Giving Credit to Some Republicans, Democrats: Lost and Confused and The News You Aren't Getting.

I have to give credit where credit is due. Four Republicans on the Senate's Armed Services Committee joined Democrats and voted down President Bush's proposals to let detainees be tortured and not allow them to see the information regarding their cases.

The four Republicans are John McCain (AZ), John W. Warner (Va.), Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) and Susan Collins (ME).

Along with all the Democrats in the Senate, there should be enough Republican support to keep this disaster from happening.

A Senate committee rebuffed the personal entreaties of President Bush yesterday,
rejecting his proposed strategies for interrogating and trying enemy combatants
and approving alternative legislation that he has strenuously opposed.

The bipartisan vote sets up a legislative showdown on an issue that GOP
strategists had hoped would unite their party and serve as a cudgel against
Democrats in the Nov. 7 elections. Instead, Bush and congressional Republican
leaders are at loggerheads with a dissident group led by Sen. John McCain (R),
who says the president's approach would jeopardize the safety of U.S. troops and
intelligence operatives.

45 Democrat Congressmen joined Republicans in passing a bill to make us think that they are actually doing something about lobby reform. This bill is a smoke screen to keep from coming up with any real lobby reform.

The House voted yesterday to shed more light on narrow-interest tax and spending
legislation called earmarks, an incremental step toward openness that ended the
prospect for a more sweeping overhaul of federal lobbying laws this year.

"This bill represents the death of lobby reform," said Rep. David R. Obey (D-Wis.), a former chairman of the House
Appropriations Committee.

Obey called the measure a "trivial pursuit," saying it would do little to
alter federal spending while blocking a serious updating of federal ethics laws.
"The majority has labored long and produced a mouse," Obey added, "or a fig leaf
at best."

Democratic leaders complained about the earmarks change yesterday. Rep. Louise M. Slaughter (D-N.Y.) called it "shameful" and "a
sham." She said that the measure would not end the abuse of the earmarking
process and was filled with loopholes that would still permit anonymous projects
to be inserted into law without public scrutiny.

Here's the 45 Democrats that think you're too stupid to know what's going on.

Brian Baird, John Barrow, Melissa Bean, Dan Boren, Leonard Boswell, Sherrod Brown, Ben Cardin, Jim Cooper, Henry Cuellar, Lincoln Davis, Artur Davis, Susan Davis, Peter DeFazio, Lloyd Doggett, Chet Edwards, Anna Eshoo, Bob Filner, Harold Ford, Bart Gordon, Jane Harman, Chris Van Hollen, Rush Holt, Darlene Hooley, Steve Israel, William Jefferson, Ron Kind, James Langevin, Stephen Lynch, Carolyn Maloney, Jim Matheson, Carolyn McCarthy, Mike McIntyre, Martin Meehan, Charles Melancon, Juanita Millender-McDonald, Earl Pomeroy, John Salazar, Brad Sherman, John Spratt, John Tanner, Ellen Tauscher, Gene Taylor, John Tierney, Maxine Waters, David Wu

Dana Milbank at the Washington Post shows us that, it's not just that Democrats can't stay on message, they can't even find a message. The Republican are trying to hand us Capitol Hill and we can't even figure out how to take it. This is starting to get embarrassing.

Among the party's campaign slogans this year: "Culture of Corruption," "Culture
of Cronyism," "Do-Nothing Congress," "Rubber-Stamp Congress," "Together, We Can Do Better,"
"Together, America Can Do Better" and, most recently, "Six for '06".

For those keeping score at home, Democrats arrived at "New Direction"
yesterday by downgrading one of the "Six for '06" issues (health care) and
upgrading three others (honesty, civility and fiscal discipline), for a total of
eight items on the contents page.

And here's the first four on the list of the ten big news stories you aren't hearing.

1. The Feds and the Media Muddy the Debate Over Internet Freedom
The Supreme Court ruled that giant cable companies aren't required to share their wires with other Internet service providers. The issue was misleadingly framed as an argument over regulation, when it's really a case of the Federal Communications Commission and Congress talking about giving cable and telephone companies the freedom to control supply and content - a decision that could have them playing favorites and forcing consumers to pay to get information and services that currently are free.

2. Halliburton Charged With Selling Nuclear Technology to Iran
Halliburton, the notorious U.S. energy company, sold key nuclear-reactor components to a private Iranian oil company called Oriental Oil Kish as recently as 2005, using offshore subsidiaries to circumvent U.S. sanctions. The story is particularly juicy because Vice President Dick Cheney, who now claims to want to stop Iran from getting nukes, was president of Halliburton in the mid-1990s, at which time he may have advocated business dealings with Iran, in violation of U.S. law.

3. World Oceans in Extreme Danger
Governments deny global warming is happening as they rush to map the ocean floor in the hopes of claiming rights to oil, gas, gold, diamonds, copper, zinc and the planet's last pristine fishing grounds. Researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2005 found "the first clear evidence that the world ocean is growing warmer," including the discovery "that the top half-mile of the ocean has warmed dramatically in the past 40 years as the result of humaninduced greenhouse gases."

4. Hunger and Homelessness Increasing in the United States
As hunger and homelessness rise in the United States, the Bush administration plans to get rid of a data source that supports this embarrassing reality, a survey that's been used to improve state and federal programs for retired and low-income Americans.
In 2003, the Bush Administration tried to whack the Bureau of Labor Statistics report on mass layoffs and in 2004 and 2005 attempted to drop the bureau's questions on the hiring and firing of women from its employment data.