Free Republic

WASHINGTON - President Bush's war strategy is failing and the top military commander in Iraq is "dead flat wrong" for warning against major changes, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said Sunday. Ahead of two days of crucial testimony by Bush's leading military and political advisers on Iraq, Sen. Joseph Biden indicated that he and other Democrats would persist in efforts to set target dates for bringing troops home. "The reality is that although there's been some mild security progress, there is in fact no security in Baghdad or Anbar province where I was dealing with the...

WASHINGTON, Aug. 9, 2007 – The commander of coalition forces in Iraq said he won’t “pull any punches” in the Iraqi benchmark report due to Congress by Sept. 15. The report will reflect both tactical progress being made in Iraq and areas that still need work, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of Multinational Force Iraq, said yesterday on Fox News Radio’s “Alan Colmes Show.” “I have vowed that I will provide a forthright and comprehensive assessment,” he said during an interview from Baghdad. President Bush has said he’ll rely heavily on the report by Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador to...

WASHINGTON, July 30, 2007 – The top U.S. commander in Iraq today acknowledged high expectations for a September assessment of the situation in Iraq and said he would work to keep politics out of the process. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of Multinational Force Iraq, spoke to Diane Sawyer on ABC’s “Good Morning America” program from his headquarters in Baghdad. He said that every time he gets a question about the assessment, “I feel another rock going into the rucksack, which is reasonably heavy at this point.” Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan C. Crocker will offer a...

CAMP H.M. SMITH, Hawaii, May 31, 2007 – Army Gen. David H. Petraeus needs to focus on the situation in Iraq, not the political climate in Washington, when he files his report on conditions there, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates told reporters here today. Gates, speaking at the U.S. Pacific Command headquarters, said he wants commanders in Iraq to focus on “the Baghdad clock and not the Washington clock” as they assess the situation in Iraq. “We want them to focus on what’s going on in Iraq and give us their recommendations, their evaluations, based on what’s going on in...

WASHINGTON, May 31, 2007 – While military leaders will present an assessment of the progress of the new strategy in Iraq by a September deadline, a U.S. military commander in Iraq said it may be too soon to get a good feel for progress in the country. Army Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, the commander of Multinational Corps Iraq, said in a Pentagon news conference that the nature of counterinsurgency warfare is such that more time may be needed to adequately assess the situation on the ground. The 2007 Emergency Supplemental signed by President Bush May 25 calls for the assessment...

MINNEAPOLIS - A new scientific method of assessing social welfare programs is revealing something important that's never been known before: which ones work. Among the ones that do, it turns out, are: * Career Academies, a nationwide high school vocational program whose graduates earn more than comparable nonparticipants with at least a year of community college credits. * Center for Employment Opportunities, a work program for ex-cons that halves their recidivism rate by putting them to work - and paying them daily - as soon as they're released. * Louisiana Opening Doors, a $1,000-a-semester performance-based scholarship whose community college recipients...

The U.S. Department of Education has warned Wisconsin officials that the state could lose about $233,000 if they don't fix shortcomings in the state's student testing system, including its alternate assessment for English language learners. Adopting a tough tone, the federal government has given the state until the end of the 2006-'07 school year to bring its tests into full compliance with the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act. But a November testing period means Wisconsin has only until fall to address the concerns or it risks losing 15% of the $1.5 million it hopes to receive to...

New Yorkers and Californians breathe in the dirtiest air in the nation and face higher cancer risks than the rest of the nation, according to the latest data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Oregon, Washington, D.C. and New Jersey had the third, fourth and fifth worst air in the nation, respectively, the EPA said. Rural residents of Wyoming, South Dakota and Montana breathed the cleanest air. New York's cancer risk is estimated to be 68 residents per million. In California, the risk is 66 residents per million.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 12, 2005 – The senior U.S. military commander in Iraq will likely conduct a force-level assessment sometime after the Dec. 15 elections, a senior defense department official said here today. However, chief DoD spokesman Lawrence Di Rita cautioned Pentagon reporters that Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., commander of Multinational Force Iraq, may not provide a recommendation for Iraq force-level changes along with his assessment. "I would expect fully that he'll come back and give an assessment of where he thinks he is," Di Rita said. "I don't know - I simply don't - whether that will include...

"The transformation of a traditional society could only be achieved extremely slowly, and certainly not by wrecking its existing structure and relationships. Even in the Soviet Union there had been the 'great mistakes' of the 1920s and 1930s. As a Soviet official in Moscow was also reported as saying [in 1981], 'If there is one country in the world where we would not like to try scientific socialism at this point in time, it is Afghanistan.'" - Martin Ewans, Afghanistan (2001)

Orford selectmen are defying a state order to use updated property-tax assessments that include valuable views on some land. The townwide revaluation by Avitar Associates of New England found that views added $100,000 or more to the value of some properties, leading to protests against what some called a "view tax." This month, the state Board of Tax and Land Appeals ordered the town to use the new revaluation instead of the previous one, performed in 1997, because state law requires towns to update their assessments every five years. The board also ordered Avitar to provide more justification for the...

Researchers applaud “grassroots” climate change studyWhite House tries to bury the National Assessment, but experts say that the project was successful and innovative. Begun in 1998 and completed in 2001, the U.S. National Assessment is the only study to broadly examine how global warming might affect communities in the U.S. Because of the subject matter, however, the assessment has been mired in political controversy since its release, and officials in the Bush Administration have sought to remove any reference to the report from publications coming out of their Climate Change Science Program (CCSP). However, in a paper posted to ES&T’s...

Schools often conceal high dropout rates for minority students. Among the "talented tenth," those in the top 10 percent of test takers, reading scores have dropped four points since 1971 and math scores have not budged since first measured in 1978. So say the latest (2004) results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the nation's report card. At the other end of the scale, dropout rates have actually increased since 1990, rising to 30 percent of all 17-year-olds.

These two shotgun doubles are owned by Carrollton area landlord Christian Hooper, who.. has donated more than $7,000 to assessor Henry Heaton's campaign fund. The houses are valued by Heaton at a total of $12,000, or $6,000 apiece, about half the value he assigned to this blighted vacant lot on Hollygrove Street. A restored two-story home in the French Quarter was owned by late real-estate agent Phil Begue, a donor to Assessor Claude Mauberret's campaign fund. It is valued at $116,000, about the same amount Mauberret assigned to this Lakeview cottage. This large, modern home in Lakewood South is valued...

AMONG THE MANY unresolved issues of the former Iraqi regime's support for terrorism, few are more potentially important than the activities throughout the mid to late 1990s of Iraqi military officials and chemical weapons specialists in Sudan. The Clinton Administration, along with a host of Sudanese opposition groups and nonproliferation experts, alleged that Iraqi chemical weapons experts were advising Sudanese military and intelligence officials on the development and production of chemical weapons. This is significant for two reasons, one obvious and one less obvious. First, any Iraqi activity on chemical weapons development inside or outside of Iraq would have constituted...

America's elementary school students made solid gains in both reading and mathematics in the first years of this decade, while middle school students made less progress and older teenagers hardly any, according to federal test results released on Thursday. . . . 9-year-old minority students made the most gains. In particular, young black students significantly narrowed the longtime gap between their math and reading scores and those of higher-achieving white students, who also made strong gains. Older minority teenagers, however, scored about as far behind whites as in previous decades, and scores for all groups pointed to a deepening crisis...

We have been discussing inexpensive ways to fast track kids through high school to avoid the liberal agenda: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1315730/posts?page=84#84 The thread title was not well thought out, because some parents might instinctively skip over it due to attached stigma, whether real or imagined.

I've been getting asked more and more about my position that high school is a waste of time and my recommendation for parents to give their children a choice to skip high school. This is in response to the liberal agendas now prevalent in high schools as well as the simple fact that such a strategy would give kids a 4 year head start on their peers. Below are some useful links for investigating this option. I will repost my own experience under that. http://parents.berkeley.edu/advice/school/equivexam.html UCB Parents Advice about School Taking the High School Equivalency Exam Advice and recommendations from...

Eleven distinguished scientists, most of whom specialize in climatology, on November 16 published an open letter to Senator John McCain (R-AZ), who has repeatedly sponsored congressional legislation that mirrors the Kyoto Protocol, which was rejected by the U.S. Senate in 1997 by a vote of 95-0. The letter disputes assertions by McCain and other alarmists that the Arctic climate is undergoing remarkable and catastrophic climate change. Below are excerpts from the text of the letter. Dear Senator McCain: The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report by the Arctic Council documents significant ecosystem response to surface temperature warming trends that occurred in...

August 27, 2004 An Initial Assessment of the California Performance Review On August 3, 2004, the California Performance Review (CPR) released its report on reforming California's state government, with the aim of making it more efficient and more responsive to its citizens. This report provides our initial comments on the CPR report. Specifically, we: (1) provide an overview of its reorganization framework and other individual recommendations, (2) discuss the savings it assumes from its major proposals, and (3) raise key issues and considerations relating to CPR's various proposals.Introduction On August 3, 2004, the California Performance Review (CPR) released its report...