This brings us to something hard to face: some things end at their beginning, and al-Qaeda’s best shot may have been exactly that. Something perhaps a hundred times worse still hangs over us, but not the Damoclean existential threat the real zealots want. When civilizations clash for ages, their roughest edges dull first, and the risk of their mutual destruction grows less assured. Once the rhetoric of extinction threatened to cow us into abandoning all thought of confrontation with an Evil Empire. Now it serves to inflate into satanic stature a merely evil man.

The difference between America in 2004 and, say, the Vietnam era is that corruption in the Whitehouse is now both expected and TOLERATED. The world community knows that Americans are indifferent to the criminality of Bush Co., and hence, any last vestige of respect they felt towards our culture has been irretrievably lost.

An extreme result of egocentrism is sociopathy, so it is not surprising that America overwhelmingly leads the world in the production of sociopathic pathologies.

The point was not just to hurl a pie in the face of morals and good taste but also of white racial and cultural identity. The message of the ad was that white women are eager to have sex with black men, that they should be eager, and that black men should take them up on it.

Today it is liberals, not conservatives, who endeavor to defend civil liberties from the state. Conservatives have been won around to the old liberal view that as long as government power is in their hands, there is no reason to fear it or to limit it. Thus, the Patriot Act, which permits government to suspend a person's civil liberty by calling him a terrorist with or without proof.
Thus, preemptive war, which permits the President to invade other countries based on unverified assertions.

There is nothing conservative about these positions. To label them conservative is to make the same error as labeling the 1930s German Brownshirts conservative.

Possibly the most serious development amid all this upheaval has been the disclosure that Porter Goss, the man Bush appointed in August to be CIA director after the surprise resignation of George Tenet in June, has triggered a rebellion within the agency over his sweeping policy and personnel changes. The latest leak focused on his order that agency employees must not "identify with, support or champion opposition" to the Bush administration.

The erosion of the old media establishment probably does entail some shift to the right, if only because so many of the newer voices are more reliably pro-Republican than Mr Rather. But the new media are simply too anarchic and subversive for any single political faction to take control of them. There are plenty of leftish bloggers too: such people helped Howard Dean's presidential campaign. And the most successful conservative bloggers are far from being party loyalists . . .

"We do not recognise the election as officially declared," he said. The proclamation of victory for Mr Yanukovich put Ukraine "on the brink of civil conflict".

With the country paralysed for a fourth day, there was no sign that supporters of Mr Yushchenko were being cowed by the refusal of the authorities to give way.

One protester called Mr Yushchenko a western puppet, saying that "we are not against working with the US," but adding that Iraq "showed a tendency that we don't like".

Two weeks after George Bush's reelection, Porter J. Goss, the newly appointed Director of Central Intelligence, wrote an internal memorandum to all employees of his agency telling them, "[Our job is to] support the administration and its policies in our work. As agency employees, we do not identify with, support, or champion opposition to the administration or its policies."[1] Translated from bureaucrat-speak, this directive says, "You now work for the Republican Party. The intelligence you produce must first and foremost protect the President from being held accountable for the delusions he has concerning Iraq, Osama bin Laden, preventive war, torturing captives, democracy growing from the barrel of a gun, and the 'war on terror.'"

McCain the Maverick is a merely a fine-honed act, underscored by these kinds of casual hypocrisies.

Throughout his career in Congress McCain has often been one of the hottest hawks around. During the war on Serbia in 1999, in one rhetorical bombing run after another, McCain bellowed for "lights out in Belgrade" and for NATO to "cream" the Serbs. At the start of May of that year he began declaiming in the US senate for NATO forces to use "any means necessary" to destroy Serbia.

What follows is an antidote to elite feminist propaganda.

An establishment that sows fear and confusion between the sexes, and promotes promiscuity and family breakdown does not have the country's best interest at heart.

Steel is the backbone and sinews of modern society. Without a robust domestic steel industry, we will not prosper in peace — or survive in war.

Tom Tancredo (R-CO) who has headed a House immigration reform caucus with now over 60 members, was most effective in preventing an attempt to sabotage the key provision in this legislation: Verifiable immigrant identification.

“Senators Collins and Lieberman have inexplicably opposed vital House provisions in H.R. 10 to finally close loopholes in America's identification and drivers license issuing process. Led by Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Sensenbrenner, key House Republicans have been hanging tough, resisting changes to these vital proposals.”

Territorial control over Canada is part of Washington's geopolitical and military agenda as formulated in April 2002 by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. "Binational integration" of military command structures is also contemplated alongside a major revamping in the areas of immigration, law enforcement and intelligence.

Since his 51 percent victory on Nov. 2, President Bush has been acting like an imperial president in the FDR tradition.

The invasion of America by illegal aliens, the security threat it poses, the Bush failure to defend our borders, the export of U.S. factories to Asia – these issues are approaching critical mass. A sinking dollar, soaring trade deficits, and daily reports of factory closings and jobs outsourced point to a coming crisis for the Clinton-Bush policy of free-trade globalism.

An empirical reality that even entrenched denizens of Manhattan and D.C. should recognize is that most Americans do not subscribe to the gospel according to the Left OR the Right.

Any news organization that presumes to inform, educate and instruct America has a moral and fiduciary responsibility to at least make a 'best faith' effort to provide news and analysis that is really fair and balanced.

We must keep Harry Truman's dictum in mind: "If you give the voters a choice of a Republican and a Republican, they'll always choose a Republican." Who knows how many liberals and radicals stayed home on election day because Kerry failed to offer them anything like a decent alternative to Bush?

What we - the American people - would much rather have is a president who betrays some faint glimmer that the border is out of control and that mass immigration represents not only a major threat to our national security and sovereignty but also a major force threatening the disintegration of our identity as a nation and civilization.

BATR News, American Memory, BATR Bull, FYI from BATR, NeoCon Watch, NWO Realpolitik, Quotidian Acumen, Tax Tyranny have a new host. Change your bookmarks and favorite links. Also new RSS xml urls for each blog. New MyYahoo link for each. Replace the RSS code for feeds. All info on Partners Page: http://batr.org/partners.html

The pattern has been consistent and obvious. Every news report or scandal that has been detrimental to the Bush/Anglo-American war agenda has been followed, within hours, with shocking executions (real and staged) that are attributed to "terrorist insurgents," despite questionable circumstances, non-verifiable evidence and unreliable sources, such as "unnamed" intelligence and military officials.

Both Hadley and Rice were subjects of the 9/11 Commission's investigation of the intelligence failures that led to the attacks. Even though he and Rice were shown a counterterrorism report in August 2001 warning that al-Qaida was planning an attack on the U.S. homeland, Hadley told the commission that he and Rice did not feel they had the job of coordinating domestic agencies before the attacks.

California, long viewed as the promised land of the American middle class, is slowly developing a novel U-shaped social system. Relatively large numbers of both the well-educated and the badly-educated are sandwiching a shrinking middle.

This trend toward greater inequality might seem at odds with the ideals of the Democratic Party. But, in fact, it could bode well for them. The party is ceasing to represent blue collar workers. Instead, it has morphed into an alliance between the elite and the underclass.

You see, the page purports to comment on the Iraqi War, and it probably even has some readers. Whether or not those readers have read anything aside from the Journal is hard to say. If they had, one can imagine that the editorial offices are daily bombarded with protests against its brazen and even immoral ranting on behalf of the warfare state.

Rhetoric aside, little of substance separated George W. Bush from John Kerry — and a second Bush term will do nothing to reduce the size, expense, and power of government.

Today (9 November), our party, the Vlaams Blok, has been condemned to death. This afternoon, the Belgian Supreme Court upheld the verdict, issued by the Court of Appeal in Ghent on 21 April, which declared the Vlaams Blok a criminal organisation. In order to preserve our party members from prosecution, we are now forced to disband. What happened in Brussels today is unique in the Western world: never has a so-called democratic regime outlawed the country's largest political party.

It didn't take long for President Bush to betray those who returned him to office for another four years.

The first big insult to his base came this week when he moved to resurrect his ugly plan to relax rules against illegal immigration – as if they weren't relaxed enough.

The tenth anniversary of The Bell Curve has passed almost unnoticed by the media (except on VDARE.COM—click here for my thoughts and here for Peter Brimelow’s).

But the topic of IQ is hotter than ever—largely because liberals, no matter how much they publicly denounce the concept as discredited racist nonsense, just can't stop privately obsessing over how much higher their IQs must be than the IQ of those cretinous conservatives.

Our trade deficit is now $600 billion a year, with a deficit in goods near $700 billion. To finance our binge buying overseas, we borrow $2 billion a day from abroad. Foreigners are using the dollars to snap up our stocks, bonds, and real estate, gaining a permanent lien on the future rents, interest, and dividends of U.S. enterprises. We have mortgaged our children’s future to enjoy the good times today.

Exactly one week after the political assassination of Dutch journalist Theo Van Gogh in Holland last Tuesday, the Supreme Court in neighbouring Belgium has banned the Vlaams Blok, an anti-immigration party that happens to be the largest party in the country.[Blow to Belgium's far right, BBC News]

One popular map circulating on the Internet shows the 19 blue states won by Sen. John Kerry -- Washington, Oregon, California, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Maryland and the Northeastern states -- conjoined with Canada to form the "United States of Canada." The 31 red states carried by Mr. Bush are depicted as a separate nation dubbed "Jesusland."

One of the strangest justifications for the attack on Fallujah is that it will allow an election to take place. This would only be true if the Sunni rebellion was a mirage and was entirely the work of FFs and FRLs oppressing a local population yearning to break free. A much more likely result of an increase in the fighting is a boycott of the election by the Sunnis. Even if they do vote then there is no reason to suppose that the guerrillas will stop fighting any more than the IRA laid down its arms despite numerous elections in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s.

There could not be a more tragic exercise in futility than Phantom Fury as Vietnam revisited - to destroy Fallujah in order to "save" it. The new Grozny, filled with rubble, will either become a garrison - with scores of Americans being blown up by roadside bombs - or the resistance will eventually get the city back when the Americans leave. Few Sunni Iraqis will believe this was all about protecting them from "terrorists" and promoting "democracy". Precision-strike democracy is a neo-conservative phantom, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Hats off to the people of Arizona who voted a resounding YES on Proposition 200, the grass-roots effort to de-privilege illegal immigration.

And a hearty belated congratulations to every real immigration reformer's favorite Congressman, Tom Tancredo (R-CO). And to two new freshmen representatives who just might give him some help in the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus - Steve King (R - 5th district of Iowa) and Tom Price (R - 6th district of Georgia).

“The president is not going to trim his sails or pull back,” Mr Powell told the Financial Times on Monday. “It's a continuation of his principles, his policies, his beliefs.” In his first interview since the presidential election last Tuesday, Mr Powell stressed Mr Bush had won a mandate to pursue a foreign policy that was in the US national interest.

A just peace on Israel and Palestinians, Bush could eliminate the primary incubator of anti-U.S. hatred across the Muslim and non-Muslim world.

Pull U.S. troops out of no-win wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- particularly after horrifying charges made by reputable U.S. and British academic analysts that U.S. forces have killed 100,000 Iraqi civilians since 2003.

Foster real democracy in the Muslim world. This means reforming U.S.-backed authoritarian, anti-democratic regimes in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, and Pakistan.

In justifying the exercise of U.S. power, all modern presidents read off the same script. The United States stands for liberty. It champions democracy. It aids the oppressed and succors the afflicted. Alone among history's great powers, the U.S. acts on behalf of the "inalienable rights" that form the birthright of all humankind.

That script was the handiwork of Woodrow Wilson. When it comes to describing this nation's purpose, each of the dominant political figures of our own day — Ronald Reagan no less than John F. Kennedy, George W. Bush no less than Bill Clinton — has embraced Wilson's legacy. Doing so has served these presidents well, enabling them to exercise extraordinary latitude in the conduct of policy while insulating them from accountability for failure.

In the last analysis, then, President Bush won because of his religious convictions, his leadership in the War on Terror and his relentless fight for lower taxes.

John Kerry, despite the hours he spent in churches and the constant reminders he gave us that he had been an altar boy, could not convince traditional Catholics or evangelical Christians he was one of them in his beliefs, and not some closet secularist.

And yet, despite all that, the person most to blame for Specter being in a position to deep six President Bush's judicial nominees is…President Bush. He's the one, after all, who went before Pennsylvania conservatives when Specter was on the edge of defeat and intoned, "I'm here to say it as plainly as I can: Arlen Specter is the right man for the United States Senate."

The liberal dystopia has no room for children. Homosexuals, the vanguard of liberated culture, have none, and heterosexuals preoccupied with cutting-edge sexual experimentation have few. The coastal metropolitan regions that gave John Kerry overwhelming support in last week's election resemble Western Europe in some respects (although they attract far more talented immigrants than ever Europe will).

The essential shortcoming of the Bush campaign was that while it appealed to the patriotism and family values of the working and middle classes, it didn't offer them bread and butter benefits—such as relief from illegal immigrants.

Carroll Quigley then did what virtually no professional historian ever does.

This myth, like all fables, does in fact have a modicum of truth. There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960's, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments.

What this means on Election Day is that ES&S, a private company, manages everything about the voting, from voter registration, the printing of ballots, the programming of the voting machines, the counting and tabulation of the votes and the final reporting of the results—for 60 million Americans in 47 states.

Palestinians take the slow poisoning of Arafat very seriously, and many are asking for the execution of these well-known Israeli collaborators inside the PA. Many Palestinians also refuse to acknowledge any new Israeli-CIA installed “leadership” of corrupt operators in the next future. This is a new situation brought as a consequence of the murder of Arafat.

Arafat is in all probability dead since last Wednesday, and while the bickering around the future of Palestinian "leadership" goes on, the corpse will be transferred to Egypt, from where transport to Gaza will be easiest. Israel has already said that they do not want to have Arafat buried in Jerusalem, and Suha has helped them implement their plan by first bringing Arafat to die far from home in Paris.

Historic justice demands that it be clearly stated that it was Arafat who envisioned the Oslo agreement at a time when both Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres still stuck to the hopeless "Jordanian Option", the belief that one could ignore the Palestinian people and give the West Bank back to Jordan. Of the three recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize, Arafat deserved it most.

But Ariel Sharon told his cabinet that he will not permit Mr Arafat to be buried in the old city or anywhere else in greater Jerusalem, which Israelis and Palestinians claim as their capital.

Yesterday, Israel's justice minister, Yosef Lapid, said: "Arafat won't be buried in Jerusalem, because Jerusalem is the city where Jewish kings are buried and not Arab terrorists."

The U.S. president should moderate his former policies in the Middle East, refrain from repeating his former mistakes and avoid all-out support for the Zionist Regime so that the region can gradually move toward the total elimination of terrorism.

Had we awakened to a John Kerry victory, anyone seriously concerned about the conflicts in Palestine and Iraq would have faced the stark reality that Kerry offered nothing substantially different from President George W. Bush in either situation. Yet that provides little consolation for seeing Bush re-elected, as the desire to see him defeated had little to do with support for Kerry. What many wanted was accountability - to see the author of so many disastrous policies thrown out.

This aside, a pertinent question is who will win over Russia, Washington, which pursues a coupling role with Moscow vis-a-vis Beijing, or Beijing, trying to wrest away Moscow from Washington? For now, Russia does not particularly feel compelled to choose between stark options, yet the situation may be altered in China's direction in case the present drift of US power incursions are heightened in the future. The answer to the above question should be delegated to the future. For now, however, the quantum leap of China into the Middle East and Caspian energy markets has become a fait accompli, no matter how disturbed its biggest trade partner, the US, over its geopolitical ramifications.

In the case of President Bush's victory, any talk of a "mandate" is simply preposterous. The president, the incumbent chief executive of a nation at war, won by a bare 51 percent, only a slight improvement over his actual loss of the popular vote four years ago.

Repeat after me: No mandate for preemptive war. No mandate for American Empire. No mandate for isolating America from its allies. No mandate for Israeli territorial expansion in the Middle East. No mandate for endless red ink. No mandate for selling out American jobs and occupations to foreigners. No mandate for a domestic police state.

The real winners November 2 are the military industrial complex, who will continue to feed at the 500 billion-dollar military trough and the corporate media, whose coffers were filled with billions of dollars for campaign ads.

Without an electoral choice democracy is non-existent and freedom only means the right to choose your own brand of toothpaste. Without an active independent media informing on the powerful we lack both freedom and democracy.

The electorate is simply too conservative for the Democrats, as shown by the defeat of Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle in South Dakota. The formula of taking the straight liberal line in Washington and talking conservative at home does not work when a Democrat’s every move becomes visible as a member of the leadership.

But this is how those in power want things. When people are polarized, they're easily controlled. The majority can impose its will upon the minority. In this case, Bush has enjoyed a Republican majority in the House, Senate and Supreme court for several years and will continue to do so for at least the next two. The majority and the minority can keep getting elected by scaring their constituents about what will happen if they're not elected. Never mind having rational, balanced discussions about real, serious issues. It's my way or the highway.

Total concentration of right-wing power - legitimized by the popular vote: this is the new neo-conservative dream turned reality. So the road ahead is to flatten the Sunni stronghold of Fallujah in Iraq, bomb Iran because of its supposed nuclear aspirations, depose President Hafez Assad in Syria, crush the Palestinian resistance, and remodel the Middle East by "precision strike" democracy.

In a free society, whoever is president is truly irrelevant, so urgent, angst-driven presidential elections only remind us of how far removed we have become from republican ideals. Those who strive to ignore sick DC culture can do so again much more easily now that this latest advanced auction of stolen goods is behind us.

If the president is reelected, it will be seen as a mandate for war – not only in Iraq, but Syria, Iran, Lebanon – even Saudi Arabia. All will be up for grabs. Bush unleashed is likely to fulfill our worst expectations, and then some. We would feel the effects almost immediately.

Today, the people of the not-so-united States are engaged in a new civil war. The war is not being fought with bullets yet. It is being fought with angry words, bumper stickers, placards, flags and angry votes. What issues are on the minds of Americans who are so angry with one another? The most prominent issues I hear people talk about are legalization of abortion, the death penalty, gay and lesbian rights, the sanctity of marriage, the right to bear arms, crime, terrorism, militarism, the price of gas, taxes and family values.

No matter which corporate puppet prevails in the American presidential dumbshow this week, there will be a continuity of democratic/capitalist government and society—barring a civil war (which seems unlikely, since all the guns are on one side). Our side's only hope of evolving out of this endgame into which history and ecology have driven us, is to nonviolently "revolve" the same wheel that America's founders turned.

Proposition 200’s grassroots triumph in the teeth of the united opposition of the entire political establishment and its media mouthpieces is, as with California’s similar Proposition 187 ten years ago, a further illustration of the extraordinary power of the immigration issue.

And while pollsters and political scientists say the unprecedented anger and resentment directed at Washington has been fundamentally anti-Bush, rather than "anti-American", his re-election to a second term is very likely to move that contempt into the second category, cementing a permanent breach in the Western alliance.

What bin Laden is saying here is in conscious echo of what many have said: The terrorists of 9/11 were over here because we were over there. We are not hated for our principles. We are hated for our policies. The neo-imperial presence of U.S. troops on Arab soil, our support of Israel's dispossession of the Palestinian people, our backing of regimes in the Arab world that deny their people freedom and rights we champion before the world – this is why we are hated; this is why we were attacked.

Pat Buchanan believes a "civil war" will break out inside the Republican Party over its ideological future, a war between the Bush partisans and their neoconservative allies on the one hand and, on the other, paleoconservatives like Mr. Buchanan, advocates of an "America First," national interest-based foreign policy, economic nationalism and traditional conservatism—small government, constitutionalism and cultural traditionalism.

The trouble with Mr. Bush's adaptations of conservatism to fit the neocon mold is that they are fundamentally inconsistent with what most American conservatives have always believed and believe today.

If the Iraqis get a government that truly represents them, it will demand that Washington go home. If elections produce a regime seemingly more responsive to Washington than to Iraqis, the insurgency will grow. Iraqis are likely to defeat those who now kill coalition personnel only when there is no longer a U.S. presence stoking their anger.

Osama bin Laden's alleged cave in Afghanistan comes complete with room service, dry cleaning, a desk and satellite TV. But despite the massive White House-spun version, this is not a caveman on the run.

Without bin Laden, there is no "war on terror" - which to begin with is a misguided tactic (war) against a concept (terrorism). With no endless "war on terror", there is no justification for Patriot Act/homeland security/infringement of civil liberties, a central theme on the election platforms of both Bush and Kerry.

If Bush is reelected, the small handful of neoconservatives, firmly allied with Israel’s right-wing Likud Party, would not be held accountable for their extraordinary incompetence or deception, which has placed the US in a gratuitous war that cannot be won.

Bush would see vindication and would follow the neoconservative impulse to escalate what neoconservatives regard as World War IV.

Conservatives tune in faithfully to partisans like Rush Limbaugh, who dispense their bile-filled misinformation from the sewers of ignorance. Liberals get their so-called facts from the likes of Al Franken. For both Limbaugh and Franken, conning the stupid is far too easy to do with the ignorant masses who use their brains only as receptacles for partisan propaganda and not for any attempt at independent thought.

Yes, you read that right. I'm saying Americans are, by and large, ignorant, uninformed louts who follow their political leaders like mindless lemmings and believe only what they are spoon-fed by liars and professional hucksters.

"It means that any U.S. state that will choose to vote for the white thug Bush as president, it means that it chose to fight us and we will consider it an enemy to us, and any state that will vote against Bush, it means that it chose to make peace with us and we will not characterize it as an enemy," the Web site said, according to MEMRI's translation.

In a revealing story, Slate, the Internet magazine, had its writers publicly name the man for whom each intended to vote and tell why. Five Slate writers named Bush, 45 named Kerry, a nine-to-one ratio. A poll of the national press would likely reach the same result.

This election has indeed revealed an "alternative media" of the right. But the national press remains what it has been since the 1960s: the most reliably left-wing voting block this side of Bedford Stuyvesant.

Neither do most of the Republicans who claim conservative credentials really deserve them anymore. The enormous prodigality of the war in Iraq, the unprecedented increase in government bureaucracy, the readiness to sacrifice privacy and liberty for the illusion of safety, and the unprovoked invasion (and chauvinistic reconstruction) of sovereign nations all violate fundamental conservative principles.