Montel Williams turned the question on live television when he choose to focus on the solders dying in Iraq rather than the passing of Heath Ledger. Montel did not return for a further segment.

COLUMBIA, S.C. - A state lawmaker wants to give members of the armed forces younger than 21 the right to buy alcohol even though it's in stark contrast to the military's efforts to diminish underage drinking and related accidents.

"I really don't think it should create a problem for the military. It might even enhance their morale," Rep. Fletcher Smith said Wednesday.

"It's absurd that people serving in the military are trained to kill on the battlefield but at the same time couldn't come back home and have a beer," the Greenville Democrat said. "If you're old enough to get training in the U.S. military, you should be old enough to get a beer. That training really matures a person."

"If a man is old enough to defend his country and die for his country," he shouldn't be told he's too young for a beer, said Rep. Grady Brown, D-Bishopville.

Suicides Among Active-Duty Soldiers Reach Record High

Suicides among active-duty soldiers in 2007 reached their highest level since the Army began keeping such records in 1980, according to a draft internal study obtained by The Washington Post. Last year, 121 soldiers took their own lives, nearly 20 percent more than in 2006.

At the same time, the number of attempted suicides or self-inflicted injuries in the Army has jumped sixfold since the Iraq war began. Last year, about 2,100 soldiers injured themselves or attempted suicide, compared with about 350 in 2002, according to the U.S. Army Medical Command Suicide Prevention Action Plan.

The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have placed severe stress on the Army, caused in part by repeated and lengthened deployments. Historically, suicide rates tend to decrease when soldiers are in conflicts overseas, but that trend has reversed in recent years. From a suicide rate of 9.8 per 100,000 active-duty soldiers in 2001 -- the lowest rate on record -- the Army reached an all-time high of 17.5 suicides per 100,000 active-duty soldiers in 2006.

Million Iraqis dead since invasion

A new study estimates that more than 1 million Iraqis have died because of the war in Iraq since the US-led invasion of the country in 2003.

Data compiled by London-based Opinion Research Business (ORB) and its research partner in Iraq, the Independent Institute for Administration and Civil Society Studies (IIACSS) reveals a fifth of Iraqi households lost at least one family member between March 2003 and August 2007 due to the conflict.

"We now estimate that the death toll between March 2003 and August 2007 is likely to have been in the order of 1,033,000," ORB said in a statement.

The margin of error for the survey was 1.7 per cent, making the estimated range between 946,000 and 1.12 million fatalities.

When asked to comment, Romney simply said "Rats!"

Meanwhile, Rudy 9ui11iani's campaign - in honor of the terrorist attack he can't stop talking about - collapsed and crumbled like a pair of plane-stricken burning skyscrapers.

With Rudy gone, the GOP race comes down to a battle between.....

Rats -vs- Sweets

"What really triggered it for him, according to Saddam, was he had sent his foreign minister to Kuwait to meet with the Emir Al Sabah, the former leader of Kuwait, to try to resolve some of these issues. And the Emir told the foreign minister of Iraq that he would not stop doing what he was doing until he turned every Iraqi woman into a $10 prostitute. And that really sealed it for him, to invade Kuwait. He wanted to punish, he told me, Emir Al Sabah, for saying that," Piro explains.

"He told me that most of the WMD had been destroyed by the U.N. inspectors in the '90s. And those that hadn't been destroyed by the inspectors were unilaterally destroyed by Iraq," Piro says.

"He considered him to be a fanatic. And as such was very wary of him. He told me, 'You can't really trust fanatics,'" Piro says.

Piro says Saddam thought that Bin Laden was a threat to him and his regime.

Bush, Facing Woes in '08, Focuses on War and Taxes

Facing an unstable economy and an unfinished war, President Bush used his final State of the Union address Monday night to call for quick passage of his tax rebate package, patience in Iraq and a modest concluding agenda that includes $300 million in scholarship money for low-income children in struggling schools.

Mr. Bush devoted relatively little of his 53 minute speech to the economy, the issue that is the top concern of voters during this election year. He spent far more time talking about the issue that has been his own primary concern, Iraq.

Our message to the people of Iran is clear. We have no quarrel with you. We have respect your traditions and your history. We look forward to the day when you have your freedom.

Our message to the leaders of Iran is also clear. Verifiably suspend your nuclear enrichment so negotiations can begin. And to rejoin the community of nations, come clean about your nuclear intentions and past actions. Stop your oppression at home. Cease your support for terror abroad.

And tonight I have a message for the brave and oppressed people of Iraq: Your enemy is not surrounding your country, your enemy is ruling your country.

In Afghanistan, America, our 25 NATO allies and 15 partner nations are helping the Afghan people defend their freedom and rebuild their country.

Thanks to the courage of these military and civilian personnel, a nation that was once a safe haven for al Qaeda is now a young democracy where boys and girls are going to school. New roads and hospitals are being built. And people are looking to the future with new hope.

These successes must continue. So we're adding 3,200 Marines to our forces in Afghanistan, where they will fight the terrorists and train the Afghan army and police.

Bush to ask for $70 billion in partial 2009 war funding

The Bush administration will ask Congress next week for $70 billion to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other related operations for part of the 2009 fiscal year, the Pentagon said on Monday.

The funding would be in addition to the administration's request for the regular Pentagon budget which is to be presented next week.

Since the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, Congress has approved $691 billion to pay for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and such related activities as Iraq reconstruction, the Congressional Budget Office said last week.

Of the total, the CBO estimated that $440 billion had been spent on the war in Iraq.

President George W. Bush will begin "unprecedented steps" to trim billions of dollars earmarked by lawmakers for pet projects, a White House spokesman said.

Bush will issue an executive order tomorrow directing federal agencies to ignore any earmarks included only in committee reports, not in the text of legislation.

Congress approved more than 11,700 earmarks valued at a total of more than $19 billion for the fiscal 2008 spending year, according to the Office of Management and Budget.

President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki issued a joint letter in November. On the surface, the "Declaration of Principles" appears as a mutual "expression of friendship," as it has been characterized by administration officials.

The "Declaration of Principles" includes language that seems run-of-the-mill. The United States will help get Iraq into the World Trade Organization. The two countries will engage in scientific and cultural exchanges.

But it also includes a provision that promises to maintain the stability of Iraq's government from "internal and external threats." This sentence is raising alarms for some U.S. lawmakers.

Any such agreement would be considered a treaty by many legal experts. And under the U.S. Constitution, treaties have to be ratified by Congress.

"The declaration of principles would appear to commit the United States to keeping the elected Iraqi government in power against internal threats," says Kenneth Katzman, a Middle East analyst at the Congressional Research Service. "I leave it to the lawyers to determine whether that's the definition of a treaty or not but it certainly seems to be - is going to be - a hefty U.S. commitment to Iraq for a long time."

Such a hefty commitment would be unprecedented in the history of American foreign policy.

Click the image for a larger version.

House Democrats failed for the second time in three months Wednesday to override President Bush's veto of a proposed $35 billion expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program.

The 260-152 tally left backers of the legislation about 15 votes short of the two-thirds majority of lawmakers voting necessary to override the president's Dec. 12 veto. Forty-two Republicans supported the override attempt, two fewer than in the previous effort to reject Bush's Oct. 3 veto of an earlier version of the bill.

"With the economy taking a sour turn, now is not the time to deny the most innocent and helpless Americans - children whose parents can't afford health insurance - what they so desperately need," said Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

The vetoed bills would have expanded the $5 -billion-a-year program by an average of $7 billion a year over the next five years, for total funding of $60 billion over the period. That would have boosted enrollment to 10 million children, up from 6.6 million, and substantially reduced the ranks of the nation's 9 million uninsured children, supporters said.

In a sign of the financial difficulties facing Republican Mike Huckabee, his presidential campaign said Tuesday that top advisers are working without pay and some aides have left.

Campaign contributions continue to come in, he said. But he acknowledged that the former Arkansas governor is stretched thin as he tries to compete in Florida's primary next Tuesday and many of the two dozen states holding contests Feb. 5.

Huckabee told reporters late Monday he would evaluate the situation in Florida daily and decide whether to keep campaigning in the state. His campaign has stopped arranging charter flights, hotel reservations and other means of helping journalists keep up with his movements. News organizations pay their own expenses, but empty seats on charter planes were costing the campaign money.

Rollins said the campaign plans to run some ads on cable stations in Florida, but it cannot afford broadcast rates. Huckabee is splitting time between Florida, Georgia and Arkansas this week.

"One can say with some assurance that in the next year the use of force by the United States is highly unlikely," Bolton told AFP on the sidelines of the Herzliya conference on the balance of Israel's national security.

"That increases the pressure on Israel in that period of time... if it feels Iran is on the verge of acquiring that capability, it brings the decision point home to use force," he said.

The hawkish former diplomat said that after a US intelligence report published late last year that claimed Iran had suspended a nuclear weapons programme in 2003, the US was unlikely to take military action against it.

"The pressure is on Israel now after the National Intelligence Estimate because, I think, the likelihood of American use of force has been dramatically reduced," he said.

"Prior to Roe," said David Garrow, a law professor at Cambridge University, and a longtime Supreme Court scholar, "whether one could obtain a legal abortion in the face of an unwanted pregnancy was a crapshoot. For 30 years now, it's been a constitutionally guaranteed right."

But the ruling was a qualified one, as many anti-abortion supporters have noted over the years, and that fact has been used by them in their efforts to narrow the scope of other abortion provisions. Blackmun noted the state's "important interests in safeguarding health, maintaining medical standards, and protecting potential life" are compelling enough to justify regulation "at some point in pregnancy."

They found success last year when the justices in a sharply divided 5-4 ruling upheld a federal ban on a controversial a late-term procedure, rejecting concerns the law didn't take into account the physical safety of the mother.

The swing vote, as in previous cases, came from Kennedy. In angry dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the lone woman on the high court since O'Connor stepped down, called the majority's conclusions "alarming" and said they "cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to chip away a right declared again and again by this court, and with increasing comprehension of its centrality to women's lives."

SENATE
10. Mississippi (OPEN Republican-held seat; Lott resigned)
9. Alaska (Republican Sen. Ted Stevens running for re-election)
8. Oregon (Republican Sen. Gordon Smith running for re-election)
7. Maine (Republican Sen. Susan Collins running for re-election)
6. Minnesota (Republican Sen. Norm Coleman running for re-election)
5. Colorado (OPEN Republican-held seat; Sen. Wayne Allard retiring)
4. Louisiana (Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu running for re-election)
3. New Hampshire (Republican Sen. John Sununu running for re-election)
2. New Mexico (OPEN Republican-held seat; Sen. Pete Domenici retiring)
1. Virginia (OPEN Republican-held seat; Sen. John Warner retiring)

House
10. Louisiana's 6th district (OPEN Republican-held seat; Baker resigning)
9. California's 11th district (Democratic Rep. Jerry McNerney running for re-election)
8. Minnesota's 3rd district (OPEN Republican-held seat; Rep. Jim Ramstad retiring)
7. New Mexico's 1st district (OPEN Republican-held seat; Rep. Heather Wilson running for Senate)
6. Ohio's 15th district (OPEN Republican-held seat; Rep. Deborah Pryce retiring)
5. New Jersey's 7th district (OPEN Republican-held seat; Rep. Mike Ferguson retiring)
4. Illinois' 11th district (OPEN Republican-held seat; Rep. Jerry Weller retiring)
3. Arizona's 1st district (OPEN Republican-held seat; Rep. Rick Renzi retiring)
2. New Jersey's 3rd district (OPEN Republican-held seat; Rep. Jim Saxton retiring)
1. Ohio's 16th district (OPEN Republican-held seat; Rep. Ralph Regula retiring)

E-mail messages sent and received by White House personnel during the first three years of the Bush administration were routinely recorded on tapes that were "recycled," the White House's chief information officer said in a court filing this week.

During the period in question, the Bush presidency faced some of its biggest controversies, including the Iraq war, the leak of former CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson's name and the CIA's destruction of interrogation videotapes.

White House spokesman Tony Fratto said he has no reason to believe any e-mails were deliberately destroyed.

Two federal statutes require presidential communications, including e-mails involving senior White House aides, to be preserved for the nation's historical record, and some historians responded to the court disclosure yesterday by urging that the White House's actions be thoroughly probed.

A federal grand jury on Wednesday indicted a former congressman originally from Chicago on charges that he was connected to a terrorist funding network that channeled money to an Afghan warlord who supported Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Mark Siljander, 56, a former Republican member of the U.S. House representing Michigan who was raised and educated in Chicago and the suburbs, faces charges of money laundering, conspiracy and obstruction of justice.

Authorities allege that Siljander lied about lobbying on behalf of a Missouri-based Islamic charity accused of sending funds to terrorists. Authorities further allege that Siljander accepted a payment of $50,000 for his efforts to lobby senators to restore the charity's eligibility to receive government work. The money Siljander was paid turned out to be stolen from the U.S. Agency for International Development, according to the indictment.

(thanks to our old friend Bob Kincaid at Head-On Radio for the picture)

Artificial Intelligence
President Bush's cavalier dismissal of the NIE undermines our credibility, again.

President George W. Bush hasn't accomplished much on his voyage to the Middle East, but he did take the time to inflict another wound on the entire U.S. intelligence community - and on the credibility of anything he might ever again say about the world.

In the latest Newsweek, Michael Hirsh reports that, during a private conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Bush "all but disowned" the agencies' Dec. 3 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran. A "senior administration official who accompanied Bush" on the trip confided to Hirsh that Bush "told the Israelis that he can't control what the intelligence community says, but that [the NIE's] conclusions don't reflect his own views."

The NIE - which was signed by all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies - concluded "with high confidence" that Iran had "halted its nuclear weapons program" back in the fall of 2003. The estimate, released to the public in sanitized form, seriously undercut efforts by the Bush-Cheney White House to portray Iran's nuclear ambitions as an imminent threat - and left the world either relieved or (especially in Israel's case) alarmed that the option of a U.S. airstrike on Iran was pretty much off the table.

(snip)

Now President Bush is splashing doubt not just on the CIA, but on all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, simply because their judgments are out of synch with his policies.

"OPEC should understand that if they can put more supply on the market it will be helpful," Bush told reporters when asked what the producer group could do to alleviate high oil prices.

"I will say to Abdullah that high energy prices can affect economic growth because it's painful for our consumers ... could cause the U.S. economy to slow down."
Reuters

"Saudi Arabia will raise oil production only when the market justifies it, the kingdom's oil minister said Tuesday, in response to President Bush's request that OPEC nations increase output to reduce world oil prices.

"Our interest is to keep oil supplies matching demand with minimum volatility in the oil market," Oil Minister Ali Naimi told reporters. "We will raise production when the market justifies it. This is our policy."

Joint Chiefs chairman: Close Guantanamo

The chief of the U.S. military said he favors closing the prison here as soon as possible because he believes negative publicity worldwide about treatment of terrorist suspects has been "pretty damaging" to the image of the United States.

"I'd like to see it shut down," Adm. Mike Mullen said Sunday in an interview with three reporters who toured the detention center with him on his first visit since becoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff last October.

His visit came two days after the sixth anniversary of the prison's opening in January 2002. He stressed that a closure decision was not his to make and that he understands there are numerous complex legal questions the administration believes would have to be settled first, such as where to move prisoners.

Mullen, whose previous visit was in December 2005 as head of the U.S. Navy, noted that President Bush and Defense Secretary Robert Gates also have spoken publicly in favor of closing the prison. But Mullen said he is unaware of any active discussion in the administration about how to do it.

Administration Times $20 Billion Arms Sale With Saudi Visit

Bush administration will notify Congress on Monday of its intent to sell $20 billion in weapons, including precision-guided bombs, to Saudi Arabia, moving up the announcement to coincide with the president's arrival in Riyadh, The Associated Press has learned.

The official said the new timing was "appropriate" and "symbolic" as it would come within hours of Bush's arrival in Saudi Arabia, the penultimate stop on his current Middle East trip. Air Force One is scheduled to land in Riyadh on Monday after a stop in Dubai.

Although administration has staunchly defended the sale as critical to U.S. interests, its desire to sell Saudi Arabia sophisticated weaponry has raised eyebrows from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who say the transfer of Joint Direct Attack Munitions technology would lend it highly accurate targeting abilities that could threaten Israel.

Those concerns have not been assuaged by the administration's plan to counterbalance the Saudi sale with $30 billion in military assistance to Israel - a more than 25 percent increase over the next 10 years - and statements from Israeli officials who say they understand the rationale for the sale and will not oppose it.

.FBI Wiretap Cut Off After Feds Fail To Pay Telecom Spying Bills

Phone companies repeatedly cut off wiretaps used by the FBI to eavesdrop on criminal and terror suspects because the bureau failed to pay bills totalling tens of thousands of dollars, an audit showed today.

The US Justice Department audit showed that, in one office alone, an unpaid wiretap bill reached $66,000.

The audit - of which only a heavily-edited version has been released - painted a chaotic picture of financial mismanagement at the agency.

In addition to more than half of 990 wiretap bills in five FBI offices not being paid on time, it highlighted the FBI's lax oversight of money used in undercover investigations, which it also said had allowed one employee to steal $25,000.

US President George W. Bush on Tuesday blamed Tehran for a "provocative" weekend face-off between US and Iranian ships as he prepared to take his warning that "Iran is a threat" to the Middle East.

"We viewed it as a provocative act. It is a dangerous situation and they should not have done it, pure and simple," Bush declared in his first public remarks on Sunday's incident in the Strait of Hormuz.

"My message today to the Iranians is, they shouldn't have done what they did," he added. "I don't know what their thinking was, but I'm telling you what I think it was, I think it was a provocative act.

For 2007, the budget rose to US $532.8 billion. This does not include many military-related items that are outside of the Defense Department budget, such as nuclear weapons research, maintenance and production (which is in the Department of Energy budget), Veterans Affairs or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (which are largely funded through extra-budgetary supplements, e.g. $120 billion in 2007).

The 2005 U.S. military budget was larger than that of the next 14 biggest spenders combined, and over eight times larger than the official military budget of China. Military discretionary spending accounts for more than half of the U.S. federal discretionary spending.

Iran's Revolutionary Guards say the US navy fabricated evidence that a convoy of its ships was harassed by Iranian speedboats in Gulf waters on Sunday.

"The footage released by the US Navy are file pictures and the audio has been fabricated," Iranian state-run TV quoted a Revolutionary Guards source as saying.

With 91 percent of Democratic precincts reporting Tuesday night amid record turnout for the state's primary, Clinton had 39 percent of the vote to 36 percent for Obama, who is seeking to become the nation's first black president.

Former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina trailed with 17 percent. Former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson had 5 percent and Rep. Dennis Kucinich had 1 percent.

"I come tonight with a very, very full heart, and I want especially to thank New Hampshire," Clinton told a jubliant crowd in Manchester. "Over the last week, I listened to you, and in the process I found my own voice.
MSNBC

Voter turnout in New Hampshire sets new primary record

Voters excited about competitive races in both parties set a record for turnout in New Hampshire's primary Tuesday.

With ballots from 6 percent of voting precincts still to be counted, about 506,000 residents had cast votes, breaking the previous primary turnout record of 396,385 ballots cast in 2000.

voting officials in several towns briefly ran out of ballots and substituted unused absentee ballots or photocopied ballots.

"We're overwhelmed. We had to use extra paper ballots that we hadn't anticipated," said Salem moderator Charles Morse.
Boston Globe

White House told to provide e-mail info

A federal magistrate ordered the White House on Tuesday to reveal whether copies of possibly millions of missing e-mails are stored on computer backup tapes.

The order by U.S. Magistrate Judge John Facciola comes amid an effort by the White House to scuttle two lawsuits that could force the Executive Office of the President to recover any e-mail that has disappeared from computer servers where electronic documents are automatically archived.

In their lawsuits, the National Security Archive and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington suggest the e-mails were improperly deleted from White House computer servers. Over 5 million White House e-mails are missing, CREW alleged. Recently, the group said it has been told by reliable sources that the actual figure of missing e-mail is over 10 million.

In asking that the complaints be dismissed, the Bush administration says the president's record keeping practices under the Presidential Records Act are not reviewable by the courts. Also, the Federal Records Act does not allow the far-reaching action the two private groups are demanding, the administration contends.

The nation's health-care bill climbed above $2 trillion in 2006, averaging a record $7,026 per person, according to a government report released today. The report is likely to intensify the debate over curbing costs and covering the nation's 47 million uninsured people.

Costs increased 6.7 percent over 2005, according to the report by Medicare's actuaries - only slightly higher than the 6.5 percent rate in 2005. But it was still well above the overall rate of inflation.

"Many people involved in health care will say, 'Hey, wait a minute, 6.7 percent ... things are moderating,' but for average people ... they don't see this as moderation," said Ron Pollack, director of Families USA, a liberal advocacy group that promotes coverage for all.
Houston Chronicle

In one area, there was a pretty dramatic increase. Spending on prescription drugs went up 8.5 percent. That's $16 billion.

Health care consultant Bob Lasziewski says it's like a ship sinking at a reduced rate from how it was sinking before. "Health care is still increasing at twice the rate of inflation," he says. "Five years ago, it was four times the rate of inflation."

Paul Ginsburg sees other problems. He's president of the Center for Studying Health Systems Change, which has been studying health care costs in 25 communities around the country. For one thing, Ginsburg says if the economy hits a downturn and wages slump, health care costs will take a bigger bite out of every paycheck.
NPR

It is not often we wish we lived in New Hampshire (nice place to visit), but we sorely wish we could be there on Tuesday to 'vote early and often' for John Edwards. Although we do not at all dislike the prospect of a President Obama, and though the nation would be in good hands if any one of the four Democratic candidates in Saturday's New Hampshire debate were to win the White House, we have long preferred the 2004 Democratic vice presidential candidate and former senator from North Carolina. (Edwards/Obama? In what order? The 'change' candidates could alternate being president/vice president.)

It is not only that John Edwards had the good sense and correct priorities to launch his campaign for the presidency from New Orleans (take note, presidential debate site committee). And it's not just Edwards' plan to remove all U.S. troops from Iraq within 10 months-something his competitors haven't offered. We don't favor Edwards only because he alone has spoken consistently as a populist public defender against the 'iron grip' of corporate special interests on Washington. Nor is he our favorite merely because he has the best health care plan (Paul Krugman's praise-'Edwards Gets It Right'-sounds right to us).

We vote for John Edwards for all of these reasons, but especially because Democrats need a tough, combative lead candidate to whip the Republicans, who are vicious fighters in a presidential campaign-especially when they're desperate. Barack Obama is marvelous and would also be a good president, but we worry he doesn't have the aggressiveness to kick the Republican operatives in the balls, the way they always do to Democrats.

Protesters ask Clinton to iron shirts

Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign stop was interrupted Monday when two men stood in the crowd and began screaming, "Iron my shirt!" during one of her final appearances before the New Hampshire primary.

Clinton, a former first lady running to become the nation's first female president, laughed at the seemingly sexist protest that suggested a woman's place is doing the laundry and not running the country.

"Ah, the remnants of sexism - alive and well," Clinton said to applause in a school auditorium.

"If there's anyone left in the auditorium who wants to learn how to iron a shirt, I'll talk about that," she said with a smile.

Israeli officials in Jerusalem are to deploy more than 10,000 police officers in a vast security operation ahead of the arrival this week of George Bush, the first US president to visit in a decade. Graffiti are being cleaned off walls, road markings are being repainted and hundreds of American flags are being put up across the city. The floodlights which illuminate the stone ramparts of the Old City will stay on for an extra two hours every night, until 2am, to give the president the chance to catch the view.

Bush, who arrives on Wednesday for his first visit as president, will stay at the King David hotel. Eight truckloads of equipment have already arrived in advance of his two-night stay. All the hotel's rooms will be taken by his entourage - tourists have had their bookings cancelled.

The security precautions, dubbed Operation Clear Skies by the Israeli security services, are immense. Roads around the hotel will be blocked, despite the huge traffic jams that will entail. A force of 10,500 police and security staff will be deployed and Bush will be flown in to the hotel by helicopter from the airport near Tel Aviv. "There will be so much security nobody will be able to get anywhere near the president," said Micky Rosenfield, Israel's police spokesman.
Overprotected spoiled brat

The official Arab view of Bush was summed up inadvertently by a diplomat from a major Arab state, who indicated disbelief that Bush is to use the trip to renew his drive for Middle East democracy.

"Is that still on?" the Arab official asked. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of diplomatic sensitivities.

Nonetheless, Bush appears unlikely to alter his rhetoric during the trip, which is scheduled to take him to Israel, the Palestinian territories and five Arab countries -- Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

Meanwhile, Al Qaeda's U.S.-born spokesman urged fighters to meet Bush with bombs when he visits the Middle East, according to a new video posted Sunday on the Internet.

Bush spokesman Gordon Johndroe said the threats won't alter the president's travel plans.
Master of low expectations

Giuliani positive despite weak campaign

He flatlined in Iowa and he's struggling in New Hampshire, but Rudy Giuliani shook off the early-state blues Thursday as only he can.

"None of this worries me - Sept. 11, there were times I was worried," Giuliani said.

"We're sitting in a pretty good position right now. So we're not worried and not concerned," he told a news conference here. "Maybe other people acted nervous in a situation like this, but this is not unexpected."

Drag Queen

Total Voter Turnout (approximate)

356,000

Percentage of total vote

24.5% Obama
20.5% Edwards
19.8% Clinton
11.4% Huckabee (R)

Dems:

1,781 of 1,781 districts reporting

Obama 37.58
Edwards 29.75
Clinton 29.47
Richardson 2.11
Biden 0.93
Uncommitted 0.14
Dodd 0.02

Cons:

1,546 of 1,781 districts reporting

Huckabee 34
Romney 25
Thomspon 13
McCain 13
Paul 10
Giuliani 3

"They're armed agents showing up at 5 a.m., banging on doors, kicking them in, going into people's bedrooms, ripping covers off people in their beds, asking them questions when they're half asleep, and seizing them and taking them away," said Patrick Gennardo of Englewood, one of several area attorneys who have filed suits recently asking that such ICE practices be found unconstitutional. "These aren't fine lines between consent and storming in; these are scary, major violations of the Constitution."

(snip)

"Immigration officials have every right to place people in deportation proceedings," said Bassina Farbenblum, an attorney with Seton Hall University's Center for Social Justice. "And if they're not entitled to stay in the United States, they should remove them. But there have to be constitutional limitations on the way in which immigration officials locate and arrest them."

"It's very dangerous to go down a path where we say the Constitution doesn't matter for a certain group of people," Farben-blum said. "This isn't a cowboy state."

While I certainly agree that these matters warrant an immediate criminal investigation, it is disappointing that the Attorney General has stepped outside the Justice Department's own regulations and declined to appoint a more independent special counsel in this matter. Because of this action, the Congress and the American people will be denied - as they were in the Valerie Plame matter - any final report on the investigation.

Equally disappointing is the limited scope of this investigation, which appears limited to the destruction of two tapes. The government needs to scrutinize what other evidence may have been destroyed beyond the two tapes, as well as the underlying allegations of misconduct associated with the interrogations.

The Justice Department's record over the past seven years of sweeping the administration's misconduct under the rug has left the American public with little confidence in the administration's ability to investigate itself. Nothing less than a special counsel with a full investigative mandate will meet the tests of independence, transparency and completeness. Appointment of a special counsel will allow our nation to begin to restore our credibility and moral standing on these issues.

The price of oil surged past $100 per barrel for the first time Wednesday, the first trading day of the new year.

Several Mexican oil export ports were closed due to rough weather. And, unrest in Nigeria, a major oil producer, also spooked concerns about supply.

Further fueling the rally was a report that OPEC may not be able to meet its share of global oil demand by 2024.

Consumers are feeling the brunt of the spike at the pump too. Gas prices were up 0.6 cent Wednesday to a national average of $3.049 a gallon, according to AAA and the Oil Price Information Service.

24,000 civilian Iraqi deaths in 2007

US-LED coalition and paramilitary forces in Iraq were responsible for some 24,000 violent civilian deaths in 2007, according to an independent group monitoring casualties in the war-ravaged country.

The Iraq Body Count (IBC) whose figures are tallied from media reports, morgue and hospital data, non-governmental and other sources, said in a report that there were between 22,586 and 24,159 violent civilian deaths in Iraq during the past year.

"For some 24,000 Iraqi civilians, and their families and friends, the year was one of devastating and irreparable tragedy," the IBC said.