Just to reinforce that nothing has happened in the meantime

Elisabeth Bumiller recycles some verbiage from the Nov. 11 article she co-wrote with David Sanger about the three competing military options for Obama's Afghanistan strategy.

Well, maybe we've made some progress. Back then, Gates, Mullen and Clinton were "coalescing around a proposal to send 30,000 or more additional American troops to Afghanistan," whereas today's piece (sans Sanger) states that those three "have coalesced around a plan to send 30,000 or more troops to Afghsntian." The coalescing is complete! This latter quote continues, "although there are variations in their positions and they are not working in lock step." This was also lifted from the earlier writing.

I'm just being difficult, though. There wasn't any new info in today's article, but I appreciate the revisiting since the Prez is expected to make a decision in the next week or two.