deliberations

Sorry wingnuts. It wasn’t terrorism. The “mooslims” weren’t trying to torch Israel. Instead it was a 14 year old boy that accidentally started the fire:

A 14-year-old boy from the Carmel region admitted Monday to throwing a piece of burning coal into the forest and causing what later became the largest and most devastating forest fire in Israel's history.

Police arrested the teen early on Monday, and he admitted during his interrogation to smoking a Hookah pipe in the forest, and later disposing the burning piece of coal into an open area in the woods, which caused a fire to erupt.

The teen said that he was so astounded at what had happened that he ran back to school and didn’t report the incident to anyone.

He will be brought before the Haifa Magistrate's Court on Tuesday for deliberations on extending his remand.

For more info on how the wingnuts have been spinning this, see my earlier post “Liberals Hate Israel”.

Just now breaking and it is definitely going to send shockwaves around D.C.

The bipartisan Iraq Study Group reached a consensus on Wednesday on a final report that will call for a gradual pullback of the 15 American combat brigades now in Iraq but stop short of setting a firm timetable for their withdrawal, according to people familiar with the panel’s deliberations.

The report, unanimously approved by the 10-member panel, led by James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton, is to be delivered to President Bush next week. It is a compromise between distinct paths that the group has debated since March, avoiding a specific timetable, which has been opposed by Mr. Bush, but making it clear that the American troop commitment should not be open-ended. The recommendations of the group, formed at the request of members of Congress, are nonbinding.

A person who participated in the commission’s debate said that unless the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki believed that Mr. Bush was under pressure to pull back troops in the near future, “there will be zero sense of urgency to reach the political settlement that needs to be reached.”

This sounds an awful lot like what Democrats have been getting at. Prove to Iraq we are done and force them to step up. Of course Bush already said this week he would not go this route:

Mr. Bush has rejected such contacts until now, and he has also rejected withdrawal, declaring in Riga, Latvia, on Tuesday that while he will show flexibility, “there’s one thing I’m not going to do: I’m not going to pull the troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete.”

Well McCain may be busy trying to show he is a good little Bushie this weekend but other Republicans are not buying into it.

Several Republicans here said Mr. Bush urgently needed to shake up his staff. Senator Norm Coleman, Republican of Minnesota, pointed to what he described as a series of management and political failures as he urged Mr. Bush to bring in a new team.

[..]

Some senior Republicans with ties to the White House, who asked for anonymity because they did not want to be identified describing internal White House deliberations, said there was a widespread feeling here that Mr. Bush would be well served to bring in new advisers, either replacing Andrew H. Card Jr., his chief of staff, or Karl Rove, his senior political adviser.

But one Republican with close ties to the White House said the investigation of Mr. Rove's role in leaking the name of a C.I.A. operative was making it nearly impossible to make any changes until it was resolved.

Like I said after Scarborough's little whine fest about "being ashamed to be a Republican", SO WHAT. These people are the ones who have let Bush go unchecked for 5 years and now that things are getting ugly they want to get out. Sorry but you made your bed now you must lie in it.