Americans may soon look around Iraq and wonder where everyone went. Great Britain announced that it plans to cut its force in Iraq in half, down to 2,500 troops. And there is no guarantee that even those few remaining will be around by the end of next year.
Even before this British withdrawal, the total number of "coalition of the willing" troops had dropped from about 50,000 in 2003 to less than 12,000 now — or about 7 percent of the foreign troops in Iraq.
Posted by Kristin Mehler
Republican voters trying to figure out Fred Thompson will get a better perspective this afternoon, as the former Tennessee senator and "Law & Order" prosecutor joins the lineup at the sixth GOP presidential debate for 2008. Maybe this assessment from President Nixon, excavated from the White House tapes by ABC, will help, too:
"Oh, s—, that kid," Nixon said upon learning that Thompson had been appointed a Watergate counsel. "He’s dumb as hell. . . . He isn’t very smart, is he? . . . But he’s friendly."
Posted by Rhonda Holman
America was not founded as a "Christian nation," despite what many conservative Christians claim today, wrote Jon Meacham, the editor of Newsweek, in a New York Times commentary.
"The founders were not anti-religion," he wrote. "Many of them were faithful in their personal lives, and in their public language they evoked God. They grounded the founding principle of the nation — that all men are created equal — in the divine. But they wanted faith to be one thread in the country’s tapestry, not the whole tapestry."
Meacham cited several early documents and actions by past presidents that supported religious liberty and rejected an exclusive Christian view. For example, the treaty of Tripoli of 1797, which the Senate unanimously approved, stated that "the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
New York state had an 8 percent decline in heart attacks in the year after its 2003 indoor public smoking ban went into effect, according to a study released by New York health authorities. Hospitals admitted 3,813 fewer cardiac patients than would have been expected in 2004 without the clean air law.
And in Scotland, a nationwide ban on public smoking led to a 20 percent decline in heart attack admissions of nonsmokers in the 10 months after it went into effect, according to another recent study.
The evidence keeps piling up that smoking bans deliver major public health benefits.
Posted by Randy Scholfield
It’s been a rough few days in a rough year for Park City, which saw the best chance for a reopening of Wild West World expire Friday and saw Wichita Greyhound Park close for good Saturday. Now, Thomas Etheredge’s failed theme park will be sold off in pieces, leaving creditors and the community to ponder an expert’s assessment that "there were just many, many poor decisions that went into the planning of that park." The 18-year-old dog track’s closing was only a matter of time once Sedgwick County voters failed to allow it to add slot machines. But don’t count out Park City, which has seen other kinds of new economic activity this year along the I-135 corridor.
Posted by Rhonda Holman