The Empire Strikes Bush

"Critics contend that the president is masking the original, and later discredited, reasons for invading Iraq with his vow to end world tyranny, a theme Bush voiced in his second-term inaugural address and has repeated across Europe."

Domestic Focus

Peter Baker writes in The Washington Post: "President Bush, fresh from a European trip and a White House summit with Central American leaders, returned to his troubled domestic agenda yesterday and tried to ratchet up pressure on a balky Congress to pass his Social Security, energy, legal liability, health care and tax proposals."

Here is the text of his speech Friday to the National Association of Realtors.

AFP reports that Bush said in his Saturday radio address that this week, he will "discuss our need for a comprehensive national energy strategy that reduces our dependence on foreign oil."

Bush talks about energy today at a biodiesel refinery in West Point, Va.

Judith Haynes writes in the Hampton Roads Daily Press that none of this visit is open to the public.

Incoming: Stem Cells

Karen Tumulty writes in Time magazine: "It was the toughest call of his young presidency, and George Bush chose an event no less momentous than his first prime-time address to announce that he had found a thin ridge of moral high ground on which to perch. The wrenching decision: whether to lend federal support to embryonic-stem-cell research, unleashing potential cures for horrific illnesses and life-shattering injuries, but at the cost of giving government sanction to the destruction of human embryos."

Bush's conclusion: "The government would move forward carefully, he promised, providing federal money for research on cell colonies that had already been created by that point, August 2001, but not edging one inch further down the slope of destroying additional human embryos. 'I spent a lot of time on the subject,' he later told reporters. 'I laid out the policy I think is right for America, and I'm not going to change my mind.'

"Now, the once solid ground that Bush staked out almost four years ago is crumbling beneath him, and he will probably soon find himself once again in the middle of an argument that he had declared settled."

Rove Watch, I

Neil A. Lewis writes in the New York Times that the White House chief political strategist has had quite the hand in the formation of Justice Priscilla R. Owen of the Texas Supreme Court, one of the Bush nominees to a federal appeals court at the center of the partisan battle in the Senate over changing the filibuster rules.

Lewis cites "three crucial moments in her judicial career in which she seemed to have been guided by the hand of Karl Rove."

For instance, Owen was "a respected but little-known lawyer in Houston in 1994 when she was first elected to the State Supreme Court with Mr. Rove's support and tutelage."