The first vote is still more than a year away, but the campaign to replace President George W Bush in the White House is already throwing up surprises.

Unfortunately for Senator Hillary Clinton, long the front-runner in the Democratic drive to retake the presidency, most of them are coming at her expense.

A brace of Christmas opinion polls has left Clinton with a political hangover after a year that had appeared to cement her status as the Democrats’ best-organised, best-financed and best-connected contender for her party’s presidential nomination.

Despite winning re-election to the US Senate by a handsome margin in mid-term voting last month, Clinton has had little to celebrate as polls from the presidential primary battlegrounds signalled early trouble for her historic bid to become America’s first woman president.

In Iowa, the Midwestern state that will once again open the primary season with its caucus votes on January 14, 2008, Clinton slumped to fourth place with only 10% of the vote in a survey of 600 likely Democratic voters. (more…)

WASHINGTON — Vice President Dick Cheney hailed former U.S. President Gerald Ford at a state funeral on Saturday for pardoning Richard Nixon, his disgraced predecessor, and helping to heal the nation after the Watergate scandal.

Ford, the 38th president who died on Tuesday at age 93, steered the United States through “a crisis that could have turned to catastrophe,” said Cheney, chief of staff in Ford’s White House 30 years ago and an honorary pallbearer at the ceremony in the U.S. Capitol rotunda.

Cheney spoke after it emerged that Ford, a moderate Republican, had said in an interview with journalist Bob Woodward that he disagreed with President George W. Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq. The report was published in The Washington Post two days after Ford’s death.

Ford held office for 2-1/2 years after Richard Nixon became the only president to resign. Nixon did so on August 9, 1974, implicated in a cover-up of a break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office complex in Washington. (more…)

Apparently, when Chavez called him El Diablo - he meant it as a compliment.

AP Poll Top Villian of 2006

SCARBOROUGH: Now[,] you don’t have to have a [doctorate] in Political Science to realize it’s never a good sign when you’re outpolled by Lucifer

• Watch it: WMP | MOV

2006 marks the year that Saddam got death by hanging and Bush got death by polling. (more…)

DUBLIN, Ireland — President John F. Kennedy was the subject of three separate death threats during his visit to Ireland in 1963, according to newly declassified police documents released Friday.

The documents released by the Irish Justice Department said police received two anonymous telephoned warnings in the weeks before the arrival of the United States’ first Irish Catholic president. A third threat went to the newsroom of the Irish Independent newspaper.

Kennedy’s June 26-29 visit went ahead trouble free as he was greeted by adoring crowds in Dublin, Cork, Galway and at his family homestead in County Wexford, in southeast Ireland.

He was assassinated in Dallas five months later. (more…)

The Bush administration is considering an increase in troop levels in Iraq of 17,000 to 20,000, which would be accomplished in part by delaying the departure of two Marine regiments now deployed in Anbar Province, Pentagon officials said Thursday.

The option was among those discussed in Crawford, Tex., on Thursday as President Bush met there with his national security team, and it has emerged as a likely course as he considers a strategy shift in Iraq, the officials said.

Most of the additional troops would probably be employed in and around Baghdad, the officials said.

With the continuing high levels of violence there, senior officials increasingly say additional American forces will be needed as soon as possible to clear neighborhoods and to conduct other combat operations to regain control of the capital, rather than primarily to train Iraqi forces. (more…)

• Flashback: U.S. Sen. John Edwards at Bilderberg

John Edwards, the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 2004, has announced he will again run for the White House.

Mr Edwards has taken the risky decision of launching his second presidential run in the normally slow news week between Christmas and New Year. Although they have yet to declare their candidacy, Senators Hillary clinton and Barack Obama are widely expected to throw their hats into the ring.

Mr Edwards launched his campaign last night in a poor New Orleans neighbourhood, where thousands of people are still living in poverty following Hurricane Katrina.

The former North Carolina senator reiterated to his supporters that there are “two Americas” - one for the comfortable and another for the struggling. He has proposed a series of work, housing and school measures aimed at lifting millions of Americans out of poverty in the next 10 years, and called for a goal of ending poverty within 30 years. (more…)

It’s fishy as hell.

Paul Sanford, a prominent Aptos, California, attorney, who accused Karl Rove of treason in the Plame outing case, took a leap from the Embassy Suites Hotel in Monterey Bay on Christmas Eve. Police describe it as “probable” suicide, even though it appears Sanford was not depressed.

“Friends and associates expressed disbelief at the news of Sanford’s death and that it was ruled a suicide, saying Sanford seemed happy and had made many plans for this week and in coming months. [Business associate and friend Shawn Mills] said he and Sanford recently decided to open a shared law office to serve Monterey and Santa Cruz counties, something Sanford was looking forward to doing,” reports the Monterey Herald. “Mills said he had spoken to Sanford’s wife, Paula, and that she also was in shock. He said Sanford, a father of two, was a devoted family man.” Sanford “would never have intentionally put his family through that trauma. Something’s not right, it doesn’t make sense.”

On July 25, 2005, in the James S. Brady Briefing Room at the White House, Sanford asked then press secretary Scott McClellan about Karl Rove, accused at the time by Joseph Wilson, the husband of Valerie Plame, of outing his wife as a CIA employee in retaliation for Wilson’s op-ed published in the New York Times. Wilson criticized the citation of bogus yellowcake documents used as flimsy justification for invading Iraq and murdering more than 650,000 Iraqis. (more…)

Today President Bush signed the H.R. 6407, the “Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act. In doing so he added a few signing statements. One of them is particularly alarming.

The executive branch shall construe subsection 404(c) of title 39, as enacted by subsection 1010(e) of the Act, which provides for opening of an item of a class of mail otherwise sealed against inspection, in a manner consistent, to the maximum extent permissible, with the need to conduct searches in exigent circumstances, such as to protect human life and safety against hazardous materials, and the need for physical searches specifically authorized by law for foreign intelligence collection.

This says the Bush can now search our mail without a warrant. There is no arguing that this is exactly what it says. A signing statement does not outweigh our Constitution. (more…)

The US is telling its overseas allies that it has stopped “extraordinary renditions” and needs their help to empty Guantánamo’s prison cells. But human rights groups dispute this assertion and a question mark hangs over 200 “war on terror” detainees who could be held indefinitely without trial.

European diplomats say Washington is reacting to pressure from parliamentary investigations, lawsuits from former prisoners, and calls by friendly governments, including the UK, to close Guantánamo, the prison camp at a US naval base in Cuba.

However, the administration’s response is seen as confused and inadequate. Analysts attribute this to internal divisions over how far to roll back controversial counter-terrorism practices - including torture, secret prisons, detention without trial, and renditions - as the price for rekindling transatlantic relations. (more…)

WASHINGTON - The State Department signaled support Tuesday for Ethiopian military operations against Somalia, noting that Ethiopia has had “genuine security concerns” stemming from the rise of Islamist forces in its eastern neighbor.

Department spokesman Gonzalo Gallegos also noted that the Ethiopian military acted at the request of Somalia’s internationally-backed secular government, which has been resisting with little success the spreading influence of the more powerful Islamist forces.

Gallegos had no information on whether the United States has been bolstering the Ethiopian military through delivery of supplies. He noted that Ethiopia has said that its action is intended to prevent further aggression by the Islamic Courts militias.

The Bush administration has been increasingly alarmed by the growing strength of the militias and the welcome they reportedly have given to al-Qaida militants. (more…)

Middle East analyst Flynt Leverett, who served under President Bush on the National Security Council and is now a fellow at the New America Foundation, revealed last week that the White House has been blocking the publication of an op-ed he wrote for the New York Times. The column is critical of the administration’s refusal to engage Iran.

Leverett’s op-ed had been cleared by the CIA, where he had been a senior analyst. Today in an op-ed for the New York Times, Levrett explains more:

[The] Op-Ed article we wrote for The Times, [was] blacked out by the Central Intelligence Agency’s Publication Review Board after the White House intervened in the normal prepublication review process and demanded substantial deletions. Agency officials told us that they had concluded on their own that the original draft included no classified material, but that they had to bow to the White House.

The redacted version of Leverett’s original op-ed is here. (more…)

When President George W Bush meets his national security team at his Texan ranch this week to draw up a new military strategy for Iraq, a 56-slide PowerPoint presentation entitled Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq will be at the heart of their discussion.

The report, put together by Frederick Kagan, a conservative military analyst, and Jack Keane, a retired general, proposes “surging” at least 30,000 extra US troops into Baghdad and other Iraqi hotspots, as a first step to quelling the bloodshed and restoring security.

The strategy is at odds with the much-vaunted findings of the bipartisan panel of experts of the Iraq Study Group (ISG), not to mention the army’s top commanders who argue that they do not need more forces on the ground and fear a further strain on resources.

But when Mr Bush announces his plans for Iraq next month, he is expected to draw heavily on the Kagan-Keane plan – put together over a single weekend last month, after a brainstorming session with other senior, former military officers and defence experts. (more…)

The New York Times has taken the unusual step of publishing an op-ed in which parts of the contents have been “redacted” or blacked out by government censors, who believe that its contents would reveal “sensitive” information that the White House wants to withold. Below is RAW STORY’s best informed guess at what might hide behind the redactions.

In addition to the redacted op-ed, the Times published an explanatory note from its authors, Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann. Leverett served in the Bush National Security Council under Condoleezza Rice, and is now affiliated with the Washington, DC-based Brookings Institution. Hillary Mann is an ex-foreign service officer who participated in US dialogue with Iran from 2001 to 2003.

Leverett and Mann made available a set of publicly-available sources of information which they had “provided…to the board to demonstrate that all of the material the White House objected to is already in the public domain.” However, as they noted, “to make sense of much of our Op-Ed article, readers will have to read the citations for themselves.”

RAW STORY has examined these sources and has attempted to connect the previously published materials to the redacted paragraphs in the op-ed. What the information reveals is a series of events in which US-Iran dialogue broke down. In the aftermath of 9/11, the cooperative spirit around the world sparked by America’s victimhood encouraged Iran to collaborate with the United States in its effort to topple the Taliban in Afghanistan. But the goodwill that might have been sustained by those early negotiations was undermined by a series of disputes between the US and Iran. (more…)

The shadow of President Bush seemed to loom large over his younger brother on Wednesday, as the outgoing Florida governor ruled out any plans to return to elected office.

“No tengo futuro (I have no future),” Jeb Bush told Spanish-language reporters in Miami, when asked about any possible political ambitions after he steps down next month.

The popular, two-term governor has often been touted as a savvy politician with a good chance of following both his brother and father, George H.W. Bush, into the White House.

But the unpopularity and dismal job-approval ratings of his brother may have scuttled any plans Jeb Bush may have had for a future in politics after running one of America’s most crucial swing states for the past eight years. (more…)

BUSH ‘DEVIL HORNS’ PIC HITS WIRES…” blared the headline at the right-wing Drudge Report.

The site suggests that an Associated Press photograph of President Bush, credited to Lawrence Jackson, had intentionally been taken at an angle, or otherwise changed or cropped by the news organization, to portray the president in an evil light. Bloggers were quick to put their own spin on the charge by the Drudge Report, which follows several recent press photos that had come under fire for various forms of alteration.

A commenter at Hot Air had this to say of the “horns” shot:

It’s not the photographer. Lawrence Jackson is a good photographer with no history of this type of thing, but the cropping is obvious. Why would you crop a photo almost to his chin, and then so high above his head unless you were purposely attempting to frame in the “horns?”

It is unknown at the present time if the AP has issued a public comment about what, if anything, was done to the picture of the president. (more…)