President Bush worked nearly three hours at his Texas ranch on Thursday to design a new U.S. policy in Iraq, then emerged to say that he and his advisers need more time to craft the plan he'll announce in the new year.

"My resolution is, is that they'll be safe and that we'll come closer to our objective, that we'll be able to help this young democracy survive and thrive and, therefore, we'll be writing a chapter of peace," Bush said.

The U.S. military death toll in Iraq this month continued to rise as officials reported Thursday that five more American service members had died.

The latest deaths brought to 100 the number of service members killed in December, according to iCasualties.org, an independent Web site that tracks military fatalities.

To: Cincinnatus.45-70
The great Party of Moderates, including Nixon, G. Ford, McCain, Guilianna, GWH Bush & son have just about put on end to any pretense of a Conservative Republican Party. IMO...a spineless bunch of political losers who are little better than DemoRat-lite! Thank these posers for giving us Jimmah Carter, Bilbious Clinton and now even a HildeBeast is a possibility...jeez!
Whatever one believes about Woodward's Ford interview, it is believable that Ford would say such a thing...he is & was a squishee Moderate and failed in most areas as a Temp President a lot like GWHB.

posted on 12/28/2006 5:26:57 AM PST by iopscusa (El Vaquero. (SC Lowcountry Cowboy))

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1759252/posts#comment?q=1

The FBI is missing nearly a quarter of its files relating to investigations of recent leaks of classified information, according to a court filing the bureau made last week.

In response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the FBI said it identified 94 leak investigations since 2001, but that the investigative files in 22 of those cases "are missing" and cannot be located. "There is no physical slip of paper on the shelf which indicates that the file has been charged out to a particular FBI employee, so therefore there is no way of knowing where the file may actually be," an official in the bureau's records division, Peggy Bellando, wrote in a December 22 declaration.

"That's an amazing number," an academic who has studied the FBI's record-keeping procedures, Athan Theoharis of Marquette University, said in an interview yesterday. "These are very sensitive investigations.... They could be called to account for whether they are monitoring reporters. These are records that should be handled very well."

Americans should ring in the new year without undue worry about a terrorist attack, the White House homeland security adviser said Thursday.

"People ought to come, have a good time, they ought to feel confident," Frances Fragos Townsend said in a nationally broadcast television interview.

Townsend said that while the Bush administration takes every threat seriously, it has heard of no plot or plan that should cause alarm as the nation celebrates New Year's Eve and New Year's Day.

Gerald Ford is gone, but he lives on in two of his key appointees: Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Their impact on America today is greater than Ford's, who died Tuesday at 93.

Ford appointed Rumsfeld his chief of staff when he took office after Nixon's resignation in 1974. The next year, when he made the 42-year-old Rumsfeld the youngest secretary of defense in the nation's history, he named 34-year-old Dick Cheney his chief of staff, also the youngest ever.

Those two Ford appointees worked together ever since. The Bush White House assertion of unchecked presidential power stems from the lessons they drew from their experience of working for the weakest president in recent American history. "For Dick and Don," Harold Meyerson wrote in The American Prospect last July, "the frustrations of the Ford years have been compensated for by the abuses of the Bush years."

After weeks of deliberation, President Bush is honing in on a national security team meeting at his Texas ranch that will take him a step closer to deciding a new U.S. policy in Iraq.

With each passing day that he gathers advice, Bush is creating more than a new way forward. He's building expectations that will be hard to meet no matter what he unveils.

(snip)

Anticipation of Bush's decision is high not just because people are weary of war, but also because of the way Bush has gone about deciding his next move.

(snip)

Bush has promised a new approach, yet even Gates, his new defense secretary, has acknowledged that "there are no new ideas in Iraq."

Nearly four years after the war in Iraq began, the number of Americans troops killed in the strife-torn country now exceeds the grim toll of victims from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The U.S. military death toll in Iraq has reached 2,974, one more than the number of deaths in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the U.S., according to an Associated Press count on Tuesday.

"Yes, I think a black person can be elected president," Rice said in an Associated Press interview Thursday.

Iraq is "worth the investment" in American lives and dollars. She said the United States can win in Iraq.

"I don't think it's a matter of money," Rice said. "Along the way there have been plenty of markers that show that this is a country that is worth the investment, because once it emerges as a country that is a stabilizing factor you will have a very different kind of Middle East."

When the right wing cheerleaders start ragging on him and using the "I" word, it's not a good sign for the Warmonger in Chief.

Crooks and Liars has the video

The Pentagon wants the White House to seek an additional $99.7 billion to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to information provided to the Associated Press.

The military's request, if embraced by President Bush and approved by Congress, would boost this year's budget for those wars to about $170 billion.

Overall, the war in Iraq has cost about $350 billion. Combined with the conflict in Afghanistan and operations against terrorism elsewhere, the cost has topped $500 billion, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

In a letter sent to hundreds of voters this month, Representative Virgil H. Goode Jr., Republican of Virginia, warned that the recent election of the first Muslim to Congress posed a serious threat to the nation's traditional values.

In his letter, which was dated Dec. 5, Mr. Goode said that Americans needed to "wake up" or else there would "likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran."

"I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America and to prevent our resources from being swamped," said Mr. Goode, who vowed to use the Bible when taking his own oath of office.

Bush said at a Wednesday news conference that any pay hike should be accompanied by tax and regulatory relief for small businesses.

(snip)

He said he wants to work on the looming insolvency of the Social Security program. But his one-time plan to add private accounts to the system, once the highest domestic priority of his administration, is considered dead by Democrats.

Vice President Dick Cheney will be called to testify on behalf of his former chief of staff in the CIA leak case, defense attorneys said Tuesday, ending months of speculation over what would be historic testimony.

"We're calling the vice president," attorney Ted Wells said in court. Wells represents defendant I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who is charged with perjury and obstruction.

Sitting presidents, including Clinton and Ford, have testified in criminal cases, but presidential historians said they knew of no vice president who has done so.

The report called Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq cites a 22 percent increase in attacks, to nearly 1,000 per week. It says two thirds of the attacks are aimed at coalition forces, but that the remaining attacks, on Iraqi security forces and civilians, are much more deadly.

The report blames sectarian militias for most of the violence, singling out the Mahdi Army of Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr for having what it calls "the greatest negative affect on the security situation in Iraq." It says the militia has replaced al-Qaida terrorists as the biggest cause of civilian casualties in Iraq, and has become the greatest threat to the coalition. It calls the Mahdi Army Iraq's "most dangerous accelerant of potentially self-sustaining sectarian violence."
Voice of America

Hanna and Barbera pose amongside their characters circa 1984. (click pic for larger image)

"The characters he created with his late partner William Hanna are not only animated superstars, but also a very beloved part of American pop culture. While he will be missed by his family and friends, Joe will live on through his work," Warner Bros. Chairman Barry Meyer said in a statement.

Yabba-Dabba-Do

"We do know of certain knowledge that he [Osama Bin Laden] is either in Afghanistan, or in some other country, or dead."

"I believe what I said yesterday. I don't know what I said, but I know what I think, and, well, I assume it's what I said."

"Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war."

"If I said yes, that would then suggest that that might be the only place where it might be done which would not be accurate, necessarily accurate. It might also not be inaccurate, but I'm disinclined to mislead anyone."

The White House took a step back Monday from President Bush's confident assertion two months ago that "absolutely, we're winning" the war in Iraq.

"I'm not playing the game any more," said White House press secretary Tony Snow. "It's one of those things where you end up ... trying to summarize a complex situation with a single word or gerund, and - or even a participle."

Federal agents continue to eavesdrop on Americans' electronic communications without warrants a year after President Bush confirmed the practice, and experts say a new Congress' efforts to limit the program could trigger a constitutional showdown.

High-ranking Democrats set to take control of both chambers are mulling ways to curb the program Bush secretly authorized a month after the Sept. 11 attacks. The White House argues the Constitution gives the president wartime powers to eavesdrop that he wouldn't have during times of peace.

"As a practical matter, the president can do whatever he wants as long as he has the capacity and executive branch officials to do it," said Carl Tobias, a legal scholar at the University of Richmond in Virginia.

"He could take the position he doesn't have to comply with whatever a new Congress says," said Vikram Amar, a law professor at the University of California, Hastings, and a former Supreme Court clerk.

Former secretary of State Colin Powell said Sunday that the U.S. Army "is about broken" and could not support sending a significant increase of Soldiers to Iraq.

The conflict in Iraq, Powell said, has become a civil war that requires an Iraqi political solution. "It's very difficult to see how the American Army can impose its will in this sort of conflict," he said.