Swamp Gas, October 31, 2007

by Frank James

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

The Supreme Court stopped an execution in Mississippi, the strongest indication yet that the court intends to halt all such ultimate sanctions until it decides a lethal injection case which is scheduled to be argued in January.

The U.S. military will oversee private-security contractors in Iraq as it attempts to tighten control over firms like Blackwater USA in order to avoid further unwarranted violence against Iraqi civilians like the killings of at least 17 Iraqis in September.

Having already brutally driven out many Baghdad Sunnis and taken over their neighborhoods, businesses and municipal services, Shiites are seeking to hold onto their gains, moving the civil war in Iraq into a less outwardly violent phase.

Sen. Hillary Clinton, frontrunner in national polls for the Democratic presidential nomination, came under more aggressive attack in the seventh debate as her opponents tried to make the case that she is the Republicans' preferred opponent because they see her as offering them the greatest number of targets.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called for the ouster of Consumer Product Safety Commission chairman Nancy Nord, saying that the bureaucrat wasn't responsive to the public's clamor for greater oversight by the agency following numerous recalls of Chinese-made toys because they contained lead and other dangers.

Attorney General-nominee Michael Mukasey called repugnant the torture technique known as waterboarding but failed to call it torture, doing little to tamp down growing Senate unhappiness with him as President Bush's choice to run the Justice Department.

President Bush nominated retired Army Gen. James Peake to head the troubled Veterans Affairs Department, making the retired officer the first general and medical doctor to head the agency.

The early and compressed primary schedule is causing presidential campaigns to alter strategies from the approaches of past candidates, including large amounts of spending in Florida whose primary now comes in January and ever more spending in Iowa, where several Democrats now bunched together in the polls hope for a win that could help them in the primaries that quickly ensue.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's style of seeking out information from his colleagues and contacts in the financial markets and his handling so far of the subprime-mortgage related credit crisis has reassured many observers who had wondered earlier if the former academic had the heft to perform to a level they had gotten accustomed to under Alan Greenspan.

The Supreme Court is examining a federal child-porn law that makes even the suggestion that someone possesses child porn a felony and whose opponents criticize the law as overly broad since the statute could conceivably be used against works of art such as literature.