Imagine you are PM. And you receive this intelligence. And not just about Iraq. But about the whole murky trade in WMD. And one thing we know. Not from intelligence. But from historical fact. That Saddam's regime has not just developed but used such weapons gassing thousands of his own people. And has lied about it consistently, concealing it for years even under the noses of the UN Inspectors. And I see the terrorism and the trade in WMD growing. And I look at Saddam's country and I see its people in torment ground underfoot by his and his sons' brutality and wickedness. So what do I do? Say "I've got the intelligence but I've a hunch its wrong?" Leave Saddam in place but now with the world's democracies humiliated and him emboldened? You see, I believe the security threat of the 21st century is not countries waging conventional war. I believe that in today's interdependent world the threat is chaos. It is fanaticism defeating reason. Suppose the terrorists repeated September 11th or worse. Suppose they got hold of a chemical or biological or nuclear dirty bomb; and if they could, they would. What then?

Can we really imagine that Wilson's wife used her name, Valerie Plame, to go undercover for the CIA? Children and dogs have Web pages that identify their interests and accomplishments. You'd imagine that an "energy analyst at a private firm" would have left some sort of HTML trail for Google to pick up. Unless reporters and investigators ferret out any new information, the Justice Department is not likely to find that any lasting harm was done to national security. Instead of prosecuting, Tenet might have his druthers this time and fire whoever leaked the information from the CIA and recommend the president do the same at the White House.

Certainly many people wore the foam and the mesh, but people seem to be confusing how it made its way into popular culture (MTV and MTV2 especially). The foam and mesh cap entered popular culture via San Francisco indie rock bands with origins in the central valley. Many of the people in the Central Valley are the descendants of the "Okies" and "Arkies" who fled to California during the depression, and they dominate cultural life in the Central Valley (certainly among the White population). The band Joaquina (name of a small town in the central valley) even had a 1998 album called "the Foam and the Mesh." The most popular of these bands is named "Grandaddy" and they are from Modesto, CA. Most of the bands moved from the central valley into the Bay area in the mid 1990s in the wake of Pavement's (from Stockton) fame. They dominate the Bay area music scene now, and Grandaddy is very popular in England. The hipsters picked up on it. Check out SF's Future Farmer Records. Note the rocket tractor at www.futurefarmer.com. There is even a minor trend to name one's band after small towns in the Central Valley (see Earlimart).

"Nobody in the Bush administration called me to leak this. In July I was interviewing a senior administration official on Ambassador Wilson's report when he told me the trip was inspired by his wife, a CIA employee working on weapons of mass destruction. Another senior official told me the same thing. As a professional journalist with 46 years experience in Washington I do not reveal confidential sources. When I called the CIA in July to confirm Mrs. Wilson's involvement in the mission for her husband - he is a former Clinton administration official - they asked me not to use her name, but never indicated it would endanger her or anybody else. According to a confidential source at the CIA, Mrs. Wilson was an analyst, not a spy, not a covert operator, and not in charge of undercover operatives."

Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him. "I will not answer any question about my wife," Wilson told me.

First of all, every child of the boondocks knows it's a 'gimme cap', not a 'trucker hat'. They were free gifts from seed corn companies and implement dealers, not $60 accessories from the Von Dutch boutique. Second, although it may come as some shock to the uberhipsteroids of Williamsburg, college kids in Iowa were wearing them as purely ironic fashion statements TWENTY YEARS AGO. Interesting to see that trends eventually make it to the hinterlands of Brooklyn.

The FMA does, however, bar governmental benefits to unmarried persons premised on a sexual relationship between (or among) them. It would not bar legislatively enacted civil unions that, say, opened various benefits to any two people living together--whether they were two brothers, two guys who sleep together, widows who had set up house, or whatever. It would bar civil unions that were limited to gay couples.

Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this constitution or the constitution of any state, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.

Neither this constitution or the constitution of any state, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon any homosexual couples for whatever reason.

North Korea has called for economic aid and a non-aggression pact with America in return for surrendering its nuclear ambitions, but Washington has consistently refused.

"For middle-class kids just out of university and living in Williamsburg, the closest thing right now to bad-ass culture is blue-collar culture, so you have hipsters play-acting blue collar. Instead of saying, `I'm a PlayStation-reared, e-mailing-all-the-time Friendster loser,' they're getting lots of tattoos and drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon and listening to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs."

But it can be admirable in a way to go through life with one skin too few, to be easily agonized and upset and offended. Too many people survive, or imagine that they do, by coarsening themselves and by protectively dulling their sensitivity to the point of acceptance. This would never be Edward's way. His emotional strength — one has to resort to cliché sometimes — was nonetheless also a weakness.

Most experts believe the amendment would invalidate Vermont and California laws that are virtually equivalent of marriage.

Two pro-Clark sites, ClarkRecruits.com and DigitalClark.com, have already been shut down, and a third, DraftWesleyClark.com, is slated to be disbanded within the month, according to its founder. ClarkRecruits.com had helped would-be volunteers link up with other Clark supporters in their areas; now volunteers have to fill out a form on the candidate's official site (Clark04.com) and wait for the main campaign to figure out what to do with them ... "They are destroying the parts of the draft movement that worked really well and they are transforming the draft movement into people who want to lick envelopes," says one worried member of the movement. "They are rebuilding the Kerry campaign with a better candidate."

You can say [Bush] made a misjudgment. You can say he picked the wrong enemy. You can say almost anything about this war, but to say that he fought it for political advantage is absurd. The possibilities for disaster were real and many: house-to-house combat in Baghdad, thousands of possible casualties, a chemical attack on our troops (which is why they were ordered into those dangerously bulky and hot protective suits on the road to Baghdad). We were expecting oil fires, terrorist attacks and all manner of calamities. This is a way to boost political ratings?
Whatever your (and history's) verdict on the war, it is undeniable that it was an act of singular presidential leadership. And more than that, it was an act of political courage. George Bush wagered his presidency on a war he thought necessary for national security -- a war that could very obviously and very easily have been his political undoing. And it might yet be.

You pose that "if" Clark is not coopted by the Clintons and McAuliffe, he might have a real shot at the nomination. He already has been so coopted, at least if the Safire line of commentary is to be believed. As for Clark's debate appearance, and saying the right things on the deficit, etc., that's what Rhodes Scholars, like Bill C., do the best! It's part of the suck up technique that got them to the top. My qualms about Clark are that he, like Bill Clinton, doesn't really believe in anything other than his own personal advancement. Clark, like Clinton, will say anything that the focus groups suggest is the flavor du jour in order to secure favorable media coverage, and eventually votes, to get them to that next higher rung on the advancement ladder. I suspect that this lack of real values may be what Gen. Shelton was referring to in his lack of character and integrity reference when Shelton predicted that Clark won't get his vote.

We're going to focus it on deficit reduction. We're going to put this economy back on a sound footing so we can not only pay our bills but meet the other needs that we have in education, health care, the environment and Social Security.

"Re: your post on that totally incomprehensible "Philosophy in a Time of Terror" Habermas Book. That stuff is now so funny to read but it was not so funny when it was crammed down our throats in the "Communications" Dept. at university. Mein Gott in Himmel. I read your excerpt three times just to see if it was possible to grok ANY part it.
Now that I am out in the world and making good use of college-learned skills in my pro career I can look back at the madness of way bitchin 80's college life with its omnipresent bevy of undergraduate teaching aides who conducted their earnest but indecipherable lectures by day dancing to The Cure or Violent Femmes by nite. I learned other skills in college too, such as "don't feed marshmellows to grizzly bears" and "if you're pulled over say the car belongs to her dad and of course she's 18." But I digress."

No fair giving Derrida your Poseur Alert award! He's the uber-poseur--giving him this award would be like having an award for pretentious biblical speech and then awarding it to the Bible.

This is an issue that was made an issue by the proponents of gay marriage and their advocacy of gay marriage... those in favor of gay marriage seem to indicate that tolerance is no longer defined by my accepting people for who they are... I accept people for who they are and love them. That doesn't mean I have to agree or that I have to turn my back on the tenets of my faith and reject the tenets of my faith when it comes to homosexuality. I think when people say, well, no, that is not enough, it is not enough that you accept me for who I am, you have to agree with and condone my choice. That to me is religious bigotry and I believe that is intolerance and I think they are the ones who are crossing a line here...

In considering the retrospective debate which has emerged regarding the war in Iraq, the left and right of the Western political spectrum are obviously talking past each other. This stunted communication results from the inability of each side to simultaneously apprehend both the *substantive* and *procedural* elements of the war in Iraq and the events leading thereto. The anti-war left has proven to be comically ineffective in countering the basic point that the war has set the stage for an infinitely improved society in Iraq and has removed a dangerous and tyrannical despot. They stubbornly refuse to acknowledge the positive *substantive* result of the war.

On the other hand, the right has not been willing to recognize legitimate critiques of the *process* by which war was effectuated. The right generally will not respond to charges that the WMD threat was distorted, that the human rights justification only became a prominent one retrospectively, and that the Bush Administration's bellicose tone in the international arena prevented the successful utilization of coalition forces in either the waging or aftermath of combat operations. Instead, they focus on the *substantive* success of the war, and pretend that the means by which these undoubtedly moral results were achieved matters not.

Clark also was cautious about plunging into battle after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when many Americans were out for vengeance. Three days after the attacks, he counseled this response: "It's fundamentally a police effort against individuals. It's not a military effort directed against factories and airfields. You may still need to use military force, but you have to use it in a very precise way." It became a huge military effort to uproot the government of Afghanistan and the terrorist network it harbored. Clark seemed to swing behind the strategy once it was set, and he voiced confidence in the outcome.

I enjoy reading your column (even though I usually disagree with you), but I think you may have gotten this line wrong:

"And Republicans oppose the FMA by a 58 to 38 percent margin."
Reading the original article, it looks to me like the FMA is opposed 58 to 38 percent among Republicans who think same-sex marriage should be illegal. If you read the paragraphs above the second table (from which you pulled the 58/38 number), it says things like "only 23 percent of older Americans who oppose such marriages say it's worth amending the Constitution to do so" (emphasis added). Twenty-three percent in favor of FMA among older Americans matches up numerically with the second table. Also, the second table is titled "The Constitution: Amended if Same Sex Marriage Banned" (emphasis added), which also suggests the second table only represents anti-gay marriage folks.

The good thing about this misreading is that it strengthens your point. Since 73 percent of Republicans oppose gay marriage and 38 percent of them are in favor of FMA, this means that only 27 percent of all Republicans support FMA. It's still higher than the 20 percent support from the general populace, but even I, a diehard Democrat, will admit that it's impressive that so many Republicans are against FMA. What's especially impressive is how many are willing to put the integrity of our Constitution over their own objections to gay marriage.

[T]he number of engagements in Iraq have declined from roughly 25 a day in July to about 15 a day today — and each lasts for an average of two or three minutes.

I have learned painfully that some "idealism" is in effect a flight from reality... To show you how "over idealistic" my training was — I awoke to the realization (almost too late) that even in marriage I had a little guilty feeling about sex, as though the whole thing was tinged with evil.
A very fine old gentleman started me out on the right track by interesting me in the practices of, or I should say, moral standards of, the primitive peoples never exposed to our civilization — such as the Polynesians. These peoples who are truly children of nature and thus of God, accept physical desire as a natural, normal appetite to be satisfied honestly and fearlessly with no surrounding aura of sin and sly whispers in the darkness . . .
I guess what I am trying to say is that I oppose the dogmas of some organized religions who accept marital relationship only as a "tolerated" sin for the purpose of conceiving children and who believe all children to be born in sin. My personal belief is that God couldn't create evil so the desires he planted in us are good and the physical relationship between a man and woman is the highest form of companionship ...

In May, soon after Bush announced that major combat operations had ended in Iraq, 41 percent of Americans said they thought the war was over. But now only one in 10 feel that way.

When pressed by Mr. Goldberg and audience members, some of these justifications seemed less certain. "Iraq did have contacts with Al Qaeda," Mr. Wolfowitz insisted, momentarily silencing the audience with an accusation even President Bush now says is unsubstantiated. He added, "We don't know how clear they were."

Blair disdains the notion, popular with quite a lot of his colleagues and not so long ago openly propounded by Peter Hain, that a new 50 per cent rate on those earning more than £100,000 a year would raise some useful revenue from an affluent but small slice of the voters. Would the electoral penalty really be that high? Blair is as emphatic as he has ever been that the penalty would be huge, and for the same reason as always: those earning less would believe that Labour was coming after them next. On this, at least, Downing Street insiders say that he and Gordon Brown are in complete agreement.

I have read the accounts of the Clark interviews and my reaction is despair and anger. Why did my party's best operatives think it would be a good idea to subject their neophyte candidate to the country's savviest reporters for over an hour? Why have my party's elders rallied around a candidate who is so shockingly uninformed about core issues and his own positions? I am not a Dean supporter — but I am angry that our party's leaders have anointed an alternative to him who seems even more ignorant and unprepared — and that this supposed 'anti-war' candidate turns out to have been in favor of both the war resolution and Richard Nixon!! And let's not even talk about the Clintons. Today I am embarrassed to be a Democrat.

First, they wanted to establish debating societies and newsletters in the Baghdad universities. "These are going to be the seeds of democracy," Yasser explains. "Once you learn to argue against people instead of killing them as Saddam did, you're on your way. We explained to the university students that they could have different newspapers - and even have different opinions in the same newspapers - and it seemed totally surreal to them. They just couldn't understand it. But when they realised that it really was possible and nobody was going to punish them, they were so excited that they were just obsessed. They were in the middle of their exams and supposed to be studying, but they insisted on writing and photocopying a newsletter that they distributed everywhere. They wrote articles on amazing things they could find out about on the internet - philosophy and art and the difference between proportional representation and first-past-the-post! It was the best thing in my life, seeing that," Yasser says.

There is a terrible fear among many Iraqis that they will not be able to match the Kurds' achievement if they are abandoned by the Americans once again. "The memories of 1991 are so vivid," says Sama. "People still fear that somehow the Americans will abandon us and Saddam will claw his way back from the grave. They say, `It happened in 1991, it could happen again.' That's one crucial reason why people are reluctant to cooperate with the coalition." She adds: "I find it absolutely incredible that the anti-war people are now calling for the coalition to leave straight away. Nobody in Iraq wants that. The opinion polls show it's just 13 per cent. Don't they care about the Iraqi people and what they want at all? This isn't a game. This isn't about poking a stick at George Bush. This is our lives."

If France were serious, it would be using its influence within the European Union to assemble an army of 25,000 Eurotroops, and a $5 billion reconstruction package, and then saying to the Bush team: Here, we're sincere about helping to rebuild Iraq, but now we want a real seat at the management table. Instead, the French have put out an ill-conceived proposal, just to show that they can be different, without any promise that even if America said yes Paris would make a meaningful contribution.
But then France has never been interested in promoting democracy in the modern Arab world, which is why its pose as the new protector of Iraqi representative government — after being so content with Saddam's one-man rule — is so patently cynical.

All government spending eventually must be funded with taxes, and budget deficits only delay the inevitable taxes (with interest). This year’s $401 billion budget deficit will add $3,774 to the average household’s future tax burden. If the budget deficit reaches $600 billion to $700 billion, the annual tax increase will top $6,000 per household. Unless they balance tax relief with spending cuts, President Bush and Congress will leave a legacy of temporary tax relief followed by permanently higher taxes.

On the walls of Mosul University, one of Iraq's oldest, warning signs are clearly displayed; "No Jordanians, No Palestinians". Iraqis are clearly still upset that other Arabs were able to study in Iraq, effectively on Saddam's payroll. Iraqis have had enough of seeing their own lives compromised for the benefit of Arabs from neighbouring countries.
Saddam Hussein played the Palestinian card to the max. It's widely believed that the support, both vocal and financial, he gave to the suicide bombers, are the reason behind the wrath of the "Zionists" in Tel Aviv and Washington. Whether that is true or not is beside the point - Iraqis saw other Arabs benefit from Saddam's regime while they were left to suffer.
In contrast, the US spilled the blood of its own people to liberate them from Saddam's tyranny. No matter how bad things are here right now, friends, colleagues and relatives assure me that with the pressure of living under the old regime gone, life is one hundred percent better.

The war in Iraq was a war of sufficiency when what was needed was a war of surplus, for the proper objective should have been not merely to drive to Baghdad but to engage and impress the imagination of the Arab and Islamic worlds on the scale of the thousand-year war that is to them, if not to us, still ongoing. Had the United States delivered a coup de main soon after September 11 and, on an appropriate scale, had the president asked Congress on the 12th for a declaration of war and all he needed to wage war, and had this country risen to the occasion as it has done so often, the war on terrorism would now be largely over. But the country did not rise to the occasion, and our enemies know that we fought them on the cheap. They know that we did not, would not, and will not tolerate the disruption of our normal way of life. They know that they did not seize our full attention. They know that we have hardly stirred. And as long as they have these things to know, they will neither stand down nor shrink back, and, for us, the sorrows that will come will be greater than the sorrows that have been.

For Blair, in his Bush-Iraq mode, [foreign policy] has been a lot more theoretical: the theory of pre-emptive intervention in a third country's affairs, for moral purposes, at the instigation of the power whose hyperdom he cannot resist. What does this mean? That we have ceased to be a sovereign nation. ... What it means to be an independent nation is a question that touches the wellsprings of a people's being. Yet it is one that our leader, as regards this war, has simply disguised from his people, egged on by sufficient numbers of North American papers and journalists who seem to be wholly delighted at the prospect of surrendering it. I do not believe this obtuseness can last for ever. If there is one virtue in the unfinished history of the Iraq war, it is that the British may finally wake up to what the special relationship is doing to their existence.

The militant groups abandoned the truce on August 21 after Israel assassinated a Hamas leader in a missile strike that followed a suicide bombing which killed 22 people in Jerusalem.

Cheney was less forthcoming when asked about Saudi Arabia's ties to al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 hijackers. "I don't want to speculate," he said, adding that Sept. 11 is "over with now, it's done, it's history and we can put it behind us."

I don't want to speculate on that, Tim, partly because I was involved in reviewing those pages. It was the judgment of our senior intelligence officials, both CIA and FBI that that material needed to remain classified. At some point, we may be able to declassify it, but there are ongoing investigations that might be affected by that release, and for that reason, we kept it classified. The committee knows what's in there. They helped to prepare it. So it hasn't been kept secret from the Congress, but from the standpoint of our ongoing investigations, we needed to do that.
One of the things this points out that’s important for us to understand—so there's this great temptation to look at these events as [discrete] events. We got hit on 9/11. So we can go and investigate it. It's over with now. It's done. It’s history and put it behind us.
From our perspective, trying to deal with this continuing campaign of terror, if you will, the war on terror that we’re engaged in, this is a continuing enterprise. The people that were involved in some of those activities before 9/11 are still out there. We learn more and more as we capture people, detain people, get access to records and so forth that this is a continuing enterprise and, therefore, we do need to be careful when we look at things like 9/11, the commission report from 9/11, not to jeopardize our capacity to deal with this threat going forward in the interest of putting that information that’s interesting that relates to the period of time before that. These are continuing requirements on our part, and we have to be sensitive to that.

An article in this week's L'Express pretty much lays bare France's diplomatic aim on the US-Iraq-UN front, namely, to revamp the UN as a useful weapon against the US. This poisonous article has to be read to be believed, but basically the theme is that Bush's offer to get the UN involved again in Iraq is a "poisoned present" that only a "dupe" would accept, but that nonetheless the demarche offers a not-to-be-missed opportunity to restore both "credibility" and "diplomatic survival" to the UN and its Security Council, which alone can hope to control the "all powerful" US. Anyway, here's the last paragraph: "In the name of their credibility, and of their diplomatic survival, the UN and its Security Council can't afford to miss the opportunity to bring back the all-powerful America into the fold and to retake some semblance of initiative on the critically important Iraq dossier. But it remains to measure their hypothetical power, once more, by the measuring stick of concessions from Washington." I reread the article, you know, looking for something about doing good work amongst people who could sorely use some, and found nothing. And there's nothing about bringing democracy to the Middle East either. It's all about bringing the US to heel.

Hirschman lays out 3 aspects of this rhetoric:
1. The Perversity Thesis: "any purposive action to improve some feature of the political, social, or economic order only serves to exacerbate the condition one wishes to remedy."
Opponents of the war on terror claim that fighting this war will only lead to more terrorism. Toppling Saddam Hussein has only worsened the condition of the Iraqi people, etc. etc.
2. The Futility Thesis: "attempts at social transformation will be unavailing."
Iraq can't possibly become a democracy.
3. The Jeopardy Thesis: "the cost of the proposed change or reform is too high as it endangers some previous, precious accomplishment."
Fighting the war on terror will lead to the destruction of democracy at home.

Terror, totalitarian states, and their ways are nothing new to me, but I felt from the start that [Saddam's Iraq] was in a category by itself, with the possible exception in the present world of North Korea. I felt that that was the central truth that has to be told about this place. It was also the essential truth that was untold by the vast majority of correspondents here. Why? Because they judged that the only way they could keep themselves in play here was to pretend that it was okay.
There were correspondents who thought it appropriate to seek the approbation of the people who governed their lives. This was the ministry of information, and particularly the director of the ministry. By taking him out for long candlelit dinners, plying him with sweet cakes, plying him with mobile phones at $600 each for members of his family, and giving bribes of thousands of dollars. Senior members of the information ministry took hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes from these television correspondents who then behaved as if they were in Belgium. They never mentioned the function of minders. Never mentioned terror.
In one case, a correspondent actually went to the Internet Center at the Al-Rashid Hotel and printed out copies of his and other people's stories -- mine included -- specifically in order to be able to show the difference between himself and the others. He wanted to show what a good boy he was compared to this enemy of the state. He was with a major American newspaper.

Now left with the residue of all of this, I would say there are serious lessons to be learned. Editors of great newspapers, and small newspapers, and editors of great television networks should exact from their correspondents the obligation of telling the truth about these places. It's not impossible to tell the truth. I have a conviction about closed societies, that they're actually much easier to report on than they seem, because the act of closure is itself revealing. Every lie tells you a truth. If you just leave your eyes and ears open, it's extremely revealing... I did a piece on Uday Hussein and his use of the National Olympic Committee headquarters as a torture site. It's not just journalists who turned a blind eye. Juan Antonio Samaranch of the International Olympic Committee could not have been unaware that Western human rights reports for years had been reporting the National Olympic Committee building had been used as a torture center. I went through its file cabinets and got letter after letter from Juan Antonio Samaranch to Uday Saddam Hussein: "The universal spirit of sport," "My esteemed colleague." The world chose in the main to ignore this.

The socialist debacle, then, contributed to the resentment of American triumphs. But something else happened at the same time. In a curious way left and right began to change places. The expansion of global capitalism, which is not without negative consequences, to be sure, turned leftists into champions of cultural and political nationalism. When Marxism was still a potent ideology, the left sought universal solutions for the ills of the world. Now globalisation has become another word for what Heidegger meant by Americanism: an assault on native culture and identity. So the old left has turned conservative.

The conservative right (I'm not talking of fascists), traditionally, was not internationalist and certainly not revolutionary. Business, stability, national interests, and political realism ("our bastards", and so on), were the order of the day. Democracy, to conservative realists, was fine for us but not for strange people with exotic names. It was the left that wanted to change the world, no matter where. Left-wing internationalism did not wish to recognise cultural or national barriers. To them, liberation was a universal project. Yet now that the "Bush-Cheney junta" talks about a democratic revolution, regardless of culture, colour or creed, Gore Vidal claims it is not our business, and others cry "racism"... In the case of Gore Vidal, there has always been an old-fashioned isolationist screaming to be let out of the great man's bulky frame. But Tariq Ali, and many of his readers, would surely consider themselves to be internationalists. They profess to care about oppressed peoples in faraway countries. That is why they set themselves morally above the right. So why do they appear to be so much keener to denounce the US than to find ways to liberate Iraqis and others from their murderous Fuhrers? And how can anybody, knowing the brutal costs of political violence, especially in poor countries split by religious and ethnic divisions, be so insouciant as to call for more aggression? Perhaps it is a kind of provincialism after all.

Not long afterward, Tertullian, already famous as a champion of orthodoxy, himself joined the new prophecy and defended its members as genuinely spirit-filled Christians. Although to this day, Tertullian stands among the "fathers of the church," at the end of his life he turned against what, at this point, he now began to call "the church of a bunch of bishops."

No one but Lopez and Gonzalez could have known what was said during their two-hour meeting, no one except every journalist in the United States and beyond. 'Voodoo psychic adviser to J-Lo blamed for stars axing big day' screamed the headlines, which sounded utterly ridiculous to anyone in their right mind, although perhaps not to Jennifer Lopez herself. After all, she knows better than anyone what life in America is like for a Latina actress with ambition.

The proposed amendment interferes with the rights of states, rights that have been consistently recognized since the founding of our Nation. Under our federal system of government, family law has long been the province of the states. A basic principle of American democracy and federalism is that government actions that control a citizen’s personal life and liberty -- such as government actions that control people’s decisions about whom to marry -- should be made at the level of government closest to the citizen, rather than by the U.S. Congress or by the legislatures of other states.
States already actively regulate marriage; for example, 37 states specifically prohibit marriage between same-sex couples. That is a choice that they are now free to make. The Amendment will wrongly deny those states -- which is to say, the states’ citizens and their representatives -- this choice.

Here's a BBC classic, heard while driving on September 11 listening to BBC World Service in car... Sorry couldn't write down exact words. Was around 10.25 Greenwich Mean Time - roughly 6.25 in USA...:
"At the one extreme you have George W Bush, at the other Osama Bin Laden.."
Just as I was choking on this one the presenter went on to say and...in the middle, President Musharaff is pointing out that relations with the Muslim world have deteriorated since 9.11 etc etc...

This is what the world was waiting for
Wyclef who came from the Fugees
Jeremie, Haiti, Port-au-Prince, Flatbush...

Jaspora doesn't respect Jaspora (repeat 4 x)

Ever since I was little, I left Haiti
There's some that went to Brooklyn there's some that
went to Miami
Why do Jamaicans always say they are Jamaicans,
But Haitians are afraid to say they are Haitians?
Why? Are you scared to say your name is Samuel?
Why? Are you scared to say you're with Israel?
Why? Every night you are sleeping with Jezebel!
You're scared to say Haitian girls are beautiful!
Beautiful girls are beautiful...

I respect your name just like I respect the angel
Gabriel
Here, Diaspora men want to take you to hotels,
Start talking English, turning to playboy channel
They do not respect Israel.

Diaspora do not respect Diaspora
If you are a Diaspora I am going to give you to sharks
Diaspora do not respect Diaspora
If you are a Diaspora tonight we're going to disarm
you

Diaspora ha ha o, put your hands up!
I am going to take them and throw them in prison
I will make them know who is Toussaint
I will make them know who is Dessalines
After, we will let them go and send them back to
Brooklyn
So he could go to his mother who is cooking in the
kitchen
His mom looked at him and said "Man, you've changed"
She said I changed because I am Haitian
They taught me a lesson, they put me in prison.

I see Diaspora women and Diaspora men
There are people who are not going to make it because
they will sleep with the fishes
They lost their knowledge just like a priest without
religion

Diaspora do not respect Diaspora
If you are a Diaspora I am going to give you to sharks
Diaspora do not respect Diaspora
If you are a Diaspora tonight were going to disarm you

Port-au-Prince do not respect Diaspora again
Men Flatbush do not respect Diaspora
Men Canada do not respect Diaspora
Men Miami do not respect Diaspora

Pa Kayos do not respect diaspora
Papa Djoume do not respect Diaspora
Refugees do not respect Diaspora
Men Florida do not respect Diaspora
Wrong things done are going to finish worse
If you disrespect native-born
Done wrong things are going to finish worse
Disrespect Haitians you will get hit...

Jaspora has to respect Jaspora
Jaspora has to respect Jaspora

I have been unable to think of anything substantive to write today. It is almost as if the usual conventions of journalism and analysis should somehow remain mute in the face of such an event. How can one analyze what one hasn't even begun to absorb? Numbness is part of the intent of these demons, I suppose. So here are some tentative reflections. It feels - finally - as if a new era has begun. The strange interlude of 1989 - 2001, with its decadent post-Cold War extravaganzas from Lewinsky to Condit to the e-boom, is now suddenly washed away. We are reminded that history obviously hasn't ended; that freedom is never secure; that previous generations aren't the only ones to be called to defend the rare way of life that this country and a handful of others have achieved for a small fraction of world history. The boom is done with. Peace is over. The new war against the frenzied forces of what Nietzsche called ressentiment is just beginning. The one silver lining of this is that we may perhaps be shaken out of our self-indulgent preoccupations and be reminded of what really matters: our freedom, our security, our integrity as a democratic society. This means we must be vigilant not to let our civil liberties collapse under the understandable desire for action. To surrender to that temptation is part of what these killers want. And the other small sliver of consolation is that the constant American temptation to withdraw from the world, entertained these past few years by many, will perhaps now be stifled. We cannot withdraw; we cannot ignore. We live in a world where technology and hatred accelerate in ever-faster cycles, and in which isolation is not an option. Evil is still here. It begets evil. When you look at the delighted faces of Palestinians cheering in the streets, we have to realize that there are cultures on this planet of such depravity that understanding them is never fully possible. And empathy for them at such a moment is obscene. But we can observe and remember. There is always a tension between civilization and barbarism, and the barbarians are now here. The task in front of us to somehow stay civilized while not shrinking from the face of extinguishing - by sheer force if necessary - the forces that would eclipse us.

So much for American unilateralism. As our strategic doctrine of choice, unilateralism had a one-year run, from one Labor Day to the next. A year ago the administration announced we had both the right and the might to run the world free from the constraints of entangling alliances or multinational accords.

Much has been made of the sympathy that the French expressed for the United States immediately after the September 11 attacks, as embodied by the famous editorial of Le Monde's publisher Jean-Marie Colombani, "Nous Sommes Tous Américains" ("We are all Americans"). And much has been made of the speed with which the United States presumably squandered that sympathy in the months that followed. But even Colombani's column, written on so searing a day, was not the unalloyed message of sympathy suggested by the title. Even on that very day, Colombani wrote of the United States reaping the whirlwind of its "cynicism"; he recycled the hackneyed charge that Osama bin Laden had been created and nurtured by U.S. intelligence agencies.

Colombani quickly retracted what little sympathy he had expressed when, in December of 2001, he was back with an open letter to "our American friends" and soon thereafter with a short book, Tous Américains? le monde après le 11 septembre 2001 (All Americans? The World After September 11, 2001). By now the sympathy had drained, and the tone was one of belligerent judgment and disapproval. There was nothing to admire in Colombani's United States, which had run roughshod in the world and had been indifferent to the rule of law. Colombani described the U.S. republic as a fundamentalist Christian enterprise, its magistrates too deeply attached to the death penalty, its police cruel to its black population. A republic of this sort could not in good conscience undertake a campaign against Islamism. One can't, Colombani writes, battle the Taliban while trying to introduce prayers in one's own schools; one can't strive to reform Saudi Arabia while refusing to teach Darwinism in the schools of the Bible Belt; and one can't denounce the demands of the sharia (Islamic law) while refusing to outlaw the death penalty. Doubtless, he adds, the United States can't do battle with the Taliban before doing battle against the bigotry that ravages the depths of the United States itself. The United States had not squandered Colombani's sympathy; he never had that sympathy in the first place.

the Bush administration brushed aside these supportive gestures — and that may loom as the greatest tragedy of Sept. 11, apart from the tolls taken by the attack itself.

An American leader could have taken advantage of that moment and reached out to the world, forged new alliances, strengthened old ones, and laid the foundations of a new, broad-based system of international security for the post-Cold War era—much as Harry Truman and George Marshall had done in the months and years following World War II.

Over the past couple of weeks, as the fighting persists in Baghdad, as the Taliban attempts a comeback in Afghanistan, as Saddam and Osama Bin Laden remain on the prowl—in short, as the light glows dimmer, the tunnel stretches longer, the budget piles higher, and the desert-swamp gets deeper—President Bush seems to have realized he took a wrong turn back at the 9/11 junction. He has been persuaded to go back to the much-loathed United Nations, for assistance and legitimacy... He has extended his hand a bit late in the game.

The immoral behavior of Catholics, both lay and clergy, is a cause of scandal and defections. Under this heading I would include not only sexual abuse of minors, which has been so extensively publicized in recent years, but sex outside of marriage, abortion, divorce, alcoholism, the use and marketing of drugs, domestic violence, defamation, and financial scandals such as falsification of records and embezzlement. The morality of Catholics all too often sinks below the standards commonly observed by Protestants and unbelievers.

These bishops showed "no resistance," Mr. George said, to conservatives' pleas to "call the evil by name" in terms of the clergy's sexual-abuse crisis.

Having done the part of the job others refused to do — ousting Saddam — we should return the rest of the job to the Security Council. That means surrendering authority as well as responsibility...

justifies any war in which, as a result of our actions, terrorists attack our troops. Imagine an invasion of Cuba, whose dictator has long rankled Bush and would be easier to topple than Saddam was. No doubt al-Qaida and other terrorist groups would send agents to try to kill the occupying troops. Bush could then defend the occupation as part of the "war on terror." The second argument is equally fraught with implications. Yes, tyranny breeds terrorism. But if the "war on terror" requires us to overthrow tyrants just because they're tyrants, we'll be at war for the rest of your life.

While many journalists around the world are quickly rallying around the BBC as an example of a grand old institution that remains the gold standard for all, this incident has unnerved many in the public broadcasting community -- certainly in North America. Some colleagues have said that it shows that investigative journalism will always fail against a government or an industry with superior resources. Others say that the BBC was right to go after the Blair government. But by not being cautious enough, the BBC bungled it and brought the institution into disrepute. But the BBC, like The New York Times in the Jayson Blair scandal, may have succumbed to hubris and to the self-inflicted delusion that since it is the BBC (or The New York Times), it may allow itself to cut corners. This is an arrogant delusion and one that may have ill-served the BBC's listeners while emboldening the BBC's political enemies on Fleet Street and in Parliament.

We have difficult work to do in Iraq. We're bringing order to parts of that country that remain dangerous. We're pursuing and finding leaders of the old regime who will be held to account for their crimes. We've begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons, and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated.
We are helping to rebuild Iraq where the dictator built palaces for himself instead of hospitals and schools.
And we will stand with the new leaders of Iraq as they establish a government of, by and for the Iraqi people.
The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort. Our coalition will stay until our work is done and then we will leave and we will leave behind a free Iraq.

It is also interesting to consider the unfair trading situation which pertained for most of that time. Ordinary commercial laundries throughout Ireland paid their largely female workforce the going rate of pay, and published annual accounts which were filed in the Companies Office. But they had to compete with Magdalen laundries run on slave labour which, as registered charities, had accounts closed to public inspection. And for those charities that may also have been limited companies, a special section of Irish company law allowed religious orders to file their annual audits at the Companies Office without any disclosure of turnover, profits or capital assets. This special exemption is still in place and used by a number of RC organisations.
Much has been made of the selfless devotion of the individual nuns who worked in these institutions, but even they would surely admit that they did so voluntarily as part of their religious vocation and could have left at any time, unlike the unfortunate women who ended up in their care. It was a sickening final insult that the High Park nuns, having sold the land for a considerable fortune, did not even grant these women individual graves: they were institutionalised even in death.
We can only speculate on what happened to the accumulated profits generated by these businesses, but one can be reasonably certain that the canny and able administrator nuns invested in buildings and land.

The word Vermonters use most often to describe Dean is "frugal." Coming into office amidst the early 1990s recession, he cut formerly sacrosanct welfare spending to keep the state out of debt. The Cato analysis shows that during Dean's first four years in office, Vermont's budget grew much more slowly than other states'. He cut income tax rates across the board (much as President Bush did). Although he raised overall business taxes, he approved millions of dollars' worth of incentives to lure smoke stacks back into the Green Mountain State. It was during these early years that the head of the state's powerful Progressive party called him "a very right-wing Democrat." And during a time when President Bush has been piling up mountains of debt in Washington and 47 governors face record budget deficits of their own, Dean admirably left Vermont with a $10.4 million surplus when he left office this past January--which would certainly be one of his trump cards against Bush. If Dean were ever elected president, I'm convinced he would be monomaniacal about balancing the budget--though certainly not in ways that would please conservatives.

You can either have Al-Qaeda as this small group I'm talking about, this hardcore around bin Laden, that evolved very late on in the development of modern Islamic militancy, and to my mind has now disappeared. Since 2001, I would say that their role in what is happening today, or their role in the threats and various bombs there have been, is negligible. Bin Laden is peripheral. His practical ability to commission or organize terror has been minimized. Many of those operatives who were drawn to him in the late 1990s have been killed or imprisoned. Others have had their efficiency vastly curtailed by the hugely enhanced monitoring by various secret services and cooperation between security authorities. So the hardcore Al-Qaeda…defined in that narrow sense, is over effectively as a really powerful force in modern Islamic militancy.

The al Qaeda network is determined to open a new front in Iraq to sustain itself as the vanguard of radical Islamic groups fighting holy war, according to European, American and Arab intelligence sources. The turn toward Iraq was made in February, as U.S. forces were preparing to attack, the sources said. Two seasoned operatives met at a safe house in eastern Iran. One of them was Mohammed Ibrahim Makawi, the military chief of al Qaeda, who is better known as Saif Adel. He welcomed a guest, Abu Musab Zarqawi, who had recently fled Iraq's Kurdish northern region in anticipation of the U.S. targeting of a radical group with which he was affiliated, Arab intelligence sources said. The encounter resulted in the dispatch of Zarqawi to become al Qaeda's man in Iraq, opening a new chapter in the history of the group and a serious threat to American forces there. "The monster is already near you," said one Arab official who is familiar with the intelligence and who spoke on condition that he not be identified by name or nationality. "I don't know if you can kill it." The official added: "Iraq is the new battleground. It is the perfect place. It will be the perfect place."

In our system of government, laws affecting family life are under the jurisdiction of the states, not the federal government. This is as it should be. After all, Republicans have always believed that government actions that affect someone's personal life, property and liberty - including, if not especially, marriage - should be made at the level of government closest to the people. Indeed, states already actively regulate marriage. For example, 37 states have passed their own version of the Defense of Marriage Act.

I do not argue in any way that we should now sanction gay marriage. Reasonable people can have disagreements about it. That people of goodwill would disagree was something our Founders fully understood when they created our federal system. They saw that contentious social issues would best be handled in the legislatures of the states, where debates could be held closest to home. That's why we should let the states decide how best to define and recognize any legally sanctioned unions - marriage or otherwise.

As someone who is basically a conservative, I see not an argument about banning marriage or "defending" families but rather a power grab. Conservatives argue vehemently about federal usurpation of other issues best left to the states, such as abortion or gun control. Why would they elevate this one to the federal level?

But if it did happen, exactly as Arnold described it in 1977, it's pretty disgusting. It's disgusting even if it was consensual all around. It's disgusting even though Arnold wasn't married at the time. It's disgusting even if this amounts to applying the standards of the 21st century to events of the mid-1970s. Schwarzenegger isn't running for governor of California in 1975.

Brian Jones, a retired branch head of the defence intelligence analysis staff, told the Hutton inquiry there were several concerns about the 45 minute claim and one of his staff felt some of the assessements of the threat posed by Iraq were "over-egged" in the dossier. The inquiry heard the "shutters came down" on the dossier before intelligence officials' reservations had a chance to be properly considered and there were fears "spin merchants" had been too involved in the dossier's production.

[Jones] also told the inquiry a chemical weapons expert within his branch was concerned about the intelligence in the dossier relating to the production of chemical weapons in Iraq. "He was concerned he could not point to any solid evidence of such production. He did not dismiss it may have happened... but he didn't have good evidence it had happened. It is the difference between making the judgment that the production of chemical weapons had taken place as opposed to that judgment being that it had probably taken place or even possible taken place. It was that degree of certainty in the judgment that was being made."

On the 11th of August we successfully raided three more objectives and netted two former Republican Guards officers one a division commander and the other a corps level chief of staff.  The third objective netted us a leader of Fedayeen militia.  By the 13th we had seen small enemy attempts to harass or strike back at us. On a secondary market street, CPT Boyd's convoy narrowly escaped harm as assailants rolled a volley of RPGs down the street like some game of ten pins. The rockets whooshed, skipped and scraped along the pavement, but made no contact for them to explode. The enemy attackers had fired from several hundred meters away in the middle of a street and then fled.
Our actions continued to have momentum. By mid-month two men wanted by our forces - one who worked for Saddam's wife turned themselves in to us and on the same day we received weapons from helpful Tikriti merchants with keen eyes.  Even so, the young and the stupid continue to step forward.  In a suburb to our south, attackers launched a volley of RPGs at A Company soldiers in yet another classic miss and run attack.  Our Gators responded so quickly that the enemy was forced to flee for his life and abandoned his rocket launchers in the street. The attackers melded into the local population before they could be caught.  Hence, we continue to work with the locals, the sheiks and plan more raids. One benefit of our dialogue with the sheiks has been the recruitment of reliable militia that we are now training.  Tapping into some previous experience I had on a much grander scale when I served in Afghanistan forming the plans for the Afghan National Army, we moved out with a modest training program that is producing a good-quality small element to assist the local government and our forces.  Through the great work of 1LT Deel and SGM Castro, and with the assistance of a couple of former drill sergeants in each company, we move forward to train Iraqis in martial and civil arts that will help them stabilize their own town...
The enemy continues to adapt his tactics to counter ours.  His only cowardly refuge has been to hide among the population and among legitimate emergency services.  On the night of the 18th our soldiers at a temporary checkpoint searched an ambulance that was bringing back an older man from the hospital.  Seeing this, a white car placed an explosive on a side street and ignited the fuse.  A Company soldiers reacted to the blast to the west.  The ambulance drove north to get out of danger and as it did, the white car pulled along side the Red Crescent vehicle and sent a burst of gunfire toward another unit's outpost.  The outpost responded, seeing the fire come from what appeared to be the ambulance.
Also seeing the fire exchanged between the outpost and the ambulance, our snipers engaged the ambulance as it sped north, the victim of a cruel crossfire.  The white car, fully masked in its movements, then dashed down a dark alley and made good his escape. The ambulance shuddered to a stop.  The driver, fearing for his life, got out of the front seat to escape the bullet exchange.  He nearly made it but for one round that hit his ankle.  Another aid man was cut by glass from the windshield.  The older man in transport took a round to the shoulder and the thigh.  The police and our forces quickly arrived along the dark street.  The police took the seriously wounded victim to the hospital where he was stabilized. The ambulance then began its journey northward toward a police checkpoint, met by both police and our scouts.  After much confusion, we determined what had happened and treated the man with the ankle wound.  We took him to better care to remove the bullet.  We also handed over the ambulance back to the emergency workers.  The Iraqis helped us piece together the confusing puzzle and, while frightened and initially angered, became more angered at the fact that the attackers would once again use innocent people as shields.  They are by all estimations cowards... The next day, the 20th, we got an emergency request for help from another unit working in our area.  While coordinating information on a market street, armed attackers masked within the population open up a deadly burst of gunfire.  The soldiers translator falls dead with a torso wound.  A soldier collapses with a serious thigh wound and another is also hit in his extremities severely wounded.  The soldiers return fire.  The enemy's damage done, he flees, unable to be pursued by this small wounded band.
Men from our C Company rushed to the scene.  Shocked and bloody men are lifted into vehicles, accompanied by their angry and equally shocked peers.  Our soldiers cordon the area, conduct a wide search and gather little from the locals who have either closed their shops in typical fear or claimed they saw nothing. The men's lives are saved by a medical evacuation.  A translator, an American citizen, will speak no more. Vigilance, vigilance, vigilance.  My burden is that every soldier of mine goes home and with a pair of legs. God has spared us from much in the midst of our battles.  Psalm 68:19-21.
One such sparing occurred on the 22nd of August.  A tip from a distraught local warned us of a plan to attack the Tigris Bridge.  He stated that the attack would occur within an hour and would be with RPGs, small arms and mortars using a water-services truck as a mask. Our response was immediate.  A section of M1 Abrams tanks changed the scenery of the bridge and our checkpoint there.  The enemy did materialize at a distance and launched a single pathetic 82mm mortar round, impacting just across the near bank of the river at dusk. The scenery of his own attack also changed, he missed and now ran.
An hour later, our Recon platoon headed south along the main highway. They approached a decorative gate incongruently guarding a wadi that funnels the waste byproduct of Tikrit into the Tigris River.   Our men affectionately know this depression as the Stink Wadi.  That night it exuded more than just odor.  A volley of RPGs raced across in a flash from the south bank of the wadi.  Small arms accompanied the volley. The scout's weapons erupted in a converging arc that raked and then secondarily exploded on the bank. Unable to get to the scene quickly by the nature of the wadi, distance and terrain, the men could not determine the damage they inflicted.  But they blew up something.  When searched later, the area was vacant, revealing little information.
The revelation of information took on a different form in Tikrit the following morning.  Our C Company posted security along the main street of the city near the telephone exchange offices.  Bradley fighting vehicles and tough soldiers mixed with the squat, dilapidated structures of the city.  A small crowd gathered at a new café in town, an Internet café.  Words are exchanged, cameras roll and snap, a pair of scissors is lifted off a pillow as the owner and I cut a ribbon at the entrance.
While thrilled, it all seems so foreign to me given the context of the previous days.  For a brief moment these small trappings of normal life of normal pursuits and daily living awaken me.  As I leave the café an old woman is nearly struck by a car and a bicycle as she attempts to cross the busy street.  Our soldiers step into the four lanes of traffic and she is escorted across the thoroughfare.   As we pull out in our vehicles, we cradle our weapons, begin to watch rooftops, examine every trash pile, and check each alley.  A sea of people is scanned quickly - what is in their arms, what are their facial expressions, do they make unusual movement. We pull away and reenter our world.

A qualitative analysis of uses of "liar" suggests that in the 1940s and 50s, Members were more likely to accuse a foreign enemy of lying and are now more likely to address such charges against the president, a presidential candidate, an opposing party, or each other. A content analysis confirms that discussions of lying have more frequently referred to or been directed at other Members in more recent times. An analysis of uses of vulgarity suggests that the l04th was less likely to include coarse language than most of the Congresses of the past decade. A comparison of the level of vulgarity in the House and the British House of Commons suggests that the level in the U.S. is somewhat higher.

lack of political progress in solving the linked problems of security, infrastructure and the political process are undermining the consent of the Iraqi people to the coalition presence and providing fertile ground for extremists and terrorists.

Compliance has become easier because drugmakers from India and elsewhere are beginning to make triple-therapy cocktails that come in as few as two pills a day. (These are not available in the United States yet because of patent problems — no Western company makes all three drugs for an ideal cocktail.)

While the 11 days of testimony have uncovered evidence that the government was feverishly involved in the wording and shaping of the intelligence dossier, it has not turned up any corroboration for Mr. Gilligan's report that it deliberately published dubious claims over the objections of intelligence chiefs.