GOP narrowing its congressional agenda  —  Focus is on pleasing base ahead of elections  —  WASHINGTON — Republican leaders in Congress have all but abandoned efforts to pass major policy initiatives this year, and are instead focusing their energies on a series of conservative favorites …

Bush Backs Brother Jeb for White House  —  President Bush suggested Wednesday that he'd like to see his family's White House legacy continue, perhaps with his younger brother Jeb as the chief executive.  —  The president said Florida Gov. Jeb Bush is well-suited for another office and would make "a great president."

Cheney's daughter provokes mixed reaction on gay issues  —  WASHINGTON - Throughout the last U.S. presidential election, Mary Cheney was known to American voters simply as Vice-President Dick Cheney's quiet gay daughter.  —  No more.  —  In a memoir published Tuesday …

J. Michael Luttig Resigns From Appeals Court  —  Appeals court Judge J. Michael Luttig, a leading conservative jurist and a short-list Bush administration candidate for the Supreme Court, announced today that he is resigning from the bench to serve as senior vice president and general counsel of the Boeing Co.

Costly Words: 'I Don't Like President Bush'  —  Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson was back home in Dallas on April 28 giving a speech to minority real estate folks and offering a most interesting take on how business is done in Washington.

New U.N. Rights Group Includes Six Nations With Poor Records  —  UNITED NATIONS, May 9 — Six nations with poor human rights records were among those elected to the new Human Rights Council on Tuesday, although notorious violators that had belonged to the predecessor Human Rights Commission …

Condoleezza Rice admits she responded to Iran letter before US had translated missive  —  From an interview with the NBC editorial board as released by the State Department.  (Just off wires, can't find link yet).  Rice also admitted she hadn't read the letter in an interview with the Associated Press editorial board.

EXCLUSIVE: Presidential Plans Found In Trash  —  How much do you think Osama bin Laden would pay to know exactly when and where the President was traveling, and who was with him?  Turns out, he wouldn't have had to pay a dime.  All he had to do was go through the trash early Tuesday morning.

America's new "silent majority"  —  And so tonight-to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans-I ask for your support.  — Richard Nixon, Nov. 3, 1969.  —  We were reading the New York Times on Sunday, which had an interesting article about the political situation in Ohio …

FREE ADVICE FOR PRESIDENT BUSH  —  The President hasn't asked for my advice, but here it is anyway.  —  You know how the Democrats are always after you to admit that you made a mistake?  You've wisely ignored them; they don't have your interests at heart, and the policies they're talking about weren't mistakes.

More Good News!  Iraqi Tribal Leaders Unite & Denounce Terror  —  Wow!  Here is some very encouraging news translated by Iraqi-American Haider Ajina from the Iraqi media.  Iraqi Sunni, Shia and Kurdish tribal leaders are meeting today to sign a pact to unite and fight terror!

Is It Genocide?  —  Before we start dropping bombs, we should first ask whether the situation in Darfur is in fact a genocide.  —  As everyone knows by now, terrible atrocities have been and are continuing to be committed against the civilian population of Darfur in Sudan.

Iraq War Is Drawing Less Support Than Vietnam Did at Same Stage  —  May 9 (Bloomberg) — Three years into major combat in Vietnam, 28,500 U.S. service members had perished, millions of families were anxious about the military draft and antiwar protests had spread to dozens of college campuses.

Celebrity pundits are on their way out  —  In my experience, there's no bigger bunch of crybabies in American  —  public life than the fops and courtiers of our Washington press corps.  If Comedy Central satirist Stephen Colbert's performance at the White House Correspondents' Dinner did nothing else, it surely proved that.

Israel Gives Hamas Deadline to Negotiate  —  JERUSALEM - Israel will give the Palestinians until the end of the year to prove they are willing to negotiate a final peace deal, and will unilaterally set its final borders by 2008 if they don't, Israel's justice minister said Wednesday.

Affluence and Its Discontents  —  You hear the refrain all the time: The economy looks good statistically (4.7 percent unemployment), but it doesn't feel good.  Although the United States is the wealthiest nation in history, our quarrels and quibbles with our prosperity are unending.

AHMADINEJAD AND HIS LIBERAL TALKING POINTS  —  Why is it when the world's thugs, tyrants, madmen, and dictators open their yaps and attack the United States, they sound like someone who's hacked the Democratic National Committee mainframe and downloaded Howard Dean's next speech?