will find . . . a dwindling minority inside the Senate Republican caucus when Congress reconvenes this week. 

President Bush and McCain, the front-runner for the party's 2008 presidential nomination, will have trouble finding support from more than 12 of the 49 Republican senators when pressing for a surge of 30,000 troops. "It's Alice in Wonderland," Sen. Chuck Hagel, second-ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, told me in describing the proposal. "I'm absolutely opposed to sending any more troops to Iraq. It is folly." . . .  

Disenchantment with George W. Bush within the GOP runs deep. Republican leaders around the country, anticipating that the 2006 election disaster would prompt an orderly disengagement from Iraq, are shocked that the president now appears ready to add troops.

General Casey is now likely to be removed, probably within the next two months, while Lt-Gen John Abizaid, the head of Central Command and in overall charge of the Iraq war, is also due to step down.

 After the post-midterm election replacement of Donald Rumsfeld by Robert Gates at the Pentagon, Mr Bush will in effect have installed an entire new leadership of the war.

If consumers are the engine of America's economy, then debt is the fuel driving Americans into the red as never before.  Consumers owe a whopping $9.9 trillion dollars. It is affecting all generations; from the newly-minted college grad — who owes an average of $20,000 in student loans — to the baby boomers contemplating retirement with jumbo mortgages. 

“One of the implications of huge debt loads is that millions of Americans literally can not afford to retire,” says bankruptcy expert and Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Warren. 

Warren calls this record-high debt “the dark underbelly of the American economy. This isn't about over-consuming, this is about the basics.”  . . .  

In 1981, just three percent of consumers’ income was spent on credit cards and 11 percent was saved. By 2003, those numbers flip to 12 percent spent on credit cards and a measly one percent saved.

About 20 percent of sub-prime mortgages granted in the last two years will end in foreclosure as owners struggle to make payments and home prices stagnate.

That rate is almost double the 2002 level and could result in about 2.2 million U.S. borrowers losing their homes, the Center for Responsible Lending said in a report. The non-profit advocacy group's analysis of mortgage data shows homeowners risk losing $164 billion in wealth through 2014. 

The weakening U.S. housing market is straining some borrowers. Year-over-year median existing home prices fell for the three months ending Oct. 31 to $221,000, according to the National Association of Realtors. That suggests less equity for consumers who might have used it to pay off sub-prime loans, which account for one in four U.S. mortgages granted today. 

``There's a very high rate of trouble in these loans,'' Kathleen Keest, senior policy counsel for the center, said in an interview. ``Those of us who have been on the ground watching the foreclosures had been getting more and more concerned.''

[T[he hanging of the longtime Iraqi strongman does not alter the fundamental problems that Bush faces: Reclaiming public support in the U.S. for a war that a majority of Americans now oppose, and charting a convincing course for the victory that Bush vows to achieve before withdrawing U.S. forces.  . . .  

For Bush, the key to regaining public confidence in his handling of the war is likely to lie in the success of "the new way forward" in Iraq that he promises to spell out with the arrival of the new year.  

Saddam Hussein's Baath Party exhorted Iraqis to "strike without mercy" at the U.S. occupiers and Shi'ite Iran to avenge the execution of Iraq's former president but warned them not to be drawn into a civil war.

"Today is your great day. Strike without mercy at the joint enemy in Iraq -- America and Iran," the party said in a statement posted on an Iraqi Web site on Saturday.

"Forget your organisational structures and take the stand of honour you deserve which is to take revenge for Saddam Hussein," said the statement, posted on the www.albasrah.net.

Bush appears to be delusional about Iraq, at least in public. At his Dec. 20, 2006 news conference he said that the U.S. needs to increase the overall size of the Army and the Marine Corps (when neither service can presently meet its recruiting goals). He also said that insurgents in Iraq thwarted U.S. efforts at "establishing security and stability throughout the country" in 2006. These "enemies of liberty ... carried out a deliberate strategy to foment sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shia. And over the course of the year they had success." He announced that the Selective Service would be running "tests" at some time in the future related to reinstating the draft. He also pledged to work with the new Democratic Congress. Further, he announced that first four of the 20-30,000 additional US troops to be sent to Iraq would be his two daughters and his niece and nephew, all, it happens, of draft age, were the draft to be reinstated as Bush has said it might have to be. (Yes, I did sneak that last one in.)

It seems that Bush has decided to send those additional 30,000 troops, in a "surge" to do something (although exactly what has not yet been announced). So why 30,000? Not that we have them to spare without recycling and extending tours, but why not 50,000, or why not 20,000? Since "I always listen to my Generals and make my military decisions based on what they tell me, except when I don't" Bush is obviously not listening to his military Generals, who is he listening to? 

Well, this one has the fingerprints of General "I change Constitutions" Rove (The Guardian (UK) Nov. 25, 2004, Sidney Blumenthal) all over it. Militarily it makes no sense, so the generals tell us. Politically it does, for Rovian, always attack, never defend, politics. This move is clearly intended to put the Democrats, not the Iraqi insurgents, Sunni, Shiite and other, on the defensive. Bush wants to appear to be "doing something," to "be in charge," and surely to be in a position to be able to blame the Dems. for any failures, as he defines them, should they somehow block the 30,000. His talk of the draft is of the same ilk. The buck never stops on his desk, and if he can kick it onto the desk of an enemy, and for him the Democrats are just as much enemies as are the Iraqis, so much the better.

In his superb history of the Era of Georgite Propaganda, Frank Rich (The Greatest Story Ever Sold), repeatedly makes the point that every major decision about the Iraq War, from the occasion the invasion was publicly announced to be timed with the 2002, on to, as Rich puts it, the point when (p. 222): "[the] administration was forced into rebuilding Iraq, it would [further] time every pivot point, from the creation of a constitution to the scheduling of elections, to deadlines dictated by Rove's political goals at home (whether a State of the Union speech or a domestic election), rather than to the patience-requiring realities of forging a post-Saddam government."

And so, it is not Bush, but the Democrats who are delusional, about Bush, if they cannot see this for what it is: a naked political ploy.

The higher $2 trillion amount takes a 'moderate' approach. Both figures are based on the projection that US troops will remain in Iraq until 2010, with steadily decreasing numbers each year. The economists also used government data from past wars, and included such costs as the rise in the price of oil, a larger US deficit and greater global insecurity caused by the war, the loss to the economy from injured veterans who cannot contribute as productively as they would have done if not injured, and the increased costs of recruiting to replenish a military drained by repeated tours of duty in Iraq. These are items which are almost never included by the US government when determining the cost of the war.

So Bush's budget for the war is as out of touch with reality as his justifications for invading Iraq in the first place.

The administration is trying to sell the notion that they have repealed the laws of economics. They want us to believe that we don't have to choose between guns and butter -- that we can have them both. The reality is, the money spent on the war could have been spent on other things. 

Such as?

One quarter of the war budget would have fixed Social Security for the next seventy-five years. George Bush says that Social Security is a major economic problem. If you believe him -- although there are many reasons not to believe him -- the war is four times worse as an economic problem.

With $2 trillion, we could have funded the entire world's commitment to foreign aid to poor countries for the next twenty years. Or just think what we could have done to stop global warming if we had spent that two trillion developing cheaper photovoltaic cells to convert solar energy into electricity. With our technological advantages, we could have had some real breakthroughs. We have the resources -- we just need to redirect them from destroying another country.

Will average Americans notice any economic fallout from the war?

We'll have a lower living standard than we otherwise would have achieved. The median American income is going down. Most of us are worse off than we were five or six years ago. Why are we getting poorer? This big pot of money we spent on the war obviously has something to do with it. Americans have a hard time seeing it when the numbers come out in dribs and drabs. But when it's $2 trillion? Did we really want to spend it like this? It's hard to think how we could have spent it worse.

The No Child Left Behind education act, which requires the states to close the achievement gap between rich and poor students in exchange for federal aid, has been under heavy fire since it was passed five years ago. Critics, some of whom never wanted accountability in the first place, have ratcheted up their attacks in anticipation of Congressional hearings and a reauthorization process that could get under way soon after the new Congress convenes in January.  

Those critics were empowered by a spate of recent studies showing that the nation has made slight overall progress in closing the achievement gap since the law went into effect. (A handful, including New York and New Jersey, are said to have made moderate progress.) The data has been seized upon as evidence that Congress set the bar too high.  . . .  

And the country can’t afford that. Unless we improve schools — especially for minority children who will make up the work force of the future — we will fall behind our competitors abroad who are doing a better job of educating the next generation.  

It’s impossible to brand No Child Left Behind as a failure, because its agenda has never been carried out. The law was supposed to remake schools that serve poor and minority students by breaking with the age-old practice of staffing those schools with poorly trained and poorly educated teachers. States were supposed to provide students with highly qualified teachers in all core courses by the beginning of the current academic year. That didn’t happen. 

The country would be much further down the road toward complying with No Child Left Behind if the Department of Education had given the states clear direction and the technical assistance they needed. Instead, the department simply ignored the provision until recently and allowed states to behave as though the teacher quality problem did not exist. Thanks to this approach, the country must now start from scratch on what is far and away the most crucial provision of the law.  . . .  

The battle for teacher quality is just getting under way. The country can either win that battle or watch its fortunes fade as the national work force becomes less and less competitive. Given what’s at stake, the teacher quality provision of No Child Left Behind deserves to be at the very top of the list when Congress revisits the law.