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Former President Ford is "doing well," spokeswoman says RANCHO MIRAGE, Calif. (AP) - Former President Gerald Ford is still hospitalized with pneumonia, but his spokeswoman says he is doing well. Ford's chief of staff Penny Circle says the 92-year-old's condition is not life-threatening. She says no other medical information will be released. The ex-president was admitted to Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage on January 14th. He was initally expected to be released by Thursday, but doctors thought he needed more treatment.

New York Times 4Q Profit Seen Dipping Published: January 23, 2006 10:55 AM ET NEW YORK (AP) Newspaper publisher New York Times Co. reports earnings for the fourth quarter on Tuesday, Jan. 24. The following is a summary of key developments and analyst opinion related to the period. EXPECTATIONS: New York Times, which also owns the Boston Globe and International Herald Tribune, said in December it expects fourth-quarter earnings of 45 cents to 47 cents per share, sharply below year-ago profit of 75 cents, due to the difficult advertising environment. Excluding costs related to job cuts, the company pegged its...

In President Bush's speech, during a question and answer session, an Iraqi woman took the microphone and thanked America and President Bush for liberating 27 million Iraqis. She said that she lost family members to the ruthless Saddam Hussein's reign of terror and two sisters are now members of the new Iraqi Parliament. The unidentified Iraqi woman blasted the naysayers and non-supporters (read: Democrats and loony left) for standing against such a correct decision to oust Saddam from power. When the President told her to tell her relatives in Parliament to form a Unity government with Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds,...

Latest 'Wash Post' Ombud Column Draws Over 1,000 E-mails By Joe Strupp Published: January 23, 2006 11:30 AM ET NEW YORK Interest in Washington Post Ombudsman Deborah Howell's recent flap over indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff has apparently not died down as Howell received more than 1,000 e-mails Sunday after her latest column addressed the issue again. She said the profanity and offensive comments in the e-mails have gotten so bad she recently turned on an obscenity filter in her e-mail software to block them out. "It really got bad on Thursday, so the obscenity filter went up Thursday or Friday,"...

'Wash Post' Ombud Vows to Stay on Job Despite Uproar Deborah Howell By E&P Staff Published: January 22, 2006 12:45 AM ET NEW YORK Responding to the furor that started exactly one week ago, Deborah Howell, ombudsman at The Washington Post since just last autumn, writes today, "Nothing in my 50-year career prepared me for the thousands of flaming e-mails I got last week over my last column, e-mails so abusive and many so obscene that part of The Post's Web site was shut down." As Howell notes, that column claimed that indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff gave campaign money to...

Poverty is the biggest failure" Teodoro Petkoff is reluctant to speak of his potential choice to become a presidential candidate The Coordination and Planning Head Office (Cordiplan) ex minister thinks that an alternative project to remove misery could defeat President Hugo Chávez. Will he face the challenge of running for president? "Something about it ought to be said soon." PEDRO PABLO PEÑALOZA EL UNIVERSAL A guerrilla member, congressman, founder of a political party, writer, intellectual, minister and journalist, in the Venezuelan political scenario Teodoro Petkoff has been almost everything. And some think that he could be everything. "I am basically...

How the left becomes the center BY FRED ROSEN El Universal January 21, 2006 Chile´s newly elected president, Michelle Bachelet, represents the "extreme center" of Latin America´s new generation of elected leftist leaders. A socialist, she came to power as the candidate of the center-left coalition, the Concertación, on a platform committed to maintaining Chile´s policies of macroeconomic balance, encouragement of foreign and domestic private investment, and free trade (that´s the center). It also pushed for the state´s generation of non-poverty-level jobs, more effective public services, an overhaul of Chile´s privatized pension system, and a strengthening of the networks of...

Clooney whacked over wisecrack George Clooney may have gotten laughs in Hollywood when he poked fun at disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff at the Golden Globes, but not all TV viewers appreciated Clooney's wit. Especially not Abramoff's dad, Frank Abramoff. The joke went as follows: "Who would name their kid 'Jack' with 'off' at the end? No wonder the guy's screwed up." Abramoff Sr. was not amused. He writes: "Your glib and ridiculous attack on my son, Jack, coupled with your obscene query as to the choice his mother and I made in naming him brought shame and dishonor on you...

In the Fox News Channel Senator George Allen blasted the Democrats as shameless, bereft of ideas and rejected Harry Reid's apology for trying to taint 33 GOP Senators in the Abramoff Scandal. Senator Allen, a possible contender for the White House in 2008 ripped the "playbook" of the Democrats in the upcoming elections as scurrilous and beneath contempt since they have no new ideas to offer the American people. At the same time he gave little credibility to Osama Bin Laden's latest audiotape threatenig America as "old news".

Ted Kennedy to Drop Club Membership After ripping Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito for what Senator Ted Kennedy called "troubling” ties to a social club at Princeton University, Kennedy is distancing himself from his own curious ties to a club at Harvard University. As previously reported by NewsMax, Kennedy is a member of The Owl Club, a social club for Harvard alumni that bans women from membership. Ironically, the Owl Club, long reviled at Harvard as "sexist,” was evicted from the campus in 1984 for violating federal anti-discrimination laws authored by Kennedy. According to the Boston Herald, Kennedy was questioned...

Jan. 18, 2006 Radio talker Beck joins Headline News Syndicated conservative radio talker Glenn Beck is joining CNN Headline News for a one-hour topical talk show that will air in primetime beginning in April. According to CNN, the program will take an "unconventional look at the news of the day featuring Beck's unique and often amusing perspective." Topics will range from top stories to world events and politics to life's ordinary hassles and pop culture. The show will include guests and produced packages. "When we revamped Headline News a year ago, we said we were eager to launch different types...

Only half those who voted for him in '04 would do so again, poll finds A criminal indictment and continuing investigations have severely eroded support for U.S. Rep Tom DeLay in his district, most notably among Republicans who have voted for him before, according to a Houston Chronicle poll. Only half of those who cast ballots for DeLay in 2004 said they will do so again. And while a fourth of the 2004 DeLay voters still aren't sure whom they will vote for this year, almost 20 percent have defected to other candidates. Responding to the poll Saturday, DeLay spokeswoman...

The U.S. anti-migrant push and the Mexican campaign January 15, 2006 Before the coming week is out, five presidential candidates will have officially registered. The imposed lull on their public campaigning will be lifted; the tumult and shouting will begin anew. Voters will once again venture into the mire of Mexican electoral politics in search of something substantive to inform the choice they'll make on July 2. The Institutional Revolutionary Party’s Roberto Madrazo will try to convince voters that he represents a refreshed version of the stability, growth and nationalist spirit of his party in its heyday. His opponents will...

White House Briefing: Reporters Zero in On Rove's Abramoff Connections By E&P Staff Published: January 17, 2006 7:44 PM ET NEW YORK Reporters continued to hammer away at President Bush's chief spokesperson today on the domestic spying issue, particularly a report in today's New York Times that suggested the NSA's secret eavesdropping program netted "a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names" after the Sept. 11 attacks, nearly all of which "led to dead ends or innocent Americans." But another theme emerged today. As the fallout from indicted Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff continues, reporters are now trying to...

It would be easy to portray Jack Murtha, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid or any of the other wheezy prophets of the Defeatocrat Party as oddities were it not for the fact that their position on Iraq is deeply consonant with what the Modern Democratic Party has believed for 50 years. The latest Democratic position on Iraq goes something like this: Even though the Iraqis pulled off a stunningly peaceful and successful election on December 15, President Bush still needs to establish benchmarks for the future, informing the American people of precisely what he will do — i.e., how many troops...

Poor Mrs. Alito. Like Mr. Smith, she came to Washington expecting the nation's capital to resemble, even vaguely, the place we read about in our civics textbooks. Her brilliant husband sat there and promised to have an open mind, to enforce the Constitution, to put his country first -- and for that he was getting hammered. Unlike so many of his Yale classmates, the Alitos aren't rich, but these rich senators were creaming him as if he had somehow tried to profit on the bench. A Kennedy tormenting an Alito? I don't blame her for crying. As for me, though,...

Lieberman Slipping Among Democrats War Stance Hurts Him, But Overall Appeal Is Strong January 12, 2006 By MARK PAZNIOKAS, Courant Staff Writer A new poll shows that U.S. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman's support among fellow Democrats fell significantly in the past six months as he has become increasingly associated with an unpopular war in Iraq. A Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday suggests that Lieberman's outspoken support for the war has cost him in his own party: Republican and unaffiliated voters overwhelmingly endorse his job performance, while his approval among Democrats dropped from 70 to 55 percent. Seventy-four percent of Democrats...

The Imperial Presidency at Work Published: January 15, 2006 You would think that Senators Carl Levin and John McCain would have learned by now that you cannot deal in good faith with a White House that does not act in good faith. Yet both men struck bargains intended to restore the rule of law to American prison camps. And President Bush tossed them aside at the first opportunity. Mr. Bush made a grand show of inviting Mr. McCain into the Oval Office last month to announce his support for a bill to require humane treatment of detainees at Guantánamo Bay...

Chris Matthews is very angry. In his show this morning he has just accused the Democrats of being "idiotic" for completely fumbling the Alito nomination. Andrew Sullivan, smiling, agreed with him. Matthews wanted a discussion on the issues, that Alito is very coonservative and will move the Court to the right (Nora O'Donnell strongly agreed...barf) Matthews attacked the Dems for going on a wild-goose chase looking for any scandal to derail Alito. Then he went to attack Prersident Bush's speech when he said that it is OK to disagree with him and the War of Iraq but not to do...

Immigrants' Hospital Care Forces Tough Choices January 15, 2006 By GARRET CONDON, Courant Staff Writer A 42-year-old Chinese man was taken to Yale-New Haven Hospital after suffering a heart attack and a massive stroke at Foxwoods Resort Casino in February 2004. Doctors, therapists and a nearly 'round-the-clock translator helped him improve. He was soon ready to leave the hospital. Most patients on the road to recovery would do a short stint in a rehabilitation facility and then head home, perhaps with help from visiting nurses and other professionals. But the man was an undocumented immigrant who didn't qualify for federal...