by Frank James
A quick guided tour of some of the morning’s most important or interesting, or both, Washington-related stories.
The Army made its recruiting goals for the for the 12-month period ended in September by increasing the percentage of recruits it accepted with criminal convictions and without high school diplomas.
The Marine Corps is pushing to remove its Marines from Iraq, leaving the Army to continue operations there while the Marines would redeploy to Afghanistan.
President Bush said he wouldn’t sign a new surveillance bill being considered by Congress unless it contained the kind of flexibility that’s in the legislation currently in force but due to expire in February. Norman Hsu, the disgraced campaign fundraiser for Sen. Hillary Clinton, had a fondness for wine and Clinton memorabilia, with federal agents finding 180 bottles of expensive wines worth around $100,000 and a saxophone autographed by President Bill Clinton in the jailed felon’s apartment.
The fight between Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney over the presidential line-item veto (Romney supports it and Giuliani, as New York City mayor successfully sued President Clinton over it) is really a fight for the fiscal conservatives More Top Picks Usb Drive
Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he supported spending billions of dollars to expand the military services, particularly the Army but that the military needed to learn the lessons of Iraq and prepare well for unconventional war as well.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is scheduled to introduce his health care plan Thursday which will place a priority on containing health care costs over insuring the uninsured.
An analysis of the risky high-rate mortgage loans that have led to the credit crisis in the U.S. indicates that such mortgages were made in affluent suburbs as well as small towns alike, affecting families across the income scale and that the fallout could be far wider than just the sub-prime market of less-than-credit worthy home buyers.
The Justice Department hasn’t spent any of the $8 million Congress gave it for DNA innocence testing of the claims by prisoners who claim they didn’t commit the crimes for which they were convicted while it has spent $214 million to collect DNA from prisoners for a crime database.