Just when you get your mind all made up about President George W. Bush, along comes Karl Rove trying to unsettle things.
 
The president is far from being the uncultured book-burner often portrayed by his critics, his former deputy chief of staff wrote in The Wall Street Journal Friday.
 
In fact, Bush is a voracious reader and lover of books, Rove insisted.
 
The president has gone through 40 tomes so far this year. That follows 51 in 2007 and 95 in 2006. Plus the Bible from cover to cover each year.
 
History, fiction, biography. You name it, he’s read it.
 
“Team of Rivals,” the book about Abraham Lincoln’s Cabinet that is shaping President-elect Barack Obama’s thinking about his own administration?
 
Bush has been there, done that. Read it back in ‘06. Along with a Mao biography, Nathaniel Philbrick’s “Mayflower,” eight Travis McGee novels by John D. MacDonald and “The Stranger” by Albert Camus.
 
He went through “Khrushchev’s Cold War,” “Rogue Regime” and “The Shia Revival” in ‘07. That plus his daughter Jenna’s book “Ana’s Story.” And many others.
 
This year there’s been U.S. Grant’s “Personal Memoirs,” Hugh Thomas’ “Spanish Civil War” and James McPherson’s “Tried by war: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief.”
 
“There is a myth perpetuated by Bush critics that he would rather burn a book than read one,” Rove wrote.
 
“Like so many caricatures of the past eight years, this one is not only wrong, but also the opposite of the truth and evidence that bitterness can devour a small-minded critic,” he said.
 
If the reading part wasn’t shock enough for Bush naysayers, Rove has more.
 
“Mr. Bush loves books, learns from them and is intellectually engaged by them,” he wrote.
 
How, you may ask, would Rove know so much about Bush’s reading habits?
 
It seems they have been engaged in friendly competition to see who could read the greatest number of books each year. 

And who won? 
 
Not the president. Rove mopped the floor with him every year. He read 110 in 2006, 76 in 2007 and has 64 to his credit so far in 2008.

Bush’s excuse? Too busy with his day job.

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Photo credit: Reuters/Larry Downing (Bush and his father, former President George H.W. Bush, prepare to board Air Force One en route to Texas Dec. 26); Reuters/Fred Prouser (Rove takes part in a panel discussion on Fox TV July 14)

President George W. Bush heads to his Texas ranch for a holiday break Friday.
 
President-elect Barack Obama is already on vacation in Hawaii, where he paid a visit to Marines on Christmas Day.
 
Congress is in recess until after Jan. 1.
 
With the politicians away from Washington, the morning TV shows focused on other news, including the ailing economy’s performance during the holiday shopping season.
 
Retail sales, minus gasoline, were down 2 percent from the previous year in November and 4 percent in the Dec. 1-Dec. 24 period, MasterCard Advisor’s SpendingPulse reported.
 
Some retailers generate up to 40 percent of their annual revenue during the holiday period, which typically runs from the day after Thanksgiving until Christmas Eve.
 
Retailer hopes are now pinned on the post-Christmas sales, which began Friday. 

Retailers on the only ones hurting from the bad economy. A drop in revenues is forcing forcing states to cut back on Medicaid, the government’s health insurance program for the poor, the Washington Post said.
 
States are cutting payments to hospitals and nursing homes, eliminating discretionary programs like physical therapy, eyeglasses and hearing aids or forcing the poor to pick up a larger share of the tab, the Post said.
 
The Washington Times reported Friday that a power struggle over the future leadership of the Republican party has broken out into the open.
 
Several members of the Republican National Committee’s governing body are working to call an extra meeting to hear from the six candidates for national chairman, the Times said.
 
The move is seen as a backlash against control of the RNC by Bush, his allies and their Washington-based consulting firms, it said.
 
The extra meeting is seen as giving the six candidates for chairman an equal shot at the job, rather than favoring the current chairman, Robert M. “Mike” Duncan, the Times said.
 
Stock futures were up on Friday, pointing to a higher open on Wall Street amid moves to turn General Moter’s financing arm into a bank holding company.
 
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Photo credit/Hugh Gentry (Obama shares a laugh with U.S. Marine Col. Robert Rice during a visit with Marines on Christmas Day); Reuters/Fred Prouser (Sales signs at a shoe store in Losangeles Dec. 24)

U.S. President-elect Barack Obama is not yet commander in chief of the armed forces, but he appears to be warming up to the role as he prepares to take office on Jan. 20 and begin withdrawing troops from Iraq and sending more to Afghanistan.
 
First, he used his Christmas message to pay tribute to the “selfless sacrifice” of the men and women in uniform, and then on Christmas Day, in his only public outing, he visited a Marine Corps base in Hawaii, where he is holidaying, to thank the Marines and sailors stationed there for their service.
 
He spent 75 minutes shaking hands, chatting with the servicemen and posing for photographs at their cafeteria, where they had been enjoying a traditional Christmas dinner before his surprise arrival.
 
Obama is no stranger to the base. He has been visiting it every day since his arrival to work out at the gym there. He broke that routine on Christmas Day, resetting the clock on the seven-day-a-week workout regimen that he religiously follows when at home in Chicago.
 
Some of the servicemen appeared bemused to see him, while others whipped out their camera phones to snap pictures after he walked into the cafeteria with a bellowed “Hi everybody, Merry Christmas.”
 
Local media reported that a Marine stationed at the base, Lance Corporal Thomas Reilly Jr, 19, had been killed in an attack in Iraq’s western Anbar province on Sunday.

U.S. President-elect Barack Obama can body-surf with the best of them.

But can he golf?
 
Obama, who freely admits not being very good,  sent great chunks of grass flying as he warmed up on the driving range at a private golf club on the Hawaiian island of Oahu before hitting the course  on Christmas Eve.
 
Several wincing observers also accused him of shanking, which golfers define as striking the ball badly by smacking it with the heel of the club.
 
Later, as he practiced his putting, a little boy watching him from the clubhouse was heard defending him after he missed several attempts to sink the ball.
 
“He’s just practicing,” the boy said. Onlookers debated whether the president-elect was being put off his stride by all the people watching him.

Mid-way through the game, Obama greeted a group of onlookers who asked him how the golf was going. “I’m terrible,” he replied to one person. “Got any tips?” he asked someone else. 

It was Obama’s second golf excursion in four days since jetting into Oahu on Saturday for a two-week vacation with his family.

He was playing with aide Eugene Kang, close Chicago friend Eric Whitaker, who is spending Christmas with the Obamas, and one other friend.

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Reuters photo by Hugh Gentry (Obama warms up on the driving range at Mid Pacific Country Club, Hawaii, Dec. 24)

Barack Obama went to a gym at a military base in Hawaii the other day and did something positively Reaganesque — he returned a Marine’s salute.
 
In so doing, he wandered directly into the middle of a thorny debate: Should U.S. presidents return military salutes or not?
 
Longstanding tradition requires members of the military to salute the president. The practice of presidents returning that salute is more recent — Ronald Reagan started it in 1981.
 
Reagan’s decision raised eyebrows at the time. Dwight Eisenhower, a former five-star general, did not return military salutes while president. Nor had other presidents.
 
John Kline, then Reagan’s military aide and now a Minnesota congressman, advised him that it went against military protocol for presidents to return salutes.
 
Kline said in a 2004 op-ed piece in The Hill that Reagan ultimately took up the issue with Gen. Robert Barrow, then commandant of the Marine Corps.
 
Barrow told Reagan that as commander in chief of the armed forces, he was entitled to offer a salute — or any sign of respect he wished — to anyone he wished, Kline wrote, adding he was glad for the change.
 
Every president since Reagan has followed that practice, even those with no military experience. President Bill Clinton’s saluting skills were roundly criticized after he took office, but the consensus was he eventually got better.
 
The debate over saluting has persisted, with some arguing against it for protocol reasons, others saying it represents an increasing militarization of the civilian presidency.
 
“The gesture is of course quite wrong: Such a salute has always required the wearing of a uniform,” author and historian John Lukacs wrote in The New York Times in 2003.
 
“But there is more to this than a decline in military manners,” he added. “There is something puerile in the Reagan (and now Bush) salute. It is the joyful gesture of someone who likes playing soldier. It also represents an exaggeration of the president’s military role.”
 
Garry Wills, the author and Northwestern University professor, echoed those remarks in the Times in 2007.
 
“The glorification of the president as a war leader is registered in numerous and substantial executive aggrandizements; but it is symbolized in other ways that, while small in themselves, dispose the citizenry to accept those aggrandizements,” he wrote.
 
“We are reminded, for instance, of the expanded commander in chief status every time a modern president gets off the White House helicopter and returns the salute of Marines.”
 
What do you think? Is returning a salute a common courtesy? Or should Obama reconsider the practice?
 
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Photo credit: Reuters/Hugh Gentry (Obama waves after leaving a gym at a Marine Corps base in Hawaii Dec. 23); Reuters/Pool (Bush salutes at a ceremony in New York Nov. 11)

President-elect Barack Obama’s pecs were gone from the news Wednesday, replaced by Chicago shenanigans.
 
Newspapers and television covered the Obama team’s report detailing its contacts with Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.
 
Blagojevich is charged with trying to sell the U.S. Senate seat Obama vacated after his November election victory.
 
The report cleared Obama and his aides of any misconduct. But it revealed for the first time that the president-elect sat for an interview last week with the U.S. prosecutor investigating Blagojevich. So did two of his aides.
 
President George W. Bush’s holiday pardons also made the newspapers.
 
Among those receiving pardons was Charlie Winters, who was imprisoned for 18 months breaking a weapons embargo against Israel by ferrying bombers to the new state in 1948, The New York Times reported.
 
Winters, an Irish protestant from Boston, is viewed as a hero in Israel. He died in 1984 at the age of 71.
 
Not on the pardons list: I. Lewis Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, who was convicted of lying and obstructing justice during an investigation into who leaked the name of an undercover CIA operative.
 
Bush previously commuted Libby’s sentence.
 
Data out Wednesday showed new jobless claims jumped by 30,000 last week to a 26-year peak. Consumer spending posted a fifth monthly drop. Stock futures were little changed, pointing to a flat opening on Wall Street.
 
It’s Christmas Eve. Obama continued his holiday in Hawaii and Bush was at Camp David. Congress was in recess.
 
Not everyone was on holiday though. The folks at NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, were hard at work with their traditional Christmas Eve task – keeping an eye on Santa Claus.
 
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Photo credit: Reuters/Larry Downing (Bush leaving White House Tuesday to go to Camp David for holidays)

HONOLULU - The hectic pace of the election campaign kept him from attending her funeral.
 
But President-elect Barack Obama on Tuesday finally paid his last respects to the woman he called the “rock” of his family, the grandmother who help raise him in Hawaii, before scattering her ashes from the shoreline.
 
Madelyn Dunham, known to Obama as Toot, short for Tutu, the Hawaiian word for grandmother, took him in when his mother went to work in Indonesia and put him through private school.
 
Dunham was one of the main formative influences on his life, but she did not live to see him win office. She died of cancer at 86 just two days before he won the Nov. 4 election.
 
Obama bade her farewell at a memorial service attended by friends and family at the First Unitarian Church in Honolulu on the island of Oahu, where he is spending a two-week Christmas holiday.
 
After the service, Obama and about a dozen others traveled to Lanai Lookout on the southeast corner of Oahu, scrambling over a wall and down to the rocky shoreline to scatter his grandmother’s ashes.
 
It was the same place where he scattered his mother’s ashes after her death in 1995.
 
Obama attributed many character attributes to his grandmother, who raised him in the absence of his traveling mother, and his father, who lived in Kenya.
 
“She’s the one who taught me about hard work,” he told a packed stadium in Denver in August when he accepted the Democratic presidential nomination.

“She’s the one who put off buying a new car or a new dress for herself so that I could have a better life.”
 
Reporting by Mike Gordon.  Reuters photo by Hugh Gentry  (Obama returns from scattering the ashes of his grandmother at a seaside ceremony).

Tuesday’s political news is all about pecs, abs and and a painful shoulder.
 
A photographer caught President-elect Barack Obama sunning in his swimsuit on a Hawaii beach. 
 
The images drew an admiring “Fit for Office” headline from the New York Post as well as approving nods from the morning TV talk shows. 
 
The painful shoulder belonged to President George W. Bush. It got an MRI scan and a cortisone shot at Walter Reed Army Medical Center Monday as Bush paid a visit to wounded soldiers.
 
Obama’s transition team is due to release a report detailing the contacts between his staff and the office of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.
 
The governor has been charged with trying to benefit personally by selling off the Senate seat that Obama vacated in November after winning the presidential election. Blagojevich has the power to appoint a replacement to finish Obama’s term.
 
ABC News said the report found that Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff, discussed the seat with the governor’s office but did not do or say anything wrong.
 
Obama’s staff finished the report last week but its release was held up at the request of the U.S. attorney investigating Blagojevich.
 
The president-elect also will attend a private memorial service Tuesday for his grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, who died just before the election. Obama lived with his grandmother and grandfather in Hawaii throughout his teenage years.
 
Hillary Clinton has written off $13.1 million in loans to her failed campaign for president, according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission.
 
The New York Times also reported that the former first lady and New York senator, who was selected by Obama to serve as secretary of state, is moving to widen the role of the State Department.
 
She is seeking to build a more powerful State Department with a bigger budget, high-profile special envoys to trouble spots and a larger role in dealing with global economic issues, the Times reported.
 
The U.S. economy shrank at an annual pace of 0.5 percent, new government figures showed Tuesday. Consumer spending shrank by 3.8 percent, the sharpest drop since 1980.
 
Stock futures were little changed, suggesting a relatively flat open on Wall Street.
 
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Photo credit: Reuters/Hugh Gentry (Obama meets with Marines at a base in Hawaii Monday); Reuters/Ho New (Bush shakes hands with Staff Sgt Kyle Stipp after presenting him with Purple Heart medals during visit to Walter Reed Monday)

HONOLULU - “Paparazzo photographs topless celebrity on beach”
 
At first glance that reads like nothing new — another revealing photograph of a Hollywood star that will be eagerly snapped up by celebrity-obsessed magazines.
 
But the celebrity in question is the next president of the United States and the photographs, published on some websites on Monday, raise questions about his future relationship with the media, in particular how much privacy he and his family are entitled to when they are not in public view.
 
The photograph of a shirtless Barack Obama was shot by a paparazzo photographer outside his secluded beach villa on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, where he is spending a two-week holiday with his family.
 
The rented villa was chosen because it is easier to secure than the house he occupied on his last holiday to Hawaii.  Secret Service agents have blocked off the road that runs past the villa and the public beach is only accessible after scrambling over a rocky outcrop.
 
Obama has media travelling everywhere with him who are required to observe certain restrictions with respect to when and where they can take photographs of him. While the paparazzo was shooting his picture on Sunday, the Obama media pool were sitting in a bus in a street near the president-elect’s home.
 
That may leave some media organizations questioning whether it is worth being part of the pool if others are operating outside it without any such restrictions. The downside is that those outside the pool are not informed beforehand of Obama’s  movements, so could miss out on photo opportunities.
 
The paparazzo photographs of Obama, his wife Michelle in a swimsuit and those of his youngest daughter Sasha, 7, give a foretaste of the media scrutiny the telegenic soon-to-be first family will face after his Jan. 20 inauguration, which is expected to draw record crowds.
 
The pictures show Obama, who works out seven days a week, in black swimming trunks, looking more muscular and toned than he did in August when he was photographed body-surfing in Hawaii.
 
Others show daughter Sasha, in a bright blue swimsuit, walking down to the beach from the house with two Secret Service agents in tow, and Michelle wearing a black one-piece swimsuit and a brightly coloured towel wrapped around her waist.
 
“No comment,” was the terse response from an Obama spokesman when asked for the president-elect’s reaction.
 
Frank Griffin, the co-owner of Bauer-Griffin, a Los-Angeles-based celebrity photo agency, told Reuters the pictures had been shot on Sunday by one of the agency’s photographers on a public beach in full view of Secret Service agents. He said the agents had spoken to the photographer but had made no attempt to stop him from taking the pictures. 
  
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Photo credit: Reuters/Hugh Gentry - U.S. President-elect Barack Obama meets with Marines after working out at the Semper Fit gym on Kaneohe Marine Corps Base while in Hawaii for a vacation over the holidays on December 22.

President-elect Barack Obama may release a report Monday detailing the contacts between his staff and scandal-tainted Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. 
 
ABC News says Obama is expected to release the report sometime Monday. The Washington Post says it is due out Monday or Tuesday. 
 
Blagojevich has been charged with trying to sell the Senate seat that was vacated by Obama after his election to the presidency in November. 
 
The governor has power to appoint someone to serve out the remaining years of the term. 
 
Obama’s staff finished the report last week but its release was held up at the request of the U.S. attorney who is investigating Blagojevich.
 
ABC said Sunday the report found that Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel spoke once with Blagojevich and four times with Blagojevich’s chief of staff, John Harris. ABC said the report cleared Emanuel of doing anything or saying anything wrong.
 
The fiery Continental Airlines accident in Denver, with a dramatic escape by passengers and crew, dominated the morning TV news. The icy U.S. weather ran a close second.
 
Temperatures weren’t a problem for the president-elect, who is relaxing in Hawaii for the holidays.
 
President George W. Bush has a holiday-related schedule Monday. He visits a project for the needy in Washington and later meets with wounded troops at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. 
 
Caroline Kennedy’s bid to become a senator was back in the news on morning TV. Kennedy is trying to win appointment to the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Hillary Clinton, who is becoming Obama’s secretary of state.
 
New York Gov. David Paterson is considering a number of names, including the daughter of assassinated President John F. Kennedy. 
 
New York’s Republicans objected mightily to her consideration, with Rep. Peter King questioning her lack of political experience.
 
Stock futures were little changed Monday in what was expected to be a light trading week ahead of the Christmas holiday.
 
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Photo credit: Reuters/Hugh Gentry (Obama plays golf in Hawaii Sunday); Reuters/Jeff Haynes (Blagojevich at a news conference Dec 19)