Today's Washington Post makes it clear that Sen. Trent Lott (Miss.) and Minority Leader John Boehner (Ohio) are either leading Republicans and our troops into an Iraq death trap deliberately, or are again being misled by President Bush, who has zero intention of any evaluation of Iraq policy this fall, or even this year, as they suggest.

Let's quote General Odierno verbatim from the Post today. "What I am trying to do is get until April so we can decide whether to keep it going or not," he said.

Let's be crystal clear. This should no longer be called a surge, which is not a description, but a deception, about what is truly going on.

This is a long-term military escalation that will not be reevaluated in September, as Republican leaders claim. It will not be reevaluated in December. It will not be reevaluated until April of 2008, at which point Bush may well want to continue the escalation far beyond April 2008. Read more...

I recently read CBS correspondent Byron Pitts’s admission that he was found to be “functionally illiterate” when he was 12 years old. This propelled me to write about something dear to my heart: education. I have always emphasized that everyone should get a good education and become financially secure. While this journey may be easy for some, it can be more difficult for others.

Statistics, in America’s capital, show that a majority of fourth- and eighth-graders are failing to read or do math at basic levels. It is estimated that four in five schools are not meeting achievement goals under the federal No Child Left Behind law and only 43 percent of students graduate from high school in five years. Low voter turnout for school board elections and sagging test scores have generated a movement for mayors to take control of schools in their respective cities.

One must ask: Are the mayors equipped to take on the communities, the high turnover rates associated with school boards and the superintendents who report to them? Is this takeover contributing to our children’s future? Read more...

A television commercial in the works by VoteVets.org, challenging the notion that President Bush listens to commanders on the ground, will feature Maj. Gens. John Batiste and Paul Eaton. Batiste and Eaton were those very commanders on the ground, and their words will inform voters in districts and states represented by Republicans that, indeed, Bush did not heed their advice about the right strategy for Iraq. These words, from the non-political military, will be hard to forget.

In a staggering letter Eaton wrote Bush last week following Bush's veto of the emergency war spending bill passed by Congress, Eaton said the bill Bush vetoed represented "a course of action that is long overdue." He accused Bush of ignoring the advice of his military experts and noted that a number of generals, including Gen. Eric Shineski, who "did not tell you what you wanted to hear," were forced out of their jobs. Eaton expressed respect for the office Bush holds but said he "could not sit idly by as you told the American people today that your veto was based on the recommendations of military men. Your administration ignored the advice of our military's finest minds before, and I see no evidence that you are listening to them now." Read more...

It was a regal gathering at the White House. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II of England was received by His Majesty King George II of the United States.

As seen on national television, it was all glorious pomp and circumstance, except for one untidy fact: She’s a real queen, while he’s just a wannabe king.

Yet he acts like he really is a king. He disdains the common people. He ignores the will of members of Parliament, or Congress. He decides which laws he will obey and which ones he will not. In fact, ever since Sept. 11, 2001, he acts as if he is above the law. Read more...

The Washington Post reports today: “Astronomers have spotted a cataclysmic explosion that marked the death of a huge, distant star in a blast five times as bright and powerful as any they had seen previously. They said yesterday that a similar fate may be imminent for a star in Earth’s galactic neighborhood.

“The size and energy of the newly recorded blast, 240 million light-years away, have already begun to transform scientific understanding of how especially large stars explode, and have left awestruck researchers concerned — and a little excited — about what might happen to the similarly enormous and unstable star closer to home.”

Was this caused by global warming? Read more...

Two interesting articles today about environmentalism — not just as a feel-good weekend activity, but as a way of life, a religion and, yes folks, a rationale for birth control. Can Al Gore purchasing carbon emission credits from Planned Parenthood be too far in the future? No, I dare say not.

"John Guillebaud, co-chairman of OPT and emeritus professor of family planning at University College London, said: 'The effect on the planet of having one child less is an order of magnitude greater than all these other things we might do, such as switching off lights.The greatest thing anyone in Britain could do to help the future of the planet would be to have one less child.'

"In his latest comments, the academic says that when couples are planning a family they should be encouraged to think about the environmental consequences. Read more...

I have never been one to bash the French. I like their wine, I like their cheese, and these days, I am starting to like their politics.

With the election of Nicolas Sarkozy, the French are starting to drop all the Socialist baggage that has bedeviled their economy for decades. And if you consider the victory of German Chancellor Angela Merkel last year and the likely strong showing for the Tories in the next election in Great Britain, it seems that the center-right in Europe is on a roll.

Sarkozy ran as a tax cutter, a spending cutter and a hard-liner on illegal immigration. If those ideas are popular in France, surely they should be popular here in the United States. Read more...

More than half (57%) of voters in our latest Quick Poll! thought Rudy Giuliani, of all the leading GOP candidates, had done most damage to his presidential chances in last week's debate. John McCain was the choice of 34% and Mitt Romney scored just 9%.

Some commentators disliked the question, seeing it as biased because of its assumption that damage had been done, and also because there was no similar poll after the Democrats' debate. The question arose, however, because of widespread dissatisfaction among Republicans with the candidates' performances. Some said McCain was too scripted, others said Giuliani gradually came to pieces. There was no similar dispute after the Democrats' debate; it was widely agreed that the worst flub that night was Barack Obama's answer to a question about what he would do in the event of 911-type terrorist attack on the US.

The choice of Giuliani as the most undermined by the debate accords the view of our pundit, Dick Morris, that the debate organizers robber the former New York Mayor of significant air time.

As of last Friday morning, the day after the first GOP presidential debate, the breathlessness over the potential candidacy of former Sen. Fred Thompson (Tenn.) continued, full steam. Would he announce in Orange County, home to the birth of the Reagan Revolution?

But Thompson reportedly didn't wow them at the Lincoln Club, as expected, according to the mixed reviews. Thompson hit the right notes, talking about bipartisanship and strong leadership, but Bob Novak weighed in with what at this critical juncture is the Kiss of Death, calling Thompson's performance there "ordinary." Read more...