Pelosi Threatens to Sue President Over War Funding Bill if He Vetoes It Again: Congress Will Get It's Clock Cleaned if She Does

Here we go again.

President Bush has been threatening to veto a two-month war spending bill that Congress is floating around to members, and House Speaker Pelosi is threatening to take him to court over it, saying the President is overstepping the separation of powers.

I hope she does, because she will find out that it is Congress that is violating the separation of powers in this instance.

This is an attempt by Pelosi to violate Constitutional procedures by denying the President the right to veto the bill, and her own failure to get enough members of the House to override the Presidential veto.

She will ultimately fail to override the nuts and bolts of the Constitution.

Looking Forward: Pentagon Needs to Carefully Plan Withdrawal of U.S. Forces, or We'll Lose a Ton of People on the Last Day

The recent clashes between Congress and the White House over withdrawal dates for U.S. forces from Iraq have me worried that the government may err on how they go about actually doing it, when the time comes to leave Iraq.

One nightmare scenario that I can see happening is that the U.S. military will be on the move under cover of darkness to their pre-invasion positions in Kuwait, as well as heading for Saudi Arabia. No one will realize what exactly is going on, until one of the networks put two and two together and announce that the U.S. pull-out is underway.

When it goes on the air, you can bet that al-Qaeda and many insurgent groups will head to the American withdrawal routes and start staging ambushes.

The same kind of thing happened to the Soviets when they withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989; they lost a lot of soldiers to snipers and ambushes; Soviet President Gorbachev bitterly complained that they were leaving and they shouldn't be shot at, but the mujahideen didn't care. Bullets and bombs continued to hit the Red Army as they headed back into Soviet territory.

Hopefully the Pentagon is looking at this carefully and determining how they will get our troops out. I think a gradual quiet withdrawal is the way to go, instead of having tens of thousands of vehicles and 140,000 troops on the move at the same time. That's a disaster waiting to happen.

We don't need tons of casualties on the last day simply because the withdrawal of troops from Iraq was planned in the same way as the occupation was. We don't need to go there.

Now that the "Emergency" Military Bill is Dead, Can They Please Dispense With the Nonsense and Pass a Funding Bill?

Congress and President Bush both got their two cents in when Congress passed a doomed "emergency" spending bill on the military and their pork projects, and President Bush vetoed it.

Now that the hubris from Round 1 is done, will they please get off their lazy fat asses and pass the original bill as it was written, and without non-military not-emergency earmarks that Pelosi & company used to bribe members of their own party?

The House in particular had better get a move on; their job approval ratings are virtually the same as President Bush's, and every House seat is in play in 2008. Thirty-three Class II U.S. Senate seats are also up for grabs. If they don't do their jobs, they'll be joining President Bush in looking at new career options after 2008.

The military has already begun to make cuts in their equipment maintenance and repair apparatus; this is impacting how quickly used and battle-damaged equipment makes it back onto the battlefield. The troops are relying on this hardware to complete their missions and to keep them alive.

Thousands of the new family of mine & IED-resistant armored vehicles (MRAP) have not been shipped over yet either; many more are halted on the production lines because the funding is part of this hot-potato spending bill.

A mine-resistant Cougar vehicle being tested.

Congress and the President must make haste and table everything else for another time. They shouldn't allow the military to run out of money and not provide the troops with the tools that they need.

Get it done, NOW.

Tenet's New Book: Telling Everyone What He Should Have Said When He Was CIA Director

Former CIA Director George Tenet went on a media blitz over the weekend, promoting his new book which blasts the Bush Administration of how it handled 9/11, and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It looks like an exercise in shifting blame to others; most notably Vice-President Cheney.

For instance, he was very aggressive in his book and on his media blitz about his "slam dunk" comment being taken out of context with regards to Saddam Hussein's possessing chemical and biological weapons.

For someone in such an important position, such as the directorship of the Central Intelligence Agency, he should have been very wary about using a term like "slam dunk" in ANY context.

He had the ear of the President from 9/11 to the end of his tenure at CIA, and he should have gone after the incorrect political interpretation of his agency's intelligence data. But instead he played it safe and went with the flow, which helped to lock our nation's future with an Iraq that may not hold together. And by saying "went with the flow" I meant he didn't do enough to get around administrative roadblocks that were there.

And now he has a book deal, and is telling everyone what he should have been SCREAMING at Cheney, Rove, and the other hawks during those meetings. Too little, too late.

What a shame.