Toast Talks!

Bridge Collapse Revives Issue of Road Spending
By SUSAN SAULNY and JENNIFER STEINHAUER

MINNEAPOLIS, Aug. 6 — In the past two years, Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota twice vetoed legislation to raise the state’s gas tax to pay for transportation needs.

Now, with at least five people dead in the collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge here, Mr. Pawlenty, a Republican, appears to have had a change of heart. More

Dems Cave

NY Times Editorial
The Fear of Fear Itself

It was appalling to watch over the last few days as Congress — now led by Democrats — caved in to yet another unnecessary and dangerous expansion of President Bush’s powers, this time to spy on Americans in violation of basic constitutional rights. Many of the 16 Democrats in the Senate and 41 in the House who voted for the bill said that they had acted in the name of national security, but the only security at play was their job security. More

Not at all like Viet Nam! (Only drier)

Editorial
Those Missing Guns in Iraq

American taxpayers are rightly prepared to pay for all the equipment our soldiers need to defend themselves in Iraq. What is harder to accept is that because of the Pentagon’s scandalous mismanagement, they may have been paying to arm Iraqi insurgents who are shooting at American soldiers. More

A few women here, a few women there...

Poisonous Choices, Women at Risk
By JUDITH WARNER

When the Supreme Court voted 5 to 4 to uphold the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act this spring, the ambivalently pro-choice public was largely quiescent, believing, as Congress had previously ruled, that the procedure was “gruesome and inhuman,” medically unnecessary, highly controversial in the medical community and so rare as to be little missed.

What’s clear, however, as the ban has become a reality, is that fetuses will be spared no brutality. Second trimester abortion is still legal and the most common method for it — dismembering a fetus inside the womb before removing it in pieces — is no less awful to contemplate than the outlawed procedure, in which an intact fetus’s skull was punctured and collapsed to ease its removal. But women are now more at risk. And doctors have been forced into a danger zone where they must weigh what they believe to be best medical practices against the need to protect themselves from the threat of prosecution. More