Swamp Gas, September 27, 2007

by Frank James

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

Defense Secretary Robert Gates sought an additional $42.3 billion for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, bringing to $190 billion the amount the Bush Administration has requested for fiscal 2008 with Democrats saying they wouldn't rubber stamp the request. Meanwhile, Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey Jr. said that service was seriously stretched and would have trouble responding to conflict elsewhere.

U.S. and coalition forces have killed more than 19,000 militants in Iraq since 2003, according to statistics newly released by the U.S. military.

Democratic presidential candidates aggressively criticized frontrunner Sen. Hillary Clinton at a debate at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire as they tried to cut into her frontrunner status in national and state polls.

Blackwater USA leads other private security contractors in the rate of shooting incidents involving Iraqis compared with firms providing similar services to the State Department, said Bush Administration officials.

The Senate, with a large number of Republicans joining Democrats, approved a non-binding resolution calling for Iraq's government to be decentralized into three parts for each of the major religious-ethnic groups in the nation, a so-called soft partition. It was a rebuke of President Bush's reliance on the central government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki.

Myanmar's military regime continued its crackdown, raiding monasteries and arresting Buddhist monks like those who have led recent protests against the government as the United Nations Security Council failed to reach consensus on strong action against that nation's leaders.

The Government Accountability Office reported that slower than hoped for improvements in the troubled outpatient care for soldiers at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

The General Motors-United Auto Workers deal in which employee health costs were shifted to the union illustrates a larger trend of companies yielding what until now had been their major role in providing employees with health-care.

A federal district court judge found parts of the USA Patriot Act unconstitutional, ruling that the act allows surveillance and searches of U.S. citizens in violation of the Fourth Amendment's probable cause requirement.

Two Americans travel the world trying to beat terrorists to sources of enriched uranium in order to secure them so they can't be used to create nuclear mayhem.

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan fears that stubborn, 1970s-style inflation could return as the global forces that have kept inflation low lose their impact.