The Vatican denounced the "arbitrarily hastened'' death of Terri Schiavo on Thursday as a violation of principles of Christianity and civilization, and a cardinal described her end as a "death sentence executed through a cruel method.''

"What happened to just being a human being, you know? It's nothing more than state-sanctioned murder. All the big guys, they all have their hands tied up by some tinhorn judge down there. Come on, when they want to whip a judge, they got no problem doing that. Look what they did to [Ten Commandments proponent Roy Moore] in a heartbeat. So they can do it if they want. They just don't want to."

Mexican head honcho and bandito-in-chief Vicente Fox, who was recently basking in the luxury of the Bush ranch in Crawford, says he will do everything in his power to stop the Minuteman Project next month, which will see more than 1,000 American civilians helping the Border Patrol secure a 20-mile stretch of the Arizona-Mexico border by radioing and phoning the Border Patrol to tell them where illegals are crossing. Fox is the man running this insurgency, of course. And he is calling for President Bush to totally dismantle what border security we have and go to an open-border situation such as that found in Europe.

Euthanasia is embraced by the lack of values in our society. It is the result of a culture that has accepted and promoted the killing of unborn children. The value of life is the extent of the pleasure and well being it brings. Suffering, imperfection, illness, and inefficiency are viewed as unbearable setbacks, useless and burdensome. Death is viewed as a "rightful liberation." As a result, euthanasia is packaged to appear desirable and then sold to the unsuspecting public as the "living will," "death with dignity" and "the right to die." Is it not logical that those who can kill the child in the womb will also kill their parents in their old age for the same reasons of convenience, compassion, money etc. . . .?

Conservatives who think for a minute that if President Bush were given a line item veto then he would suddenly turn into a fiscal conservative and rein in Congressional spending are naïve or just plain stupid. As I pointed out soon after Bush’s inauguration in 2005 in my article "Those Bush Vetoes," the president did not veto a single bill during his first term in office.

If George W. Bush were to hold up a carrot and call it a watermelon, the American news media would immediately begin calling carrots watermelons. That’s an undeniable fact. Equally undeniable is the fact that we have long passed the point when we can trust the American corporate media to report the news. But even more distressing is the fact that we now have reached the point when we cannot even trust them with the English language.

You can only push some people so far, and then they start pushing back. A perfect case in point is the Minuteman Project. Based in Arizona and led by former Vietnam veteran Jim Gilchrist, the Minutemen will set up 50 outposts from Douglas, Arizona to Tombstone, and will do the job that our federal government has failed in doing for us.

Florida Probate Judge George Greer has taken judicial supremacy to new abuses in ordering the starvation of an innocent woman against the will of her parents, her brother, her church, thousands of volunteers, and, as far as we know, herself. We wouldn't permit anyone to treat a dog this way.

From abortion on demand in 1973, to a right to die in Oregon, to a right to suicide in Holland, to involuntary euthanasia in the old folks homes on the old and dying continent of Europe, to America's death sentence for Terri Schiavo, the West advances steadily toward its own death.

As we find more and more justifications for ending life, we also find that not one Western nation has a native-born population that is growing. All are dying. Before century's end, the West ends, as T.S. Eliot wrote, "Not with a bang, but a whimper."

How has it come about that Terri Schiavo's life is at the mercy of the very man who wants her dead? The law presumes that a husband has the best interests of his wife at heart. But the interests of spouses may not be identical, but opposed. No woman's life should depend on the good will of her enemy. After all, nobody who stands to gain by an accused murderer's execution would be allowed to sit on his jury."

Sooner or later, most with whom I speak say something like, "You know, I always considered going to law school," or "I've been thinking about going back to college and studying law." It seems like everybody at one time or another considers going to law school. Few of those who actually do so should have done so. A young man recently told me that he soon would enter law school and sought my advice. Here is what I told him:

The long term upshot of the Schiavo saga is: The right to die has evolved into the requirement to die. This is unconscionable given that, by and large, no American clergyman would stand in the way of individual conscience where a patient previously asserted a desire not to be maintained by feeding tubes. Yet it appears that some wish to negate individual religious conscience when such desires conflict with judicial and statist attitudes toward life and death and who may, in the future, supercede even a Living Will. Personalism appears to have lost to judicial arrogance and force.

Goodbye, Rule of Law. Say hello to rule by black-robed judicial Jacobins.

As if there weren’t already thousands of other examples of judicial tyranny nationwide, a recent decision giving previously deported criminal aliens the opportunity to gain legal immigration status again—contrary to the clear intent of Congress—has just been reinforced.

America is now a nation ruled by the amoral and fallible will of men. They are called lawyers. The warning has been coming for decades. The current case involving the litigated and legally mandated death sentence of Terri Schiavo has now confirmed our current fate. This should be no surprise.

Members of a violent Central America-based gang have been sent to Arizona to target Minuteman Project volunteers, who will begin a monthlong border vigil this weekend to find and report foreigner sneaking into the United States, project officials say.

The MS-13 gang has established major smuggling operations in several areas along the U.S.-Mexico border and have transported hundreds of Central and South Americans -- including gang members -- into the United States in the past two years. The gang also is involved in drug and weapons smuggling.

Calls for a limit on judicial terms are long overdue. One of the best proposals is House Joint Resolution 55, a constitutional amendment introduced by Texas Rep. John Culberson (R-Houston), that would require federal district court judges to be retained every 10 years by both the state legislature and the governor where the judge serves. That strengthens federalism by interconnecting the federal courts with state governments, which are closer to the people.

We must all remember her when the politicians who caused her death, especially those in Washington D.C., have all been consigned to the garbage-tip reserved for the worst criminals in history.

Citizens of the USA, we from around the world salute the courage and devotion to freedom and decency of your fellow-countrywoman who should forever serve as a model for all young women around the world.

"The 'judicial competence' that Judge Greer has exhibited in his handling of the Terri Schiavo case is clearly the kind that ignores evidence and even Florida statutes in order to uphold Scientology doctrine-which requires the deletion of "social contagions" (the disabled) from society. It is no coincidence that a Scientology attorney - who was a lead attorney in the Lisa McPherson case - personally bestowed this award to Judge Greer. Greer's decisions to consistently rule in favor of terminating a disabled person do reflect high ideals-in the sight of Scientology."

The welfare state secularists who oppose Terri Schiavo's right to life see the red ink coming. They see that the bankruptcy of the Medicare system could create a massive political reaction against the promises of politicians to provide tax-funded healing at below-market prices. The myth of the state as healer is about to have its feeding tube pulled by a lack of funds. Let it never be! So they are silently admitting that triage must be performed. But nobody in the private sector must be presented with the bill, because the anti-Schiavo people themselves may someday have the bills presented to them for close relatives in her condition. Better to invoke euthanasia by court order. It's cost-effective, and it also reduces guilt. "Sorry, Doctor, I won't be paying this bill. I'll miss momma, of course, but the judge has made his decision. It's final."

As Klinghoffer notes, "For Jesus, oral Torah was a manmade accretion without transcendent authority. He tells a group of Pharisees, 'So for the sake of your tradition, you have made void the word of God.' ... This explains why he felt it was appropriate to teach solely on his own authority, rather than by citing previous sages." Some Christians today believe they have figured out the Bible's secret code. Some Jews 2,000 years ago felt the same way, but Jesus flatly told them that there was no code: Just read and pray.

This is a court system totally out of control, obviously committed to death, obviously bound by nothing beyond its morbid obsession with its own omnipotence and its fascination with the letting the innocent die. This is simply terrifying. The Falange followers of Francisco Franco had an evil cry: Long live death. Obviously, Justice Kennedy was listening.

Conservatives have been asking themselves the question for years: "Is this finally it?" "This" being whatever event in the news exemplified a current gag-making excess of the culture or the polity or the law, and "it" being the point at which the nation as a whole simply won't take it anymore. There have been many points along the way when it seemed as though society might rear up and refuse to go in the current direction.

Terri Schiavo’s life could be saved by a piece of paper.

A simple subpoena.

When a top ranking agent of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) opened a criminal investigation in the case of Terri Schindler-Schiavo, he was called into his supervisor’s office and told to shut down the investigation not once, but twice.

The basic moral problem lies with Mr. Schiavo himself, and with a society that turns a blind eye to his adultery or bigamy. The American states, once upon a time, had stiff laws on both, and even today Florida’s statutes make living “in an open state of adultery . . . a misdemeanor of the second degree” punishable by up to 60 days in prison. Mr. Schiavo is also guilty of “lewd and lascivious behavior,” another second-class misdemeanor applied to “any man and woman, not being married to each other, [who] lewdly and lasciviously associate and cohabit.” In other words, the faithless husband might be sent to prison for 120 days and, if he returned to his “fiancée,” he might be slapped with a second set of sentences.

Christians are right to be disturbed by the culture of death that has made abortion and euthanasia not only acceptable but legal and is well on the way to legitimating that form of homicide that goes by the name “assisted suicide.”

The VNRs are wrong on two levels.

First, they are legally dubious. The Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress, said the VNRs may constitute "covert propaganda," which is prohibited by law. Federal law forbids the broadcast of government propaganda or government-produced "news" to the American people.

The VNRs also raise ethical issues. By creating the appearance of a legitimate news report -- and by failing to disclose the source -- the government is engaging in deception. If they were clearly labeled, like infomercials or campaign advertising, people could judge their merits.

"What the United States is saying about this is essentially that, we are disappointed by Iceland's decision because Mr. Fischer is a fugitive from justice in the United States. There is a federal warrant for his arrest for violating sanctions against the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. "Our position has not changed. We believe that Mr. Fischer should have his day in court in the United States on those charges," Boyle said. "Beyond that, we really can't talk about the case as we are required by U.S. law Privacy Act to not comment."

House Republicans are taking the offensive in the burgeoning ethics war on Capitol Hill by circulating research that details links among Democrats, George Soros and government watchdog groups that have criticized Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) and the House ethics process.

The research shows that members of these groups’ boards have contributed tens of thousands of dollars to Democratic candidates and political organizations and several of their staff members have previously worked for Democrats. The groups have also accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Open Society Institute, an organization founded by Soros, who spent millions trying to defeat President Bush in last year’s election.

If the tragic case of Terri Schiavo shows nothing else, it shows how easily "the right to die" can become the right to kill. It is hard to believe that anyone, regardless of their position on euthanasia, would have chosen the agony of starvation and dehydration as the way to end someone's life.

Ours is a nation where a judge may not sentence Beltway sniper Lee Malvo to death, because he is too young to die, but can sentence Terri Schiavo to death, because she is too severely handicapped to live.

Schiavo continues the process of dying by starvation and dehydration, a method of capital punishment most would consider criminal if done to a pet.

Michael Schiavo once tried to kill his wife Terri with insulin shots, according to a former caregiver for the brain-injured Florida woman.

The estranged husband -- who is living with another woman with whom he has two children -- "wants her to die; he doesn't want the truth to be known," said Carla Sauer Iyer in an interview this morning on the Fox News Channel program "Fox and Friends."

Since Social Security functions as a retirement plan, we need to acknowledge that it faces the same problems as defined-benefit plans in the private sector. Basically, it is an unsustainable Ponzi scheme because it relies on each generation being large enough to fund the preceding generation's retirement benefits. It is for this reason that much of the private sector is turning to defined-contribution plans.

If Social Security is to survive deeper into the 21st Century, it must likewise change.

People of faith who recognize God as the Supreme Being see the horror of euthanasia. For example, the AFA was founded by a United Methodist minister. Jewish physician Daniel Eisenberg, M.D., has pointed out that "the Torah does not sanction euthanasia in any situation. To remove the feeding tube from a patient whose only impairment is cognitive is simply murder." Cardinal Renato Martino, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, has stated that "No one can be the arbiter of life except God himself." He has also warned: "If Mr. Schiavo succeeds legally in causing the death of his wife, this not only would be tragic in itself, but would be a grave step toward the legal approval of euthanasia in the United States."

Legalized euthanasia is a certain recipe for moral disaster. The Schiavo case is not just a battle over one woman's life. It is a battle between the powers of death and the Power of Life.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) said the bill "would place a federal judge in the middle of this case after the state courts have adjudicated it," Nadler said. "We have never, ever done such a thing in the history of this country," Nadler added, "and we should not start now."

Bork said Nadler's contention is wrong.

"Federal habeas corpus is precisely that. Somebody is convicted in a state court, exhausts his appeals and then files a writ of habeas corpus in a federal court in order to challenge the constitutionality or otherwise of his trial. So this is not a unique intrusion into state court jurisdiction," Bork added.

While the AARP loves to use their multi-million dollar spin machine to brag about all the things they supposedly do to help America’s seniors, it’s what they don’t do that reveals the real AARP agenda.

An ABC News poll reached the surprising conclusion that a majority of Americans think Terri Schiavo's feeding tube should remain out so she can be starved to death, but the question posed by the news network portrayed her as having "no consciousness" and being on "life support," rather than an awake, responsive patient with a feeding tube.

Despite a falling dollar, the U.S. trade deficit has continued to increase to new record levels. The total current account deficit1 rose to a record 6.3 % of GDP during the 4thquarter of 2004, exceeding for the first time ever 6% of GDP. What are the implications of this for the U.S. economy? Is it good or bad? Or a little bit of both?

David Duke, a leading European rights activist, was attacked in Barcelona, Spain yesterday by a violent group of Communists while giving a speech at a Nationalist bookstore.

The speech, organized by Spanish patriot Pedro Varela (pictured), was given in its entirety before Communists ransacked the bookstore, which left a number of courageous nationalists injured.

Michael Schiavo gave contradictory stories about whether disconnecting his estranged wife from feeding tubes was his wish or her wish in a Larry King interview on CNN.

Under mysterious and still unexplained circumstances, Terri Schiavo lost consciousness and blood flow to her brain for a period of time some 15 years ago. Her parents suspect foul play.

Delusion has settled over America. Washington cannot tell fact from fantasy. Neither can sycophantic media nor nothink economists.

The Bush administration is the first government in history to initiate a war based entirely on fantasy--fantasy about nonexistent "weapons of mass destruction," fantasy about nonexistent "terrorist links," fantasy about "liberating" a people from their culture, fantasy about a "cakewalk" invasion, fantasy about America's omnipotence.

"Everybody recognizes that deficits are unsustainable. And I don't think anybody takes the current deficit-reduction effort serious," said Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a bipartisan group that advocates eliminating federal deficits.

Bixby said it might take some major outside force - a financial market collapse, foreign investors deciding to flee U.S. government securities - to force action.

Our Founding Fathers no more trusted in the people always to do the right thing than they trusted in kings. In the republic they created, the House of Representatives, the people’s house, was severely restricted in its powers by a Bill of Rights and checked by a Senate whose members were to be chosen by the states, by a president with veto power, and by a Supreme Court.

America is dead, and the international bankers are getting ready to pick its carcass. Anybody still walking around is now a willing zombie waving that flag of mass murder and injustice, the Stars and Stripes.

The republic is dangerous, or at least potentially so, because it is the form of the State that people will most likely let get away with tyranny and murder. Many Americans who would take up arms if a King or dictator taxed 36% of their income, claim in our Republic that that rate is too low. A King who forces children to go to schools which taught them how great monarchy is would face a revolution, yet public school funding remains one of the great budgetary problems in our republican states. A King who would force grandma to suffer in agony rather than let her take marijuana would justly be called a barbarian, yet few American politicians want to appear "soft" on the War on Drugs.

The real danger is the large, centralized State, regardless of its form of government. Let’s keep government as small and as close to the people as possible.

If the current trend among countries such as China, Japan and India to reduce their dollar holdings continues, the dollar's status will plummet, and eventually its role as the world's reserve currency will come to an end. No longer will the Asian nations subsidize America's debt, and in consequence the cost of living for ordinary Americans will start to soar, pushing even more over the edge.

Why is Garry Trudeau doing a "Doonesbury" sequence inspired by disgraced Republican-friendly reporter Jeff Gannon?

When asked if he thought the press has underreported the Gannon episode, pundit payola, and other examples of media manipulation, Trudeau said: "It's not that it's been underreported so far. It's just that the media, in both its own and the public's interest, ought to stay with this story. If Bush is prepared to defend fake news, then the media should be equally prepared to say why it's anti-democratic and an abuse of power."

Nothing is more important to the pro-life movement than the story of Terri Schiavo, the unfortunate young woman who suffered a brain injury some 15 years ago, and basically is on “death row” in Florida. As it stands now, Mrs. Schiavo has been given a death sentence for Friday, March 18, by Judge George Greer, who has mandated that Schiavo’s estranged husband, Michael Schiavo, may order her feeding tube permanently removed on that date.

It is the nature of institutions like the World Bank to underwrite vicious regimes, and to attract the services of the likes of Wolfowitz and McNamara. And as long as it has access to U.S. taxpayer money, the World Bank will continue to cultivate corruption and conflict abroad. This is why abolishing the World Bank — and, for that matter, the entire corrupt architecture of globalism — should be an objective of decent people everywhere, irrespective of their ideological affiliations.

So you see it doesn't really matter that Wolfowitz doesn't know the first thing about banking or the economics of development projects. He will sit behind the biggest desk at the Bank and take the telephone calls from the Big Banks and the Multinationals, telling him what to do, and providing him with experts like John Perkins, who did the actual dirty work as an economic hit man, and now writes his confessions.

So you see why it makes perfect sense to have Wolfowitz at the World Bank. He's terrific at doing wars, and wars are much more profitable than nickel-and-dime industrial projects. That's the way the world works. Always has been.

Why should China's emergence as a rich, successful country be to the disadvantage of either Japan or the United States? History teaches us that the least intelligent response to this development would be to try to stop it through military force. As a Hong Kong wisecrack has it, China has just had a couple of bad centuries and now it's back. The world needs to adjust peacefully to its legitimate claims - one of which is for other nations to stop militarizing the Taiwan problem - while checking unreasonable Chinese efforts to impose its will on the region. Unfortunately, the trend of events in East Asia suggests we may yet see a repetition of the last Sino-Japanese conflict, only this time the US is unlikely to be on the winning side.

Thirty-five percent of Americans, according to a 2004 Pew Research survey, call themselves conservative, while only 22 percent call themselves liberal (43 percent call themselves moderate) -- a 3 percent increase in conservatives since 1992. There is a reason for this -- liberals keep getting it wrong.

A related worry is that Mr Wolfowitz will not be able to separate himself from the White House. It is perhaps instructive to look at the history of another man who came out of America’s defence department to head the World Bank: Robert McNamara, who as defence secretary was an architect of the Vietnam war. Steven Radelet of the Centre for Global Development, speaking to CNN, points out that Mr McNamara was accused of picking aid recipients based on their support for America’s foreign policy, rather than their suitability for assistance. Will Mr Wolfowitz be able to resist using his office to further his political aims?

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) pressed the soon-to-be Secretary of State on the obscure but important Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST). Ms. Rice responded that the President "certainly would like to see it pass as soon as possible."

The treaty was largely developed in the 1970s and is a relic from that very different time. LOST was pushed by the Third World, supported by the Soviet bloc, to mulct wealth and technology from the industrialized West. Only President Reagan's willingness to confront the "international community" by rejecting the convention saved the U.S. from signing away access to the entire seabed.

As life and possibilities finally return to the long-dormant Middle East peace process, Japan is making a determined effort to ensure that Tokyo plays a key role in any settlement, demonstrating its larger and more effective role on the world stage. In its latest and boldest initiative, Tokyo has offered to host a summit between Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the end of May or in early June. Japan currently enjoys strong economic and political ties with both sides and is regarded by both as a reliable neutral party, an honest broker, impartial and disinterested in anything but peace.

Fukushima said that during a meeting with Masaharu Miura, the head of the Immigration Bureau had offered Fischer the possibility of leaving Japan instead of being deported to the United States.

The Utah legislature in recently passed a bill to issue special Driving Privilege cards to undocumented alien workers. These are in lieu of regular drivers' licenses and may not be used as items of identification for other purposes such as boarding a plane, opening bank accounts, getting a driver's license from another state, or obtaining government services. Why any state or U.S. Government agency would issue an undocumented alien anything but a one-way ride back to wherever he came from is a mystery unto itself.

1) He would follow in the great tradition of World Bank president Robert McNamara, who also helped kill tens of thousands of people in a poor country most Americans couldn’t find on a map before getting the job.
2) It helps to be a good liar when you run an institution with employees who earn over $100,000 a year to pretend to help billions of people who live on less than $1 a day.
3) With all his experience helping U.S. companies grab Iraq ’s oil profits, he's got just the right experience for doling out lucrative World Bank contracts to U.S. businesses.
4) After predecessor James Wolfensohn blew millions of dollars on "consultations" with citizen groups to give the appearance of openness, Wolfowitz's tough-guy style is just what’s needed to rid the World Bank of those irritating activists.
5) Unlike former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, another one of the four leading candidates, at least Wolfowitz hasn't failed at running a Fortune 500 company.
6) Unlike the Treasury Department’s John Taylor, another leading candidate, at least Wolfowitz doesn't want to get rid of the institution he would head.
7) While earning a University of Chicago Ph.D. , he was exposed to the tenets of market fundamentalism that have reigned at the World Bank for decades.
8) He has experience in constructing echo chambers where only the advice he wants to hear is spoken.
9) He knows some efficient private contractors who build echo chambers for only a few hundred billion dollars (cost plus, of course).
10) He can develop a pre-emptive poverty doctrine where the World Bank could invade countries that fail to make themselves safe for U.S. business, modeled on the U.S. pre-emptive war doctrine he helped craft.

My advice to the administration, therefore, is to go over the heads of the Democrats in Congress, as he has begun to do. Let them know he doesn't feel desperately in need of their votes. Encourage and work with the House Republicans to pass the best possible pure personal accounts bill they can muster, unencumbered by anything that could be used against House Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections, such as tax increases, benefit cuts and hikes in the retirement age.

A country cannot be a superpower without a high tech economy, and America’s high tech economy is eroding as I write.

The erosion began when US corporations outsourced manufacturing. Today many US companies are little more than a brand name selling goods made in Asia.

Corporate outsourcers and their apologists presented the loss of manufacturing capability as a positive development. Manufacturing, they said, was the "old economy," whose loss to Asia ensured Americans lower consumer prices and greater shareholder returns. The American future was in the "new economy" of high tech knowledge jobs.

There are many other reform plans, such as that offered by George Reisman. What matters here is not the method but the goal, which is to eliminate the program. Now, if Bush had proposed this, Republicans might run for their lives. I don't know. Maybe it would actually stand a chance of passage. At least the terms of the debate would be clear, and we wouldn't be in the current fog in which "privatizers" seek the largest tax increase in history while Democrats who favor the current system are decrying the attempted looting schemes of the Republicans.

From across the country, slowly but steadily, there is the start of an American uprising. One by one, people are rising up community by community and town by town. We are deathly tired of gratuitous cruelty and rapacious creeds of violence, and we won't stand by any longer.

We are reclaiming our nation, our principles, and our souls. We are the only ones who can do it.

We won't forget Rachel.

And we won't be stopped.

“Make no mistake about it,” says Rep. Paul, “WTO ministers tell Congress to change American laws, and Congress complies. In fact, congressional leaders obediently scrambled to make sure the corporate tax bill passed before a WTO deadline. Thousands and thousands of bills languish in committees, yet a bill ordered by the WTO was pushed to the front of the line.”

The real issue to protest, in the silence of your own ravaged heart, is your own silent complicity in the savage system that kills innocent people every day so that rich Zionist Jew manipulators and their conscienceless Zionist Christian dupes can steal money from YOU.

Just to be clear, these people are Americans, British, and Israelis, and they have no real consciences, which makes them dangerous sociopaths - which is why we have a sociopathic culture that feels no guilt when we kill innocent people overseas. It is no coincidence that this attitude perfectly reflects what is written in the Talmud and the Old Testament. Now that would really be something to protest about.

If the peace movement had continued to advocate for an end to the war during the presidential election year, rather than remaining silent where would be today? We would have built on the successes of our beginnings rather than having to start anew. We'd be nearer the end of the war-occupation, not farther from it. President Bush would be on the defensive, not on the offensive. Iraqis would be seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, when they would get their country and economy back, rather than the darkness of continued occupation.

In the end, though, after all the dead, all the maimed, all the psychologically blighted, all the expense, it won't make a rat's toenail's worth of difference. Iraq will end up with another dictatorship in one form or another. It is too fractious a country to be ruled by the wobbly hand of democracy.

Among the organizations directing illegal aliens into America's medical systems, according to the report, are the Ford Foundation-funded Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the National Immigration Law Center, the American Immigration Lawyers Association, the American Bar Association's Commission on Immigration Policy, Practice, and Pro Bono, the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, the National Council of La Raza, George Soros's Open Society Institute, the Migration Policy Institute, the National Network for Immigration and Refugee Rights and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Opponents of these transnational trade deals insist that NAFTA, GATT-WTO, CAFTA and FTAA proposals not only ensure that America’s best jobs and its tax base will be among the nation’s top exports, but also that national borders would be diluted or erased under the FTAA, which would economically and politically merge the Western Hemisphere into a European Union-style super state with a resulting unregulated migration of people from one nation to another in this “age of terrorism,” creating a very perilous situation.

The issue of government debt and deficits lay dormant throughout the high-revenue 1990s. But with recession and exploding government spending, the issue has become enormously important again. Sadly, just about everyone is missing the central point, which is not that we need budget reform so much as drastic monetary reform.

Halliburton subsidiary KBR got $12 billion worth of exclusive contracts for work in Iraq. But even more shocking is how KBR spent some of the money. Former U.S. Army Corps of Engineers official Bunnatine Greenhouse is blowing the whistle on the Dick Cheney–linked company's profits of war.

This is A SCARY CHART - showing 4 decade trends of total debt in America (the red line, reaching $40 trillion in 2004 vs. growth of the economy as measured by national income (blue line). (adjusted for inflation). That debt increased $3 Trillion (8.6% more) in the past year.

In their desire to reform or save Social Security, some advocates of free enterprise display a reluctance to openly call for the repeal or dismantling of Social Security or even to suggest that their Social Security reform plan would gradually tend in that direction. For example, the conservative Heritage Foundation, whose mission is “to formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values,” openly declares that “the President has put forward a bold and responsible proposal that would permanently save Social Security and make the program a better deal for all Americans.”

It is almost certain that Bush's invocation of this "night-and-fog" measure will be upheld. So let us be clear about the consequences. It will mean that any crime committed by a government official -- torture, rendition, murder, state terrorism, even treason -- can be sealed in permanent darkness. The justice system itself will be "rendered" into a black hole. The victims of state crime -- American citizens as well as foreign captives -- will be left without rights, without redress, without a voice. Bush's kingdom of strappado will reign supreme.

A U.S. federal appeals court next Tuesday will hear oral arguments on motions to overturn Jonathan Pollard’s imprisonment.

Attorney Jacques Semmelman said he will ask the District of Columbia court to set aside the statute of limitations and allow Pollard to claim he did not have proper legal counsel. He said Pollard, convicted of spying for Israel, also is seeking access to classified information used in the decision to sentence him. Pollard will not attend the hearing.

Last fall, a federal judge said exempting the Internet from the law's restrictions on political speech would undermine McCain-Feingold. Now the FEC is back at it trying to figure out how to restrict political speech on the Internet.

Of course, The New York Times can endorse candidates for office and promote their causes, and you might think that bloggers would enjoy the same First Amendment protections. But you would be wrong. The FEC has not given news sites or bloggers what is tellingly called "the press exemption" from campaign finance laws. What bloggers say and do may well fall under federal campaign finance restrictions.

Of course, the mind-set that goes with World War IV and GWOT ensures that nothing complex and untelegenic, nothing that smacks of our real, complicated world but doesn't have the clean, Manichaean feel of a global crusade to it, is possible. If, on our proliferating planet, we end up, one of these days, with an actual apocalyptic scenario on our hands, it will be too late to thank the GWOT intellectuals, who took a terrible situation and are managing to turn it into the Schwarzenegger movie from Hell.

Although Rather is through as anchorman, what he represents is not through, and that is what makes it important to be clear about what he was and what he did, regardless of the spin of those seeking to make excuses for him. We the public need to recognize what is and is not a fact and the media need to recognize the bias and arrogance in Rather's work -- and in their own.

For decades, we have sat helplessly watching as a government intended to be of, by and for the people became increasingly all about the Party…All about the politics and the politician.

So there is a good reason why the Internet is now the new target for censorship by Washington insiders and media elites alike…. Network news ratings are tanking, newspaper circulations are plummeting and Washington elites are growing weary of answering a steadily increasing volume of mail from we the people… This isn’t how it is supposed to work (in their minds).

No, America isn't to blame for all of its own problems. Even if all our politicians were reasonably honest, there would be international frictions, nation-states being what they are. But America needs to learn to see itself with a detachment we don't find on either the jingoist Right or the America-bashing Left.

The desperate left is reviving old clichés and images, fighting a reactionary rear-guard effort to defend the vision of a secular state and society they have tried to build in the Twentieth Century. Faced with continuing losses at the polls, they are resorting to amplifying the volume of their disdain for those with whom they disagree.

Ugly, bigoted, nearly-incoherent elitist liberal hatred for conservative Protestants is on display this morning on the op-ed pages of the Los Angeles Times. William Thatcher Dowell raises alarms over the campaign to defend the public display of the Ten Commandments, which he curiously seems to think is exclusively a Protestant affair, ignoring the preference of roughly 80% of Americans to do so, a group which must necessarily include many Catholics and Jews.

Two Florida lawmakers Tuesday introduced legislation that could save the life of Terri Schindler Schiavo, a brain-damaged woman in Florida, whose husband is fighting to remove her feeding tube despite her family's pleas.

The Incapacitated Person's Legal Protection Act (HR 1151 and S 539) would give Terri Schindler Schiavo and people in similar situations the same constitutional protection of due process as death-row inmates.

Once again what I have said has been turned into the opposite of itself.

First, Dan Caplis, Craig Silverman and numerous other right-wing media spinmeisters asserted that I "advocated" terrorist attacks on the United States in my Op-Ed piece of Sept. 12, 2001. Even a casual reading of that piece, as well as the 300-page book On the Justice of Roosting Chickens in which I more fully explicated and documented my argument, reveals that I did not advocate such attacks. Rather, I pointed out that they were and will continue to be the inevitable result of a U.S. foreign policy that disregards the rule of law and results in massive death and destruction abroad.

Here in Georgiafornia, as in many states, the success last year of the Prop. 200 initiative in Arizona did not go unnoticed.

Stopping the importation into Georgia of Mexico’s poverty, and Islam’s terror, is now an open goal for many state legislators.

A large group of them are working hard to make Georgia considerably less attractive to the horde sent here by Osama Bin Laden, Vicente Fox and George W. Bush each day.

A specter is haunting post-9/11 America – the specter of fascism. Lew Rockwell calls it "red-state fascism," former Treasury official and conservative economist Paul Craig Roberts refers to "the brownshirting of the conservative movement," and Scott McConnell, editor of The American Conservative, while demurring that the rise of a homegrown authoritarian regime is somewhat problematic, also sees a potential problem and sounds a warning. All these writers, however, pose the threat as emanating exclusively from the American Right: it comes, avers Roberts, from

"Bush's conservative supporters [who] want no debate. They want no facts, no analysis. They want to denounce and demonize the enemies that the Hannitys, Limbaughs, and Savages of talk radio assure them are everywhere at work destroying their great and noble country."

General Butler has been squeezed into the fringes of American history, where those who dispute establishment doctrine always find a cool reception. If he were alive today, few networks would air his denunciation of the Bush administration’s incestuous ties to the Halliburton Corporation or its preferential selection of Halliburton to reap the profits from the invasion of Iraq. Corporate-dominated government and the corporate-owned media would simply brand him as unpatriotic, Medals of Honor and all.

The Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act, S.51, introduced by Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) along with 31 other co-sponsors, is making its way through the legislative process. It’s being touted as a key pro-life bill and supporters want to make it a priority issue in the 109th Congress.

If a truly pro-life bill is to be introduced, why not try a really novel approach and declare that the preborn child is a person who possesses the same inalienable right to life as the rest of us? Now, that would be a pro-life bill.

Conservative misgivings about Sen. Arlen Specter's rise this year to become chairman of the Judiciary Committee were validated last week. Without consulting the Republican leadership, Specter launched a procedure that undercuts party strategy for confirming President Bush's judicial nominees. Ironically, however, Democrats are so intransigent that not even Specter's temporizing has moderated them so far.

Now that Summers has released the text of his Jan. 14 speech, we can see that he presented three rational hypotheses to explain why there are fewer women than men in science and engineering academia:

All these big-government liberals are spreading the lie that American women are massively discriminated against and victims of a "nationwide epidemic" of stress, anxiety, frustrations and depression. Both Warner and Hewlett want socialist Europe to be our model.

Sen. John McCain pressed a cable company's case for pricing changes with regulators at the same time a tax-exempt group that he has worked with since its founding solicited $200,000 in contributions from the company.

Charles Lewis, a longtime ethics watchdog, said McCain's case shows "there are different ways for purveyors of influence to show their gratitude and express their friendliness. And it's not just PACs, it's not just campaign committees."

"President George W. Bush’s newfound enthusiasm for working with a 'strong and united' European Union could help the campaign to ratify the new EU constitution," reported the February 24 Financial Times of London, citing supporters of the ratification campaign.

The only thing special about this horrible event in Baghdad was that the victims were prominent Westerners. Events just like it happen all the time to poor Iraqis, whole families being shot up sometimes by American soldiers, to say nothing of the countless cases of brutality and torture inflicted on men unfortunate enough to imprisoned at the mercy of Appalachian Throwbacks in uniform.

Another reason few men viscerally grasp that gender quotas like those Summers has now promised to women will work against their own opportunities: the individual male ego. Collective male solidarity is seldom a match for it.

Sex preferences for women penalize the marginal male. But what Real Man would admit to himself that he is marginal? (This was one of the findings of Frederick Lynch’s 1992 study of white men and Affirmative Action, Invisible Victims.)

Sam was convinced Western culture and civilization could not survive the dispossession or death of the European peoples who gave them birth. He opposed the mass immigration of non-Western peoples, cultures and creeds, and regarded as the "Stupid Party" a GOP that truckled to corporate contributors and refused to defend our borders.

An odd situation has arisen in which American nationalism—for good and ill more than 200 years in the making—cannot be seriously discussed without elucidating the role Israel has come to play in it. This notion would astonish every previous generation of American statesmen, and stating it now will enrage many. But as America today occupies two Muslim countries and threatens two others, it is hardly honest not to include it.

Excuse me, but -- as an American -- I not only have the right but also the obligation to be critical of my government if -- and when -- I feel it has failed in its service to the citizens.

Sorry, but those who stand up against tyranny are the true patriots and that includes tyranny at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as well as those who wear turbans and carry suicide bombs.

Modern conservatism, in the United States and Europe, is confused and distorted. Under the influence of representative democracy and with the transformation of the U.S. and Europe into mass democracies from World War I, conservatism was transformed from an anti-egalitarian, aristocratic, anti-statist ideological force into a movement of culturally conservative statists: the right wing of the socialists and social democrats.

McConnell is right that we are not yet in the grip of a fully developed fascist system, and the conservative movement is far from thoroughly neoconized. But we are a single terrorist incident away from all that: a bomb placed in a mall or on the Golden Gate Bridge, or a biological attack of some kind, could sweep away the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and two centuries of legal, political, and cultural traditions – all of it wiped out in a single instant, by means of a single act that would tip the balance and push us into the abyss of post-Constitutional history.

Where is the outrage from all those who demanded morality from the leadership of this nation - just ten short years ago? Bush claims the international mantel of moral authority, yet he personally embraces a sect of Christian extremism that is not only, not moral, it is a political party whose mission is to convert everyone who disagrees with them! Those who bow to this new and ancient cult will be "saved" - and the rest of us must die!

No concept lies more firmly embedded in our national character than the notion that the USA is "No. 1," "the greatest." Our broadcast media are, in essence, continuous advertisements for the brand name "America Is No. 1." Any office seeker saying otherwise would be committing political suicide. In fact, anyone saying otherwise will be labeled "un-American." We're an "empire," ain't we? Sure we are. An empire without a manufacturing base. An empire that must borrow $2 billion a day from its competitors in order to function. Yet the delusion is ineradicable. We're No. 1. Well...this is the country you really live in:

This is why people turn away from real Christian values, because the establishment Christian right are walking hypocrites. Their deliberate ignorance of the Gannon affair (due to the grand illusion that Bush is anointed by God and can therefore do no harm) discredits their focus on other issues of equal importance, such as the Philadelphia 5. This gives liberals cannon fodder to attack Christianity as a whole and those caught in-between say, 'if this is God, I want nothing to do with it'.

We Americans have been at war throughout most of the same decades that Switzerland has been at peace. Now that America has mutated from Republic to Empire, we are at perpetual war with every nation that wants to be independent of the whims of the POTUS. At the very least, we must all recognize the fact, and be prepared for the shocks to come. Civil society can recover from a lot of destruction; it can’t recover from cowardice and refusal to prepare for trouble until chaos is already upon us.

On all these issues, we're in the realm of assertions based in faith, a "take-it-all or leave-it" stance, that cannot be negotiated with the non-believer. But, you ask, why do people feel they must fight over these specific beliefs. Because they have boxed themselves into a situation where all their basic assumptions have to stand up or the whole "house of words" tumbles if one shibboleth is removed. This means they cannot discuss, and certainly not accept, the possibility that they might not have it all right. To admit a deficiency sends tremors up the spine.

The political dialogue in post-constitutional America has become so bizarre and corrupted that, even when the unvarnished truth makes a rare appearance in the New York Times—confirming some of the most important tenets of 9/11 "conspiracy theory"—it is hardly noticed.

The place: Rush Limbaugh's front porch.

Rush: (watching TV) Okay, now throw the ball here. Now throw it there.

Soldier: What're you doing, Mr. Limbaugh?

Rush: Directing the war from my armchair! Oops! Another brave patriot just made the ultimate sacrifice to bring liberty to oppressed people! And to bring Jesus back! And to make sure my SUV has plenty of gas! Say, how do you like my $20 million mansion? Pretty good for a loudmouth and college dropout, huh?

Utah, as well as New Hampshire and Montana, seem to be the states leading the way towards restoring states rights - as least as much as possible as long as the fraudulent Seventeenth Amendment remains in place. Last week Utah made news on their stand to repudiate the federal "No Child Left Behind" Act with eight more states looking to follow their fine example. The latest bombshell to come out of Utah's State Legislature is long overdue. They have passed a resolution to Congress discouraging participation in the Free Trade Area of the Americas. (FTAA)

Conservative Americans who consider George W. Bush a champion of national sovereignty have been shocked to learn that the president seeks Senate ratification of the UN's Convention on the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST). Despite the Senate's refusal thus far to ratify the treaty, it went into effect in 1995, and elements of the vast regulatory apparatus it outlines are already in operation.

Suburban AMRAAM SAM missile launcher with 50 pound warhead called "reassuring" by military spokesman.

Last month I noticed an ominous looking weapon system close to my neighbourhood in Bethesda. I was dropping off my 13 year-old daughter at a girlfriend’s house and I noticed what looked like a Patriot Missile system right off the Clara Barton Parkway. I thought President Bush might be going the extra mile to protect my family from those nasty terrorists who are apparently now plotting to attack my neighborhood, but I vowed to investigate what these guys were doing.

In March 2004, 28-year-old Sgt. Camilo Mejia turned himself in to the U.S. military and filed an application for conscientious objector status. On May 21, he was sentenced to one year in prison for refusing to return to fight in Iraq. He was released from prison on Feb. 15, 2005.

The biting comments come in the newest issue of The New Yorker, in which Rather opens up for the first time since CBS released an outside report on the controversy around his "60 Minutes Wednesday" Bush story, in which bogus documents were used to substantiate a story about the president's National Guard service.

China has doubled its oil imports over the last five years and increased oil imports by almost 40% in 2004. China's GDP rose almost ten percent last year, and -- according to a Time magazine report -- about 2.5 million more cars will be on Chinese roads this year alone. Chinese economic expansion will keep oil prices high, and the dollar weak. It is long past time for us to open ANWR, reinvigorate offshore drilling, and to make nuclear power what it must be if our economy is to continue to grow: a common and reliable source of energy. We can push the price of energy down domestically, and let the rest of the world market function as it should, freely and to the economic detriment of Europe.

What they really mean is that the government isn’t free, though it’s apparently easy to mix up the two, very opposite concepts.

Well, how much is “freedom” going to cost us this year? Well, just for “freedom” on the federal level, assuming – incorrectly – that Bush won’t add on some supplemental war spending and Congress won’t pile on additional pork like a glutton piles on extraneous bacon on top of a ham-pork chop sandwich, federal freedom will cost the American taxpayers (not including through monetary trickery via the Federal Reserve) $2.57 trillion.

The U.S. government is exporting what the Pentagon calls "security" around the World and is, at any given time, training soldiers in over 70 countries. One of the best known of these training programs is the Pentagon's International Military Education and Training Program (IMET).