Costly Words: 'I Don't Like President Bush'  —  Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson was back home in Dallas on April 28 giving a speech to minority real estate folks and offering a most interesting take on how business is done in Washington.

New U.N. Rights Group Includes Six Nations With Poor Records  —  UNITED NATIONS, May 9 — Six nations with poor human rights records were among those elected to the new Human Rights Council on Tuesday, although notorious violators that had belonged to the predecessor Human Rights Commission …

The GOP's Bankruptcy of Ideas  —  The emerging Republican game plan for 2006 is, at bottom, a tautology: If the Democrats retake Congress it will mean, well, that the Democrats retake Congress.  (Cue lightning bolt and ominous clap of thunder.)  Karl Rove and his minions have plumb run out of issues to campaign on.

EXCLUSIVE: Presidential Plans Found In Trash  —  How much do you think Osama bin Laden would pay to know exactly when and where the President was traveling, and who was with him?  Turns out, he wouldn't have had to pay a dime.  All he had to do was go through the trash early Tuesday morning.

J. Michael Luttig Resigns From Appeals Court  —  Appeals court Judge J. Michael Luttig, a leading conservative jurist and a short-list Bush administration candidate for the Supreme Court, announced today that he is resigning from the bench to serve as senior vice president and general counsel of the Boeing Co.

Bush Backs Brother Jeb for White House  —  President Bush suggested Wednesday that he'd like to see his family's White House legacy continue, perhaps with his younger brother Jeb as the chief executive.  —  The president said Florida Gov. Jeb Bush is well-suited for another office and would make "a great president."

Mary Cheney calls John Kerry a "son of a bitch" for using gays for political gain, but not a word about George Bush or dear old dad doing the same  —  Welcome to Mary Cheney's million-dollar closet.  It's still a bit stuffy in here as a lot of things haven't been totally cleared out.

FREE ADVICE FOR PRESIDENT BUSH  —  The President hasn't asked for my advice, but here it is anyway.  —  You know how the Democrats are always after you to admit that you made a mistake?  You've wisely ignored them; they don't have your interests at heart, and the policies they're talking about weren't mistakes.

Is It Genocide?  —  Before we start dropping bombs, we should first ask whether the situation in Darfur is in fact a genocide.  —  As everyone knows by now, terrible atrocities have been and are continuing to be committed against the civilian population of Darfur in Sudan.

The Year of the Black Republican?  —  GOP Targets Democratic Constituency in 3 High-Profile Races  —  COLUMBUS, Ohio — When J. Kenneth Blackwell took the stage here on May 2 to claim the Republican nomination for governor, he became something more than his party's standard-bearer in a bellwether state.

It's Only $300 Billion  —  For the United States, the cost of the Iraq war will soon exceed the anticipated cost of the Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement designed to control greenhouse gases.  For both, the cost is somewhere in excess of $300 billion.

Celebrity pundits are on their way out  —  In my experience, there's no bigger bunch of crybabies in American  —  public life than the fops and courtiers of our Washington press corps.  If Comedy Central satirist Stephen Colbert's performance at the White House Correspondents' Dinner did nothing else, it surely proved that.

DHS: DENY, HEDGE, SPIN  —  The Customs and Border Protection agency at DHS has issued a statement, much-ballyhooed by blind Bush supporters, which calls the Inland Valley Bulletin's story on the Border Patrol/Minutemen/Mexican government "inaccurate."  Let's examine the full bluster: