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No more passes and excuses for the Middle East What are we to make of scenes from the eighth-century in Fallujah? Random murder, mutilation of the dead, dismemberment, televised gore, and pride in stringing up the charred corpses of those who sought to bring food to the hungry? Perhaps we can shrug and say all this is the wage of Saddam Hussein and the thirty years of brutality of his Baathists that institutionalized such barbarity? Or was the carnage the dying scream of Baathist hold-outs intent on shocking the Western world at home watching it live? We could speculate for...

[Tape plays.] Senator Kerry, in the clearest terms, what would be the principal difference between the foreign policy of your administration and that of the Bush administration? Kerry: Brian, the principle difference will be almost everything. This administration has been arrogant. I think they have been reckless. They have been overly ideological. They have pushed our allies away. I will bring our allies back to us. I will respect the international community — not that we're tying ourselves to it in a way that doesn't allow us to make decisions and protect our own security. But it's important to try...

The headline on the Washington Post review sums it up: “‘Passion’ Is A Gory Take On A Gentle Teacher’s Violent End”. Somebody’s confusing their Gospel with Godspell. A few days before the “violent end”, the gentle teacher had been hurling tables around in the temple. And, even if you overlook the rough stuff, rhetorically Christ was as forceful as He was gentle. That’s the real argument over The Passion Of The Christ. It’s not between Christians and Jews, but between believing Christians and the broader post-Christian culture, a term that covers a large swathe from the media to your average...

Fractured as the bones of the body politic may be, we can all agree on one thing: This will be the longest, grimmest, harshest campaign in living memory. Right? That's the conventional wisdom: It's going negative sooner than ever before, and the mud being slung is particularly disgusting. Blame, of course, the Republican Slime Machine, which will stop at nothing. Just look at how it attacked Richard Clarke — by sending out operatives to point out Clarke's contradictions. Heavens. Decent people everywhere took to their fainting couches over that one. Slimy? No. Saying your opponent dates a goat and likes...

When I was young, my parents in the early 1960s told me to ignore stories about the “Jews.” Of course, out here in rural California, I never met such distant persons, but only heard about them from disgruntled farmers (who, I wager, had never met any either). These pesky “Jews” apparently in some secretive cabal controlled the entire fruit-market of the United States! “They” — not the paradoxes of interstate commerce and the cutthroat nature of American marketing — explained why we got $3 a box for plums while “they” took $20. Middle men, market manipulators, and secret smart guys...

Oil production is back to where it was before the war started. So is electrical power generation. Thousands of police and teachers have been trained. New scouting programs for boys and girls have even taken root. And, most important, a new interim constitution is now in place. One year after President Bush ordered the U.S. military to invade Iraq, evidence mounts that the nation is headed in the direction Bush has promised — toward a fully functioning democracy that is at peace with its neighbors and that honors individual rights. Attacks on American soldiers have eased. Unemployment has declined. Food...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Secretary of State Colin Powell on Sunday challenged Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry to name the foreign leaders whom the Massachusetts senator claims want him as the next U.S. president. Kerry, the all-but-certain Democratic presidential nominee, said at a fund-raiser last week in Florida that he's heard from some world leaders who quietly back his candidacy and hope he defeats President Bush in November. Powell expressed skepticism on ``Fox News Sunday'' when asked about Kerry's assertion. ``I don't know what foreign leaders Senator Kerry is talking about. It's an easy charge, an easy assertion to make. But...

NEW YORK, March 11, 2004 - Mainstream news organizations may "filter" the news, as President George W. Bush claimed late last year, but not to omit good stories from their Iraq coverage, but to broadcast more negative news about the president himself, according to a report released today by MediaChannel.org and Media Tenor. The report reveals a strong negative cast to ABC, CBS and NBC news coverage of the president thus far in 2004. Meanwhile, Senator John Kerry, Bush's certain opponent for November, has received more positive coverage by the same three networks. According to data compiled for MediaChannel.org by...

Gnat’s bouncing on the bed with a rabbit, which is really a kangaroo, while the radio restates the death toll: 150 dead, and an unimaginable number of wounded. I dread the day when she starts to listen to the radio, and understand; I wonder what she will think about the world outside Jasperwood. Right now she knows that we live in Minneapolis, in Minnesota, on the Earth. It’s a pretty good place. It has seasons and it has ice cream and it has spring, soon, and it’s where her room is. But at some point kids realize that when daddy...

Why don't we just pencil in a Haiti invasion for 2014? That seems to be the pattern: Every 10 years or so, it's off to Port-au-Prince to clean up the old mess and help the benighted island get a fresh start on an entirely new mess. Haiti makes everyone go nuts. Exhibit 1 is John Kerry, who has identified the real threat to American security: Haitian rebels. "President Kerry would never have allowed that to get where it is," Kerry said, speaking in that odd third-person style used by popes, kings and rap stars. A Kerry administration would have presented...

It is being claimed, ever more widely, that neoconservative policies are determined by the advantages they bring, manifest or putative, to the state of Israel. Patrick Buchanan, in the current issue of American Conservative, believes this ardently, while the most quoted advocates of neocon militancy, Richard Perle and David Frum, go further than merely to deny that neoconservatism is an Israel First worldview. They insist that criticism of neocon policies is, at heart, anti-Semitic. Richard Perle, co-author with Frum of "An End to Evil," old acquaintances remember as being for many years on the public scene as an adamant opponent...

A former Special Forces green beret who served in Vietnam has touched a nerve with fellow veterans after penning a scathing column hammering Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. In the article, he calls Kerry "...a bald-faced, unprincipled liar and a disgrace, and you have dishonored me and all my fellow Vietnam veterans."

Government officials outlined details of the Bush administration's sweeping plan to overhaul the nation's immigration laws on Thursday, saying that the proposed guest worker program would grant legal status to illegal immigrants who were living in the United States on Jan. 7. The officials, from the Department of Homeland Security, said legal status would also be granted to the families of immigrants participating in the program as long as the workers earned enough to provide for their relatives...

A long day got longer as we headed north on the Point Reyes Peninsula. We all suffered from “scope-eye,” that strange affliction known to birders and photographers who spend inordinate amounts of time staring with one eye through a spotting scope or viewfinder. Afternoon birding can be slow, but we hoped a visit to Teal Pond would perk things up a bit. Maybe we would see Blue-winged Teal loafing at the water’s edge or Wilson’s Snipe probing the muddy shoreline....(snip) We instantly pulled off the paved road and fixed our eyes on this scene of utter chaos in the adjacent...

Chancellor was a 'prisoner' of French president in 'catastrophic' opposition to war to topple Saddam Germany is seeking to distance itself from France's tight embrace and realign itself more closely to Britain and America, senior German officials signalled yesterday. They said the row with Washington over Iraq had been "catastrophic" for Berlin and Chancellor Gerhard Schröderhad become "a prisoner" of President Jacques Chirac's campaign to oppose the war to topple Saddam Hussein last year. "We were more dependent on the French in that situation. But this will not be a permanent situation," said one authoritative source. Another official explained: "We...

PASADENA, Calif., Jan. 30 — The Mars rover Opportunity may have detected the iron oxide — a possible sign of water from Mars' ancient past — that was the original motivation for sending it to a broad plain near the planet's equator, some scientists involved in the project said. Scientists have been examining data from an instrument called the mini-thermal emission spectrometer, or mini-TES for short, that looks at infrared light radiated from the rocks and soil. The mix of infrared wavelengths identifies certain minerals.

Grown-ups had a hard time figuring out how Brittany Hutchinson survived being hit and run over by a school bus Tuesday afternoon, but the 5-year-old White Bear Lake girl had an easy explanation. "The angels were with me, they keepded me safe," Brittany, a kindergartner at St. Mary of the Lake School, said Wednesday night. "If the angels weren't with me, I wouldn't be alive." Brittany was hit seconds after she left the bus at her day-care center in Vadnais Heights. The entire length of it passed over her, but the wheels missed her. "I saw just a little bit...

I love New Hampshire!’ I forget which candidate opened his Tuesday night speech with that line. Oh, hang on, they all did. Except Joe Lieberman, the ever optimistic Yiddisher pixie, who beamed at the crowd and said: ‘Is New Hampshire a great state or what?’ Senator Lieberman, the only unabashedly pro-war Democrat on the ballot, had been claiming at every campaign stop for the last week to have something called ‘Joe-mentum’, which is like ‘momentum’, but apparently much smaller, if not entirely undetectable. Nonetheless, running into him in the final hours, I caught the Joe-mentum fever and rashly predicted he’d...

The news from Afghanistan yesterday should have been the enactment of the new national constitution, painfully agreed by the Loya Jirga ("grand assembly") that met in Kabul through December, which ratified it on Jan. 4th. The constitution became law Monday, by the decree of President Hamid Karzai, signing beside the former king, Zaher Shah, in an old palace now occupied by the Afghan foreign ministry. Such modest media coverage as it drew was quickly overtaken by the latest terrorist blast in the city, which claimed the life of one Canadian. There will be national elections in June; they will be...

Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina – Listening to Richard Perle on the radio recently was a little hard for a European like me. Perle, a former chairman of the Defense Policy Board, stated that European nations "do not have the most courageous of instincts," with the implication that America has to intervene in international affairs because Europeans are afraid to. Perle's comments take place against a chorus of similar sentiments to be heard on America's airwaves in recent months. An average listener would be forgiven for believing that Europeans are a cowardly bunch of ungrateful wimps, whose anti-American bombast is a...

"Where is LaRouche? Where is LaRouche? " a group of audience members began to chant in the middle of Joe Lieberman's speech. Lieberman froze. "I suspect he's in jail" Dean quipped. Al Sharpton appealed to the audience asking them to respect candidates' right to speak and was rewarded with a resounding round of applause. At that time I did not pay much attention to this incident. I assumed that a couple of hardcore Republicans decided to disrupt the debate and that LaRouche was some sort of a cartoon character that I was not aware of because of my Disney-deprived childhood....

This is Part Two of a longer article describing how the Ford Foundation is funding organizations that advocate an "Open Borders" immigration policy. In Part One, the authors had just begun describing Ford Foundation grantees and their political agendas; we join this list "in progress." Click Here to read Part One of this article. American Bar Association Commission on Immigration Policy, Practice and Pro Bono Once a bulwark of social conservatism and the rule of law, the American Bar Association has been lurching leftward for many years. It currently supports a moratorium on the death penalty, gun control measures, the...

Hastert visits Elgin: U.S. House speaker talks on immigration, energy, politics issues Elgin – Several weeks ago, President George W. Bush rolled out a program to grant temporary work permits to undocumented immigrants. But before the program can proceed, it needs to pass Congress — which probably won't happen, U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert told The Courier News Editorial Board on Thursday. "I don't think there's support to get that through Congress," the Yorkville Republican said. "But I think this is a chance to start a debate." Hastert acknowledged that immigration problems are growing in the Fox Valley, and with...

Let me start this by adding my voice in protest against the appalling, and ludicrous RCMP raid on my colleague Juliet O'Neill's home, and office, Wednesday morning. It is clear enough from the search warrant what they wanted: the name of the person who told Ms O'Neill that the government had made a hash of its case against Maher Arar. I do not have an opinion, even a private opinion, on whether Mr. Arar in fact had links with Al Qaeda or any other terrorist organization. This is an important question, and I don't think journalists are wise to take...

Watching Howard Dean go ape and John Edwards emerge as a viable contender A little over a month ago, in the Wall Street Journal, I wrote that Governor Howard Dean looked ‘like Bruce Banner just before he turns into the Incredible Hulk, as if his head’s about to explode out of his shirt collar’. On Monday night, Dean, a front-runner in the polls only a week ago, placed a very poor third in the Iowa caucuses — the first time, since he began his political career running for the state legislature in 1982, that the Vermonter has lost an election....

The Massachusetts senator leads Dean 31 percent to 21 percent, with a slipping Wesley K. Clark at 16 percent after skipping the Iowa caucuses. Sen. John Edwards is in fourth place with 11 percent, followed by Sen. Joseph Lieberman with 4 percent. Rev. Al Sharpton and Rep. Dennis Kucinich continue to barely register. Herald pollster R. Kelly Myers called it a ``dramatic turn-around for John Kerry.'' ``His once fledgling campaign has found new legs and he now finds himself the clear front-runner in this race,'' Myers said. The poll, of 501 likely Democratic primary voters, was taken by RKM Research...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The United States east of the Rocky Mountains will see extreme cold in the next two to three weeks with at least one forecaster calling it the coldest in 25 years, meteorologists said on Tuesday. "In the next six to 10 days, it will be colder than normal north of a line from Washington, D.C. to Denver," said Joe Bastardi of AccuWeather. "In the next 15 to 20 days, everybody is extremely cold including freezes into Florida and Texas. "In the worst-case scenario, in much of the energy consuming areas of the country, from the Rockies...

On Wednesday’s letters page, Mr Cathal Rabbitte of Adliswil, Swizterland wrote as follows: May I extend Mark Steyn’s list of events (such as heatwave deaths in France) which might never have happened had particular countries been run properly? In 2001 almost 3,000 Americans were killed in one single day as a result of virtually non-existent airport security. At that time no self-respecting non-welfare state needed to pay airport security staff anything more than a minimum wage; what was the point in wasting valuable tax dollars in a free market on pampering passengers? They might even turn all soft and French....

One of the proprietors-designate of the Daily Telegraph said yesterday that the newspaper could shift its political allegiance and no longer be the house organ of the Conservative party. David Barclay, one of the Barclay twins who have concluded a dramatic purchase of the controlling shares in the paper, said yesterday that the venerable rightwing publication would no longer automatically support Michael Howard and his team.

"A key member of an alleged Virginia jihad network pleaded guilty to federal weapons and explosives charges [Friday], denying that he intended to harm Americans but acknowledging that he and his co-defendants had sought to fight on behalf of Muslim causes abroad," the Washington Post reports: Randall Todd Royer, 30, of Falls Church, entered his surprise plea in U.S. District Court in Alexandria. He faces at least 20 years in prison when he is sentenced April 9. Another of the 11 men originally charged in the case, Ibrahim Ahmed al-Hamdi, 26, of Alexandria, pleaded guilty to similar charges and faces...

The differences between Democratic and Republican positions on almost all subjects of major importance are growing so great that it is fair to say that we are experiencing a second American civil war. These areas include the American role in the world, the role of God and religion in American society, abortion, capital punishment, the war in Iraq, and much more.  But four recent actions by Democrats illustrate that the divide is even greater than many of us had imagined. It has to do with the preservation of our civilization.  First, last month, Democratic Massachusetts Senator John Kerry used the...

Last week, I had occasion to mention Trevor Phillips, head honcho at the Commission for Racial Equality and a key player in the demise of Kilroy. Mr Phillips intervened in the Birmingham One's recent troubles to suggest that all would be well if, like glassy-eyed political prisoners paraded on TV in your average ramshackle dictatorship, the ex-presenter agreed to make a full public confession, enter re-education camp and give an unspecified proportion of "his vast earnings" to a Muslim charity. "Then I would say he has been properly contrite," said Mr Phillips, generously. But what's it got to do with...

The Syrian president, Bashir Assad, may soon have a bigger problem with Hezbollah than Israel has. This is because, after a generation of hosting the most psychopathic arm of Iran's psychopathic theocracy, Mr. Assad no longer wants to know them. His minority Alawite, Baathist dictatorship, which Hezbollah has helped to sustain over the years, suddenly finds itself in a position where it must make new friends. Specifically, it is in urgent need of better relations with Turkey, the United States, and Israel; and Hezbollah is not popular with any of them. It isn't in the forefront of the news, but...

The French president, Jacques Chirac, recently took it upon himself to vindicate the secularizing or (more accurately) "laicizing" traditions of the French Revolution by banning religious insignia from French state schools. His main target seems to have been the hijab, or headscarf, worn by Muslim girls and women as an assertion of their modesty. But the measure extends to Sikh turbans, Jewish yamulkas or skullcaps, and visible Christian crucifixes. It also applies to signs and symbols of political affiliation — but more nebulously, leaving school principals with broad powers to decide what is or isn't "apolitically correct". Mr. Chirac's measure...

Now that Kilroy's temporary suspension has become permanent, I was wondering if you would post the column you wrote a few years ago about being fired by the BBC. It might cheer him up.  Diana Wright Bedfordshire I doubt it. But his departure was much more dramatic than mine. Almost exactly six years ago, I was sitting in the BBC studios at Rockefeller Center, just before the start of a weekly talk show I used to host for Radio Four. With the minutes ticking away and the guests arriving, the head of BBC New York was niggling with me over...

<p>In 2000, the American electorate was evenly divided. Now, as we enter another voting season, the Gallup Organization has released a study, based on 40,000 interviews, that shows that 45.5 percent of voters identify with or lean toward the Republican Party and 45.2 percent identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party. So is that it?</p>

The morning after the 2000 election, Americans woke up to a disturbing realization: our electoral system was too flawed to say with certainty who had won. Three years later, things may actually be worse. If this year's presidential election is at all close, there is every reason to believe that there will be another national trauma over who the rightful winner is, this time compounded by troubling new questions about the reliability of electronic voting machines. This is no way to run a democracy. Americans are rightly proud of their system of government, and eager to share it with the...

OLDWICK, N.J. -- On May 5, 1996, when I was halfway through my first term as governor of New Jersey, there was a picture of me on the cover of the Sunday magazine of The New York Times, accompanied by the headline "It's My Party, Too." I liked that message so much, I had it framed and hung it in my office in Trenton and, later, Washington, D.C. To moderate Republicans like me, that headline proclaimed our belief that there was still room for us in the party of Lincoln. Now, almost eight years later, many moderate Republicans feel even...

Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Husaini al-Sistani, Iraq's highest-ranking Shia cleric, has begun seriously throwing his weight around in Iraq, helping to organize a demonstration in Basra yesterday of tens of thousands of Shia faithful, to chant "No to America!" and demand immediate mass elections — in a country which has not had a reliable census in several decades, and where the infrastructure for a fair general election does not yet exist. Raising the temperature further, the second-ranking Shia cleric, Hojat Al-Islam Ali Abdulhakim Alsafi, has written a sarcastic public letter to President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair,...

Would Iraqis prefer clean water and electricity or Britain’s taxpayer-funded ‘gender advisers’? Following the successful liberation of their country from the tyrannical rule of Saddam Hussein, ordinary Iraqis are once more beginning to experience some of those things which we in the West take for granted: electricity, telephones, fresh running water and the likes of Deirdre Spart from the Haringey Women’s Collective. If there is still a lot of work to be done in establishing security in the country, one thing which isn’t being ignored is the agenda of Western feminists. Never mind that many women’s pressure groups were vociferous...

By September, the Canadian army will have only 500 troops available for deployment, fewer soldiers than the National Hockey League has players. Last year's sudden deployment to Afghanistan was the last straw after years of cutting corners, senior commanders told David Pratt last month as he assumed his new position as Defence Minister. That unexpected 2,000-person deployment to Kabul taxed the 11,900 soldiers in the army's field force beyond its limit. Rotations home had been deferred and training delayed. In consequence, 6,200 troops will need to go on operational waivers (the army's term for downtime) in the coming months. Another...

Business groups cheer proposal, but smaller firms have doubtsSusie Morrissey is a businesswoman with a direct style. What's her product? "Sparkle." She runs a janitorial service. It's a gritty business, full of competitors who can sometimes skip payroll taxes and use illegal immigrant crews at rock-bottom wages. What does she think of President Bush's plan to temporarily legalize millions of illegal immigrants? "Are employers going to say, 'Oh gee, I am going to increase my costs by increasing my taxes?' I don't think so," says Ms. Morrissey, CEO of Dallas-based Bell Janitorial Supplies & Services Inc. For her business, Ms....

Should be titled, "Court acts illegally on energy": Court Voids a Bush Move on Energy by Matthew L. WaldJanuary 14, 2004The rule, which applies to central air-conditioners for houses, was one of several published by the Clinton administration during its last few days in office. It was effectively rescinded in a memorandum sent by Andrew H. Card Jr., chief of staff in the Bush White House, to the Energy Department, which formally acted in the early months of the new administration. Tuesday's decision, by a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York,...

President Bush's plan to give undocumented workers temporary legal status brings back painful memories for Florentino Lararios, who spent 14 grueling years in a similar World War II-era program. Lararios, a 77-year-old with large, rough hands that never mastered a pencil, recalls the back-breaking work picking cotton in the South, the slapped-together communal housing, the cold meals eaten in the fields, and the unwelcome prospect of going back to Mexico without a chance to become a U.S. citizen. "If we accept, then our grandsons and great-grandsons will go through what we went through," Lararios said. "We suffered a lot." While...

WHEN H.I.V. drained Carlos Sandoval of his health and forced him to leave behind his career as a Manhattan lawyer, he retreated to the East End of Long Island to figure out where his life was headed. The answer, as it turned out, was to the Sundance Film Festival. In September 2000, Mr. Sandoval, 51, was reading a newspaper at his boyfriend's home in Amagansett when he came across an article about two Latino day laborers from the hamlet of Farmingville who had been attacked by white men promising work. Mr. Sandoval, whose heritage is Puerto Rican and Mexican-American, was...

Hollywood Communism and Elia Kazan You usually hear the tune on Oscar night, but not often the lyric, which is more to the point: Hooray For Hollywood Where you’re terrific if you’re even good. When someone’s really terrific, it’s a different story. In a town where everyone from Johnny Depp to Janeane Garofalo is an “artist”, Hollywood doesn’t always know how to deal with the real thing. In 1996, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, mulling over their Career Achievement Award, decided to reject Elia Kazan and honour instead Roger Corman, the director of Swamp Women, Attack Of The Crab...

The New York Times reports that on January 4, "Delegates at a national meeting approved a new Constitution for Afghanistan on Sunday, concluding three weeks of often tense debate. Their decision heralded a new era of democracy after a quarter-century of war." According to reports, Afghanistan will be renamed the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan in its effort to "combine democracy and religion." Elections will be held in six months within the newly-created democratic presidential system, including directly elected president and a two-chamber national assembly (one chamber will be the Wolsei Jirga or "house of people" and the other chamber will...

WASHINGTON — Some union watchdogs are complaining that labor is getting a free pass on its accounting rules after a federal judge delayed the implementation of new regulations that would demand tougher scrutiny of unions' financial records. "This (ruling), in effect, has given the AFL-CIO and all these unions the green light to conduct their 2004 political campaigns without having to disclose any of it," said Stefan Gleason, executive director of the National Right to Work Foundation, a non-profit legal organization opposed to compulsory union membership. The new rules, imposed by the Department of Labor late last year, aim to...

Contrary to the fearful voice of Associate Justice Robert Jackson dissenting in Korematsu vs. United States (1944), emergency powers asserted by presidents in times of war have not turned into loaded guns lying around for misuse by any zealous official who claims an urgent need. History speaks otherwise. During the Civil War, for instance, President Abraham Lincoln extraconstitutionally summoned an army, expended unappropriated funds, unilaterally suspended the writ of habeas corpus, and suppressed speech friendly to the Confederacy. Congress belatedly ratified Lincoln's legislative usurpations. They were not repeated during the war. Neither did they establish presidential war principles that crept...

It's been a very long time since U.S. politicians addressed illegal immigration in anything approaching a comprehensive way. President Bush came into office planning to change that through negotiations with Mexico and new legislation. Those plans got derailed by 9-11, but last week the President put illegal immigration back on the policy front burner with a major policy address. The reactions across the political spectrum were predictable but still disappointing. The extreme left dismissed President Bush's plan as an effort to revive the controversial post-World War II bracero program. The Democratic presidential candidates mostly supported the idea of immigration reform,...