Swamp Gas, September 25, 2007

by Frank James

A quick guided tour of some of the morning's most important or most interesting (or both) Washington-related stories.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke to a Columbia University audience after a scathing introduction by the institution's president, Lee Bollinger. The Holocaust-denying Iranian leader parried many questions with his own queries, and lost any credibility he might've had with many in the audience when he said Iran didn't have homosexuals.

The military's prosecution of detainees accused of being enemy combatants was put back on track by a special military appeals panel which said a lower-court judge had erred in saying the military tribunals couldn’t proceed because of a legal technicality.

Amid massive protests against the military regime led by Buddhist monks in Burma, also known as Myanmar, President Bush said he would call for more sanctions against that authoritarian government.

The Drug Enforcement Agency raided a number of underground steroid labs across the U.S., finding that many of the precursor chemicals were made in China.

The way the U.S. military distinguishes sectarian killings in Iraq from mere crime is through teams of soldiers who analyze the data and categorize the deaths, a process that is more art than science which includes a significant degree of subjectivity.

Violent crime rose more in 2006 than previously believed, according to a Federal Bureau of Investigation report, a problem for the Bush Administration since it was the second consecutive year of higher serious crime, a trend many big-city mayors blame on federal cuts to law-enforcement programs.

The Bush Administration will propose incentives to developing nations to get them to restrain their carbon dioxide production while Congress is working on legislation to penalize devolping nations that fail to rein in such emissions by penalizing their imports into the U.S.

Further doubts were raised about the cost-effectiveness of annual medical checkups raised about it by a study which concluded the costs of all those annual visits adds to $7.8 billion, including many unnecessary pap smears and urinalyses.

The refusal of Florida Democrats to abide by the national party's wishes and change its primary back to a later date symbolizes the difficulty of fixing what many readily acknowledge is a broken presidential nominating system.