Budget officials announced yesterday “that the federal deficit has soared to a record $455 billion. … The final accounting for fiscal 2008 produced a larger shortfall than had been projected, reflecting the start of federal efforts to address the economic emergency.” The previous record deficit had been $413 billion, reached in 2004.
The Bush administration “issued a pair of secret memos to the CIA in 2003 and 2004 that explicitly endorsed the agency’s use of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding against al-Qaeda suspects.” CIA director George Tenet requested the memos “more than a year after” the program began because “senior CIA officials were troubled” that the White House had never endorsed it in writing.
20 days to go: John McCain and Barack Obama will engage in their third and final debate tonight at Hofstra University in New York. Sarah Palin is in Dover, NH, and Joe Biden campaigns at Ohio State University.
After Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) proposed a “spending freeze on everything but defense,” his campaign appears to be walking the promise back. Yesterday, aides to McCain said his budget also includes “a specific carve-out for spending on science.” “You’ll definitely see, under John McCain, more spending on research,” senior policy adviser Ike Brannon said.
And finally: Yesterday, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts issued an unusual dissent that was more “Supreme Court noir” than traditional legalese. Roberts wrote a dissent from denial of review in Pennsylvania v. Dunlap, “a fairly routine drug arrest case raising ‘probable cause’ issues.” Mystery writer Paul Levine speculated on Roberts’s shift: “My guess is that the Chief lost a bet with Scalia on the baseball playoffs. If Roberts wins the next wager, Scalia will have to write an opinion in iambic pentameter.” Read Roberts’s writing here.