The Los Angeles Times:
"I expect Gen. Petraeus will present his cherry-picked numbers to indicate enough progress so the Bush administration can stay the course," Rep. Janice Schakowsky (D-Ill.) said before the hearing, whipping out charts of her own showing that violence was down only if you didn't count car bombs or bullets to the front of the head rather than the back.
But, Schakowsky noted, there was one firm date bound to forge some kind of change:
"November 2008."
The New York Times:
“The good news is that a lot of people, unlike the run-up to the war, aren’t buying it,” said Representative Jan Schakowsky, Democrat of Illinois.
Another article from the Los Angeles Times:
"My hope is that this is a message that is going to penetrate my Republican colleagues," said Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), a close ally of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) and a leader of Congress' Out of Iraq Caucus. "We are in election season now. And I hope Republicans realize the war is an albatross around their necks."
Finally, in last Sunday's New York Times (Subscription may be required), columnist Frank Rich featured Congresswoman Schakowsky:
One Baghdad visitor left unimpressed was Representative Jan Schakowsky, a Democrat from Chicago, who dined with her delegation in Mr. Crocker's Green Zone residence last month while General Petraeus delivered his spiel. "He's spending an awful lot of time wining and dining members of Congress," she told me last week. Though the menu included that native specialty lobster tortellini, the real bill of fare, Ms. Schakowsky said, was a rigid set of talking points: "Anbar," "bottom up," "decrease in violence" and "success."
For those listening to the testimony on Capitol Hill by General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker, those rigid talking points Jan references are being repeated ad nauseam.
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