“This most recent veto threat by the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence reveals the shamelessness of the Administration’s approach to FISA reform.  

The President has repeatedly said that Americans lives will be sacrificed if Congress does not make major changes to FISA.  

But he has once again vowed to veto any FISA bill that does not grant retroactive immunity. So if we take him at his word, the President is willing to let Americans die to protect the phone companies.  

That is a position that should outrage every American.  

The President’s insistence on immunity as a precondition for any FISA reform is yet another example of his contempt for honest dialogue and for the rule of law.”

“I am convinced Sen. McCain is not a conservative, and in fact, has gone out of his way to stick his thumb in the eyes of those who are … I cannot, and will not, vote for Sen. John McCain, as a matter of conscience,” he said in a statement on Tuesday. 

“I believe this general election will offer the worst choices for president in my lifetime. I certainly can’t vote for Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama based on their virulently anti-family policy positions. If these are the nominees in November, I simply will not cast a ballot for president for the first time in my life,” he said. 

Dobson said he was just expressing his views as a private citizen — but many of his millions of followers in the evangelical community, who listen to his radio show and read his books, will take it as a signal to do the same.

John Yoo publicly argued there is no law that could prevent the President from ordering the torture of a child of a suspect in custody – including by crushing that child’s testicles.  

This came out in response to a question in a December 1st debate in Chicago with Notre Dame professor and international human rights scholar Doug Cassel. 

What is particularly chilling and revealing about this is that John Yoo was a key architect post-9/11 Bush Administration legal policy. As a deputy assistant to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, John Yoo authored a number of legal memos arguing for unlimited presidential powers to order torture of captive suspects, and to declare war anytime, anywhere, and on anyone the President deemed a threat.

Certainly, the economy is teetering on the edge of recession. Government statisticians reported on Jan. 30 that gross domestic product, dragged down by the declining home market, grew at an anemic 0.6% in the final three months of 2007. The 2.2% rate for all of 2007 was the worst performance in five years.  . . .  

Yet inflation is also running hot. The GDP report has the prices of goods paid for by consumers during the fourth quarter increasing by 3.8%, up sharply from the 1.8% pace of the previous three months. The cost of living as measured by the more widely followed consumer price index rose by a steep 4.1% last year—its highest rate in 17 years—while in the last quarter of last year the CPI surged by 5.6%. No matter how it's measured, consumer inflation is well above the Fed's target range of 1% to 2%.

When Mr. Bush took the oath of office in 2001, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected $5.6 trillion in federal budget surpluses through 2011. Through most of his tenure, the president managed to have his guns, butter and tax cuts without creating enormous budget deficits, at least as measured by their share of GDP. One reason was a surprise increase in federal tax receipts from corporations over the last couple of years. Now those revenues have flattened out and the economy is teetering on the edge of recession. 

Mr. Bush and Congress, meanwhile, increased federal spending by 25% between 2001 and 2007, adjusted for inflation, according to Brian Riedl of the conservative Heritage Foundation. By Sept. 30, the U.S. will have spent almost $800 billion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A new Medicare prescription-drug benefit for seniors costs almost $80 billion a year. Mr. Bush's signature tax cuts, in 2001 and 2003, sapped tax receipts and sliced the projected budget surplus by about $1.7 trillion through 2011, according to the CBO.

House Bill No. 282, which was introduced this month [in the Mississippi legislature], says: Any food establishment to which this section applies shall not be allowed to serve food to any person who is obese, based on criteria prescribed by the State Department of Health after consultation with the Mississippi Council on Obesity Prevention and Management established under Section 41-101-1 or its successor. The State Department of Health shall prepare written materials that describe and explain the criteria for determining whether a person is obese, and shall provide those materials to all food establishments to which this section applies. A food establishment shall be entitled to rely on the criteria for obesity in those written materials when determining whether or not it is allowed to serve food to any person. 

The proposal would allow health inspectors to yank the permit from any restaurant that "repeatedly" feeds extremely overweight customers. 

The bill, written by GOP Rep. W. T. Mayhall Jr., was referred to the Judiciary and Public Health committees, but The Jackson Free Press doesn't expect it to garner much support in the statehouse. 

About two-third of Mississippians are considered overweight or obese, according to a recent analysis of federal health data.

 When the subject returned to waterboarding, there was especially tough questioning by Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, who had initially championed Mr. Mukasey’s nomination and has sometimes defended his performance when other Democrats have not.  

The senator appeared exasperated by Mr. Mukasey’s refusal to say whether waterboarding was torture and should be outlawed, despite the attorney general’s statement during his confirmation hearings that he found the technique “repugnant.” 

“I find it hard to understand how you personally, when asked for advice, would not be able to say that something that’s repugnant should be outlawed,” Mr. Schumer said. “You said it’s repugnant. I don’t understand how you can now say, Well, I have to ask a whole lot of other people.”

I AM voting today to support Michael B. Mukasey for attorney general for one critical reason: the Department of Justice — once the crown jewel among our government institutions — is a shambles and is in desperate need of a strong leader, committed to depoliticizing the agency’s operations. . . .  

There is virtually universal agreement, even from those who oppose Judge Mukasey, that he would do a good job in turning the department around. My colleagues who oppose his confirmation have gone out of their way to praise his character and qualifications. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, for one, commended Judge Mukasey as “a brilliant lawyer, a distinguished jurist and by all accounts a good man.” 

Most important, Judge Mukasey has demonstrated his fidelity to the rule of law, saying that if he believed the president were violating the law he would resign. 

Should we reject Judge Mukasey, President Bush has said he would install an acting, caretaker attorney general who could serve for the rest of his term without the advice and consent of the Senate. To accept such an unaccountable attorney general, I believe, would be to surrender the department to the extreme ideology of Vice President Dick Cheney and his chief of staff, David Addington. All the work we did to pressure Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to resign would be undone in a moment. 

I deeply oppose this administration’s opaque policy on the use of torture — its refusal to reveal what forms of interrogation it considers acceptable. In particular, I believe that the cruel and inhumane technique of waterboarding is not only repugnant but also illegal under current laws and conventions. I also support Congress’s efforts to pass additional measures that would explicitly ban this and other forms of torture. I voted for Senator Ted Kennedy’s anti-torture amendment in 2006 and am a co-sponsor of his similar bill in this Congress. 

Judge Mukasey’s refusal to state that waterboarding is illegal was unsatisfactory to me and many other members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. But Congress is now considering — and I hope we will soon pass — a law that would explicitly ban the use of waterboarding and other abusive interrogation techniques. And I am confident that Judge Mukasey would enforce that law.

Pollster	Dates	N/Pop	Clinton	Edwards	Obama	Undecided
Rasmussen	1/29/2008	807 LV	43	9	40	4
SurveyUSA	1/27/2008	888 LV	49	9	38	2
CNN/LATimes/ Politico	1/23-27/08	690 LV	49	14	32	4
USA Today/Gallup	1/23-26/08	779 LV	47	10	35	6

State	Type	District-level	At-large	PLEO	Total Pledged	DLD/ALD
		Delegates	Delegates	Delegates	Delegates
						CLINTON	OBAMA
Alabama	primary	34	11	7	52	23	28
Alaska	caucus	8	3	2	13	7	6
American Samoa	primary		3		3	2	1
Arizona	primary	37	12	7	56	32	24
Arkansas	primary	22	8	5	35	23	12
California	primary	241	81	48	370	202	168
Colorado	caucus	36	12	5	55	27	28
Connecticut	primary	33	11	6	48	26	22
Delaware	primary	10	3	2	15	10	5
Democrats Abroad	primary		6	1	7	2	5
Georgia	primary	57