By DOUG THOMPSON
The absolute and unrelenting takeover of the government of the United States by George W. Bush continues – right under the noses of the new Democratic leadership of Congress and in outright defiance of the wishes of the American voters who sent a clear mandate for change in last year’s elections.
By HOPE YEN and PAULINE JELINEK
The U.S. government wasted tens of millions of dollars in Iraq reconstruction aid, including scores of unaccounted-for weapons and a never-used camp for housing police trainers with an Olympic-size swimming pool, investigators say.
The quarterly audit by Stuart Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, is the latest to paint a grim picture of waste, fraud and frustration in an Iraq war and reconstruction effort that has cost taxpayers more than $300 billion and left the region near civil war.
By LAURIE KELLMAN
Training the police is as important to stabilizing Iraq as standing up an army there, but the United States has botched the job by assigning the wrong agencies to the task, two members of the Iraq Study Group say.
By NEDRA PICKLER
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama said Tuesday U.S. combat forces should be out of Iraq by spring 2008 to end “a foreign policy disaster” but he stopped short of endorsing a cutoff in funds.
The Illinois senator introduced a bill to force the redeployment under law, but that’s unlikely while Bush is president. Still, Obama said he’s taking Bush up on his challenge to critics to offer alternatives.
By PAUL C. CAMPOS
Reforming the American health care system will be difficult as long as certain myths about it continue to flourish. Some of these myths include: In America, health care is provided by the market, rather than by the government. In countries where the government pays for health care, people don’t have the freedom to choose their own doctor. American health care is expensive because it’s of such high quality.
And, by the way, we have “the best health care system in the world.”
Let’s look at these myths.
By ARTHUR I. CYR
President Bush appropriately was center stage for the delivery of the latest State of the Union address, but he was quickly upstaged in regard to Iraq policy by other leaders.
In our video age, the visible Nancy Pelosi, just behind the presidential podium during the speech, has been much noted in immediate media commentary. Nothing inappropriate there; she is the first female to keep an eye on a president from that position. She also personifies the return of Democrats to congressional majorities.
By LEILA FADEL
McClatchy Newspapers
Iraq’s first democratically elected prime minister said this week that he warned U.S. officials two years ago that Shiite Muslim militias were infiltrating the country’s security services and that they would become entrenched in Iraqi society if they weren’t stopped.
“But with deep remorse the friends did not help us,” said Ibrahim al-Jaafari, who became Iraq’s prime minister after elections on Jan. 30, 2005. “America didn’t help us.”
Sen. Joe Biden officially joined an increasingly crowded field for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination Wednesday, as he has been promising for months.
“After nine months of doing this, there is no exploratory committee  I’m running,” the Delaware senator told The Associated Press.
A 34-year Senate veteran known for his foreign policy expertise and somewhat windy oratory, Biden acknowledged his campaign would generate little of the buzz surrounding the celebrity candidates New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama.