NEW YORK - Appearing on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" tonight, Democratic Party chief Howard Dean told host Jon Stewart, "I know half your audience wants us to impeach the president"-- this drew wide cheers -- "but it's not going to happen."

Stewart apologized to Dean for telling him on a previous appearance that the Democrats could not possibly win unless they staked out a clear policy on Iraq and other issues. In Stewart's view, they didn't, and won anyway.

He also noted the two key breakups announced Wednesday: Britney and KFed and Bush and "DFeld," as Stewart called Donald Rumsfeld.

Stewart also said that President Bush seemed a bit humbled during his press conference today and perhaps was ready to compromise and work with the Democrats. Dean reminded him that this was the same person who brought us "Rumsfeld and Cheney."

Later, on the Colbert Report, host Stephen Colbert noted the election success enjoyed by nearly everyone who had appeared on his show this year, such as Rep. Eliot Engel of New York -- who had let him comb his moustache.

John Hall, who won a stunning upset fofr Congress, also in upstate New York -- after getting what Colbert called "The Colbert Bump"-- returned to the show and the two sang a rousing version of "The Star Spangled Banner." They had done the same in Hall's first visit, but it was cut from the show-- but ended up on YouTube. So this one was for everyone. Hall is the former leader of the rock group Orleans, best known for '70s hits such as "She's the One."

Rep. John Conyers, a leading House proponent of impeaching the president -- and soon to head a key committee -- said Thursday that this notion was now off the table.

"We both extended the hand of friendship and partnership to solve the problems facing our country," added Pelosi, like the president eagerly leaning forward in her chair. "We have our differences and we will debate them ... but we will do so in a way that gets results." She pledged to represent everyone in the House. "I understand my responsibility: of speaker of the House, of all of the House, not just the Democrats.

"I look forward to working in a confidence-building way with the president recognizing that we have our differences and we will debate them, and that is what our founders intended, but we will do so in a way that gets results for the American people," she said.

Bush extended the lunch invitation after this week's election that will put Democrats in charge of the House and the Senate for the final two years of his presidency.
Earlier, after meeting with his Cabinet and Republican leaders from the House and Senate, the president ticked off a to-do list for the current Congress before January's changeover in power.

It included: spending bills funding government's continued operation "with strong fiscal discipline and without diminishing our capacity to fight the war on terror;" legislation retroactively authorizing his warrantless domestic surveillance of suspected terrorists; energy legislation; and congressional approval for a landmark civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with India and for normalizing trade relations with Vietnam. "The next few weeks are going to be busy ones," the president said.

Bush originally named Bolton last year, but was forced to use a device known as a recess appointment to bypass Senate objections.

But the position expires when the new Congress convenes in January, and Bolton would need to be confirmed to carry on in a post granted added importance by intense diplomacy over
North Korea's and Iran's nuclear programs.

The latest nomination was announced in a statement by the White House, and appeared to have been timed to coincide with a "lame duck" session of Congress controlled by Republicans next week before Democrats take control in January.

Democrats have been united in opposing Bolton, who is close to Vice President Dick Cheney, and there is no chance he could be approved when they take control of the upper chamber.

Bolton's chances of being confirmed in the "lame-duck" session of Congress -- which opens next week still under control of the Republicans -- also appear slim.

A spokesman for Senator Lincoln Chafee, a Republican of Rhode Island who blocked approval of Bolton, and who lost his seat on Tuesday, said his boss would again vote 'No' in the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Asked whether the nomination was therefore dead, he answered "it's done."

The Bush administration, however, said Bolton deserved a vote.

"We believe that he deserves an up-or-down vote; that if he gets such a vote that he would win it in the Senate. He has been extraordinarily effective up there at the UN," said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack.

But Democratic Senator Chris Dodd, a fierce Bolton opponent, hit out at Bush for lodging the new nomination, on a day he promised to work with Democrats, following the rejection of congressional Republicans at the ballot box.

"Trying to jam this nomination through during a lame duck session may indicate that the President didn't fully hear the voice of the American public and that is troubling," Dodd said.

"The President should immediately rethink this nomination."

Democratic Senator Joseph Biden, in line to take over the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the new Congress, quickly signalled Thursday that Democrats would not allow Bush to get Bolton's nomination through.

"I see no point in considering Mr. Bolton's nomination again in the Foreign Relations Committee, because regardless of what happens there, he is unlikely to be considered by the full Senate," Biden said in a statement.

"Mr. Bolton did not get a vote in the full Senate last year because the administration refused, with no justification, to allow the Senate to review documents highly relevant to his nomination.

"Unless the administration provides the Senate with the documents it is entitled to see, Mr. Bolton should not get a vote."

A spokesman for Richard Lugar, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said it was not clear if Bolton would get a vote on the panel next week.

Given the fierce opposition to Bolton, the White House's decision to renew it on a day when it was stressing the need for all sides to work together in the aftermath of Tuesday's huge political shift puzzled some observers.

One insider closely familiar with the issue suggested Bush may have been sending a signal to Congress, that despite the Republican defeat, he still intended to set the agenda in foreign affairs.

Another rejection of Bolton might allow the White House to blame the Democrats for souring the new mood of bipartisanship in Washington.

US Minister of Defense Donald Rumsfeld resigned on Wednesday amid a wave of strong criticism for the catastrophic course of the war against Iraq, where over 2,840 American soldiers have died so far.

The Bush government wants to keep its representative to the UN at least until 2007, but that needs to be confirmed by the Senate, with democrat majority from January on.

USA Today daily reported that Republican senator Lincoln Chafee, who determines the balance vote in the Foreign Affairs Committee, said he will not support the White House nomination.

Analysts agree that the doors have been closed for Bolton since Bush s opponents are ready to take the control of the Congress in January.

Opponents of the Bush administration are fully entitled to their yelps of triumph and warm feelings of schadenfreude in the aftermath of Rumsfeld's resignation this week, a development that will be interpreted as the ultimate presidential admission of failure in Iraq. The evidence testifying to the defence secretary's cosmic levels of incompetence had grown too great even for his former supporters to deny. Nobody was venturing the opinion that he was "the man" any more - certainly not Republican candidates for Congress, many of whom used their campaigns to call for his departure.
But the rapidity with which things have changed shouldn't blind us to the fact that Nordlinger, for all his unseemly delight in the context of 9/11 and war, had a point. Rumsfeld did have admirers across the spectrum. Even his enemies acknowledged a kind of magnetic oddness, a bluntness of manner combined with a wolfishness evocative of Jack Nicholson that made it hard not to stop what you were doing when his face appeared on the television screen. Then there was the wit. George Bush just mangled his words. But the defence secretary's famous "Rumsfeldisms" proved so hypnotic precisely because they hinted at oceans of meaning, even if the meaning was usually elusive, like a Zen koan. "Things will not be necessarily continuous," he told reporters in October 2001. "The fact that they are something other than perfectly continuous ought not to be characterised as a pause. There will be some things that people will see. There will be some things that people won't see. And life goes on."

Whatever else it may herald, this week's news marks the end of the public career of one of the most profoundly strange political personalities in US history. Or at least one assumes that it does, since Rumsfeld is 74 now. In fact, though, his career in government has proved so repeatedly impossible to kill off - stretching back as it does to the Eisenhower administration - that political obituaries may even now be premature.

The notion of Rumsfeld's sexual allure was a popular one in 2001 and 2002: Dick Cheney even gruffly conceded in a television interview that the secretary of defence was a "babe magnet", albeit only "for the 70-year-old crowd". ("Babe magnet for the over-70s? C'mon, Mr Vice President!" one poster wrote on the National Review's website. "I'm a finely aged 32-year-old Texas broad, and I proclaim Don Rumsfeld my Hottie of the Month.") It was hardly the stuff of serious geopolitical debate. But the Rumsfeld-as-sex-god thesis - much more often referenced, interestingly, by male conservatives than by anyone else - was part of a broader cult of personality that saw him as the man of the hour, and a man for the future. Since serving as an aide to Richard Nixon and defence secretary under Gerald Ford, Rumsfeld had spent a decade as chief executive of the pharmaceutical giant GD Searle, where he had garnered a reputation for being a hard-nosed boss, slashing the workforce and turning the troubled business around.

The plan for his return to the Pentagon was to bring tough lessons from corporate America to the US military, transforming it from a lumbering cold-war behemoth to a nimble strategic force capable of fighting new kinds of wars. It did seem as if he might be the man for that job. "He's a ruthless little bastard, you can be sure of that," President Nixon had said of Rumsfeld, a remark captured in 1971 on the White House's hidden taping system. According to legend, Henry Kissinger even described him as the most ruthless man he had ever met; higher praise, given its source, is difficult to imagine.

It may only have been because of 9/11 that things didn't go wrong immediately for Rumsfeld. "You've got to remember that during the first eight months of his time in office, the Pentagon was in chaos," says Harlan Ullman, a senior adviser at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, and the man principally credited with inventing the doctrine of "shock and awe", the approach the administration planned to use to ensure swift and decisive victory in Iraq. "Nobody had the slightest idea what 'transformation' was, and Rumsfeld was on the endangered species list. Time magazine ran a cover, asking where Colin Powell had gone. And from those ashes Rumsfeld became a phoenix. The war in Afghanistan dazzled people - people thought we'd repeat the British experience there, the Soviet experience - and we didn't. Rumsfeld was determined to do Iraq with an equally brilliant plan, a plan that would be the proof of transformation, taking the military out of the industrial age and putting it into the information age. There was euphoria."

But behind the scenes, Rumsfeld's abrasive manner and idiosyncratic style of management caused immediate strains with the Pentagon's most senior generals, as Bob Woodward's most recent book on the Iraq war, State of Denial, makes clear. At press conferences, he treated General Richard B Myers, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff , as a trusted colleague and friend: "Calibrate me, Dick," was the curious turn of phrase he used when he wanted Myers to verify the accuracy of a statement he was making to journalists. In private, by contrast, he was obsessed with the idea that Myers and the other generals were hoarding too much information, disrupting the chain of command that placed Rumsfeld, as a civilian, at the pinnacle of military decision-making. "Where's the loyalty here?" he screamed at one point, according to Woodward, who adds: "[Rumsfeld] proceeded to give Myers a royal ass-chewing."

Working standing up in his office at a lectern, Rumsfeld fired off thousands of unsigned, oneline memos, known as "Rummy's snowflakes". In a self-congratulatory article published in the Wall Street Journal shortly after he took office, the defence secretary published "Rumsfeld's Rules", a list of proverbs accumulated during a life in business and politics. It is striking how many of them he seems to have completely ignored. "Don't 'overcontrol' like a novice pilot," ran one such rule. "Stay loose enough from the flow that you can observe, calibrate and refine." (Others include "Don't think of yourself as indispensable or infallible" and "Don't allow people to be excluded from a meeting, or denied an opportunity to express their views, because their views differ from the president's views.") In fact, if Woodward is to be believed, overcontrol was the order of the day. "Rumsfeld was into everyone's business," he writes. "No one was immune. Many in the Pentagon looked on the snowflakes as an annoyance. Others found them intrusive, and at times petty. For some, there was no way to keep up."

At first, the public saw little of this. In TV appearances Rumsfeld was immediately engaging, verbally jousting with journalists and implying, in his responses, that he was simultaneously more folksy, more plainspoken, and yet more intelligent than they were. The Rumsfeldisms continued to flow. Eventually, as the Iraq war got under way, a journalist for the Syracuse Post-Standard, Hart Seely, had the kind of flash of inspiration that makes other reporters deeply jealous. He collected some of the defence secretary's most mysterious sayings into a book, inserting line-breaks and calling the collection, which became a bestseller, The Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld. An example:

Glass Box
You know, it's the old glass box at the -
At the gas station,
Where you're using those little things
Trying to pick up the prize, And you can't find it.
It's -

And it's all these arms are going down in there.
And so you keep dropping it
And picking it up again and moving it
But -

Some of you are probably too young to remember those -
Those glass boxes,
But -

But they used to have them
At all the gas stations
When I was a kid.

The irony is that the most famous of the Rumsfeldisms - about known knowns, known unknowns, unknown knowns and unknown unknowns - is not the baffling outburst of meaninglessness his critics have often made it out to be. It was good advice, about managing uncertainty and not proceeding on the basis of a presumed reality that might not match the objective one. The problem was that Rumsfeld didn't heed it.

It's impossible to pinpoint the exact moment when Rumsfeld's apparent straightforwardness in press conferences decisively crossed the line into arrogance, into seeming glibly untroubled by tragedy. But by the time he declared that looting in Iraq proved simply that "freedom is untidy", and that "stuff happens", the moment had passed. The catalogue of his failures is well established now. He waved aside any consideration of a postwar plan, and, as the journalist Seymour Hersh has shown, spent the run-up to the invasion personally tweaking plans to shave off "unnecessary" troops up to the last minute. He approved the disbanding of the Iraqi army, dismissed concerns about torture and insisted that minors held in Guantánamo Bay were "not children".

Objecting to a Pentagon lawyer's advice on how the military could ensure compliance with international conventions on torture, he scrawled in handwriting on an internal document: "I stand for eight to 10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to four hours?" And in Woodward's book, he uses an extraordinary analogy when discussing attacks by insurgents in Iraq. "A random round can be an attack, and all the way up to killing 50 people someplace. So you've got a whole fruit bowl of different things - a banana and an apple and an orange." ("I was speechless," Woodward recalls.)

In 2004, an unnamed White House official told the journalist Ron Suskind, disparagingly, that critics like Suskind inhabited the "reality-based community ... We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality". Rumsfeld had become one of the chief engines of the notion that insisting on a particular version of the reality in Iraq would somehow cause that version to be manifested. It was the power of positive thinking, as applied to geopolitics, and by 2005 it had gone too far for a slew of retired generals, who joined the calls for Rumsfeld to resign.

Harlan Ullman defends Rumsfeld, stressing that Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice also bear responsibility for the disaster in Iraq - along, of course, with the man ultimately responsible, George Bush. But he agrees that the defence secretary was not a personality easily able to accept that he was wrong. ("First law of holes: if you're in one, stop digging," reads one of Rumsfeld's Rules.) "He is extraordinarily bright and he's tough and you've got to stand up to him," Ullman says. "He doesn't tolerate fools at all. But he was abrasive and arrogant, and he did have a disdain for Congress, and ultimately all this harmed him."

There is one passage in Jay Nordlinger's excitable 2001 National Review article that rings especially hollow five years later. Nordlinger refers to the anecdote as "semi-legend", and presents it as evidence of Rumsfeld's obsession with precision: "precise words, precise thoughts, precise actions". It supposedly took place in 1996, when Rumsfeld was acting as chairman of Bob Dole's fruitless campaign for the presidency. "Rumsfeld has a recent lawschool grad working as his secretary," Nordlinger relates. "The guy - green, un-Rumsfeldised - screws up somehow, and Rumsfeld gives him what for. He lectures him as follows. 'You must learn to be precise. In the drug business, if I'm imprecise, people will die. In the Pentagon, if I'm imprecise, people will die'".

The footage, shot by an area resident, came to the FBI's attention Thursday, prompting investigators to open a civil rights inquiry into the Aug. 11 incident, agency spokeswoman Laura Eimiller said.

The police department has begun its own criminal and administrative investigations into the officers' use of force, said police spokesman Lt. Paul Vernon.

The officers were identified as Alexander Schlegel and Patrick Farrell. Both have been reassigned to administrative work.

"There's no denying that the video is disturbing," Chief William Bratton said at a news conference. "But as to whether the actions of the officers were appropriate in light of what they were experiencing and the totality of the circumstances is what the investigation will determine."

Vernon said Cardenas is a known gang member who had been wanted on a felony warrant for receiving stolen property.

In an arrest report obtained by The Associated Press, the officers said they tried to arrest Cardenas as he and two others were drinking beer on a sidewalk.

Cardenas ran and the officers caught up to him, tripped him and swarmed over him to apply handcuffs, the report said.

The officers described repeated blows to the suspect's face in the report, as well as his efforts to resist, and their concern that he might grab one of their guns during the brawl.

"The suspect's hand covered my partner's gun holster so I yelled at my partner to watch his gun. My partner responded by capping his gun and delivering a left elbow to the suspect's face causing the suspect to let go of him," the report said.

With Cardenas still resisting, one officer used pepper spray on him, but that had "little effect," the report said. The officers were only able to handcuff him after two of his friends arrived and told him to stop fighting, according to the report.

Cardenas suffered cuts and bruises on his arms, leg and face, and received stitches on an eyelid. His attorney, B. Kwaku Duren, accused the officers of violating his client's civil rights and claimed department investigators were stalling.

"I think the LAPD is being caught covering up an obvious excessive use of force," he said.

Cardenas, who was held without bail, faces charges of resisting arrest.

Authorities learned of the video footage when the defense made it public Sept. 14 during Cardenas' preliminary hearing, police said. The district attorney's office will decide whether to continue with the case, which is scheduled for trial Nov. 20, said spokeswoman Jane Robison.

The conservative Democrats, or new Democrats as they are sometimes called, were disproportionately represented in the most highly contested races against Republicans, and are likely to form a substantial bloc within the new members.
Heath Shuler, a former American football celebrity who now holds a House of Representatives' seat for North Carolina, is representative of the group. He has an evangelical Christian background and is on the right of the argument on many social issues such as abortion.

Democratic party leaders deny that they had an official strategy to plant right-wing candidates in vulnerable Republican seats as a way of winning over voters. But Rahm Emanuel, the chairman of the campaign to win back the House of Representatives, has said that when they searched for candidates with the best hopes of winning, they ended up with several with a moderate approach. "As a group, they are moderate in temperament and reformers in spirit," he said.

That is not the experience of Mr Shuler, who told local newspapers that he had been reluctant to stand for election but was strong-armed into it by Mr Emanuel. "Rahm was tougher than any of the college coaches who were calling me when I was in high school. None of [the coaches] could hold a candle to Rahm Emanuel as a recruiter," he said.

The number of conservative Democrats among the 28 who wrestled house seats from Republican incumbents has yet to emerge, but with 27 of the 40 candidates in the most contested seats falling into this category, the figure could be substantial. They will join an already sizeable caucus within the Democrats in Congress who are on the right of the party and will be encouraged to line up formally with the two existing sub-groups: the New Democrats and the Blue Dog Coalition.

The Blue Dog Coalition was formed in 1995, largely among southern Democrats, and advocates a balanced budget and moderate-to-conservative social policies. It has actively put forward candidates in elections since 1998, known as Blue Pups.

The presence of the new Democrat intake is likely to impinge on the search for a clear consensus within the party on domestic issues. Stem cell research is an example of the policy areas that could cause internal dissension.

The new Democratic senator for Pennsylvania, Bob Casey, is against stem cell research involving embryos and made it clear during the campaign that he would oppose any attempt to extend federal funds to support it. On the other hand, Claire McCaskill, the new Democratic senator for Missouri, was elected partly with the help of actor Michael J Fox, who funded TV adverts backing her because of her advocacy for embryonic stem cell research. Other areas of potential disagreement include abortion and the gun laws, with Jim Webb, the winner of the Senate seat for Virginia, being pro-gun.

Mr Shuler and Brad Ellsworth of Indiana are among the new anti-abortion Democrats, which could become an issue if the question of whether to reduce the time limit for terminations comes before Congress.

Harry Reid, the majority leader-elect in the Senate, was asked about abortion at a press conference the day after the election. "If it's an issue, we deal with it," he said. "The first thing we've got to do is stop unintended pregnancies. That solves a lot of the abortion problem right there."

Economic policy could also cause ructions, with many newcomers being fiscally conservative, while those on the liberal wing of the party, including many of its leaders such as Nancy Pelosi, the house Speaker-elect, favour investment in public services.

Senator Reid said: "I think we've shown, these past two years, that we're a team. We have wide and varying political philosophies within this team. And what we've done is we've used these team members, with their strengths. And we're going to continue to do that."