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President Bush says the Iraq Study Group report “did a good job of showing what is possible.” Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain said, “It offers a strong way forward.” The New York Post called it the work of “surrender monkeys.” There is no shortage of opinions. Here are a dozen worth considering.

Secret U.S. government report: Insurgency in Iraq now self-sustaining financially, raising tens of millions of dollars a year from oil smuggling, kidnapping, counterfeiting, fake charities and other crimes... NYTIMES reporting Sunday... Developing...

The newly elected Democratic class of 2006, which is set to descend on the Capitol next week, will hardly be the first freshmen to arrive in Washington promising to make a difference. The last time Congress changed hands, the Republican freshman class of 1994 roared into town under the leadership of Newt Gingrich as speaker and quickly advanced a conservative agenda of exceptional ambition.Many in the class of 2006, especially those who delivered the new Democratic majorities by winning Republican seats, show little appetite for that kind of ideological crusade. But in interviews with nearly half of them this week,...

In most midterm elections, an out-of-power party picking up, say, 14 seats in the House and five seats in the Senate could call it a pretty good night.

An automated voice at the other end of the telephone line asks whether you believe that judges who “push homosexual marriage and create new rights like abortion and sodomy” should be controlled. If your reply is “yes,” the voice lets you know that the Democratic candidate in the Senate race in Montana, Jon Tester, is not your man. In Maryland, a similar question-and-answer sequence suggests that only the Republican Senate candidate would keep the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. In Tennessee, another paints the Democrat as wanting to give foreign terrorists “the same legal rights and privileges”...

You see kids – this is what happens when your worldview gets hopelessly narrow. In its semi-annual November surprise, the New York Times “reveals” that the Bush administration put documents on the web that showed that Iraq was quite far along in its quest for nuclear weapons. Naturally, that’s not the focus of the story. The focus of the story is the cursed incompetence of the Bush administration, the Republican Party, and even right-wing media-types (like me!) who wanted the documents released. But the takeaway from the story for normal people won’t be that conservatives both inside and outside the...

BAGHDAD, IRAQ — With recent events in Iraq causing growing strains between the Bush administration and the Iraqi government, the two governments issued a tautly worded statement through the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad on Friday renewing their commitment to work together for peace and security. The statement, remarkable for the fact that the two governments found it necessary, followed a meeting between Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador. The three-paragraph joint statement issued afterward appeared aimed at tamping down frictions between the two governments while countering a growing perception in Baghdad and Washington that the increasingly...

The lead story for the June 23 New York Times exposed a U.S. terrorist surveillance program involving international bank transfers ("Bank Data Sifted In Secret By U.S. To Block Terror"): "Under a secret Bush administration program initiated weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, counterterrorism officials have gained access to financial records from a vast international database and examined banking transactions involving thousands of Americans and others in the United States, according to government and industry officials." The word "secret" has been highlighted for reasons that will become clear.

One afternoon this past summer, I shared a picnic of fresh mangos and plums with Abdul Baqi, an Afghan Taliban fighter in his 20’s fresh from the front in Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan. We spent hours on a grassy slope under the tall pines of Murree, a former colonial hill station that is now a popular resort just outside Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad. All around us was a Pakistani rendition of Georges Seurat’s “Sunday on La Grande Jatte” — middle-class families setting up grills for barbecue, a girl and two boys chasing their errant cow with a stick, two men...

Lee C. Bollinger, the president of Columbia University, is a natural in the classroom, guiding undergraduates through the intricacies of the First Amendment. [snip] There is probably no university chief in America more steeped in issues of free speech than Mr. Bollinger, 60, a First Amendment scholar. And yet, in just the last month, his campus has been embroiled in four separate free-speech controversies: over the language in an ice hockey recruiting flier; a rescinded speaking invitation to the president of Iran; a Teachers College policy on “social justice” that some see as an ideological litmus test; and a brawl...

CAIRO, Oct. 20 — Faced with twin political threats — a rising Islamic movement at home and diminished influence throughout the region — Egypt is pressing the United States for an aggressive promotion of Palestinian statehood as a means of strengthening itself and other Arab governments allied with Washington, senior officials say. Egyptian officials told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on her recent visit here that the United States should move straight “to the endgame,” with a major policy initiative tackling the most contentious Palestinian issues: borders of a future state, the site of the capital, and the so-called right...

President Bush discussed his policies with conservative radio hosts last month at the White House, including, from left, Mike Gallagher, Neal Boortz, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity and Michael Medved. WASHINGTON, Oct. 16 — On an overcast Friday morning last month, White House aides ushered an influential group of conservative radio hosts into the Oval Office for a private audience with the president. For an hour and a half, Mr. Bush discussed his case for the war in Iraq, his immigration proposals and even the personality of his Scottish terrier Barney, who scratched on the door during the session until the...

NY Times endorses Hillary for Senate; looks ahead to 2008 president race 24 minutes ago The New York Times endorsed incumbent US Senator Hillary Clinton for re-election, but said the real question is what kind of Democratic presidential candidate she might make in 2008. "We enthusiastically endorse Mrs. Clinton for re-election, while watching with interest to see if she can convince the country that she has as much aptitude for the presidency as she does for her current job," the daily wrote in an editorial. "Can she conjure up a vision of the future for a nation desperately in need...

BAGHDAD, Oct. 10 — A team of American and Iraqi public health researchers has estimated that 600,000 civilians have died in violence across Iraq since the 2003 American invasion, the highest estimate ever for the toll of the war here. The figure breaks down to about 15,000 violent deaths a month, a number that is quadruple the one for July given by Iraqi government hospitals and the morgue in Baghdad and published last month in a United Nations report in Iraq. That month was the highest for Iraqi civilian deaths since the American invasion. But it is an estimate and...

In sharp questioning, a three-judge panel yesterday challenged arguments by federal officials seeking dismissal of a Pakistani man’s suit charging that because of his religion, race or national origin, he, like others, was held for months after 9/11 in abusive solitary confinement before being cleared of links to terrorism and deported. In the mahogany and marble splendor of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Lower Manhattan, lawyers for former Attorney General John Ashcroft and other government officials argued that the officials were entitled to immunity from the lawsuit filed by the man, Javaid Iqbal, who had been known as...

A consortium of major universities, using Homeland Security Department money, is developing software that would let the government monitor negative opinions of the United States or its leaders in newspapers and other publications overseas. Researchers at institutions including Cornell, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Utah intend to test the system on hundreds of articles published in 2001 and 2002 on topics like President Bush’s use of the term “axis of evil,” the handling of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, the debate over global warming and the coup attempt against President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela. A $2.4 million grant...

At least two news organizations were tipped off to e-mail messages sent by Representative Mark Foley long before the story of his sexually explicit remarks to teenage pages broke last week and forced him to resign. --Snip-- Brian Ross of ABC News said he learned about the e-mail messages in August but was too busy with Hurricane Katrina and the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks to pursue them immediately. None of the organizations seemed to anticipate how big the story would become. ---Snip--- Then, in June, the reports resurfaced on Capitol Hill, where a neighborhood resident struck up a...

Even if there were a case for staying the current course in Iraq, America’s badly overstretched Army cannot sustain present force levels much longer without long-term damage. And that could undermine the credibility of American foreign policy for years to come. The Army has been kept on short rations of troops and equipment for years by a Pentagon more intent on stockpiling futuristic weapons than fighting today’s wars. Now it is pushing up against the limits of hard arithmetic. Senior generals are warning that the Bush administration may have to break its word and again use National Guard units to...

New Jersey is the perennial loser in the student migration wars: more of its residents leave the state to go to college than anywhere else in the country. On the other end of the spectrum, so many students have decided that sunshine, mosquitoes and the Marlins are the essential elements of the college experience that Florida is the state with the highest “net migration” (the number who enter minus the number who leave). Source: Interstate Commission for Higher Education; number of students in 2005 and 2015 are projections based on 2001-2 data... The swelling population of 18-year-olds — members of...

This latest controversy over the National Intelligence Estimate is the latest…and only the latest example of what's wrong with the news business these days. In short, no perspective, incomplete facts and intentionally or unintentionally biased. The New York Times, a newspaper with a reputation for being on the left, runs a story quoting an un-named U.S. intelligence official as saying the latest summary by the nation's intelligence agencies concludes that quote "the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse. Two days later, after a firestorm of I told you from all the war critics, President Bush decides to...