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The Wall Street Journal POTOMAC WATCH September 13, 2012, 7:10 p.m. ET Mr. Romney, Trust Your Pants Obama tells Americans the terrible things the Republican will do to them. The Republican remains silent about what he would do. By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL In the classic 1968 film "Once Upon a Time in the West," a villainous Henry Fonda shoots one of his lackeys, in part for the sin of wearing both a belt and suspenders. How do you trust a man, muses Fonda, who "can't even trust his own pants?" Mitt Romney is slipping in the polls because, when it...

Does Barack Obama know what he's doing? The question isn't purely rhetorical because Obama's response to the cascade of global crises over the past several weeks has often seemed mystifying. He supported pro-democracy forces in Egypt and nudged out a regime the U.S. had backed for decades, but has been unwilling to do the same in Bahrain or Yemen. In Libya, his Administration was against armed intervention to stop Muammar Gaddafi before Obama was for it. American warplanes carried out the initial wave of strikes on Tripoli, but Obama's aides insist that Washington is merely following the Europeans' lead. U.S....

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The international assault on Libya has shown Barack Obama to be a cautious presidential warrior who has reframed US rules for war abroad after absorbing the painful lessons of Iraq. Though he escalated the Afghan conflict, one of two wars he inherited, the Libyan action is the first military adventure Obama has actually launched and reveals key aspects of his philosophy as commander in chief. The president's preference for avoiding overseas entanglements led him to anchor his political rise on opposition to "dumb" wars. He was against the Iraq invasion launched by his Republican predecessor George W....

CORAL SPRINGS · A burly exotic guard dog, one of several that frightened residents of an upscale neighborhood in recent days, ferociously mauled and killed its owner Friday afternoon, apparently in sight of the woman's young daughter. Police said they found the dog, a Presa Canario named Zino, in the backyard of a home in the 9000 block of the Northwest 39th Court in The Hills neighborhood. It was standing over the body of the mother of two.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. and Iraqi forces strike the Baghdad base of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr — but his gunmen hold their fire. U.S. soldiers kill 15 of al-Sadr's followers, drawing little more than a few perfunctory complaints. That's a dramatic departure in style for the youthful firebrand, who launched two major uprisings against the American-led coalition two years ago when U.S. authorities closed his newspaper and pushed an Iraqi judge into issuing an arrest warrant against him. If anything, al-Sadr is more powerful today than he was then. But that power is also a restraint: al-Sadr has more...

Biotech company executives in the Bay Area met Tuesday to begin working with California's sputtering stem-cell research institute, which was jump-started last week by the $150 million boost it got from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. ``I feel we are at a very important point in history here,'' said Michael West, chairman and chief scientific officer of Advanced Cell Technology of Alameda. He added that it was essential ``do do everything we possibly can to see that money is well spent.'' Still, the executives who met in San Francisco with officials at the stem-cell institute, created in 2004 when California voters passed...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 2, 2006 – Some Beltway pundits have opined that U.S. force levels in Iraq could fall to 100,000 by the end of this year, but the Defense Department's top official said he won't play the speculation game. The Iraqi security forces, now at about 227,000 soldiers and police, are "doing a good job," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told attendees at the National Press Club here today. "They're increasingly experienced. They're increasingly well-equipped," Rumsfeld said, noting U.S. military members are embedded in Iraqi units to provide mentoring, if needed. "We have near instantaneous visibility into what their weaknesses...

Kerry cautious on probing `Downing Street Memo' By Noelle Straub Monday, June 20, 2005 - Updated: 10:36 AM EST WASHINGTON - Walking a tightrope on a politically charged issue, Sen. John F. Kerry vowed weeks ago to raise the controversial ``Downing Street Memo'' as an issue in Washington, but has since publicly held his tongue on the matter. Instead, Kerry has been enlisting other senators to sign onto a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee seeking answers about the memo, aides said. The memo contained minutes of a 2002 meeting in which British officials told Prime Minister Tony Blair they...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. officials voiced cautious support for U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Tuesday, saying they did not know where an inquiry into the U.N. oil-for-food program may lead or whether Annan would survive it. The independent probe led by former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker on Tuesday cleared Annan of interfering in the award of a contract under the scandal-plagued oil-for-food program in Iraq to a firm that employed his son. However, the investigation faulted Annan for not having investigated possible conflicts of interest properly. "Secretary-General Annan and the United States share a common commitment to working...

McALLEN, Texas - The wife of presidential candidate John Kerry (news - web sites) told a receptive audience in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas that Kerry would seek out all other options before going to war. "John will never send a boy or girl in a uniform anywhere in the world because of our need and greed for oil," Teresa Heinz Kerry told about 1,200 supporters at the McAllen Civic Center. She said her husband, as president, would be able to approach the families of slain soldiers and say, "'I did everything I could to prevent this, I'm sorry.'...

<p>In a departure from legislative Democrats' longtime insistence that the state must raise taxes to ease its budget woes, the Assembly's new Democratic leader said Thursday that his agenda does not include tax hikes.</p> <p>The message from voters in the fall recall election, he said, has prompted him and others to rethink their rigidity on the issue.</p>