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Democrats enjoyed rhetorical revenge Thursday after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met Syria's foreign minister, just a month after President Bush and many congressional Republicans lambasted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for traveling to Damascus. Rice's meeting in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, "is a marked improvement in the administration's ostrich policy approach, and a tacit admission of how wrong it was last month in criticizing the speaker of the House and congressional colleagues, including myself, for going to Damascus,'' said Rep. Tom Lantos, D-San Mateo. Pelosi, D-San Francisco, and Lantos led a bipartisan House delegation in a meeting with Syrian President...

Anti-War Democrats Say They Won't Give Up By Susan Jones CNSNews.com Senior Editor May 02, 2007 (CNSNews.com) - While the Israeli people are furious with their prime minister for failing to achieve a conclusive victory in the war with Hizballah, many Americans are furious with President Bush for insisting on victory in the Iraq war. Democratic congressional leaders are trying to end a war that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid last month described as "lost." On Wednesday, one day after vetoing a war-funding bill that set a timeline for withdrawing U.S. troops, President Bush planned to meet with congressional leaders...

WASHINGTON, (AP) -- President Bush showed little appetite for compromise Wednesday, hours ahead of a session with congressional leaders aimed at crafting a new bill to fund the war in Iraq. Fresh from his Tuesday night veto of spending legislation that set timelines for U.S. troop withdrawals, Bush stuck firmly to his demands on what a follow up bill should look like. The Democrats who control of Capitol Hill, and their Republican counterparts, were due at the White House Wednesday afternoon for discussions with the president, just after a planned attempt in the House — sure to fail — to...

WASHINGTON — In the end, neither side was willing to give an inch — or give up the last word. In the span of about two hours Tuesday, President Bush received, vetoed and publicly denounced legislation ordering troops to begin coming home from Iraq. Democrats, who had staged a dramatic signing ceremony, headed back to the television cameras to chide Bush for rejecting it.

Washington -- President Bush carried through on his often-repeated threat Tuesday to veto a war spending bill requiring a U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq, but on Capitol Hill key Republicans started moving away from the administration's hard line against compromising with Democrats. Republican lawmakers, who thus far had stayed solidly behind the president, say they could support binding benchmarks on the Baghdad government as the debate about the war goes forward in Congress. Amid the showdown atmosphere, Bush is scheduled to meet with Democratic and Republican congressional leaders at the White House this afternoon to discuss how to proceed with...

An al Jazeera journalist has been sentenced to six months in prison in absentia by an Egyptian court after producing a film highlighting police torture.Howayda Taha was not in Cairo to hear the court's sentence against her [AP] An al Jazeera journalist has been sentenced to six months in prison in absentia by an Egyptian court after producing a film highlighting police torture. The state security criminal court found Howayda Taha guilty of "harming Egypt's national interest" and ordered her on Wednesday to pay a fine of 30,000 Egyptian pounds ($5,200). She had been accused of planning to broadcast fabricated...

The resolution offered by the gentleman from Ohio reads sensibly. It alleges crimes high and low, misdemeanors galore - all of them representing an effort to mislead the American people and take them into war. It is Dennis Kucinich's articles of impeachment, directed at Dick Cheney. The vice president will, of course, deny he's a liar. As long as Kucinich is at it, add that to the articles. The congressman's case is persuasive, although his remedy may be too radical. He calls for Cheney to be impeached by the House and tried by the Senate, just as Bill Clinton was...

WASHINGTON, (AP) -- Anti-war legislation on the way to President Bush for his promised veto represents a rare rebuke by Congress of a large and ongoing ground conflict, even eclipsing challenges made during the Vietnam War. While a bill ordering troops home from an ongoing military mission is not unprecedented — legislation aimed at conflicts in Somalia and Haiti are other examples — the Iraq bill is an unusually swift feat by a Congress forcefully challenging a war involving thousands of U.S. troops. "Congress is not shy usually about attempting to create problems for a president when a war becomes...

  Biden: Shove It Down His Throat

WASHINGTON - A defiant Democratic-controlled Senate passed legislation Thursday that would require the start of troop withdrawals from Iraq by Oct. 1, propelling Congress toward a historic veto showdown with President Bush on the war. The 51-46 vote was largely along party lines, and like House passage of the same bill a day earlier, fell far short of the two-thirds margin needed to overturn the president's threatened veto. Neverthe less, the legislation is the first binding challenge on the war that Democrats have managed to send to Bush since they reclaimed control of both houses of Congress in January.

From last night’s Special Report with Brit Hume: —On Harry Reid and Iraq— MORT KONDRACKE: But, you know, you have a dynamic going where everybody is ratcheting up their rhetoric and ratcheting up their position or making it more [confrontational], and I wonder whether there’s going to be a deal reached here. If there’s not a deal reached, the troops don’t get their money. If troops don’t get their money then they begin hurting as of a certain point. And I got to say, you know, if al Qaeda is watching American television, watching what’s going on in the United...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Democratic lawmakers voted on Wednesday to subpoena Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to testify about administration justifications for the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. On a party-line vote of 21-10, the House of Representatives' Oversight and Government Reform Committee directed Rice to appear before the panel next month. Republicans accused Democrats of a "fishing expedition." But Democrats said they want Rice to explain what she knew about administration's warnings, later proven false, that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger for nuclear arms.

The Star Tribune has already removed Curt Brown's page-one Star Tribune article on the coming of Sharia to the Minneapolis Community and Technical College from public access. Here is the paragraph I quoted from the article in ("Sharia in Minnesota"): "Minneapolis Community and Technical College is poised to become the state's first public school to install a foot-washing basin to help the school's 500 Muslim students perform pre-prayer rituals. "We want to be welcoming," MCTC President Phil Davis said, noting a student was hurt trying to wash in a regular sink." I predicted:The Star Tribune can get unusually exercised about...

Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama said Tuesday that America needs to ask Israel to help change the status quo in its conflict with the Palestinians, the only candidate at a National Jewish Democratic Council conference to suggest that there is any onus on the Jewish state when it comes to making peace with its neighbors. "The United States government and an Obama presidency cannot ask Israel to take risks with respect to its security," he told the crowd of Democratic activists and campaign contributors. "But it can ask Israel to say that it is still possible for us to allow...

House Speaker to Skip Gen. David Petraeus' Briefing on the Progress of the Troop EscalationAs the House and Senate prepare to vote this week on the final conference report on the $124 billion troop funding bill — which would also mandate that U.S. combat troops begin withdrawing from Iraq on October 1 at the latest — Gen. David Petraeus is scheduled to come to the Hill tomorrow to brief lawmakers on the progress of the recent troop escalation. ABC News has learned, however, that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., will not attend the briefing. "She can't make the briefing tomorrow,"...

WASHINGTON — Rep. Dennis Kucinich introduced three articles of impeachment against Dick Cheney on Tuesday, saying the vice president lied to America to get into a war in Iraq. Kucinich, a 2008 presidential candidate, said Cheney misled the nation about Iraq's having weapons of mass destruction; he had been deceitful about a nexus between Iraq and Al Qaeda and was being aggressive toward Iran "absent any real threat" from the Islamic Republic.

Capitol Hill Washington, D.C. THE VICE PRESIDENT: I usually avoid press comment when I'm up here, but I felt so strongly about what Senator Reid said in the last couple of days, that I thought it was appropriate that I come out today and make a statement that I think needs to be made. I thought his speech yesterday was unfortunate, that his comments were uninformed and misleading. Senator Reid has taken many positions on Iraq. He has threatened that if the President vetoes the current pending supplemental legislation, that he will send up Senator Russ Feingold's bill to de-fund...

Come September, an Arabic-language public secondary school is slated to open its doors in Brooklyn. The New York City Department of Education says the Khalil Gibran International Academy, serving grades six through 12, will boast a "multicultural curriculum and intensive Arabic language instruction." This appears to be a marvelous idea, for New York and the country need native-born Arabic speakers. They have a role in the military, diplomacy, intelligence, the courts, the press, the academy, and many other institutions — and teaching languages to the young is the ideal route to polyglotism. As someone who spent years learning Arabic, I...

WASHINGTON - A tough U.S. Marine stationed in one of the most hostile areas of Iraq has a message for Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid: "We need to stay here and help rebuild." In raw and emotional language from the bloody front lines, Cpl. Tyler Rock, of the 1st Battalion, 6th Marines, skewered Reid for being far removed from the patriotism and progress in Iraq. "Yeah, and I got a quote for that [expletive] Harry Reid. These families need us here," Rock vented in an e-mail to Pat Dollard, a Hollywood agent-turned-war reporter who posted the comment on his Web...