The administration will also push hard for large savings accounts that could shelter thousands of dollars of deposits each year from taxation on investment gains, according to White House economic advisers who have been involved with the planning. And any tax reform, according to Treasury Department officials, would likely eliminate the alternative minimum tax, a parallel income tax designed to ensure that the rich pay income taxes but one that increasingly ensnares the middle class. To pay for those large tax cuts, the administration is looking at eliminating both the deduction for state and local taxes, and the business tax deduction for employer-sponsored health insurance. That would raise nearly $926 billion over five years, according to White House and congressional documents.

… efforts to suppress the last remnants of the Iraqi insurgency continue in Falluja.

Mortar fire and heavy explosive rounds targeted areas in the city where the US believes insurgents are still hiding.

Iraq's interim government says some 1,600 rebels lie dead in the rubble of the city, and civilians have been trying to collect their dead between upsurges in the fighting.

Russia Agrees to Send Troops to Iraq

Russia has agreed to send a small number of troops to Iraq to protect oil wells and support the U.S.-led military campaign there, an aide in the Bush administration has said.

The Russian Kommersant-Vlast magazine spoke with the aide on conditions of anonymity, and he said that he had heard the information at a recent meeting in the White House.

The meeting mentioned by the source was held in the wake of a report released by the CIA alleging that Iraq had circumvented sanctions against it through loopholes in UN’s oil for food program, and apparently sold off millions of dollars in oil to Russian politicians and businessmen. Russian companies, the report alleged, were also planning to ship weapons to Iraq just months before the start of the U.S.-led campaign to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime in March of 2003.

In light of these findings, the source said, many officials in the administration were wary of close military collaboration with Russia, but national security advisor Condoleeza Rice insisted on asking Russia for troops.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 17 - Senior Marine intelligence officers in Iraq are warning that if American troop levels in the Falluja area are significantly reduced during reconstruction there, as has been planned, insurgents in the region will rebound from their defeat. The rebels could thwart the retraining of Iraqi security forces, intimidate the local population and derail elections set for January, the officers say.

They have further advised that despite taking heavy casualties in the weeklong battle, the insurgents will continue to grow in number, wage guerrilla attacks and try to foment unrest among Falluja's returning residents, emphasizing that expectations for improved conditions have not been met.

What Are Democrats About?

Once more, the theme of themelessness. Cover the Democrats for any length of time and you become expert in campaigns that don't seem to be about anything. They have policies; Democrats are good at policies. But all too often the campaigns lack a message -- a sense of what the candidate's about and what he aims to do.

The insider accounts of the Kerry campaign that are emerging have a sickening familiarity to them. The Boston Globe tells of Paul Begala, who helped Bill Clinton win two presidential races, descending on Kerry headquarters, white board in hand, scribbling a dozen suggested lines of attack against George Bush on it, and imploring the campaign to choose one and stick with it. The papers are full of Kerry aides attesting that they never knew what the campaign's message was, and there are accounts of Kerry himself chafing at the confusion. …

The themelessness isn't simply Kerry's, however, any more than it was simply Gore's or Dukakis's. Time was when the Democrats were the party of economic justice and opportunity, the party that championed emerging constituencies as well as classes: Catholics, blacks, women. They were the party of the many against the powerful, which played a lot better in the electoral arena than being the party of the one against the many. But, with the signal exception of Clinton's '92 campaign -- a brilliant mix of economic progressivism and cultural centrism -- the Democrats haven't been able to persuade enough voters to choose them as their champions for a very long time. And Clinton's ability to deliver on that promise once in office was a sometime thing. Full employment made life better for the people at the bottom of the economy. But the erosion of the decent jobs of the old industrial economy never really stopped (and, of course, has escalated greatly under Bush), and the jobs that replaced them more often than not offered lower pay, fewer benefits and less security. The Wal-Mart economy has grown on both the Democrats' and Republicans' watch. …

Historically the Democrats have been the party of security, but that's an identity they need to reclaim. The challenge of radical Islam demands more of them than a foreign policy of realpolitik; empiricism -- while a welcome counter to Bush's indifference to fact -- is not enough. The challenge of a global labor market demands more of them than a commitment to mid-career retraining; defending the American middle class means creating the kind of global standards that the Democrats created on the national level during the 1930s and '40s, the time of their greatest popularity. That's a daunting challenge, one that requires the Democrats to think and develop a story about the new threats to the American dream. If they do they'll come up with a more plausible list of culprits -- and solutions -- than the Republicans ever will. They may even come up with a new sense of self, with a purpose, with a theme.

Democratic Party leaders said Wednesday they want to know why Sen. John Kerry ended his presidential campaign with more than $15 million in the bank, money that could have helped Democratic candidates across the country.

Some said he will be pressured to give the money to Democratic campaign committees rather than save it for a potential White House bid in 2008.

"Democrats are questioning why he sat on so much money that could have helped him defeat George Bush or helped down-ballot races, many of which could have gone our way with a few more million dollars," said Donna Brazile, campaign manager for Al Gore's 2000 presidential race.

Brazile is a member of the 400-plus member Democratic National Committee, which meets early next year to pick a new party chairman. One high-ranking member of the DNC, speaking on condition of anonymity, said word of Kerry's nest egg has stirred anger on the committee and could hurt his chances of putting an ally in the chairmanship.

Key Republicans said yesterday they believe that Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) will be approved by GOP colleagues as chairman of the Judiciary Committee despite an uproar over his expressed doubts that a Supreme Court nominee who opposes abortion rights could be confirmed by the Senate.

"I expect him to have the support" necessary to win the chairmanship, said the outgoing committee chairman, Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah). He was joined by former Senate GOP leader Trent Lott (Miss.) and deputy party whip Robert F. Bennett (Utah) in predicting victory for Specter.

"There's an overwhelming belief ever since the U.S. elections that the dollar has got quite a way to go down," said Chris Furness, senior currency strategist for 4Cast research in London.

Gold continued its push to higher ground Wednesday, consolidating its position at levels last seen more than 16 years ago. Spot gold was lately bid at $442.50 an ounce, up $2.70. Likewise, gold for December delivery rose $3.30 an ounce to stand at $433.80 in electronic trading

retail consumer prices were up 4.2 percent in the month that saw oil futures reach record levels. Gasoline prices rose 8.6 percent during the month and heating oil was up 8.1 percent.

Much of American "productivity," Rifkin suggests, is accounted for by economic activity that might be better described as wasteful: military spending; the endlessly expanding police and prison bureaucracies; the spiraling cost of healthcare; suburban sprawl; the fast-food industry and its inevitable corollary, the weight-loss craze. Meaningful comparisons of living standards, he says, consistently favor the Europeans. In France, for instance, the work week is 35 hours and most employees take 10 to 12 weeks off every year, factors that clearly depress GDP. Yet it takes a John Locke heart of stone to say that France is worse off as a nation for all that time people spend in the countryside downing du vin rouge et du Camembert with friends and family [...]

European children are consistently better educated; the United States would rank ninth in the EU in reading, ninth in scientific literacy, and 13th in math. Twenty-two percent of American children grow up in poverty, which means that our country ranks 22nd out of the 23 industrialized nations, ahead of only Mexico and behind all 15 of the pre-2004 EU countries. What's more horrifying: the statistic itself or the fact that no American politician to the right of Dennis Kucinich would ever address it?

Perhaps more surprisingly, European business has not been strangled by the EU welfare state; in fact, quite the opposite is true. Europe has surpassed the United States in several high-tech and financial sectors, including wireless technology, grid computing and the insurance industry. The EU has a higher proportion of small businesses than the U.S., and their success rate is higher. American capitalists have begun to pay attention to all this. In Reid's book, Ford Motor Co. chairman Bill Ford explains that the company's Volvo subsidiary is more profitable than its U.S. manufacturing operation, even though wages and benefits are significantly higher in Sweden. Government-subsidized healthcare, child care, pensions and other social supports, Ford says, more than make up for the difference.

The new EU constitution, currently being considered by the member states, is an unwieldy, jargon-laden document that runs to 265 pages in English (and even more in Spanish and French). It should also serve as an inspiration to progressives around the world. It bars capital punishment in all 25 nations and defines such things as universal healthcare, child care, paid annual leave, parental leave, housing for the poor, and equal treatment for gays and lesbians as fundamental human rights. Most of these are still hotly contested questions in the United States; as Rifkin says, this document all by itself makes the European Union the world leader in the human rights debate. It is the first governing document that aspires to universality, "with rights and responsibilities that encompass the totality of human existence on Earth."

The rise of the European Union may in fact, as Rifkin says, represent a new phase of history, and we barely saw it coming. While the outcome of this new cold war between Europe and America is far from clear, we should feel humbled by the way it's gone so far. The EU has succeeded so dramatically in its ambitious goals that the utopian dreamers of the last century who dared to imagine a peaceful, prosperous, united Europe seem eerily prescient now. If nothing else, it's an object lesson in the power of vision.

"I am a democrat," James Joyce wrote in 1916, while an entire generation of Europe's young men were slaughtering each other in the fields of Flanders. "I'll work and act for the social liberty and equality among all classes and sexes in the United States of the Europe of the future." People read that and laughed bitterly. Europe seemed poisoned by mustard gas and history; America was the land of liberty, democracy and the future. Nobody's laughing now.

While at least 38 Marine and Army troops have died in a tough week of house-to-house fighting in Fallujah, that is not the hardest part of the U.S. counteroffensive against the Iraqi insurgency.

The U.S. strategy in Iraq, Marine Col. T.X. Hammes observed in a recent interview, is a three-step process. "Clear out the insurgents, build up the Iraqi security forces, and then develop and install local governments in preparation for national elections," said Hammes, who served in the U.S. occupation authority in Iraq last winter.

The second and third steps promise to be more difficult to take than the first, in part because they are largely beyond U.S. control. Yet those steps of "Iraqifying" security and politics are also the keys to the Bush administration's strategy for getting out of Iraq. And over the course of the 18 month-long insurgency, U.S. officials frequently have overestimated their progress, both in creating durable Iraqi police and military units and in laying the groundwork for Iraqi political control of the country.

Good evening, my fellow Americans:

Tonight I want to talk to you on a subject of deep concern to all Americans and to many people in all parts of the world the war in Vietnam.

I believe that one of the reasons for the deep division about Vietnam is that many Americans have lost confidence in what their Government has told them about our policy. The American people cannot and should not be asked to support a policy which involves the overriding issues of war and peace unless they know the truth about that policy.

Tonight, therefore, I would like to answer some of the questions that I know are on the minds of many of you listening to me.

• How and why did America get involved in Vietnam in the first place?
  
• How has this administration changed the policy of the previous administration?
  
• What has really happened in the negotiations in Paris and on the battle-front in Vietnam?
  
• What choices do we have if we are to end the war?
  
• What are the prospects for peace?

The policy of the previous administration not only resulted in our assuming the primary responsibility for fighting the war, but even more significantly did not adequately stress the goal of strengthening the South Vietnamese so that they could defend themselves when we left.

The Vietnamization plan was launched following Secretary Laird's visit to Vietnam in March. Under the plan, I ordered first a substantial increase in the training and equipment of South Vietnamese forces.

-After 5 years of Americans going into Vietnam, we are finally bringing men home. By December 15, over 60,000 men will have been withdrawn from South Vietnam including 20 percent of all of our combat forces.

-The South Vietnamese have continued to gain in strength. As a result they have been able to take over combat responsibilities from our American troops.