69 percent: Iraqis who say U.S. troop presence in Iraq is worsening security.
$390,000: Average annual cost of each U.S. soldier in Iraq.
$250,000: U.S. cost per minute of Iraq war.
17 percent: Rate at which Warren Buffet’s income was taxed last year.
30 percent: Rate at which Buffet’s receptionist’s income was taxed last year.
37 percent: Out-of-wedlock births among U.S. births in 2005.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
If everybody who runs for president now must face his own Swift-Boating — heaven forbid — Rudy Giuliani’s surely will come from New York City firefighters and families of Sept. 11 victims. They have a new 13-minute video criticizing the former New York City mayor’s handling of the terrorist attacks, the heart of his campaign. "He’s running on his 9/11 leadership and it was lacking — and there was none," says Jim Riches, a deputy fire chief and a father of a Sept. 11 victim, on the video. Giuliani’s campaign is trying to counter the charges with flattering Sept. 11-related testimony from others.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
It wasn’t too surprising that the House Appropriations Committee defeated attempts Thursday to remove the 2003 Tiahrt amendment restricting access to federal gun data. The gun lobby has great influence in Washington, D.C., even with the Democratic takeover of Congress. But at least the committee approved language clarifying that police could access the data, which 225 mayors and 34 police organizations said was important in fighting crime and protecting cops.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
“I count one, two, three, four, five, six, seven Democrats here today. If anybody’s watching C-SPAN 3 or if the staffs would notify Republican senators, I could use some company,” said Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., the lone Republican for most of the Judiciary Committee’s Wednesday hearing on the U.S. attorneys’ firings.
Meanwhile, a House Judiciary subcommittee voted Thursday to seek contempt charges against former White House counsel Harriet Miers, who — following President Bush’s orders — refused to appear at a hearing on the firings.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Parents, teachers and librarians have praised J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books for awakening young people to the joy of recreational reading. But federal research shows that joy hasn’t had a lasting impact on reading habits.
Despite the huge success of the series — the seventh and final installment, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” is due July 21 — the percentage of young people who read for fun continues to drop significantly as children get older, at almost exactly the same rate as before Harry Potter came along, the New York Times reported.
“It got millions of kids to read a long and reasonably complex series of books,” said Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (who will be in Wichita next week). “The trouble is that one Harry Potter novel every few years is not enough to reverse the decline in reading.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Lady Bird Johnson, who died this week at age 94, was a shy, unassuming woman. But as LBJ’s first lady, she became one of the most powerful environmentalists ever to occupy the White House.
Lady Bird almost single-handedly changed the nation’s landscape in the 1960s through her roadside wildflower program, the forerunner of today’s many highway greenscapes and urban beautification efforts.
Many people forget how ugly, littered and cluttered with billboards U.S. roadways were before Lady Bird began her push for a more scenic landscape. She was the first president’s wife to lobby Congress, and was a driving force behind passage of the 1965 Highway Beautification Act.
“My heart found its home long ago in the beauty, mystery, order and disorder of the flowering earth,” Lady Bird wrote a few years ago. “I wanted future generations to be able to savor what I had all my life.”
She left America a more beautiful place. How many public servants can claim as much?
Posted by Randy Scholfield