As war wages on in the Middle East, there's a heated battle on Capitol Hill over which political party's proposals to continue the war are more PRO-TROOP.  There's a raging debate over exactly what set of futile recommendations to the dictator living in the Vice President's mansion on Massachusetts Avenue amounts to the greatest PRO or ANTI TROOP agenda.

Leading contestants are:

1.-a Republican proposal to give Cheney and Bush another $93 billion off the books for the war, no questions asked.

2.-a Democratic proposal to give Cheney and Bush another $93 billion off the books for the war but reauthorize the war with new lies in place of the old ones and/or ask the President to issue a public statement whenever he sends troops to Iraq without proper equipment or training, but not actually DO anything if the President chooses not to make such a public statement.

The New York Times and CBS News recently polled the US public:
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/national/03022007_poll.pdf

After a long list of questions that confused any distinction between health care and health coverage, the New York Times/CBS asked:

"Do you think it would be fair or unfair for the government in Washington to require all Americans to participate in a national health care plan, funded by taxpayers?"

By 48 to 43 percent, respondents said: unfair.  But a strong majority had already said they thought it was very important for the government to cover everyone, even if it meant raising taxes.  What was seen as unfair here, for some people, was almost certainly the national health care plan, which sounds like something more than a national health coverage plan.  In fact it sounds like Walter Reed Hospital.

The New York Times article reporting on the poll quoted one respondent who obviously thought national health care, not just coverage, was being discussed:

Department of Energy Research Shows Technology Does Not Reduce Risks of Nuclear Proliferation and Terrorism

Background

The Bush administration requested $250 million in its fiscal 2007 budget as a first installment for a program to "reprocess" spent fuel from nuclear power reactors. Spent fuel is intensely radioactive, and reprocessing is a complex chemical operation that separates plutonium from those elements in spent fuel that make it highly radioactive. At that point the plutonium can be used to make new reactor fuel or nuclear weapons. For this reason, there has been a long-standing concern that reprocessing facilities anywhere would be potential sources for terrorists seeking the materials required to make nuclear weapons, and that such facilities could ease the path for nations beginning nuclear weapons programs. These concerns led the United States to abandon its reprocessing program in the 1970s.

Americans frustrated with the Democratic congressional leaders for dithering over Iraq should never forget who actually drove us into the Iraqi quagmire. Even those Democrats who voted for the president's war resolution in 2002 did so only after the president repeatedly promised -- with the deepest insincerity -- that he would only invade Iraq as a "last resort."

            Responsibility for that lie and many others rests squarely with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, who have spent nearly four years, thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars to create catastrophe. Today every policy alternative, including a phased withdrawal, is likely to impose costly consequences on us, on the Iraqis and on the world.

            So perhaps the Democrats deserve more than a month or two to determine how best to extricate our troops from that complex and perilous trap.

One of the first big show trials here in the post-9/11 homeland was of a Muslim professor from Florida, now 49, Sami al-Arian. Pro-Israel hawks had resented this computer professor at the University of South Florida long before Atta and the hijackers flew their planes into the World Trade Center towers, because they saw al-Arian, a Palestinian born in Kuwait of parents kicked out of their homeland in 1948, as an effective agitator here for the Palestinian cause.

            As John Sugg, a fine journalist based in Tampa who's followed al-Arian's tribulations for years, wrote in the spring of 2006: "When was al-Arian important? More than a decade ago, when Israel's Likudniks in the United States, such as [Steven] Emerson, were working feverishly to undermine the Oslo peace process. No Arab voice could be tolerated, and al-Arian was vigorously trying to communicate with our government and its leaders. He was being successful, making speeches to intelligence and military commanders at MacDill AFB's Central Command, inviting the FBI and other officials to attend meetings of his groups. People were beginning to listen."