From AP:

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday embraced a call by a prominent member of her rank-and-file to begin withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq, two weeks after she declined to endorse it.

"We should follow the lead of Congressman John Murtha, who has put forth a plan to make American safer, to make our military stronger and to make Iraq more stable," Pelosi said. "That is what the American people and our troops deserve."

Pelosi, D-Calif., said she wouldn't call for a party caucus position on the plan by the Pennsylvania Democrat because "a vote on the war is an individual vote."

Nevertheless, she said: "I believe that a majority of our caucus clearly supports Mr. Murtha."

From AP:

Former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres quit the Labor Party on Wednesday, leaving his political home of nearly six decades to campaign for Ariel Sharon's new centrist party.

The 82-year-old Peres, who has held every major Cabinet position, left Labor after his humiliating loss to union leader Amir Peretz in the race for party leader three weeks ago.

He said he was supporting Sharon because he had the best chance of restarting the peace process with the Palestinians.
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Under a reported deal worked out with Sharon, Peres would campaign for the prime minister without officially joining Kadima. If Sharon wins, Peres would receive a senior Cabinet post, either dealing with the peace process or with his pet project to develop Israel's sparsely populated Negev desert and northern Galilee regions.

"I don't believe that it is possible to push forward the peace process in the current political constellation," Peres said. "I believe the most qualified person for this is Ariel Sharon.

"He will restart the peace process right after the election. I decided to join him and work with him."

Reason's Matt Welch has a good piece on the faulty reporting from New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

He writes, in part: (via Jeff Goldstein)

From a journalistic point of view, the root causes of the bogus reports were largely the same: The communication breakdown without and especially within New Orleans created an information vacuum in which wild oral rumor thrived. Reporters failed to exercise enough skepticism in passing along secondhand testimony from victims (who often just parroted what they picked up from the rumor mill), and they were far too eager to broadcast as fact apocalyptic statements from government officials—such as Mayor Ray Nagin’s prediction of 10,000 Katrina-related deaths (there were less than 900 in New Orleans at press time) and Police Superintendent Edwin Compass’ reference on The Oprah Winfrey Show to “little babies getting raped”—without factoring in discounts for incompetence and ulterior motives.
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The information vacuum in the Superdome was especially dangerous. Cell phones didn’t work, the arena’s public address system wouldn’t run on generator power, and the law enforcement on hand was reduced to talking to the 20,000 evacuees using bullhorns and a lot of legwork. “A lot of them had AM radios, and they would listen to news reports that talked about the dead bodies at the Superdome, and the murders in the bathrooms of the Superdome, and the babies being raped at the Superdome,” [Maj. Ed] Bush says, “and it would create terrible panic. I would have to try and convince them that no, it wasn’t happening.”

The reports of rampant lawlessness, especially the persistent urban legend of shooting at helicopters, definitely delayed some emergency and law enforcement responses. Reports abounded, from places like Andover, Massachusetts, of localities refusing to send their firefighters because of “people shooting at helicopters.” The National Guard refused to approach the Convention Center until September 2, 100 hours after the hurricane, because “we waited until we had enough force in place to do an overwhelming force,” Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum told reporters on September 3.

From AP:

Astronomers have discovered what they believe is the birth of the smallest known solar system. Peering through ground- and space-based telescopes, scientists observed a brown dwarf — or failed star — less than one hundredth the mass of the sun surrounded by what appears to be a disk of dust and gas.

The brown dwarf — located 500 light years away in the constellation Chamaeleon — appears to be undergoing a planet-forming process that could one day yield a solar system, said Kevin Luhman of Pennsylvania State University, who led the discovery.
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The discovery was made using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and Hubble Space Telescope as well as ground observatories. Results will be published in the Dec. 10 issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Here is a transcript of the president's speech this morning.

Here is the Iraq strategy document, released by the White House today.

Ruben Navarrette, Jr.:

Democrats lost the last two presidential elections, in part because they sent forth candidates who -- in their eagerness to get as many votes as possible from the left, right and center -- took both sides of every issue, flipped positions, parsed phrases, eschewed straight talk and gave nuance a bad name by taking complicated policy positions that were impossible for most Americans to decipher.

Now Democrats are getting ready to make similar mistakes in their attempts to politicize the Iraq War. The Clintons are setting the tone. While Sen. Hillary Clinton stakes out a "hawkish'' pro-war position, former President Bill Clinton bad-mouths the administration's war effort. On the difficult question of whether we should stay the course in Iraq or pull out, Democrats have a ready answer: "Yes.''
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At this point, their strategy for retaking the White House is simple: hope that voters are, by then, so discontented with President Bush that they decide they don't want any more Republican administrations for a while and vote Democratic by default.

That's lazy politics. You bank on the opposition party messing up things so badly that you don't have to lift a finger to win. Trouble is, that strategy rarely works. If you don't have a countermeasure, a different view or an alternative policy, if all you do is criticize the other side while sending mixed messages as to what you really support, then you have nothing. And, in politics, those who offer nothing tend to lose out to those who offer something.

November 30 ...

In 1782 the United States and Britain signed preliminary peace articles in Paris, ending the Revolutionary War. In 1803 Spain completed the process of ceding Louisiana to France, which had sold it to the United States. In 1804 Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase went on trial, accused of political bias. (He was acquitted by the Senate.) In 1835 Samuel Langhorne Clemens — better known as Mark Twain — was born in Florida, MO. In 1900 Irish writer Oscar Wilde died in Paris at age 46. In 1939 the Russo-Finnish War began as Soviet troops invaded Finland. In 1962 U Thant of Burma was elected Secretary-General of the United Nations, succeeding the late Dag Hammarskjold. In 1966 the former British colony of Barbados became independent. In 1981 the US and the Soviet Union opened negotiations in Geneva aimed at reducing nuclear weapons in Europe.

Jeff Goldstein, on target again:

... control of the narrative by way of the legacy media is still the most important tool in a wealthy representative republic whose citizens are on the whole disengaged from politics and tend to follow stories only in soundbite format.

Such an information ethos—soundbite politics and a legacy media increasingly willing to follow it’s own advocacy politics (however unconsciously)—helps Democrats, who are the party of targeted carping, bloc-voting identity politics, and big-ticket, feel-good promises that are almost always fiscally unworkable and (when they come from the left base of the party) socially damaging in the long term.

In short, if Bushco doesn’t turn around the public mood—which the Dems have managed mold into a malaise by proxy (individuals believe they are doing fine, perfectly in keeping with the strong economy; they’ve just been convinced that everyone else is suffering. Similarly, they’ve been convinced that we’re losing a war we are clearly winning)—be afraid, come 2006.

Read the whole post.

From AP:

A Japanese spacecraft that landed on an asteroid to collect surface samples for analysis has developed trouble with its thruster system, the nation's space agency said Tuesday.

The problem is the latest facing Japan's attempt to complete the world's first two-way trip to an asteroid, following earlier problems with the probe's gyroscopes and two botched practice landings.

The Hayabusa probe appeared to have touched down Saturday, just long enough to collect powder from the asteroid's surface and lift off again to return to Earth.
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The agency is trying to fix the problem by a December deadline to begin the craft's 180-million-mile journey home. The Kyodo News agency said failure to remedy the glitch may make the probe's return impossible.

From AP:

Al-Jazeera broadcast an insurgent video Tuesday showing four peace activists taken hostage in Iraq, with a previously unknown group claiming responsibility for the kidnappings.

The Swords of Righteousness Brigade said the four were spies working undercover as Christian peace activists, Al-Jazeera said. The station said it could not verify any of the information on the tape.

The aid group Christian Peacemaker Teams has confirmed that four of its members were taken hostage Saturday.

German television broadcast photos Tuesday showing a blindfolded German woman being led away by armed captors in Iraq. Six Iranian pilgrims, meanwhile, were abducted by gunmen north of Baghdad.

The pictures of Susanne Osthoff were taken from a video in which her captors demanded that Germany stop any dealings with Iraq's government, according to Germany's ARD television.

Update: Here's more on the story from The Jawa Report.

Senator Joe Lieberman in the Wall Street Journal:

I have just returned from my fourth trip to Iraq in the past 17 months and can report real progress there. More work needs to be done, of course, but the Iraqi people are in reach of a watershed transformation from the primitive, killing tyranny of Saddam to modern, self-governing, self-securing nationhood--unless the great American military that has given them and us this unexpected opportunity is prematurely withdrawn.
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It is a war between 27 million and 10,000; 27 million Iraqis who want to live lives of freedom, opportunity and prosperity and roughly 10,000 terrorists who are either Saddam revanchists, Iraqi Islamic extremists or al Qaeda foreign fighters who know their wretched causes will be set back if Iraq becomes free and modern. The terrorists are intent on stopping this by instigating a civil war to produce the chaos that will allow Iraq to replace Afghanistan as the base for their fanatical war-making. We are fighting on the side of the 27 million because the outcome of this war is critically important to the security and freedom of America. If the terrorists win, they will be emboldened to strike us directly again and to further undermine the growing stability and progress in the Middle East, which has long been a major American national and economic security priority.
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In the face of terrorist threats and escalating violence, eight million Iraqis voted for their interim national government in January, almost 10 million participated in the referendum on their new constitution in October, and even more than that are expected to vote in the elections for a full-term government on Dec. 15. Every time the 27 million Iraqis have been given the chance since Saddam was overthrown, they have voted for self-government and hope over the violence and hatred the 10,000 terrorists offer them. Most encouraging has been the behavior of the Sunni community, which, when disappointed by the proposed constitution, registered to vote and went to the polls instead of taking up arms and going to the streets. Last week, I was thrilled to see a vigorous political campaign, and a large number of independent television stations and newspapers covering it.
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Here is an ironic finding I brought back from Iraq. While U.S. public opinion polls show serious declines in support for the war and increasing pessimism about how it will end, polls conducted by Iraqis for Iraqi universities show increasing optimism. Two-thirds say they are better off than they were under Saddam, and a resounding 82% are confident their lives in Iraq will be better a year from now than they are today. What a colossal mistake it would be for America's bipartisan political leadership to choose this moment in history to lose its will and, in the famous phrase, to seize defeat from the jaws of the coming victory.

Mary Laney in the Chicago Sun-Times:

We kicked the Taliban thugs out of Afghanistan, sent them packing, and worked with the populace that emerged from the rubble, allowed a government to form, citizens to vote, women to go outside, girls to go back to school, and all to return to work in hospitals, stores and banks.

In Iraq, we cornered the dictator's sadistic sons and sent them to their final judgment. We captured their father, the tyrant and mass-murdering Saddam Hussein, dragged him out of a rat-hole in the desert and are bringing him to justice before a jury of Iraqis. We've seen the populace of Iraq vote on a constitution -- even under threat of being beheaded by Islamofascists -- going to the polls some 70 percent strong. Schools are opening, stores are operating and soon the Iraqi people will vote again on a new government.

But here we get all the static, all the talking heads, and all the theories of what's happening over there. We hear politics instead of facts. We get editorials in place of reports. We have Congress tied up with some politicians making threats and insisting that we set a date to withdraw our troops or withdraw our troops immediately. We hear them making accusations that President Bush lied when he said Saddam had weapons of mass destruction -- even though former President Bill Clinton said the same thing when he was in office, as did others in his party who now seem to be suffering from an acute case of amnesia regarding the recent past.
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The noise is so loud about the war, yet we're not hearing what we need to hear. We're not hearing from the soldiers, the generals, the boots on the ground. Why is this?
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There's too much static noise out there regarding the war. It's filling a vacuum caused by the administration's failure to keep us regularly updated on what is happening throughout Iraq. It's time for the Bush administration to step up and tell us what is going on -- with regular reports, weekly updates, fireside chats, talks with soldiers -- through the entire country of Iraq.

We're getting our reports from hotel rooms in Baghdad.

It's time for the whole story from over there.

That's about right.

Michael Barone:

Will the United States become more or less like continental Europe? That's one way to frame the central question of domestic policy. In Europe much higher percentages of gross domestic product are absorbed by government; welfare state protections and restrictions on labor markets are greater, health-care and pension provisions are dominated by the central government. The result, say advocates of the European model, is greater leisure and greater protection against risk. The result, say advocates of the American model, is economic stagnation and high unemployment. Over the last 25 years, the number of jobs has increased by 57 million in the United States. The figure for Europe is 4 million. Unemployment is around 5 percent in the United States. In France and Germany it tops 10 percent.

Given those numbers, Americans, through the workings of the political marketplace, are not likely to choose the European model. But certain features of our society -- the aging of our population, the increasing percentage of gdp any affluent society will spend on health care -- move us in a European direction, unless some effort is made to counter that trend.
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The Bush administration came into office with plans to get us off the European trajectory, and has had partial success. At the moment, it seems inclined to let the Republican Congress set the course on domestic policy, which means letting the workings of regulated private markets in pensions and health care determine our direction. Democrats would like to move us some distance toward Europe, but how far they neither say nor, so far as I can tell, know. The Bush years have not produced a crisp decision to get off the European trajectory. But they have produced some significant movement in that direction, notwithstanding narrow Republican congressional majorities and harsh partisan divisions.