Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country.

When the summer is over, we will have increased our debt to China, increased our transfer of wealth to Saudi Arabia and increased our contribution to global warming for our kids to inherit.

A congressional candidate is defending his speech to a group celebrating the anniversary of Adolf Hitler's birth, saying he appeared simply because he was asked.

Tony Zirkle, who is seeking the Republican nomination in Indiana's 2nd District, stood in front of a painting of Hitler, next to people wearing swastika armbands and with a swastika flag in the background for the speech to the American National Socialist Workers Party in Chicago on Sunday.

"I'll speak before any group that invites me," Zirkle said Monday. "I've spoken on an African-American radio station in Atlanta."

Zirkle said he did not know much about the neo-Nazi group and that his intention was to talk on his concern about "the targeting of young white women and for pornography and prostitution."

• Hall was a gunner on a Humvee, which took several bullets in its protective shield. Afterward, his commander asked whether he believed in God, Hall said.

  "I said, 'No, but I believe in Plexiglas,"' Hall said. "I've never believed I was going to a happy place. You get one life. When I die, I'm worm food."

  The issue came to a head when, according to Hall, a superior officer, Maj. Freddy J. Welborn, threatened to bring charges against him for trying to hold a meeting of atheists in Iraq. Welborn has denied Hall's allegations.

• A project heralded as the dawning of an innovative, low-cost era in Navy shipbuilding has turned into a case study of how not to build a combat ship. The bill for the ship, being built by Lockheed Martin, has soared to $531 million, more than double the original, and by some calculations could be $100 million more.

• ..... a dynamic of mutually re-enforcing deficiencies: ever-changing Pentagon design requirements; unrealistic cost estimates and production schedules abetted by companies eager to win contracts, and a fondness for commercial technologies that often, as with the ferry concept, prove unsuitable for specialized military projects. At the same time, a policy of letting contractors take the lead in managing weapons programs has coincided with an acute shortage of government engineers trained to oversee these increasingly complex enterprises.

• Federal contractors will have to disclose tax violations under a new rule prompted by congressional probes that discovered thousands of companies doing business with the U.S. government owed billions of dollars in back taxes.

• Mr. Coleman said congressional investigators found contractors buying high-end boats, cars and multi-million-dollar homes while owing hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes. In 2005, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found 27,000 contractors who owed $3.3 billion in taxes.
  

Maybe Big D can handle Pacman Jones.

The Dallas Cowboys and Tennessee Titans agreed in principle on a trade on Wednesday for the suspended cornerback.

The agreement, which was first reported by ESPN's Ed Werder, was confirmed to The Associated Press by both teams. No terms had been filed with the NFL office, which already had closed for the day.

Sources tell Werder that Dallas will send its fourth-round pick (the 126th overall) in Saturday's draft to the Titans for Jones.

• My wife Barbara has begun yelling at the television set every time she hears Hillary Clinton. This is abnormal behavior, since Barbara is a meditative practitioner of everything peaceful and organic, and is inspired by Barack Obama's transformational appeal. For Barbara, Hillary has become the screech on the blackboard. From First Lady to Lady Macbeth.

• One explanation is that we got here because mortgage bankers and brokers were sleazy, investment bankers were greedy for fees, banks were incompetent, rating agencies were compromised, and regulators either were blinded by deregulatory ideology or chose to look the other way. Obviously, there is a good deal of truth in all of that.

• What if, for the better part of a decade, the United States had been living way beyond its means, consuming more than it produced and investing more than it saved? What if China and Taiwan and Saudi Arabia and even Japan were willing to finance that trade deficit on easy terms because it allowed them to peg their currencies to the dollar in a way that generated higher job creation and economic growth in their home markets? And what if this mutually advantageous imbalance in trade and investment flows wound up creating a huge supply of cheap dollar-denominated credit that virtually invited the bankers and brokers and rating agencies and private-equity firms in U.S. markets to throw caution to the wind and make ill-advised lending and investing decisions?

• ...it means that households will have to reduce consumption, increase savings and stop piling up credit card debt or using home equity as an ATM... the federal government stops running huge operating deficits by raising taxes or dramatically cutting national security and entitlement spending...the price of stocks, bonds, commodity futures and derivatives return to levels that reflect real cash flows and risk-adjusted economic values, not speculative values based on continued availability of cheap and easy money.

WASHINGTON — President Bush has set a record he'd presumably prefer to avoid: the highest disapproval rating of any president in the 70-year history of the Gallup Poll.

In a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken Friday through Sunday, 28% of Americans approve of the job Bush is doing; 69% disapprove. The approval rating matches the low point of his presidency, and the disapproval sets a new high for any president since Franklin Roosevelt.

The previous record of 67% was reached by Harry Truman in January 1952, when the United States was enmeshed in the Korean War.

"I have a lifetime of experience that I will bring to the White House. I know Senator McCain has a lifetime of experience that he will bring to the White House. And Senator Obama has a speech he gave in 2002."

• "...top Senate Democrats and Republicans have endorsed taking action in connection with the earmark that Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska), former chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, inserted into the legislation."

• Local planning officials, who never requested money for the interchange, were outraged to learn after the highway bill became law that they were required to spend $10 million on a project they did not want. The Lee County Metropolitan Planning Organization, the recipient of the money, has rejected it three times in the past year.

• "I don't pick the winner, but if I did, I'd pick SMS," Goldfein reportedly said to the seven-person group selecting a contractor to jazz up the Air Force's Thunderbirds air show with massive Jumbotron video boards, according to a lengthy Department of Defense Inspector General's report. The head of the selection team almost immediately "caved," giving in to what he believed was a fixed process. Another member of the team called it "the dirtiest thing" he'd ever experienced.

• The Iraqi government announced Sunday that it had dismissed 1,300 soldiers and policemen for refusing to fight or performing badly during last month’s offensive against Shiite militias in the southern city of Basra.

• Heston died April 5 at age 84 in his Beverly Hills home with his wife, Lydia, at his side.

Charlton Heston's Gun Taken From His Cold, Dead Hands

• Gonzales, the former attorney general, who was forced to resign last year, has been unable to interest law firms in adding his name to their roster, Washington lawyers and his associates said in recent interviews. He has, through friends, put out inquiries, they said, and has not found any takers. What makes Mr. Gonzales’s case extraordinary is that former attorneys general, the government’s chief lawyer, are typically highly sought.

• To a seasoned listener of this league, it is a foregone conclusion that this November these owners will opt out of the current collective bargaining agreement, one they approved 30-2 just before former Commissioner Paul Tagliabue retired.

• ...when circumstances render it impossible to feed their hungry children, normally passive citizens can very quickly become militants with nothing to lose. That's especially true when the source of their hunger is not the absence of food supplies but their inability to afford to buy the available food supplies. And that's precisely what we're seeing in the current wave of global food-price inflation. As Josette Sheeran of the U.N. World Food Program put it last month, "We are seeing food on the shelves but people being unable to afford it."

• When all that stands between hungry people and a warehouse full of rice and beans is a couple of padlocks and a riot policeman (who may be the neighbor of those who're trying to get past him, and whose own family may be hungry too), the invisible barricade of private-property laws can be easily ignored. Doing whatever it takes to feed oneself and a hungry child, after all, is a primal human instinct. So, with prices of basic foods skyrocketing to the point that even the global aid agencies — whose function is to provide emergency food supplies to those in need — are unable, for financial reasons, to sustain their current commitments to the growing army of the hungry, brittle regimes around the world have plenty of reason for anxiety.

"Hey, let's be honest about this. The Iraqi political leadership has achieved a lot more political reconciliation and progress in September than the American political leadership has. So we've got to give some credit for that."

• Iraqi forces were plagued by desertions and mutinies in units send to Basra, where a government offensive against militias stalled and triggered fighting elsewhere.

• Last week, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, himself a Shiite, ordered a nationwide freeze on Iraqi raids against Shiite militants, bowing to demands by al-Sadr who had hinted at retaliation if Iraqi security forces continue to arrest his followers.

• Crazed Naomi Campbell flew into a rage over ONE lost bag — after 20,000 pieces of luggage went missing at Heathrow’s trouble-hit Terminal 5. The model, 37, allegedly Spat at a cop who was called to calm her down — then laid into him with her fists.

• CINCINNATI - Cincinnati Bengals receiver Chris Henry lost his job while in jail awaiting arraignment on assault charges on Thursday. The Bengals cut him after his fifth arrest since 2005.

• The Government Accountability Office found that 95 major systems have exceeded their original budgets by a total of $295 billion, bringing their total cost to $1.6 trillion, and are delivered almost two years late on average.
• Auditors said the Defense Department showed few signs of improvement since the GAO began issuing its annual assessments of selected weapons systems six years ago. "It's not getting any better by any means," said Michael Sullivan, director of the GAO's acquisition and sourcing team. "It's taking longer and costing more."

• The classified budget of the Defense Department, concealed from the public in all but outline, has nearly doubled in the Bush years, to $32 billion.

$32 billion a year - no questions asked. That comes on top of roughly 1/2 trillion per for Defense. This is more than half of the discretionary budget each year.