• Iran has a constitution that's 100 years old: It's time to recognize and honor that constitution, and seek peaceful means to resolve conflict. Take action.
• Common Sense Budget Act: Take action.
• Iraq war: Get HJ Res 55 out of committee and onto the floor so we can talk about it: Take action.

Salute the Iranian constitution, seek peaceful conflict resolution August 5, 2006 was the hundredth anniversary of the victory of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution.

Why is this man smiling? He's remaking the federal budget -- one dollar at a time. Click here to take action!

FEDERAL BUDGET WATCH

NUCLEAR NOTES

Feds delay Divine Strake explosion in Nevada to 2007
By JENNIFER TALHELM, ASSOCIATED PRESS | August 01, 2006
Full article, click here.

WASHINGTON (AP) - The federal government will delay well into 2007 a non-nuclear test explosion known as Divine Strake, which is expected to set off a mushroom cloud over the Nevada desert, federal officials and lawmakers said Tuesday.

Also, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency is considering alternative locations for Divine Strake as well as ways to conduct the test without an explosion, they said.

Loose Nukes
New York Times Editorial | July 24, 2006

President Bush and President Vladimir Putin of Russia announced two new nuclear initiatives earlier this month that could make the world safer - if the presidents keep prodding their secretive and change-averse nuclear bureaucracies to follow through. On that score, unfortunately, the record is not great.

Declaring nuclear terrorism one of the biggest threats facing the world today, Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin began a new coalition of the willing that will share intelligence, develop better ways of securing bomb-making materials and train for the all too imaginable day when a terrorist makes off with a suitcase of plutonium or highly enriched uranium.

Any effort that requires governments to look harder at how they are protecting nuclear materials is a good idea. That is true whether a country has tons of plutonium stored at nuclear fuel plants or a few kilos of highly enriched uranium, which can still be found in scores of poorly guarded research reactors around the world.

• Insurmountable Risks: Can Nuclear Power Solve the Global Warming Problem? A summary of Brice Smith's new book
• Low-Carbon Diet for France: Hold the Nukes
  A summary of the IEER report on how to phase out nuclear power in France while reducing CO2 emissions
• The return of the nuclear messiahs
  Editorial by IEER president Arjun Makhijani
• Dangerous Discrepancies: Missing Plutonium in the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Complex?
  A summary of the IEER report on poor plutonium accounting at Los Alamos National Lab
• Dear Arjun column
  "Dear Arjun, Are you anti-nuclear or pro-nuclear?"
• It pays to increase your jargon power with Dr. Egghead
  The most fun vocabulary builder ever. Learn terms like carbon sequestration and pyroprocessing.

The New Atomic Age Requires New Nonproliferation Strategy

By Frederick Kempe | Wall Street Journal | July 18, 2006

WASHINGTON -- Accuse the U.S. State Department's Nicholas Burns of a double standard in advancing the Bush administration's efforts to stop nuclear-weapons proliferation, and he will thank you for the compliment.

"I'm proud of our double standard, so guilty as charged," he says, if that means trying to punish what Washington considers the world's most threatening states -- North Korea and Iran -- while embracing India, the world's largest democracy, which U.S. officials insist has a clean record in protecting against leaks of weapons technology. "You reward positive behavior and you punish negative behavior. Any parent knows that and any national-security expert knows that," Mr. Burns says.

So even as the administration rallies support for multilateral initiatives against North Korea's and Iran's nuclear ambitions, Mr. Burns and a host of others have been lobbying lawmakers hard to pass an Indo-U.S. civilian nuclear pact. India would gain access to civilian nuclear trade while opening some of its programs to international monitors, after sitting in the penalty box more than 30 years for going nuclear.

House Voted on Indian Deal Unaware of Iran Missile Sales
By Dafna Linzer | Washington Post
Saturday, July 29, 2006 | Full article, click here.

The Bush administration will impose sanctions on two Indian firms for selling missile parts to Iran, government officials said yesterday, acknowledging privately that the secret decision should have been shared with the House before it voted this week to support U.S. plans to sell nuclear technology to New Delhi.

It is not the first time Indian companies have been sanctioned for supplying Iran's suspected weapons programs. But the timing of the sanctions, which were not revealed before the vote and are being imposed during fighting between Israel and the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia, elicited angry responses from Democrats and arms-control experts yesterday.

IRAQ UPDATES

American politics this year has been running on two divergent tracks. The first is intensified partisan combat in advance of a critical midterm election. The second is growing disaffection among many voters with a national capital seen as stalemated by polarization and distrust between the two political parties.

That makes the coming campaign between antiwar Democrat Ned Lamont and Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, who lost last week's primary and is now running in the general election as an independent, an intriguing laboratory for what might emerge in the 2008 presidential campaign.

Will Lieberman's campaign prove to be a forerunner for a message of civility and bipartisanship that emerges nationally in 2008, or simply be remembered as an obsolete refrain from a politician living in an idealized past and that serves only to deepen partisan divisions?

The Lieberman-Lamont primary became the latest stage for the politics of anger that has dominated since President Bush took office after the disputed election of 2000. Lieberman hopes to make the general election a template for civility in politics and a return to some measure of bipartisan cooperation in Washington.

Iraq Report Card from Center for American Progress
July 25, 2006 | Full report, click here.

Last November, a bipartisan majority of 79 Senators voted for a measure declaring 2006 “to be a period of significant transition for Iraq” and called on President Bush to put forward a strategy for “the successful completion of the mission in Iraq.” This mid-term assessment finds some signs of progress in key areas, including Iraq’s political transition, the training of Iraq’s security forces, and oil production. But this limited progress has taken place against the backdrop of a dramatically deteriorating security situation in many parts of the country as Iraq slipped deeper into a civil war.

Sectarian violence has increased and armed militias have grown stronger. As of the end of June, despite “Operation Together Forward,” a joint Iraqi-Coalition military operation to control the violence in Iraq’s capital city more than three years after the U.S.-led invasion, Baghdad’s security situation has seen little, if any, improvement. Violence continued to plague many major cities from Mosul in the north to Basra in the south, with the United Nations estimating that more than 14,000 Iraqis had been killed by the conflict in the first half of 2006.

In all key areas, substantial room for improvement exists...

WATCHING LEBANON
Washington’s interests in Israel’s war.
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH | The New Yorker
Issue of 2006-08-21 | Full article, click here.

The Bush Administration, however, was closely involved in the planning of Israel’s retaliatory attacks. President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney were convinced, current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials told me, that a successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah’s heavily fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in Lebanon could ease Israel’s security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American preëmptive attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations, some of which are also buried deep underground...

The Pentagon consultant told me that intelligence about Hezbollah and Iran is being mishandled by the White House the same way intelligence had been when, in 2002 and early 2003, the Administration was making the case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. “The big complaint now in the intelligence community is that all of the important stuff is being sent directly to the top—at the insistence of the White House—and not being analyzed at all, or scarcely,” he said. “It’s an awful policy and violates all of the N.S.A.’s strictures, and if you complain about it you’re out,” he said. “Cheney had a strong hand in this.”

The long-term Administration goal was to help set up a Sunni Arab coalition—including countries like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt—that would join the United States and Europe to pressure the ruling Shiite mullahs in Iran.

NEWS FROM WiLL

WiLL at the NCSL annual meeting, August 2006