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At a time when the global economic crisis is affecting the most vulnerable across the globe, the Bush administration says the United States and other developed countries must honor their commitments to foreign assistance.

President Bush was to make a pitch for continued support to poor nations on Tuesday when he hosts a daylong summit on international development aid. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Liberia President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and musician and activist Bob Geldof are among the attendees.

“Don’t let this financial crisis become a human crisis,” Geldof said Monday in a statement previewing the event.

The event brings together about 500 representatives of nations — from Africa to Romania — that receive U.S. aid; faith-based organizations; and non-governmental, private and public leaders from the United States and the developing world.

“Given the recent economic downturn where there is concern that developing countries and their citizens will be more vulnerable, it’s more important than ever that we and other developed countries keep our commitments and continue to fund development assistance programs, as well as work to increase trade,” White House press secretary Dana Perino said.

USAID Administrator Henrietta Fore said Monday that in all regions of the world, the Bush administration has doubled, tripled or quadrupled development assistance. She said the administration also has worked to reform U.S. foreign assistance through projects like the president’s initiative on HIV/AIDS and the Millennium Challenge Corp., which provides aid to nations that embrace democracy and free markets, fight corruption and invest in education and health.

J. Brian Atwood, dean of the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota and administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development during the Clinton administration, praised the Bush administration’s work to link aid with measurable results, although he said the idea actually took root in the 1990s.

But Atwood criticized the current, as well as previous administrations, for not coordinating U.S. international aid work.

“They haven’t done anything about the basic structural problem, which is that our foreign aid programs are scattered all over the map,” he said. “They are chaotic and incoherent and you’re not getting the bang for the buck that you would get if you would have, for example, a single cabinet department running the whole show like they do in the United Kingdom.”

Joe Biden will deliver a high-profile speech intended as the first attack in a sustained anti-McCain offensive in a new speech called “Bush 44″ he’ll deliver tomorrow in the key battleground state of Michigan.

While the lines of attack have long been drawn—as the title indicates, Biden will assert that a McCain presidency would amount to a third Bush term and will focus on the Republican’s domestic policies and harsh campaign tactics—the new speech will be more detailed, comprehensive and aggressive, a campaign aide told Politico.

Biden will deliver the speech in St. Clair Shores, Mich., which is located in Macomb County—the area whose voters inspired Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg to coin the term “Reagan Democrats.” The RealClearPolitics polling average shows Obama with a 2-point lead in the state, which Democrats won by slim margins in the last two elections.

The speech is touted as matching the aggressive new strategy the Obama campaign has promised to unleash in the remaining days of the campaign to counter the recent poll gains of John McCain and running mate Sarah Palin.

Biden until now has received considerably less media attention than Palin, in part because his speeches have seemed more intended to appeal to crowds than to make news, and the speech seems to be intended to integrate him more into the broader campaign strategy and to use him as a super-surrogate to take high-profile hits at McCain.

The campaign is emphasizing Biden’s unique standing to deliver those hits, based on his longtime relationship with the Arizona senator, stretching back to the early 1970s when McCain served as Biden’s Navy liaison to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Biden gave a taste of this promised new ferocity, which the campaign hopes will translate into increased coverage of its line of attack, during campaign stops in Charlotte, N.C., Sunday.

Recalling how he offered to publicly defend McCain against character attacks during the 2000 primary, Biden told a rally that his friend McCain nonetheless “was then and is now dead wrong … about what we should do as a nation.”

The crowd of 1,100—as verified by the police department—whooped and clapped.

“John just doesn’t get it,” Biden continued. “John’s answer to your health care problems is—seriously, this is not a joke—John wants to, his answer is he’s going to give a tax credit, and the way he’s going to pay for that tax credit is to tax everybody who has health insurance.” The audience booed.

Biden also criticized McCain for voting against legislation to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.

“John doesn’t get it. If he did, he would have voted with [Rep.] Mel [Watt] (D.-N.C) and me when we tried to insure 3.2 million kids,” Biden said as many in the crowd got to their feet clapping. “John voted no! John voted no!”

Biden rapped the McCain-Palin ticket for being out of touch on the economy, and keyed in on women’s sense of economic insecurity.

“John even voted against a study—a study—just to see how big the pay gap was between women and men. A study. Ladies and gentlemen, he wants to continue the trend of this administration,” Biden said, before going on to cite statistics that North Carolina women are more likely than men to be paid just the minimum wage and to live in poverty, and make on average 82 cents for each dollar a man is paid for the same job.

Biden also took aim at McCain’s foreign policy judgment at a fundraiser earlier in the afternoon at the home of Crandall Bowles, wife of former Clinton chief of staff Erskine Bowles.

“On foreign policy there’s not only not any real difference” between Bush and McCain, Biden told a group of about 60 supporters, but “the difference that exists is even more troublesome. More troublesome [is] how John views Iran.”

While Bush sent his top negotiator to Iran, McCain doesn’t want to talk to them, Biden said. “Because we have a naked self-interest in avoiding a war, John, that’s why,” Biden said.

Biden put the blame for what he called Republicans’ “scurrilous lies” about his running mate squarely on McCain, saying that “the very people I said I would testify against [on behalf of] John McCain in South Carolina in the [2000] primary are the very people he’s hired to run this campaign.”

Next Monday, Biden will deliver another high-profile speech, this one a critique of McCain’s foreign-policy views.

For one evening, their political world was perfect. Or so it seemed.

Standing before thousands of delegates, almost half of them her backers, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton declared it time “to unite as a single party with a single purpose” and urged her followers to help elect once-bitter rival Barack Obama. “We are on the same team,” she said, after allowing the applause to build to a crescendo and linger, longer than usual — much like the Democratic primary race itself.

“Barack Obama is my candidate,” she said. “And he must be our president.”

But did she mean it? And would it matter?

True, her challenges Tuesday night were impossibly high, perhaps mutually exclusive.

She had to both promote her political future and unify her party. Clinton had to somehow convince people that she honestly thought Obama was ready for the presidency. But something stood in her way: Her words.

_Dec. 3, 2007: “So you decide which makes more sense: Entrust our country to someone who is ready on Day One … or to put America in the hands of someone with little national or international experience, who started running for president the day he arrived in the U.S. Senate.”

_March 2008. “I know Sen. McCain has a lifetime of experience that he will bring to the White House. And Sen. Obama has a speech he gave in 2002.”

_Feb. 23, 2008: “Now, I could stand up here and say, ‘Let’s just get everybody together. Let’s get unified.’ The skies will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing and everyone will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect.”

There in no such thing as a perfect world, though the Clinton and Obama image teams tried their best to create one. Hundreds of “Hillary” signs danced before the TV cameras, bearing her breezy blue signature. Her misty-eyed husband, former President Clinton, watched from above.

By the time she was done, Sen. Clinton had delivered a strong, convincing affirmation of Obama and, just as importantly, a thumping of McCain. She did her part. Her husband takes the stage Wednesday and then Obama must make his case to the American people that he will be ready on Day One.

That there’s more to him than a single speech.

That he’s the perfect man for troubled times. She brought the party together, for one night anyway, and now it’s up to Obama to close the deal with voters.

Unlike Obama, she no longer needs to worry about her favorability ratings so there was no pulling punches.

“No way,” Clinton said. “No how. No McCain.”

She said McCain would be an extension of the Bush administration. No jobs. Poor health care coverage. High gas prices. Home foreclosures. “More war,” she said, “Less diplomacy. More of a government where the privileged comes first, and everyone else come last.”

In other words, Clinton seemed to say, even if Obama is everything she said during the campaign, he’s still a better candidate than McCain. The speech was as much of an attack on McCain as it was an embrace of Obama. “We don’t need four more years of the last eight years,” she said.

The crowd, Obama and Clinton delegates alike, loved it.

She took the high road Tuesday night because it was also her best road politically; if Obama wins, she still emerges as a central voice in American liberalism, replacing the ailing Sen. Edward Kennedy. And if Obama loses, as Hillary said he would during the campaign, she is blameless and the party can turn back to her without guilt in four years.

Behind the scenes Tuesday, the Obama and Clinton camps struck a tentative deal that would allow some states to cast votes in a roll call before somebody — possibly Clinton herself — cuts short the tally and asks the convention to nominate Obama by unanimous consent. This was her price for ending her historic bid for the presidency in a manner that, however messy, still left Obama in a stronger position than Kennedy left Jimmy Carter in 1980, when the Massachusetts senator extracted platform concessions and shrank from the traditional unity show at the final gavel.

But she did extract her price.

The bill came due Tuesday. The crowd. The applause. The promise of a vote Wednesday, and a speech laced 17 times by some variation of the pronoun “I.”

“You never gave up,” Clinton told her delegates, a phrase that so perfectly fits her. “You never gave up. And together we made history.”

Sen. David Vitter, R-La., can use his campaign funds to pay for some of his legal fees stemming from an escort service scandal, the Federal Election Commission decided Thursday.

The commission deadlocked, however, on Vitter’s request to pay all of his legal fees using his campaign funds.

The legal expenses stemmed from the Louisiana Republican being tied to a Washington, D.C., escort service operated by Deborah Palfrey, who was convicted of running a prostitution ring that catered to the powerful. She committed suicide about two weeks after her conviction.

Vitter has acknowledged involvement with the service and apologized for what he called a “very serious sin.” Palfrey attempted to subpoena Vitter for a pretrial hearing, but Vitter did not testify because the hearing was canceled.

Vitter’s lawyers asked the FEC to rule on whether the senator could use campaign funds to pay about $207,000 in legal costs, and whether his campaign committee could reimburse Vitter $70,000 for fees he already paid.

The Louisiana senator has incurred $85,322 in legal fees for his attempt to quash the subpoena; $31,341 for legal consultation; $75,212.75 in fees for monitoring the Palfrey trial; and $15,301.50 for miscellaneous expenses.

Vitter argued that he would never have been targeted by Palfrey if he had not been a senator, therefore his expenses are a result of his official position.

“I committed a very serious wrong and mistake,” Vitter said in a letter to the commission. “My only point is that others who did the same but were not notable were not similarly treated or targeted by the defense in the Palfrey litigation.”

Commissioner Matthew Petersen agreed, with the Republican member saying Palfrey made known that she would try to call high profile people in her defense. Therefore, Vitter’s expenses were a direct result of him being a senator, Petersen said.

But the three Democrats on the FEC said Vitter should not be able to use campaign funds to pay for legal fees in his attempt to quash the subpoena or monitor the Palfrey trial, saying those expenses had nothing to do with him being a senator.

Allowing Vitter to use his campaign funds would be giving a green light to lawmakers to use campaign funds to pay for divorce lawyers or lawyers to represent them in other cases where they might face bad publicity, Commissioner Ellen Weintraub said.

“To put it plainly, these expenses are the result of some pretty unofficial activities,” she said.

The three Republicans and three Democrats on the FEC all agreed that Vitter should be able to use his campaign funds to pay legal fees relating to when his subpoena lawyer consulted with Vitter and his media relations staff regarding news management and news statements; for his subpoena lawyer’s legal consultations with his lawyer working with the Senate Ethics Committee; and for some miscellaneous expenses.

The commission plans to send Vitter a letter telling him the areas in which they agreed.

Chairman Donald McGahn II said earlier opinions by the commission suggest that Vitter would be able to use campaign funds to reimburse his legal expenses, despite the commission’s current deadlock. But Weintraub suggested Vitter could be putting himself at risk by doing that.

If Vitter cannot reimburse himself for his legal expenses, the funds in question would otherwise go toward the first-term senator’s 2010 campaign. He has not said whether he will run again. In its latest statement filed with the FEC, his campaign committee said it had $1.9 million cash on hand as of June 30, and no debts.

Vitter’s lawyers referred calls to his Senate office. A message left at his Senate office was not immediately returned.

The White House grasp of developments in war-battered Georgia has been hampered by confusing reports from the ground and intelligence resources that initially were focused more on Iraq and Afghanistan than the former Soviet republic.

One-sided and possibly exaggerated accounts of actions from both sides and the Bush administration’s difficulty in independently verifying information about the war have left the White House standing on an ever-changing platform from which to speak out on the crisis.

At least three times on Wednesday, President Bush referred to being concerned about “reports” that Russia had violated its pledge to a provisional cease-fire. White House press secretary Dana Perino hedged her answers to questions about the conflict, too.

“We do have credible reports that Russia has taken actions that violate the cease-fire agreement, and that’s what the president was referring to,” she said. “I can’t get into specifics, but we do have those reports and we’re concerned about them, and we are working to get concrete information. It’s not the easiest thing in the world given the geography and the cutoff of information.”

Beyond intelligence reports and media accounts, State Department officials on the ground are relaying information through cables and phone calls, said Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council. “It is very difficult to get accurate situational awareness in real time in a crisis that is fast-moving,” Johndroe said. “This is a motorized conflict in a relatively small area and that means the situation on the ground can change very quickly.”

Still, defense officials concede that in the early stages of Russia’s move into Georgia over the weekend, the U.S. did not have a good view of the war, which has strained relations between Washington and Moscow.

The Defense Department has limited intelligence-gathering assets, including satellites, and defense officials said the bulk of the military’s eyes and ears have been focused on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. During the weekend, as the situation in Georgia worsened, the Pentagon authorized the repositioning of some satellites to get a better understanding of what was happening on the ground.

While the military, as well as U.S. intelligence agencies, can collect imagery or audio at various times and locations, that information then has to be melded with other data and observations from people who are there. According to defense officials, intelligence early Wednesday was mixed and provided a somewhat ambiguous picture of whether Russian troops were launching attacks in Gori or other cities.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of intelligence-gathering, said the quality of information improved throughout the day. By late afternoon, the U.S. had what officials called more robust intelligence on the movement of Russian forces around Gori.

Ariel Cohen, a research fellow in Russian and Eurasian studies at the Heritage Foundation who has visited Georgia about a half-dozen times, countered this explanation, saying it’s “ludicrous” to assert that satellite capabilities are to blame for the administration’s lack of information about the situation in Georgia. Cohen, who said he alerted the Bush administration to Russia’s preparations for war in Georgia more than two years ago, said “glaring gaps” in research and analysis by the nation’s national security team are to blame.

“I think this is a significant lack of policy and analysis” about events in the region, he said.

Stephen Flanagan, an analyst on security and defense policy and intelligence issues at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the lack of international presence in either South Ossetia or Abkhazia — the two separatist regions that have been largely overrun by Russia since fighting broke out last week — is making it especially difficult to verify reports.

“I think the administration has most of what they need,” he said. “I’m sure we have a lot more information than they’re discussing publicly.”

Two U.S. officials also denied that the U.S. is having any special problems or unusual difficulties with getting intelligence on this conflict, though they acknowledged that the situation is confusing. The United States is not involved in the conflict, initial reports often are incorrect in the fog of war and it’s hard for people there who might give them information to get around the country to validate developments, they said.

In addition, the Russians often say one thing and the Georgians say another, and the international community must work to reconcile the two stories to learn the truth. Two U.S. officials also mentioned that the Georgians have been exaggerating in some of their reports about what the Russians are doing, further complicating the administration’s effort to find the truth.

John McCain’s campaign said Thursday it is returning $50,000 in contributions solicited by a foreign citizen. The move follows the disclosure that the money was being raised by a Jordanian man who is a business partner of prominent Florida Republican Harry Sargeant III, who has collected hundreds of thousands of dollars for McCain.

The New York Times reported Thursday that Sargeant allowed a longtime business partner, Mustafa Abu Naba’a, to bring in some $50,000 in donations in March from members of a single extended family in California, the Abdullahs, along with several of their friends.

The Abdullahs and other Arab-Americans in California also contributed tens of thousands of dollars to Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton and Republicans Rudolph Giuliani and Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, a longtime friend of Sargeant.

According to the Times, Abu Naba’a is a dual citizen of Jordan and the Dominican Republic.

It is illegal for foreigners to contribute their own money to U.S. political campaigns, and McCain’s campaign said Abu Naba’a did not do so.

But McCain spokesman Brian Rogers said some of the people solicited by Abu Naba’a had no intention of supporting McCain for president.

Rogers said “that just didn’t sound right to us” so the money is being returned. He estimated the total at less than $50,000, saying “we think we have a pretty good estimate of how much Abu Naba’a solicited.”

At the same time, the campaign sent a letter to everyone whose donations went through Sargeant, reminding them that federal law bars campaigns from accepting contributions from foreign nationals and that all donations must come from their own funds, without reimbursement.

Eight months ago, a top fundraiser for Clinton, Norman Hsu, was indicted for making contributions to various political candidates in the names of others.

Arizona Sen. McCain is co-sponsor of the campaign finance reform law that bears his name and the move is an effort to resolve any questions involving Sargeant before it turns into a major political problem for the candidate.

Sargeant, who does extensive business with the federal government, is facing problems on Capitol Hill.

A House committee chairman, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., is looking into Sargeant’s defense work shipping fuel to U.S. bases in Iraq as part of a probe into whether contractors are overcharging the Pentagon.

Sargeant and Abu Naba’a are being sued in Florida by a former partner, the husband of a half-sister of the King of Jordan. The lawsuit alleges that Sargeant and Abu Naba’a swindled the business partner out of his share of the profits from valuable contracts with the U.S. government.

The plaintiff, Mohammad Anwar Farid Al-Saleh, says he obtained authorization from Jordan to permit Sargeant’s company to ship oil across Jordanian territory to U.S. bases in Iraq.

A 2004 advisory opinion by the Federal Election Commission says a foreign national may lawfully solicit political contributions, but the issue is more complicated than that.

Federal election law does not address whether it is legal for foreigners to solicit donations. At the same time, federal regulations say a foreign national may not participate in a person’s decision-making regarding contributions.

“The 2004 opinion is very clear, but throwing the regulation into the mix muddies the water. The FEC could revisit the issue,” said Paul S. Ryan, an attorney at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group.

1. Absolutely!!

2. No. The President needs to be intelligent and powerful enough not to be a puppet.

3. Nope.

4. Oh my god no. She is the freakiest person I ever heard of. She makes absolutely no sense when she talks. She speaks in that government speak and does not make any sense. Have I mentioned she makes no sense?

5. Possibly, a black woman being president would be GREAT, but I don’t think there’s a chance she would ever run. She does seem to agree with EVERYTHING Bush does, other than that I think she could handle the job.

6. From what I have seen of her, I would seriously consider her as a viable candidate.

7. I would sooner vote for Condie than for Hillary

8. Helllllllllllllllllllllll Nooooooooooooooooooo!

9. It depends on who she ran against but she is definitely very highly regarded by me.

10. nope…no way …not a frig’n shot, she’s as bad as bush and darth cheney

11. Possibly, yes. IMHO, she’s the most qualified woman in America. However, she has never held an elected position in government. I say that she’d be a good VP running mate for the republican party … that would get Hillary’s and the democrat party’s panties in a bunch!

12. I would vote for her before I would Hillary Clinton. And with the way she handling foreign relations and the mid-eastern peace talks I think she would make a good president.

13. Maybe, depend on the other choice

14. She was so weak as the national security adviser and the Secretary of state that Donald Rumsfeld and the defense department bullied their way in to dictating what state department policy should be.

She would be a weak president.

15. depends on her stances and ideals, but i wouldn’t out right rule it out.

16. You bet. It’s nice to have a leader with class. And she’s tough and is a good speaker.

Joey, what a great idea!

17. No, since I never voted for her in anything in the first place. I want to know who the People get to nominate? All we get is a premade selection of choices that I would never make in the first place.

Attorneys choose jurors by using a system known as voir dire. This is where each side of a case has the opportunity to ask questions of the jurors to determine who would not be suited to serve on this case due to underlying biases. This is where the differences between federal and state court arise. In federal court, the judge is the one who generally conducts voir dire. the attorneys submit questions to the judge who will ask the questions to the jurors. In state court, generally each attorney is permitted to ask questions to the jurors in an alloted time period. At the end of voir dire, the attorneys are permitted to use for cause challenges to get rid of the jurors from the jury pool who would be tainted from delivering a verdict. This means for example if it is a murder case, juror fourteen’s sister was murdered. This juror would be struck for cause because it would be hard for this juror to think about this murder case differently than they would think about their own sister’s murder case. Then each side has an opportunity to exercise their preemptory challenges to get rid of a juror. This is where Batson challenges can arise. It is pretty complicated going into the ins and outs of jury selection but this is a bare bones summary.

 Perhaps the major issue here is defining public interest and the form that the presentation thereof takes. People’s opinions on what defines relevant news varies, and objective presentation, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Hyperbole is maligned by some, praised by others. It’s less a matter of what is objective than it is of who can determine what is objective.

Journalists have the duty to seek and present the truth, so inherently they must question authority, but their questioning must be based on contrary information, or to inquiry about verification. Challenging authority should never be about egos. Illegitimate questions come at the expense of integrity.