At a joint White House press conference May 16 with Australian Prime Minister John Howard, as the two men stood side by side, Bush slipped in a couple of zingers about Howard's bald head and supposed homeliness.

Bush joshed, "Somebody said, 'You and John Howard appear to be so close, don't you have any differences?' And I said, 'yes, he doesn't have any hair.'"

Getting a round of laughs from reporters, Bush moved on to his next joke: "That's what I like about John Howard," Bush said. "He may not be the prettiest person on the block, but when he tells you something you can take it to the bank."

Howard played the role of gracious guest, smiling and saying nothing in response to the disparaging comments about his physical appearance.

Though many men are very sensitive about losing their hair, Bush seems to find their baldness a source of humor, a way to put them in their place.

At a press conference on Aug. 24, 2001, Bush called on a Texas reporter who had covered Bush as Texas governor. Bush said the young reporter was "a fine lad, fine lad," drawing laughter from the national press corps.

The Texas reporter then began to ask his question, "You talked about the need to maintain technological ..." But Bush interrupted the reporter to deliver his punch line:

"A little short on hair, but a fine lad. Yeah."

As Bush joined in the snickering, the young reporter paused and acknowledged meekly, "I am losing some hair."

Bush exhibits other physical alpha-male tendencies, such as when he greets another man by cupping his hand behind the man's neck, a sign of both affection and control.

Bush also demonstrates who's boss by assigning goofy nicknames, often tied to a person's appearance. Bush called two different tall, male reporters "Stretch" before eventually dubbing the taller one "Super Stretch."

Tart Tongue

Over the years, Bush has regularly poked fun at the looks of both close friends and casual acquaintances. While Texas governor, Bush lined up for one photo and fingered the man next to him. "He's the ugly one!" Bush laughed. [NYT, Aug. 22, 1999]

Other times, Bush goes beyond playful banter and just tongue-lashes people who have gotten on his wrong side.

In 1986, for instance, Bush spotted Wall Street Journal political writer Al Hunt and his wife Judy Woodruff having dinner at a Dallas restaurant with their four-year-old son. Bush was steaming over Hunt's prediction that Jack Kemp - not then-Vice President George H.W. Bush - would win the Republican presidential nomination in 1988.

Bush stormed up to the table and cursed Hunt out. "You [expletive] son of a bitch," Bush yelled. "I saw what you wrote. We're not going to forget this." [Washington Post, July 25, 1999]

In one of Campaign 2000's most memorable moments, Bush uttered an aside to his running mate Dick Cheney about New York Times reporter Adam Clymer. "There's Adam Clymer - major league asshole - from the New York Times," Bush said as he was waving to a campaign crowd from a stage in Naperville, Ill.

"Yeah, big time," responded Cheney. Their voices were picked up on an open microphone.

Bush even seems to take pleasure from holding power over a person's life or death.

In an interview with conservative commentator Tucker Carlson at the start of Campaign 2000, Bush joked about how condemned murderer Carla Faye Tucker pleaded for her life with him as Texas governor. "Please don't kill me," Bush whimpered through pursed lips in an imitation of the woman whom Bush put to death.

Later, during a presidential debate, Bush again made light of people facing the death penalty in Texas. While arguing against the need for hate-crimes laws, Bush said the three men convicted of the racially motivated murder of James Byrd were already facing the death penalty.

"It's going to be hard to punish them any worse after they're put to death," Bush said, with an out-of-place smile across his face. Beyond the inaccuracy of his statement - one of the three killers had received life imprisonment - there was that smirk again when discussing people on Death Row.

Quick Temper

Over the years, Bush has gained a reputation, too, for dressing down subordinates.

Former Bush speechwriter David Frum painted a generally flattering portrait of Bush in the 2003 book, The Right Man, but Frum acknowledged Bush's autocratic behavior and harsh humor.

Bush is "impatient and quick to anger; sometimes glib, even dogmatic; often uncurious and as a result ill informed," Frum wrote. When referring to environmentalists, Bush would call them "green-green lima beans," according to Frum.

Bush's hot temper also has complicated U.S. foreign policy, including the tense relations with North Korea. During a lectern-pounding tirade before Republican leaders in May 2002, Bush insulted North Korea's diminutive dictator Kim Jong Il by calling him a "pygmy," Newsweek reported. The slur quickly circulated around the globe.

While many Bush backers find his acid tongue and biting humor refreshing - the sign of a "politically incorrect" politician - some critics contend that Bush's off-handed insults fit with a dynastic sense of entitlement toward the presidency and toward those he rules.

Some observers of the Bush Family say George W. inherited this imperious style from his mother, Barbara, more than from his father, George H.W. Bush. Mrs. Bush is known for flashes of prickly humor, such as describing Democratic vice presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 as a word that "rhymes with rich."

After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Mrs. Bush demonstrated a stunning lack of empathy for the disaster's victims, many of whom had lost homes and family members. While visiting New Orleans evacuees at the Houston Astrodome, she noted how poor they were before the flood and then quipped, "this is working very well for them."

By contrast, George H.W. Bush is generally gracious in social settings, though he has been known to hurl insults at his campaign opponents, such as calling Al Gore "Ozone-Man" in 1992 or dismissing Gore and Bill Clinton as "bozos."

While always ready to deliver insults, the Bush family is famously thin-skinned about receiving them. For instance, George H.W. Bush restricted Newsweek's coverage of his 1988 presidential campaign after the magazine published a cover photo of Bush with the headline, "Fighting the Wimp Factor."

His eldest son, George W. Bush, doesn't even want to take chances with unfriendly audiences. He routinely has his advance teams and Secret Service details weed out people from his speeches who might be inclined to heckle him or ask hostile questions.

Indeed, between his pre-screened crowds and his layers of protectors, Bush has gone through five-plus-years as President with barely a single note-worthy incident of anyone challenging him to his face.

Unlike alpha males in the wild, Bush has managed to mark out his territory knowing that virtually nobody - not another head of state nor a private citizen - is in any position to contest his supremacy.

The Democrats, he alluded, "offers no new ideas like the Republican Party...can only offer opposition."

News reports said the gala helped the Republican party raise 17 million U.S. dollars, at a time when both the president and Republican lawmakers had sagging approval ratings for their job performances.

Some 800 people, with some paying more than the 1,500 dollar ticket price, attended the gala, a major fund-raising event for the Republican Party.

All the 435 House seats and one-third of the 100 Senate seats are to be reelected in the midterm elections in November.

Currently, the Republicans, facing a uphill battle to keep control of Congress in November, have 231 seats in the House and 55 seats in the Senate, while the Democrats hold 201 seats in the House and 44 seats in the Senate.

The Democrats are hoping that in November's election they can regain control of the House of Representatives, lost after 40 years in a traumatic Republican landslide in 1994, and possibly gain the Senate. Control of either house would see a series of investigations launched that would add to pressure on Mr Bush in the last two years of his administration.

Mr Luntz said: "It is absolutely possible for the Democrats to take one or both [houses]. I was involved in 1994. It feels like a 1994-style election. Voters will come to the ballots for candidates they do not even know [to get the incumbent out]." Mr Frum was less pessimistic: "It is not impossible that Republicans could eke out a hold in both houses."

The Post/ABC poll, consistent with the trend in other polls during the past month, found that 69% of those surveyed thought the country was now off track and 56% would prefer to see Democrats in control of the US Congress. The Democrats recorded majorities over the Republicans on 10 crucial issues: health, education, the federal budget, petrol prices, taxes, phone-tapping and other privacy matters, the economy, Iraq, immigration, and the campaign against terrorism.

Mr Bush's personal approval rating is only 33%, down five points in a month, with the decline sharpest among Republicans. Only 32% of those polled said they approved of the way he is handling Iraq. A toll of soldiers killed in Iraq is listed daily in US papers and on television. Karl Rove, Mr Bush's top election strategist, told an AEI meeting on Monday that Iraq was the issue that soured everything.

But the issue that seems to be hurting the president most among Republicans is immigration. Mr Frum said that the unskilled, white working-class had not seen any rise in their wages since 2000 and blamed this partly on immigration.

Thomas Mann, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Brookings Institution, said: "It has been an extraordinary collapse of support for the president and the Republican party. If you look at the poll ratings for the government on a range of issues, all of those are more damning than 94 was for the Democrats." He said people had lost trust in Mr Bush as a result of Iraq and Hurricane Katrina. He had given a reasonable speech on immigration,"but no one is listening any more".

After passage in the lower house of parliament, it will be debated in June in the upper house or Senate.

Critics say the law risks creaming off the most talented people from countries where they are badly needed, and will make life harder for ordinary migrants.

"Keeping the best and sending back the worst is not exactly Christian," said Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, Archbishop of Lyon.

Ivorian reggae singer Alpha Blondy said: "This notion of chosen immigration, this migratory apartheid takes us back to the time of slavery, when the traders chose the strongest or those with the best teeth to take them to the west."

Sarkozy - a frontrunner to become French president after next year's elections - left France Wednesday to visit Mali and Benin, where he faces protests from opponents of the law.

The law creates a new type of residence permit - named a "skills and talents permit" - open to foreigners with qualifications which are judged to be important for the French economy and labour market.

At the same time rules are tightened for migrants moving to France for family reasons, as the vast majority currently do.

Foreigners will be allowed in only if they can be supported not from state hand-outs but earned income; in order to fight convenience marriages foreign spouses will wait longer for residence cards; and migrants will sign an "integration contract" committing them to respect the French way of life.

Sarkozy has said the November riots in France's high-immigration suburbs - where unemployment is rampant among young males - is evidence of the failures of France's current system of immigration.

"The violence which exploded in our suburbs is not unconnected with the shocking failure of our policies of integration and immigration," he told the National Assembly.

"We are closing the doors to those who have a job and opening it for those who don't. This absurd system is an essential ingredient in our malaise."

France's last census figures - for 1999 - showed 4.33 million foreign nationals living in France, and every year a further 140,000 are entering using legal channels.

In addition some 90,000 are believed to enter illegally every year, mainly by overstaying on short-term visas. According to Sarkozy, only five percent of those entering the country legally do so for work reasons.

The government believes there are between 200,000 and 400,000 'sans-papiers' - paperless ones - but it is resisting calls to regularise their situation.

In recent years the number of deportations has shot up, as has the number of people refused asylum. In 2006, the government is banking on making 26,000 repatriations, many on flights run jointly with Britain.

Sarkozy, who is himself the son of a Hungarian father, says his aim is to strike a sensible mid-way path between the immigrants-out rhetoric of the far right and the laissez-faire approach of the left.

In an open letter Wednesday he rebutted the slavery comparison made by reggae singer Blondy, who is a UN "messenger of peace" for the Ivory Coast.

"African slavery was one of the worst tragedies of history and it is essential not to trivialise this crime against humanity by inapt comparisons. Chosen immigration means regulated immigration, organised with reference to the reception capacity of our country," he said.

For their part, experts widely agree that Hayden is independent and not likely to be bullied by the Department of Defense. But the issue points to how the war on terror is reshaping the US intelligence structure - and whether it is wise for the Pentagon to take more of the nation's spying needs upon itself.

Perhaps more than in past conflicts, success in the war on terror depends upon good intelligence and prompt action, so "it's only natural that the Department of Defense wants to have more control," says Michael O'Hanlon, an analyst at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "The issue becomes: Where do you draw the line?"

As in all matters that involve clandestine intelligence gathering, the outlines of who does what are not immediately clear. America's intelligence structure is a tangled bureaucracy of 16 civilian and military agencies.

Yet traditionally, the Pentagon had focused its sensors and satellites mostly on enemy militaries, and some 80 percent of the annual intelligence budget has gone to agencies under the Pentagon's umbrella. Other missions, most notably counterterrorism, have fallen to other agencies such as the CIA.

But current Pentagon officials have put greater emphasis on intelligence. In 2003, for instance, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld created the post of undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and made it the third most senior civilian position.

Moreover, the Pentagon has shown a willingness to make inroads into what was previously CIA territory. Before the US invasion of Afghanistan, Secretary Rumsfeld was reportedly troubled by having to wait on the CIA to make contact with important local warlords. Since then, numerous reports suggest that the Pentagon is sending teams of intelligence specialists abroad to work with special- operations forces in the war on terror.

The apparent goal is not to replace the CIA, but simply to lessen the military's reliance on the CIA for information that directly impacts operations.

Part of this, some say, is simply a product of the nature of the current conflict. "At a time when you are trying to use covert operations for more quick, rapid-response strikes, you have to have better intelligence," says Dr. O'Hanlon.

Other longer-term trends also come into play. The CIA's ability to carry out the sort of paramilitary operations central to the war on terror "atrophied" during the 1990s, says analyst John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org - while the military's capabilities have been on an "upward trajectory" since the Iran hostage crisis.

But he and others worry that the Pentagon may be trying to push too far. In the past, the CIA has been responsible for "covert" operations - actions where United States sponsorship is not detectable. These require congressional authority. The military, meanwhile, has been at liberty to conduct "clandestine" operations - actions that are simply hard to detect, and do not need congressional authority.

The concern is that the Pentagon will broaden - or already has - its definition of clandestine operations to include covert activities. "You wind up provoking [your enemies]," says Mr. Pike. "They regard it as retaliation, but to the American people [who know nothing of the covert operations], it looks like an unprovoked attack."

The Pentagon insists that it has followed the laws for intelligence gathering. But even if it has, say others, there's a risk that the Pentagon and the CIA will knock heads as they both pursue the same types of missions. "[Military leaders] have a legitimate interest in having a strong military- intelligence capability, so it's important that civilian intelligence works closely with defense intelligence," says John McLaughlin, former acting director of the CIA. "It's important that they not bump into each other."

He suggests a civilian director, outside the CIA, to oversee and coordinate all human intelligence-gathering activity. Nominee Hayden would also play a part. His job, if confirmed, is to implement the vision of the director of national intelligence and carve out a distinct space for the CIA in the US intelligence community. A major part of that could be warding off an exuberant Pentagon.

"He is an intelligence professional first and foremost," says O'Hanlon. "The fact that he comes out of the Department of Defense makes him more likely to stand up to the Department of Defense."

Yet in a post-9/11 world where the needs and uses of intelligence have changed dramatically, deciding which agency should do what will still be a work in progress. "This is going to have to be worked out in practice," says Mr. McLaughlin. "They're still sorting out all the roles and responsibilities."

"For the past few years, the intelligence community and the CIA have taken an inordinate number of hits, some of them fair, many of them not," Hayden was expected to say in prepared remarks at his Senate confirmation hearing.

His reception by the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday was expected to be much different than a year ago, when the panel approved him unanimously to be the nation's first principal deputy director of national intelligence.

"I was actually delighted when you were appointed," the Intelligence Committee's top Democrat, West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller, told Hayden in April 2005.

This time, Rockefeller wrote Hayden on Wednesday to lay out concerns regarding the general's independence from the administration, given his aggressive defense of the decision to conduct the warrantless monitoring.

"It is of the utmost importance that officials of the intelligence community avoid even the appearance of politicization, and that its senior leaders set an example," wrote Rockefeller, who will miss Hayden's hearing while recovering from back surgery.

He said he hoped Hayden would explain how he planned to repair the CIA, which is struggling to find its footing after a 2004 overhaul law that reorganized the U.S. spy community. Rockefeller wants to be sure the Pentagon and CIA are adequately coordinating their classic spy operations.

Some have questioned whether it is appropriate to have someone like Hayden, with his lengthy resume in military intelligence, directing the civilian spies at the CIA at a time when the intelligence community is increasingly dominated by the Pentagon. In closed door meetings with senators, Hayden, 61, indicated a willingness to retire from the Air Force if necessary.

Republicans generally have praised Hayden. "I don't think he'll be under the thumb of the Defense Department," said Sen. Orrin Hatch, R- Utah, adding that Hayden brings a tremendous intelligence background to the job.

Much of the hearing was expected to focus on a recent newspaper report that the NSA was able to analyze the calling records of millions of ordinary Americans.

Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., said there were serious privacy concerns. If the government maintains a database of Americans' calls, he said, "that has got to be addressed." Levin and other Democrats have not said publicly yet whether they will support Hayden, waiting to see how he handled himself in Thursday's open and closed committee hearings.

To help smooth Hayden's path, the administration reversed course after five months and decided this week to provide more information to Congress about the ultra-secret NSA's activities. That includes full briefings for the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., who supports Hayden, said the information was necessary to have a fully informed confirmation hearing.

"This issue will be central to the committee's deliberations on General Hayden's nomination," Roberts said, "and there was no way we could fulfill our collective constitutional responsibilities without that knowledge."

President Bush chose Hayden as CIA director-nominee after consultation with Hayden's current boss, National Intelligence Director John Negroponte. Outgoing CIA Director Porter Goss announced his retirement earlier this month after disputes with Hayden and Negroponte about the CIA's direction.

He headed the National Security Agency (NSA) from 1999 to 2005, and has come under fire in recent months as senators are expected to grill him on the NSA's collection of phone records of millions of Americans and its warrantless eavesdropping on conversations between U.S. residents and suspected foreign terrorists.

USA Today reported last week that three of four major phone companies -- BellSouth , AT&T and Verizon Communications -- provided information on the calling records of millions of Americans.

Snowe said that, while Hayden's chances for confirmation are "obviously very good," the nominee will face tough questions on the NSA surveillance as well as other issues. "We have to make sure all questions are asked and all questions are answered," she said in an interview.

If confirmed by the full Senate, Hayden, 61, will find himself in the middle of one of the most fundamental debates about the agency's mission since Congress created the CIA in 1947.