The likely Republican presidential nominee addressed the annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the nation's oldest civil rights organization.
In greeting the group, John McCain praised Democrat Barack Obama's historic campaign but said the Illinois senator is wrong to oppose school vouchers for students in failing public schools. McCain said it is time to use vouchers and other tools such as merit pay for teachers to break from conventional thinking on educational policy.
Associated Press
Congress denied FBI
report on Cheney
WASHINGTON – President Bush invoked executive privilege to keep Congress from seeing the FBI report of an interview with Vice President Dick Cheney and other records related to the administration's leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity in 2003.
The president's decision drew a sharp protest yesterday from Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which had subpoenaed Attorney General Michael Mukasey to turn over the documents.
“This unfounded assertion of executive privilege does not protect a principle; it protects a person,” the Los Angeles Democrat said. “If the vice president did nothing wrong, what is there to hide?”
Bush's assertion of privilege prevented Mukasey from complying with the House subpoena for records bearing on the unmasking of Plame at a time when the administration was trying to rebut criticism from her husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, of Bush's rationale for going to war in Iraq.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Rangel challenged
on center's funding
WASHINGTON – Two Republican critics of congressional earmarks said yesterday that they will challenge further attempts by Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., to direct taxpayers' money to a new academic center that bears his name.
Reps. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., and John Campbell, R-Irvine, last year fought a $1.9 million earmark that Rangel obtained to help start the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at City College of New York. They said they were unaware that the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee had also secured two HUD grants totaling more than $690,000 for the project until The Washington Post reported on his fundraising efforts this week.
The Washington Post
U.S. health care
failing, report says
WASHINGTON – The United States fails on most measures of health care quality, with Americans waiting longer to see doctors and more likely to die of preventable or treatable illnesses than people in other industrialized countries, a report released today said.
Americans squander money on wasteful administrative costs, illnesses caused by medical error and inefficient use of time, the report from the nonprofit Commonwealth Fund concluded.
Reuters
