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WASHINGTON - President Bush, entrenched in disputes with Congress over spending and the war in Iraq, wants to intensify pressure on lawmakers when he addresses the media on Tuesday. It will be his first news conference in nearly seven weeks.

The president is expected again to admonish Congress for not sending him spending bills, intelligence legislation and tax-law changes. Bush, taking advantage of his veto power and the largest bully pulpit in town, regularly scolds Congress as a way to stay relevant and frame the debate as his presidency winds down.

Democrats counter that Bush is more interested in making statements than genuinely trying to negotiate some common ground with them.

The news conference is scheduled for 10:01 a.m. EST Tuesday.

It comes one day after a new national intelligence estimate found that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in the fall of 2003, largely because of international scrutiny and pressure. That finding is in stark contrast to the comparable intelligence estimate of just two years ago, when U.S. intelligence agencies believed Tehran was determined to develop a nuclear weapons capability and was continuing its weapons development program.

Bush, at his last news conference on Oct. 17, said people "interested in avoiding World War III" should be interested in preventing Iran from having the knowledge needed to make a nuclear weapon.

As usual, people are tending to look only at onse side of the issue. Has anyone else tried putting themselves in Irans place? Picture it like this. You are a relativly unimportant country in the middle east. About the only resource you have is oil, and you are not the only supplier of it. On top of that, you feel like the western world is deliberatly trying to hold you back because you are not a democracy or a christian nation like they are. You are looking for a way to even the playing field, so you take a look at nuclear power. Immediatly, the westerners, who you are sure are out to get you, step up and accuse you of developing nuclear weapons. They refuse to listen to your protests of innocence, and Isreal launches an unprovoked attack on your country to stop you from developing any kind of nuclear technoledgy. You believe that this is all part of a western conspiracy to hold Iran back, so you try to press on reguardless. The Westerners respond by placing sanction on your country, restricting your trade and travel over what you think is an unfair accusation. Finally, broken and humiliated, you are forced to stop production by the Western bullies, particularly the biggerst ganster on the block, the U.S. Now, when you take all this together, how would you feel?

None of this is necessarily true, its just my attempt to understand what might be going through the minds of Irans government. Unless we adress our own superiority complex, and their inferiority complex, we will always be on the brink of war with countries like Iraq, Afganistan, and Iran. Come to think of it, why don't we add North Korea to the list? The best way to solve these problems is not with sanctions or other punitive actions, it is to adress the underlying problem of smaller, less developed nations feeling threatened by the powerful west.

I mean Ahmadinejad said he wanted to wipe Israel off the map, don't you think that if we said we wanted to wipe say... Cuba off the map that people would try to stop us? In this day and age you just shouldn't express yourself if you feel that an entire country should be eliminated, those thoughts are best kept to ones self.

what I mena is alot of our soldiers were total pricks and so that was an instance where we got out of hand