Hard to believe, but two years into it, the second phase of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on prewar intelligence remains incomplete. Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., told The Christian Science Monitor that Democrats “keep moving the goalposts and asking for more information.” Not surprisingly, committee member Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., put the blame on Republicans: “It’s like the marquee on an old movie house that always reads: ‘Coming soon.’ ” Roberts now expects the report to be finished next month.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
President Bush isn’t known for his farsighted environmental decisions, but his creation Thursday of the world’s largest marine sanctuary in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands is a truly historic conservation achievement. The new marine park will protect 140,000 square miles of pristine coral reefs and remote, uninhabited atolls teeming with more than 7,000 species, one-quarter of them found nowhere else on Earth. The area is known as an important breeding ground for green sea turtles and also is home to the Hawaiian monk seal, an endangered species.
“It’s the ocean equivalent of Yellowstone, Yosemite and the Grand Canyon all rolled into one,” said Joshua Reichert, environmental program director of the Pew Charitable Trusts.
Rep. Ed Case, D-Hawaii, called the move “the most revolutionary act by any president, any administration, in terms of marine resources.”
The park is a recognition of what the administration has tended to discount in places such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska: the idea that biodiversity and critical habitat have their own intrinsic value, apart from any direct commercial benefit to humans.
Posted by Randy Scholfield
It has been red meat for die-hard Bush bashers, but many Americans could sympathize with both the offender and the offended in this story: After his Rose Garden press conference Wednesday, the president learned that a Los Angeles Times reporter he’d teased about wearing sunglasses has the degenerative vision condition Stargardt’s disease and is legally blind. “Are you going to ask that question with shades on?” is how the president started the exchange with Peter Wallsten. By day’s end, the gaffer in chief had called Wallstein to apologize. For his part, Wallstein said: “I wish people would talk instead about my question. It was a worthwhile question” — one related to Karl Rove’s unindictment, which Bush wouldn’t discuss.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
