Back From Holiday Vacation -So Whats Happening?!

International:

Iraqi President Talabani on State Visit to Iran
Iraqi President Jalal Talabani arrived in Tehran on Monday amid increasing calls for Washington to enlist Iran's help in calming the escalating violence in neighboring Iraq. "Talabani arrived in Tehran minutes ago as the head of a high-level delegation," Iran's state-run television reported.

Iran has been trying to organize a summit joining hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Talabani and Syrian President Bashar Assad in a bid to assert its role as the top regional power broker.

Talabani had planned to come to Tehran on Saturday but had to postpone his trip until Baghdad's airport, which was closed in a security clampdown, reopened Monday. More on the story here.

Ahmadinejad Predicts Collapse of Israel, U.S., U.K.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad predicted the collapse of Israel, the U.S. and Britain, attacking what he called their ``oppressive behavior.''

``The Zionist regime is on a steep downhill towards collapse and disgrace,'' Ahmandinejad told supporters at a rally of Basiji militia forces near Tehran today. In a reference to the U.S. and U.K., he said ``the collapse and crumbling of your devilish rule has started.'' The speech was carried live on state television.

Iran doesn't recognize Israel, and Ahmadinejad drew international condemnation after saying in October 2005 that Israel should be ``wiped off the map.'' The U.S. and Iran have had no diplomatic ties since 1980 following the seizure of diplomats at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979. Read It

Bolton: Future of Mideast 'may well be decided' in days

The Bush administration is facing a foreign policy crisis in Lebanon where the Iran-backed Hezbollah and Syria threaten to topple the weakened democratic government in Beirut.
"The future of the Middle East, certainly the future of Lebanon may well be decided in the next several days," U.S. envoy to the United Nations John Bolton told BBC radio. "A successful re-emergence of democracy there is being directly challenged by the terrorist Hezbollah and those who support them, Syria, Iran and others." Read more here

National:

CQ Analyst Suggests ‘Rumsfeld’s Leaving Is Just The Beginning,’ Cheney Might Be Next
Appearing on MSNBC this afternoon, Congressional Quarterly political analyst Craig Crawford speculated that, as “neocons are heading for the hills,” Dick Cheney may be the next to leave the administration. He claimed the Vice President’s “authority is waning, if not gone.” “And my point is why would he want to stick around in this environment?” he asked. “All I’m seeing is a man getting isolated more and more.” Watch it here...

If It Walks Like A Duck, Quacks Like A Duck, It Must Be A Chicken?

Most news organizations won’t call civil war in Iraq what it seems to be...A ‘Civil War’. Today, MSNBC and NBC News announced their decision to call Iraq a “civil war.” The Los Angeles Times has consistently used that term to describe the violence, and the Christian Science Monitor started to do the same today. But most media organizations, caving to White House pressure, continue to avoid the phrase. Some examples:
Fox News:
In response to today’s attacks and snowballing sectarian violence, a curfew has been imposed in Baghdad and the international airport closed to all commercial flights. [11/23/06]
Washington Post:
But fear ran high that the fighting would not end, as clashes in Ghazaliya and elsewhere illustrated the inability of Iraqi security forces to rein in the violence that has propelled the country closer to full-blown civil war. [11/27/06]
USA Today:
Abizaid didn’t have much to offer besides faith, hope and the familiar but elusive objectives of stabilizing the country, reining in sectarian violence and preparing Iraq to manage on its own. [USA Today, 11/16/06]

Bush Library Courts ‘Wealthy Heiresses, Arab Nations, Captains of Industry’ To ‘Polish’ History

The New York Daily News reports, “President Bush and his truest believers are about to launch their final campaign — an eye-popping, half-billion-dollar drive for the Bush presidential library.”
Bush is attempting to raise $500 million to build his library and a think tank at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Bush fund-raisers hope to get approximately $250 million from what they call “megadonations” of $10 million to $20 million each. Among the candidates for “megadonations,” whose names will remain anonymous:

Bush loyalists have already identified wealthy heiresses, Arab nations and captains of industry as potential “mega” donors and are pressing for a formal site announcement - now expected early in the new year.

Bush allies feel they need enormous funds to shape how history views Bush’s legacy. A Bush insider said, “The more [money] you have, the more influence [on history] you can exert.” Much of the money will be used to build a “legacy-polishing” institute:

The legacy-polishing centerpiece is an institute, which several Bush insiders called the Institute for Democracy. Patterned after Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, Bush’s institute will hire conservative scholars and “give them money to write papers and books favorable to the President’s policies,” one Bush insider said.

Bush had earlier indicated his desire to create a think tank “to talk about freedom and liberty and the DeTocqueville model of what [French political philosopher Alexis] DeTocqueville saw in America.”

In Other News…
CNN's John Roberts called the situation in Iraq an "

absolute mess" and said the media has "sanitized" their coverage of the violence. "The amount of death that's on the streets of Baghdad for U.S. forces and for the Iraqi people is at an astronomical level," Roberts said.

Yesterday on Fox News, Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) "accused a Fox News anchor of conducting a skewed interview." Frank told Chris Wallace, "Everything [you say] is aimed at trying to put us in a kind of a bad light." Asked how fair Fox is when compared to other news outlets, Frank said the network is "substantially worse."

A draft of the Iraq Study Group's report "

urges an aggressive regional diplomatic initiative that includes direct talks with Iran and Syria but sets no timetables for a military withdrawal, according to officials who have seen all or parts of the document."

Britain's Defense Secretary said that U.K. troop levels in Iraq will be "

significantly lower by a matter of thousands" at the end of next year. Britain currently has approximately 7,000 troops in Iraq.

Conservative congressional leaders are expected to punt the issue of completing spending bills to next year's Congress rather than take the time to piece together the legislation, potentially the final act of the Do-Nothing Congress. "

It could mean we would adjourn much earlier than most pundits think," said one conservative Senate aide.

This week, President Bush visits Estonia and attends a two-day NATO summit in Latvia, where he will press "

alliance members to increase defense spending." From Latvia, Bush "heads to Amman, Jordan, for two days of talks with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki."

The Washington Times reviews Defense Secretary nominee Robert Gates's writings and reports him to "be more cautious and pragmatic than his predecessor, Mr. Rumsfeld, who has transformed the military and aggressively hunted al Qaeda members."

From The Right:
Jeff Emanuel: Iraq -- An open letter to President Bush
Now that you have had nearly a month to recover from the midterm election, I would like to humbly suggest that you once again focus your attention on the situation in Iraq, and its resolution. Regardless of the reasoning behind it, we have been forcing our troops to fight with one hand (if not both) tied behind their backs in a situation which affords our enemies tremendous advantage.

From The Left:
John F. Burns and Kirk Semple: US Finds Iraq Insurgency Has Funds to Sustain Itself The insurgency in Iraq is now self-sustaining financially, raising tens of millions of dollars a year from oil smuggling, kidnapping, counterfeiting, connivance by corrupt Islamic charities and other crimes that the Iraqi government and its American patrons have been largely unable to prevent, a classified United States government report has concluded.

Quote Of The Day:

All right, well, let's just have them. Let's just have the civil wars and let the crumbs crumble and the cookie crumble where -- because I'm fed up with this. The Palestinian situation -- for 50 years we've had the Palestinian situation, and it's not going to be solved until the Limbaugh Doctrine is imposed or tried. And that is, this is a war, and until somebody loses it, it isn't going to stop. And now, you know, we've done everything we can to make Lebanon a democracy, and it's crumbling because Syria keeps killing the popular leaders there. Meanwhile, the Hezbos [Hezbollah] keep expanding their influence in Lebanon.

But what the hell! We're going to bring Syria and Iran in to fix Iraq, why not let them just fix the whole region? If we're heading to civil war -- I mean, everybody comes to us: "You got to fix this and you got to fix that." So we go and try to fix it, and our own people, Democrats and the left in our country do their best to sabotage our efforts, and then we get blamed for trying to clean up the messes that these people start.

Fine, just blow the place up. Just let these natural forces take place over there instead of trying to stop them, instead of trying to use -- I just -- sometimes natural force is going to happen. You're going to have to let it take place. You can spend all the time you like with diplomacy, and you can spend all the time you want massaging these things with diplomatic -- you're just -- you're just delaying the inevitable.

Rush Limbaugh in response to claims made by King Abdullah II of Jordan on the November 26 edition of ABC's This Week that "we could possibly imagine going into 2007 and having three civil wars on our hands,"

(Sources: Editor & Publisher, HuffingtonPost, FOXNews, TownHall, NYT, BBC, RollCall, AP, CNN, TruthOut, WashingtonTimes, Center For American Progress, Rush Limbaugh, NY Daily News, Congressional Quarterly, PoliticalCartoons.com, APNews, Drudge, Bloomberg, WorldTribune)