.7-trillion tax cut plus spending cuts will pare deficits in half.

The U.S. budget deficit has more than doubled to a projected $455 billion for the 2003 fiscal year, which ended last week, government figures show.

"The idea that this is manageable or that we are going to grow our way out of the problem is just flat false," Walker said. "Even if we repeal all the tax cuts, you are still going to have to make tough choices."

Today, Bush-Cheney ’04 launched its official blog offering the latest news and views from outside the Washington “Beltway” and from Bush-Cheney ’04.

Each morning we will update you on the day’s top stories as well as give you a quick summary of what Bush-Cheney ’04 has planned for the day. We’ll also help you follow President Bush and Vice President Cheney. We will regularly deliver breaking news notices of when President Bush, and members of his team will appear on TV and action alerts to guide your efforts to help re-elect President Bush and Vice President Cheney.

We expect an exciting year. You will find the news you need on the Bush-Cheney ’04 blog!

"[Morgan Freeman] started off playing a chauffeur in 'Driving Miss Daisy,' and then they elevated him to head of the CIA, and then they elevated him to president and in his last role they made him God. I just wonder, isn't Rush Limbaugh right to question the fact, is he that good an actor or not?"

$300 million for peacekeeping operations in Liberia, increased funding for embassy security, $400 million extra for military construction in Iraq, $400 million more in foreign assistance for Afghanistan and $413 million to clean up military facilities after Hurricane Isabel.

U.N. spokesman Hamadoun Toure confirmed on Tuesday local villagers' reports that the bodies of another 32 people had already been buried, bringing the number of dead to 55.

The victims, mainly women and children, had been either shot or hacked by machetes, U.N. officials said.

Toure said the U.N. mission might find more bodies.

Just relax and save your energy for following the voting tomorrow, without obsessing about what is happening today with mythical tracking polls.

And remember: nobody knows who is going to turn out tomorrow (not the campaigns, not the pollsters, not John Mercurio), and if, when the votes are all counted, the (next) governor of California might not be who you thought it was going to be.

"...support the institution of marriage and help parents build stronger families. And we must continue our work to create a compassionate, welcoming society, where all people are treated with dignity and respect."

That report Kathryn posted on the appalling awfulness of the North Korean regime demonstrates once again a thing that has occurred to me often when talking with liberals and lefties about communism. Why were so many decent, well-read people in Western countries such suckers for the old USSR, for Mao's China, for Castro's Cuba, etc.? A great deal of it is just wishful thinking combined with failure of imagination. They can't imagine these horrors, except in terms of things they know more immediately. Thus, they will grudgingly concede that the Gulag was awful: "...but look at conditions in our own prisons!" U.S. prison conditions leave much to be desired, but cannot reasonably be compared to the mass arrests of tens of millions of perfectly innocent non-criminal people, and their subsequent killing by starvation, forced labor, and beating. Yet you hear this sort of thing all the time ....

As America's victory in Iraq has gone sour, and Americans have begun to question why we had to go to war, the game in this town has gone hardball. Many believe the Bush presidency itself may be at risk. The stakes are thus enormous, and the Bush-haters – and baiters – are out in force.

But while hardball is justified, dirtball is not. And that is what was apparently done to Joe Wilson's wife.

Tens of thousands starved in the latest famine, from 1995 to 1997. Lee, who asked that her given name not be used, was a clerk in a government office who notarized the deaths in her town. She is a pretty young woman, 29, with tumbling hair curling to her shoulders and smooth, flawless skin that belies the hardships she has faced and struggles to explain. "We started seeing cannibalism," she recalled, pausing. "You probably won't understand."

She went on: "When one is very hungry, one can go crazy. One woman in my town killed her 7-month-old baby, and ate the baby with another woman. That woman's son reported them both to the authorities.

"I can't condemn cannibalism. Not that I wanted to eat human meat, but we were so hungry. It was common that people went to a fresh grave and dug up a body to eat meat. I witnessed a woman being questioned for cannibalism. She said it tasted good."

Massive international food aid gradually stemmed the famine after a death toll estimated at anywhere from 300,000 to 2 million.

When President Bush declared war on terrorism after Sept. 11, 2001, it was obvious that other priorities -- including the promotion of democracy and human rights -- would lose ground ... Compromises again would have to be made, but maybe the Bush administration would understand that in the long run, fighting terror and promoting democracy had to go hand in hand. Or maybe not.

Bush answered the question pretty definitively 10 days ago when he welcomed "my friend Vladimir Putin" to Camp David with these words: "I respect President Putin's vision for Russia: a country at peace within its borders, with its neighbors, a country in which democracy and freedom and rule of law thrive."

This description of Putin's Russia was so outlandishly fictional, so at odds with the KGB-inspired screw-tightening that has been the hallmark of Putin's regime, that the only possible conclusion was that Bush just doesn't care ... You can shut down your media, rig elections, send troops rampaging through Chechnya, and Bush will stay mum.

As for the reports of Schwarzenegger's groping, inappropriate touching and language toward women, Osborn, like so many other Schwarzenegger supporters, shrugged her shoulders and rolled her eyes. And, like so many others, she questioned the timing of the report, so close to the election. She wondered, as others did, why the women had not come forward at the time they were supposedly groped. And she brought up a favorite antidote to the accounts of Schwarzenegger's boorishness: his wife, Maria Shriver.

"Maria Shriver is no pushover," she said. "Arnold's wife is not the kind of woman who would just sit back and let her husband behave that way." Shriver, part of the nation's most famous family of Democrats, joined Schwarzenegger during his bus rally from San Diego to Sacramento, attracting her own share of adoring fans and requests for autographs along the way. In Modesto on Saturday afternoon, three young women admired Shriver's prominent cheekbones and declared afterward that they needed to diet. "Then maybe I'll get someone like Arnold," said Tiffany Lopez, 21, who "definitely, definitely" planned to vote for Schwarzenegger -- her first vote, ever. The women issue? "Not an issue at all," she said. "I'd let him grope me any time!"

Senator Bob Graham of Florida said Saturday that he had discussed his struggling presidential campaign with former President Bill Clinton and Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle and planned to decide its future "in a few days."

Mr. Graham said he was still committed to his bid for the White House, and he repeatedly refused to rule out the possibility that he might ultimately abandon the race given his poor showings in national polls and continuing struggles to raise money.

The one thing I regret I wrote, I used the word "operative," and I think Mr. Broder will agree that I use the word too much. I use it about hat politicians. I use it about people on the Hill. And if somebody did a Nexus search of my columns, they'd find an overuse of "operative." I did not mean it. I don't know what she did. But the indication given to me by this senior official and another senior official I checked with was not that she was deep undercover.

Exposure of CIA operative Johnny (Mike) Spann's identity as the first American killed in Afghanistan is viewed by surprised intelligence insiders as an effort by Director George Tenet to boost the embattled CIA's prestige.

Old CIA hands were shocked by the breaking of the old rule keeping secret the names of agents in order to protect their family and associates (in this case, undercover Pakistanis and Tajiks).

Anti-gay preacher Fred Phelps has announced intentions to erect a monument to Matthew Shepard the gay college student brutally murdered five years ago near Laramie.

But, the monument will be no memorial. Phelps says the monument would be 5 to 6 feet tall and made of marble or granite. It would bear a bronze plaque bearing the image of Shepard and have an inscription reading "MATTHEW SHEPARD, Entered Hell October 12, 1998, in Defiance of God's Warning: 'Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind; it is abomination.' Leviticus 18:22."

The monument would be erected in downtown Casper, Shepard's home town.

Phelps has sent details of the monument to the city of Casper city council and there may be nothing the city can do to prevent it.

Phelps said he intends to put up the monument in City Park, already the location of a controversial statue of the Ten Commandments.

The Ten Commandments statue was donated to the city by the Fraternal Order of the Eagles in 1965.

After a court battle over a similar monument in the city of Ogden, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that any city that displays a Ten Commandments monument on public property must also allow monuments espousing the views of other religions or political groups on that same property.

In a change of military tactics, Israel responded to a suicide bombing with an airstrike today deep inside Syria, directed at what Israel said was a training camp used by Palestinian extremists.

The predawn bombing raid outside the Syrian capital Damascus did not cause major damage and only one person was injured, according to reports from Syria. But the strike raised the possibility that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could begin to include neighboring countries in the combustible region.

The Bush administration sought today to distance itself from Israel's overnight airstrike on a target deep inside Syria, with senior officials saying the United States had no advance warning of the attack and did not have solid evidence that the site was in fact a terrorist training camp.

[edit]

The group that claimed responsibility for that attack, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, maintains offices and other bases of operations inside Syria, and Israel said its airstrike targeted a site used by that group for training. But the senior administration official said the evidence of such a link was "very amorphous."