"We don't want to become entertainment." he said, "I think there's something sick about making entertainment out of real people's legal problems. I don't like it in the lower courts, and I don't particularly like it in the Supreme Court."

The late Justice William Brennan once told me that in light of how distant the Supreme Court is to the majority of Americans, he very much favored television during oral arguments. Does anyone on the present court agree? After all, it's not their court; it's our court.

I have known Judge Alito for two decades. We served together in the Meese Justice Department, where he worked in the Solicitor General's Office and was considered the sharpest of Charles Fried's assistants. He is every bit as smart and personable as Chief Justice John Roberts. He is an expert on constitutional law. And he obviously has a longer judicial record, so his judicial philosophy is well-known. Judge Alito is soft-spoken. He is his own man (efforts in the media this morning to paint him as "Scalia-lite" or "Scalito" are intended to fire-up the leftwing base). If he is not qualified to serve on the Supreme Court, then no conservative is qualified.

In the immediate aftermath of September 11, criticism of the government was tantamount to treason. Over four years on and it's almost a cliched fashion trend.

Rather than jumping on the cultural bandwagon however, many individuals have simply hardened their stance on the core issue that dominates all others, state engineered terror and false flag operations.

The possibility of using civilians to assist the Border Patrol in policing both America’s northern and southern borders was offered recently, mostly as a
trial balloon, by U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Robert C. Bonner.

The proposal was immediately rejected by the Department of Homeland Security. However, Bonner indicated that the Border Patrol was considering training volunteers to create “something akin to a Border Patrol auxiliary.”

Cutting immigration would raise American's employment and wages, keep housing prices in check, and make public schools better in quality by not overloading them with children from families that don't speak English and don't put a high value on education.

But instead, incredibly, the President has encouraged illegal immigration—actually goading Mexicans to sneak across the border by saying "You're going to come here if you're worth your salt…"

We could call this “Bushicide”—for the GOP, and for the American nation.

Red Ken wants Mandela’s statue to celebrate the end of an era and coming of a new world where London is no longer the capital of a mighty empire upon which the sun never sets but rather has become a polyglot cosmopolitan city where everyone’s heroes can be equally honored and any idea that the British are or were a superior people, culture, or civilization has become repellent.

In this new age, the West’s assigned role is to repent endlessly of its shameful centuries of racism, imperialism, and colonialism.

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever,” O’Brien told Winston in 1984. In the hard Left’s picture of the future, Western man endlessly does penance and pays tribute for the sins of his fathers. That is what Nelson v. Nelson in Trafalgar Square is all about.

The possible forgery of the information by Defense Department employees would explain the viciousness of the attack on Valerie Plame and her husband. Wilson, when he denounced the forgeries in the New York Times in July 2003, turned an issue in which there was little public interest into something much bigger. The investigation continues, but the campaign against this lone detractor suggests that the administration was concerned about something far weightier than his critical op-ed.

Far from opposing Miers, Democrats were delighted with the mess Bush had stepped in by nominating her. They didn’t dare help Bush by opposing her. The NARAL ladies were told to take a back seat to Democrat dreams of an impotent George Bush. Yeah, maybe Miers would have voted to overturn Roe, but that still wouldn’t have created a majority to overturn it.

But the biggest winners of all are the grassroots conservatives and conservative organizations who have been toiling in the trenches at least since the Bork debacle in an effort to remake the nation’s highest court and bring it back to its originalist roots as established by the Founders. This was a HUGE win for the Right no matter how you slice it.

It’s time to right the wrong that was done to Judge Bork. It’s time to use this “swing” seat to right the direction of the Court. A court which reaffirmed special, rather than equal, treatment of minorities in college admissions. A court which said the government can take away your property and give it to someone else for economic reasons. A court which upheld a congressional law infringing on citizens’ right to free speech 30 days before an election. A court which is out of control and out of line.

If the president does, in fact, nominate someone like that, the Left will be loaded for bear. They’re gonna kick like mules and bite like crocodiles. It’s gonna be an old-fashioned bar brawl, complete with mud, blood and beer. Oh, what a glorious constitutional fight it will be.

Under this scenario, which is only mildly paranoid when you think about it, the president picked Miers knowing that her nomination ultimately would fail but also knowing that in failing the conditions would be riper for the selection of the sort of ultra-conservative “red meat” Supreme Court candidate the president’s right-wing covets.

The Miers’ nomination, in other words, was designed from the get-go to clear the path for the President’s true choice.

We have been warned. Prepare for a broader war in the Middle East, as plans are being laid for the next U.S.-led regime change – in Syria.

We should remember Ronald Reagan’s admonition regarding this area of the world. Ronald Reagan reflected on Lebanon in his memoirs, describing the Middle East as a jungle and Middle East politics as irrational. It forced him to rethink his policy in the region. It’s time we do some rethinking as well.

With the nominations of John Roberts and Bernard Bernanke, Bush appointed men of experience and proven capacity who shared his beliefs. Given this heaven-sent second chance, he should do the same with the Supreme Court: Pick a justice whose credentials are unimpeachable and whose judicial philosophy reads likes an excerpt from The Collected Works of Antonin Scalia.

With a single stroke -- the nomination of a Supreme Court justice who will remove the smile from the countenance of Chuck Schumer and unite his unhappy household in praise of Bush and anticipation of battle, as they pull down the rusty old pike-staffs from the wall, President Bush can begin the resurrection of his presidency.

In the title of the old Gospel Song, “Oh Happy Day.”

Our elites, our educated and successful professionals, are the ones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us. I refer specifically to the elites of journalism and politics, the elites of the Hill and at Foggy Bottom and the agencies, the elites of our state capitals, the rich and accomplished and successful of Washington, and elsewhere. I have a nagging sense, and think I have accurately observed, that many of these people have made a separate peace. That they're living their lives and taking their pleasures and pursuing their agendas; that they're going forward each day with the knowledge, which they hold more securely and with greater reason than nonelites, that the wheels are off the trolley and the trolley's off the tracks, and with a conviction, a certainty, that there is nothing they can do about it.

With Republicans like these, who needs Democrats? These Senators seem to think the main reason Republicans elected them is so they can spend money. They are oblivious to the fact that they have absolutely no Constitutional authority to spend our money this way.

President Bush has managed to turn a Supreme Court nomination into a cruel version of The Apprentice, expecting Harriet Miers, who is commendable at many jobs, to take up a wholly new one for which she is obviously miscast, a job which requires becoming an originalist in a matter of weeks and throws her into scholarly tasks she's never performed before. Amateur hour has gone much too far when barely literate Democratic Senators, still sore from the schooling John Roberts gave them, are giving her a second round of homework and puzzling over her admiration for the jurisprudence of "Warren Burger."

In all their guises – in relation to the media, the federal bureaucracy, and other countries – they actually were dominating isolationists. They took a once-honorable Republican heartland tradition – isolationism – turned it on its head, and thrust it into the world. They acted in Iraq and elsewhere as armed imperial isolationists. Where the elder Bush and Bill Clinton were multinationalists and globalizers, they were ultra-nationalists and militarists, focused only on the military solution to any problem – and damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!

Fed chairman Alan Greenspan has estimated that equity extraction from residential property has been sufficient to have accounted for all of the decline in personal saving since 1995. Of course, the monetization of wealth from homes hardly came out of thin air. It required an enormous build-up of debt - sufficient to take up the outstanding volume of household indebtedness by 20 percentage points of GDP over the past five years, equaling the gain over the preceding 20 years.

One estimate says that higher energy product prices are the functional equivalent of an annualized tax of around $130 billion on US consumers, or about 1.4% of total disposable personal income. With a negative saving rate, a significant portion of that tax will undoubtedly be funded by a retrenchment of discretionary consumption. The world's consumer is now facing major cash-flow pressures heading into the all-important holiday buying season.

As a small business owner, it deeply disturbs me that our elected officials are so willing to chase after these big businesses at the expense of helping the “little guy.” The fact is that small business owners are the backbone of our economy; therefore it is only logical that their existence, success and growth should be nurtured—not dismissed. This isn’t high-level business strategy. It is merely common sense. But then again, that may be part of the problem. As a professor once quipped to me, “If sense is so common, then why doesn’t everyone have it?”

The only way I see around this scenario is to tell the president, and the Republican elite in Washington in no uncertain terms, that staying home is exactly what will happen…by design. If the Republican majority in Washington cannot unite around true conservative values and principles--the Supreme Court being the most obvious and pressing--then perhaps the GOP needs to spend another few decades wondering the political wilderness in order to rediscover it’s roots.

Political Correctness is a bullet aimed at the very heart of our mores, our culture, our traditional values. Political Correctness is a buzz phrase to hide the goals of the leftist historians and educators in indoctrinating another generation of students with the intent to procreate and build a new radical society.

If the Iraqi insurgency evolves, as it appears to be doing, into a civil-religious war, the Sunni and Shia populations of those three autocracies cannot but be affected and those nations perhaps drawn in. And peoples' wars have almost always proven unfortunate for kings and emirs.

How does the balance sheet look for the United States?

But there is no time to bask in victory. Senator Edward Kennedy is determined to reattach the hate bill, S.1145, unmodified, to The Sex Offenders Registration Act, S.1088. If that fails, he may attach it to the Streamlined Procedures Act. Kennedy's staffers told me they are confident of victory, considering the Senate's 65-to-33 vote in favor of the hate bill last year.

While George Bush and his neoconservative allies connive to use Ronald Reagan's legacy as the latest justification for maintaining the deadly, dangerous and unnecessary occupation of a distant land, it has fallen to a more historically-savvy and genuinely-conservative Republican, Ron Paul, to honor that legacy with the suggestion that it might indeed be time to bring the troops home.

Unconfirmed sources report that the White House has suffered considerable damage from hurricane Miers. Hurricane Miers has been stalled over Washington D.C. for over three weeks shows no sign of weakening. Experts believe she could remain troublesome for Washington for several more weeks.

There is no good reason to keep going down this road other than the sheer stupid force of inertia, i.e. this is the nomination, so we're stuck with it. Indeed, if Senate Republicans and conservative lawyers were being candid about their views of this nomination, it probably would already have sunk. This moment calls for leadership from Republican senators, who should go to the White House and insist that this nomination will not work and should be withdrawn. The White House is too insulated and reflexively defensive (note President Bush's pique yesterday when asked about criticism of Miers) to figure this out on its own.

It’s clear from Secretary Chertoff’s statement that this business about "return[ing] every single illegal entrant" certainly does NOT apply at all to the thousands of illegal aliens already given a de facto non-deportation amnesty by being allowed to adjust their status to permanent residence under the shameful Section 245(i) give-aways.

This Section 245(i) crowd of illegal aliens and visa-overstayers aren’t being returned ANYWHERE!

War is the most destructive of human activities, and because it destroys everything worth conserving, I marvel that it has come to be associated with “conservatism.” Yet conservatives who oppose war find themselves isolated like lepers among “mainstream” conservatives, who regard them as puzzling eccentrics — charitably seen, perhaps, as in some spiritual peril requiring prayer. I guess if you find yourself preferring peace, at least your conscience should be troubled about it.

As more and more Americans feel the pinch of rising gas and oil prices, it is “time for President Bush to get on the phone and make some calls.”

That succinct commentary by a network television broadcaster was directed squarely at the Bush administration with the recommendation that someone in the White House call the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and the big oil companies and demand they share some of their soaring profits with strapped U.S. citizens whipsawed between higher prices and static income.

An impeachment process directed against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al. would inevitably undermine the entire neoconservative construct. Iit would also backlash on the Pentagon's top military brass. If criminal charges are laid, Vice President Cheney would be one of the main targets:

The Oct. 11 grand jury appearance by New York Times reporter Judith Miller has shifted the focus of attention to Cheney's office. Miller's hour-long testimony, according to news accounts, focussed on a third meeting that she had with Cheney's chief of staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby in June 2003—a month prior to the publication of Valerie Plame's name in a Robert Novak syndicated column. Plame, the wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV, was "outed" by Novak as a CIA officer. Novak reported that he had been given Plame's name by two "senior administration officials," now widely believed to be Libby and President Bush's chief political counsel Karl Rove.

Miller's game was the Times' game. They were witting co-conspirators. When Miller co-wrote (with Stephen Engelberg and William Broad) Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War, the Times was happy to print her stories in the paper designed to push the book up into Bestseller status, in a staggering conflict of interest that earned the paper plenty of money. This, remember, was when Miller was sent that mysterious envelope of white powder that turned out not to be anthrax spores, which gave the book yet another boost.

But the indispensable enablers of war are the New Democrats and potential presidential nominees, Sens. Kerry, Edwards, Clinton, Biden and Bayh. Fearful that Bush and Rove would use their refusal to authorize war in October 2002 to impeach Democrats' patriotism, they voted to give him a blank check for war. Six months later, Bush cashed it.

Since President Bush passed over many legal stars to appoint his Texas friend, the battle over the Miers nomination will largely be fought over side issues--among them whether the Judiciary Committee will attempt to resurrect old Bush scandals from Texas by subpoenaing the director of the Texas Lottery Commission whom Ms. Miers fired. A spokesman for Sen. Pat Leahy, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, says he plans to explore all aspects of Ms. Miers's career, including her tenure at the Lottery Commission from 1995 to 2000.

And most Americans, liberal or conservative, can't imagine it any other way. The public is no longer content to accept a mere chief magistrate, charged with faithful execution of the laws; instead, over the 20th century, the president has been transformed into a national Father-Protector, who is supposed to keep us safe from everything from economic dislocation to bad weather. As the National Post's Colby Cosh put it two weeks after the Katrina debacle, "the 49 percent of Americans who have been complaining for five years about George W. Bush being a dictator are now vexed to the point of utter incoherence because for the last fortnight he has failed to do a sufficiently convincing impression of a dictator."

She can't count on Committee Republicans, either. Another conservative Committee member, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, commented after the TUL-PAC questionnaire came out that Miers still needs to "show she has the capacity to be a Supreme Court justice." The New York Times reported two weeks ago that after meeting with Miers, conservative Committee member Sam Brownback of Kansas "said he would consider voting against the nomination, even if President Bush made a personal plea for his support." And squishy Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, along with ranking Democrat Leahy, it was reported yesterday, was very displeased with Miers's "incomplete" answers to a Judiciary Committee questionnaire.

Moreover, in one of the most highly unusual arrangements between a news organization and the Department of Defense, Miller sat in on the initial debriefing of Jamal Sultan Tikriti, according to a June 25, 2003 article published in the Washington Post

The Post article sheds some light on her unusual arrangement in obtaining a special security clearance from the Department of Defense which is now the subject of a Democratic congressional inquiry. On Monday, Reps. John Conyers and Ira Skelton, the ranking Democrats on the House Judiciary and Armed Services committees sent Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld a letter demanding an explanation to Miller's top secret security clearance, which Rumsfeld reportedly personally authorized.

The current push into world dominance is a religion. It is worshipped by not only Americans, but non-Americans as well. The whole earth seems polarized in its furious agenda. In every country there are those who see the President of the United States as the great Satan, but there are other millions who virtually worship this man Bush, as a Savior, a Christ, coming upon the scene to deliver the world from evil. This is true worldwide, and it does not even exclude some Muslims.

Although Joseph McCarthy was one of the most demonized American politicians of the last century, new information -- including half-century-old FBI recordings of Soviet embassy conversations -- are showing that McCarthy was right in nearly all his accusations.

"With Joe McCarthy it was the losers who've written the history which condemns him," said Dan Flynn, director of Accuracy in Academia's recent national conference on McCarthy, broadcast by C-SPAN.

Democracy sometimes leads to silly laws such as the one that prohibited married couples from buying contraception in Connecticut. But allowing Americans to vote has never led to crèches being torn down across America. It's never led to prayer being purged from every public school in the nation. It's never led to gay marriage. It's never led to returning slaves who had escaped to free states to their slave masters. And it's never led to 30 million dead babies.

We've gone from a representative democracy to a monarchy, and the most appalling thing is–even conservatives just hope like the dickens the next king is a good one.

"We have to be careful, if somebody does this kind of provocation, big violent explosions of some kind, we have to not take the word of the masters there in Washington that this was some terrorist event because it could well be a provocation allowing them, or seemingly to allow them to get what they want."

Conservatives have to stop giving Republicans a pass on spending. This habit has only emboldened GOP leaders to act more irresponsibly. If the base is not willing to hold party leaders accountable -- by abandoning them if necessary -- then they will quickly become the lapdogs of the Republican Party, stroked every now and then, but wholly controlled by their masters.

What now? The American Conservative Movement, which I regard as the flower of democracy and the savior of the Free World, to which I immigrated and in whose closing years I was proud to play a small part as a journalist, is finished. Greatly to my surprise, those who said the end of the Cold War would prove fatal to it were right.

It turns out that many who joined the anti-communist coalition also harbored messianic fantasies about "global democracy" and America as the first "universal nation" (i.e. polity. Nation-states must have a specific ethnic core.)

But the most sweeping challenge to President Bush's faith-based war comes from F. Gregory Cause III in Foreign Affairs. Writes Cause: "There is no evidence that democracy reduces terror. Indeed, a democratic Middle East would probably result in Islamist governments unwilling to cooperate with Washington."

Without outright calling their co-worker a liar and a shill for the Bush administration's war marketing campaign, they left almost no doubt in the reader's mind not only that this was in fact what she was, but that the Times' senior management and many of her colleagues at the paper thought exactly the same thing.

By her reasoning, Miss Miers should be condemned for thwarting a law on behalf of wealthy and powerful businessmen who craved self-protective rules to avoid lawsuits by their hapless victims.

In sum, doesn't Miss Miers lack the intellectual acuity indispensable to sound constitutional thinking?

I could go on, but the point is that George W. Bush has never demonstrated any interest in shrinking the size of government. And on many occasions, he has increased government significantly. Yet if there is anything that defines conservatism in America, it is hostility to government expansion. The idea of big government conservatism, a term often used to describe Mr. Bush’s philosophy, is a contradiction in terms.

So why should it surprise anyone that the Democrat members of Congress would buy into Bush’s welfare-state rationale for invading Iraq? In the minds of the Democrats, Bush’s invasion reflects our federal daddy-god’s compassionate and caring love for the Iraqi people.

At any rate, pandemics – even the bad one in 1918–1919 – run their course and stop on their own, usually in a year or two. Even the 1918 one killed only about 550,000 Americans, and so it is well to keep in mind for perspective purposes that, on average, 2 million of us die every year from one cause or another.

The apex of the Times hierarchy has provided no indication of personal remorse or institutional accountability. And the next time agenda-setting for U.S. military action -- against Iran or Syria or wherever -- shifts into high gear, it's very unlikely that the New York Times or other top-tier U.S. media outlets will present major roadblocks.

By hanging out a shingle reading “No Males Need Apply!” Bush has made the O’Connor seat the affirmative action seat for women on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Which raises a question: Will Justice Harriet Miers, a beneficiary of affirmative action, recuse herself when the issue of discrimination against men comes before the court?

If George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck is the best shot the left can unload on Joe McCarthy these days, the famous Red hunter is well on his way to a thorough rehabilitation. Ann Coulter has already begun the process in Treason and Stan Evans’ much anticipated book—due out next year—is likely to boost the late Wisconsin senator’s stock even further.

Because he did not distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants, the $1,800 figure is the average of both.

But just taking the roughly 10 million illegal immigrants in the United States, and using Denslow's figures, that would come to a cost of about $18 billion annually, slightly more than the entire NASA budget.

In any case, the information is important to the swirling debate and should spur a serious study of the financial impact on the federal government.

Here's a question that prosecutors would be naturally curious about, and I'd be surprised if Fitzgerald didn't ask Miller about it during her testimony: what was she doing in Jackson Hole, anyway?

If Miller met with Cheney at some point in this time frame, under the terms of her agreement with Fitzgerald she couldn't even be asked about it.

Renominate the Honorable Robert H. Bork to be an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court.

Lest there be any doubt, this suggestion to resubmit Bork’s name for Senate consideration is no satirical flourish. I am absolutely, positively serious about this. Bork was abundantly qualified to sit on the Supreme Court when he was nominated (and rejected) in 1987 and he remains so today because he is widely acknowledged as one of the foremost legal scholars in the United States. As opposed to Harriet Miers, widely acknowledged as one of the foremost legal scholars in her immediate family.

Supporters of the law scoff at the suggestion that pastors and religious leaders would be held accountable for asserting, from a biblical perspective, that homosexuality is immoral. But we have seen cases across the globe where this is taking place.

Such speech is already under attack. Liberty Counsel notes these examples:

And yet, the Trouble with Harriet is much larger than any of this. It is not just that she is so obviously unfit to hold the office of associate justice of the US Supreme Court, though she is certainly that. It is the simple, depressing lack of seriousness demonstrated by the White House in coming up with such a candidate, the sheer cramped and occluded smallness of the thinking that now seems to characterise the Bush Administration’s approach to governing.

One condemned property was valued at $60,000 (Cristofaro’s) by the assessors hired by the city. This is the same city, which, in 2000, assessed the property at $215,000 for tax purposes. The rationale being that as the property is under threat of condemnation, it has no value. " It is important to note that Christofaro actually offered to give the city his house n return for one of the yet to be built condos. However, city officials told him that would be impossible because they didn’t yet know how much the new condos would be worth. The elderly whose family homes were taken from them in the name of "progress" were left not only homeless, but penniless, as well. There is nothing "just" about a system that sanctions stealing private property.

Some of the most important cases likely to come before the Supreme Court will involve Bush administration claims of unprecedented Presidential powers. Both liberals and conservatives who believe in limited government under law should reject her nomination unless she can present convincing evidence that she will stand up to her devoted boss in defense of the Constitution. Both Democratic and Republican Senators should ask her:

The skepticism is not abating. Back home, the Liberty Legal Institute, the only conservative legal foundation in Texas, has declined to endorse her. Several large GOP donors in Texas have met to discuss spending large sums to run ads calling on Ms. Miers to withdraw. "They include both male and female friends of hers who don't think the confirmation process will be good for her or the country," one told me. "They're not sexists, they're realists." This even though the White House has ominously put out the word in Texas: "If you oppose this nomination, you oppose the president." Everyone knows what the political ramifications of that can mean in the world of George W. Bush and Karl Rove.

An unborn baby, according to the court, enjoyed no rightful legal presumption as to its right to be born. In Roe, the social passions of the 1960s -- the rejection of authority, the exaltation of personal autonomy -- flowed and mixed together and inundated the landscape.

Roe came to symbolize everything Americans either loved or hated about the post-Eisenhower period.

There's no way to resolve such concerns, pending a test case in which the issue is, starkly, affirm or slap down Roe. But the very ambiguity of these times and controversies goes far toward showing us the court's crime in Roe. Crime, yes -- the crime of setting Americans against each other and of unhealthily diverting their energies and passions. This is what you get into when you call on courts to shortcircuit the deliberative processes of democracy.

In 1951, one of America's true conservatives, Senator Robert A. Taft, published a book titled A Foreign Policy for Americans.

Like the Founding Fathers, Senator Taft valued liberty here at home above "superpower" status abroad. The Founding Fathers understood that these two are in tension. To preserve liberty here at home, we need a weak federal government, because a strong federal government is the greatest potential threat to our liberties. The division of powers between the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government is intended to make decisions and actions by the federal government difficult.

Senator Richard Lugar (R.-Ind.) recently revealed that so-called bloggers would "probably not" be considered journalists by the Free Flow of Information Act of 2005, which will include provisions detailing "shield law" protections for journalists. In effect, this could mean that it will be open season on those pesky bloggers once this bill passes.

By a margin of 50% to 44%, Americans want Congress to consider impeaching President Bush if he lied about the war in Iraq, according to a new poll commissioned by AfterDowningStreet.org, a grassroots coalition that supports a Congressional investigation of President Bush's decision to invade Iraq in 2003.

The poll was conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs, the highly-regarded non-partisan polling company. The poll interviewed 1,001 U.S. adults on October 6-9.

Can anyone read these remarks in full and say honestly, yes, Bill Bennett was proposing racial genocide, through forced abortions on black women, to cut the crime rate?

As for abortions, according to Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy, one in three today are performed on black women, 413,000 in 2002 alone. Thus, more than 1 percent of America's entire black population is summarily put to death each year, before these unborn children ever see the light of day.

Dual citizenship is also a problem because some immigrants have falsely been led to believe that they are or can be dual citizens. Mexico has even named a cabinet minister whose mission is to encourage Mexicans (both illegals and naturalized U.S. citizens) to vote in Mexican elections and, as he said, to "think Mexico first."

Congress has never legislated a specific prohibition on dual citizenship and the Supreme Court has never ruled on this precise point. But to become a U.S. citizen, immigrants are required by our law to swear allegiance to the United States AND to absolutely renounce any and all allegiance to the nation from which they came.

Hamstringing Bush before the upcoming debate over amnesty for illegal aliens is not a price to paid, it’s a prize to be won.

Lasting damage might be done to Bush, but what about the Conservative movement? Unlikely. In fact, the confirmation of Miers is much more likely to harm the movement than the opposite being true. This is a fight that energizes the base. Capitulation and acceptance energizes no one.

No rescue will come within the usual exchange of White House or Congress. The failure is widely bipartisan, if especially jarring in the mythology and crudity of a neo-conservative cabal. Even if Democratic national security advisors magically acquired more foresight and courage, they would be unlikely to effect significant change in policy, so captive are politicians of both parties to narrow, serve-at-any-price interests of corporate and wealthy contributors and lobbies, the bottom-line politics and bondage that trump ideology and all else. America remains so unresponsive to the new challenges-the politics of foreign policy so corrupted and stifled, the public so misled-that a great national debate on national security is itself an urgent strategic imperative.

The crisis over Harriet Miers, however, is much different. It reflects a schism not over ideology, but over perceptions of the President himself. While many activists are extremely unhappy with the choice of Miers and some conservative intellectuals have expressed opposition over her supposed lack of credentials, the question of supporting or opposing the nominee comes down to one, simple question.

How much do you trust George W. Bush? For the conservative “true believers” however, this is the crisis of the Bush presidency.

If the Democrat leadership is, in fact, the "loyal" opposition, they have a duty to participate in civil debate on all these issues. Nancy Pelosi’s boycott of the Katrina inquiry, and the rush by the Democrat leadership to blame Bush for all that went wrong in Katrina’s aftermath, illustrates the difference between "loyal" opposition, and opportunistic obstructionists whose quest is regaining power.

The visceral objections to Harriet Miers have more to do with the fact that many conservative activists have been toiling in the political trenches for many years to elect a Republican President and a Republican Senate for the expressed purpose of being able to seat individuals on the nation’s highest court who have the conservative judicial and intellectual star-power and brain-power we were denied by the left when they “borked” Robert Bork. The fact is, with Republican kiesters warming 55 of the Senate’s 100 seats, a superior Bork-like nominee could have been confirmed to join Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Antonin Scalia and Chief Justice John Roberts on the Supreme Court of the United States of America.

If the cloak of democracy is stripped away, Bush’s "wars for democracy" begin to look like the foreign adventures of a megalomaniac. Remove Bush’s rhetorical cover, and tolerance at home and abroad for Bush’s war would evaporate. If Bush persisted, he would become a pariah.

Americans may feel that they cannot undercut a president at war, in which case Americans will become an embattled people consumed by decades of conflict. Americans can boot out Bush or pay dearly in blood and money.

But something fundamental has changed. Looking out at the American political landscape of the last 25 years shows three broad trends. The first is increasing levels of hostile partisanship, which has led to the dramatic polarization of the electorate. The second is the astronomical increase in the cost of political campaigning that has been fed by an equally astronomical increase in the amount of money donated to politicians by both individuals and businesses. And third, a general decrease in the effectiveness of government, where no matter which party controls the White House or the Congress, the results are often the same; nothing changes.

Conservatives have been especially bad on tolerating egregious uses of the military. We need to reflect on what it means to have the military take over in the event of crisis. What kind of ideology promotes such things, and looks the other way when it happens? I think I know, and it serves as a reminder that not all threats to freedom come from the Left.

The age of confident central planning is behind us. Right now, the state is just trying to keep its head above water. If freedom is to have a future, the time will come when it will sink to an ignoble end, and we will wonder how we ever believed in this myth called government crisis management.

I have changed my mind about Harriet Miers. Last Thursday, I wrote in OpinionJournal's Political Diary that "while skepticism of Ms. Miers is justified, the time is fast approaching when such expressions should be muted until the Senate hearings begin. At that point, Ms. Miers will finally be able to speak for herself."

But that was before I interviewed more than a dozen of her friends and colleagues along with political players in Texas. I came away convinced that questions about Ms. Miers should be raised now--and loudly--because she has spent her entire life avoiding giving a clear picture of herself. "She is unrevealing to the point that it's an obsession," says one of her close colleagues at her law firm.

The stunning series of articles by WND columnist Jerome Corsi, raising serious and nagging questions about Harriet Miers' role as chairman of the Texas Lottery Commission and the cover-up of the way that story intersects with George W. Bush's National Guard service, points up why this kind of cronyism was frowned upon by the Founding Fathers.

When presidents, prime ministers, bankers and generals rub shoulders with European royalty at the annual secret Bilderberg meeting, they discuss the business of running markets and wars without being accountable to the public.

The problem is not that Harriet Miers stands outside the elite legal establishment but that she is very much part of it. The Bush administration, searching here and there for a marketing point to quiet skeptical conservatives, has been touting her simple, populist virtues. But her substantial involvement in the American Bar Association suggests she's spent far more time in the company of judicial activists than in the company of unfashionable originalists whose understanding of the Constitution corresponds to the common sense of ordinary Americans.

Garet Garrett described the psychology behind the American drive to empire as "a complex of vaunting and fear," and surely both fear and vaunting permeate the president's speech.

This speech proves what the rest of the world already knows, and an increasing number of Americans are coming to realize: that there is no limit to the arrogance of our leaders, who preen and pose on the world stage as "liberators" and are, in fact, the world's worst hypocrites.

Bush also attacked Syria and Iran by name, calling the two countries "allies of convenience" of Islamic radicals "with a long history of collaboration with terrorists."

The main message of the speech, however, appeared to be aimed primarily at his fellow citizens, and particularly Republicans and senior military officers who have become increasingly uneasy about the direction of Bush's anti-terrorist campaign, especially in Iraq.

In singing Miers's praises, Bush agents contend her every thought is of the president's best interests, not her own. That may be a desirable profile for a White House counsel, but it hardly commends a Supreme Court justice who will be around long after George W. Bush is gone. By naming his longtime attorney, Bush risks the charge of cronyism.

There are today third-generation conservatives who have bravely defended their beliefs in hostile law schools, clerked for Supreme Court justices, paid their dues in the White House or the Department of Justice, joined the Federalist Society, advanced by excellence and merit to federal judgeships. The message of the Miers appointment to this generation is: You made a mistake. You left a “paper trail.” Is this the message we want to send to the next generation: Don’t let anybody know where you stand on gay rights, affirmative action, or Roe v. Wade?

The president would have been politically better served by what Pat Buchanan called a bench-clearing brawl. A fractious and sparring base would have come together arm in arm to fight for something all believe in: the beginning of the end of command-and-control liberalism on the U.S. Supreme Court. Senate Democrats, forced to confront a serious and principled conservative of known stature, would have damaged themselves in the fight. If in the end President Bush lost, he'd lose while advancing a cause that is right and doing serious damage to the other side. Then he could come back to win with the next nominee. And if he won he'd have won, rousing his base and reminding them why they're Republicans.

Believing in 'Peak Oil' is not a price to pay to avoid the price of drilling for oil in new ways, for setting fair and unwavering commodity prices. The cost of blood and lives and the future of nations are too much to pay for the folly of 'Peak Oil.' In fact, realizing that oil is a self-renewing resource puts the neocon agenda into a new perspective. Instead of seeing 'Peak Oil' as the end days of technological civilization literally losing its power, see this idea as the further manipulation towards fascist power and subjugation that it is: still another way to scare the world into believing its resources are terminally finite, and that we must be led into another and another war that must be waged to survive.

In California's District 48, Minuteman Founder Jim Gilchrist emerged victorious from Tuesday's primary, having forced a run-off of the top vote-getters of each qualified party in a Dec. 6 special general election—and having scored a second-place surge of Election Day votes.

I like the term "paleoliberal" because it puts "paleoconservatism" in some context. Paleoconservatives, though they have some libertarian leanings here and there, are not nearly as clearly libertarian as a paleoliberal would be, since conservatives in the old days were never as libertarian as the classical liberals were.

The paleoliberal tradition is one of individual liberty, free markets, freedom from state persecution and privilege, cultural tolerance, private property, freedom of association, and peace. This is my political program, my ideology summed up in bullet points, my agenda.

As President Bush's counsel, Harriet E. Miers continued the expansive interpretation of presidential powers favored by her predecessor, Alberto Gonzales, who backed Bush's authority to hold terrorist suspects without trial, as well as the White House's right to withhold more administration documents from public disclosure than in the past.

Miers has also been outspoken in her support of reauthorizing the Patriot Act, which gave the executive branch new powers of surveillance over US citizens.

Both the FBI and CIA are calling it the first case of espionage in the White House in modern history.

Officials tell ABC News the alleged spy worked undetected at the White House for almost three years. Leandro Aragoncillo, 46, was a U.S. Marine most recently assigned to the staff of Vice President Dick Cheney.

Time Warner's ISP, Road Runner, has blocked access to all of Alex Jones' flagship websites across the entire United States.

We were first alerted to this problem early this morning when several locals in Austin reported that they were unable to access Infowars.com, PrisonPlanet.com or Prison Planet.tv.

If Time Warner do not immediately restore subscribers' access to our websites we will initiate a wider boycott campaign. They are already receiving a deluge of complaints and according to some are now claiming that this is an 'error' that they are looking into and citing other websites that have also been affected, even though these websites are having no problems.

Senators beginning what ought to be a protracted and exacting scrutiny of Harriet Miers should be guided by three rules. First, it is not important that she be confirmed. Second, it might be very important that she not be. Third, the presumption -- perhaps rebuttable but certainly in need of rebutting -- should be that her nomination is not a defensible exercise of presidential discretion to which senatorial deference is due.

Here’s your question. What is the true cost of all the lies?

Nimble minds would immediately respond "$2 billion per week in Iraq, $1 billion per month in Afghanistan, $14 trillion per year for Israel, counting all the labyrinthine corporate perks ... " and continue chattering through a long list that ends somewhere around trillions being made on poisons that are put into bottles and sold as medicine. You get the general idea that a considerable amount of spare change disappears in the blink of an eye as the cost of doing business in the world of official lies.

True conservatives holding office deserve our support now more than ever. Republicans who continually offend our principles don't deserve our support on the grounds that they share our party affiliation. Without demonstrating negative consequences, we will never get positive results.

Principles lost are difficult to recover. After selling out our principles for the president's benefit, we now have the gall to accuse George W. Bush of selling us out? It's not difficult to understand why President Bush felt it politically safe to insult his base by nominating Harriet Miers: no consequences for past assaults on conservative principles results in future assaults on conservative principles. Fool us once, shame on the president. Fool us 137 times, shame on us.

Much of this new foreign aid proposed by Bush would flow through United Nations channels, such as the "Global Fund" Bush mentioned in his UN speech. That's part of the plan for empowering the UN, gradually transforming it from incipient to full-blown world government. "We believe in the United Nations. We want the UN to be strengthened. We want the UN to be effective around the world," U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Nicholas Burns said, reiterating the Bush administration worldview. The summit's agenda would result, Burns said, in a "greatly strengthened United Nations" making it a "more effective institution and allowing the United States to participate in the UN in a very vigorous way." Indeed, the U.S. government signed onto the outrageous 40-page World Summit Outcomes document that emerged from the summit, which calls for, among other things, "cooperating with the International Criminal Court," the UN judicial monstrosity that violates every principle of "the rule of law" the UN sanctimoniously pretends to champion.

Bennett is correct. He is not a racist and he is not recommending abortion. He was using a Socratic hypothetical…and even then…qualified it with the broad caveat that it would be "impossible, ridiculous, AND morally reprehensible".

A simple statistical analysis reveals FACTS defenders of the indefensible always gripe about - according to 'The Color of Crime':

Michael Steele is lieutenant governor of Maryland, and the DSCC, and along with most everyone else, expects Steele to run for the open seat of retiring Sen. Paul Sarbanes.

Apparently nothing frightens the DSCC more than an articulate and charismatic black American who also happens to be a Reagan conservative. How else to explain the behavior of two of Schumer's campaign committee members — research director Katie Barge and junior staffer Lauren Weiner — who dug for dirt using Steele's Social Security number, reportedly culled from court records, to fraudulently and illegally obtain his credit report?

Thus, in much constitutional jurisprudence what is most needed by a Supreme Court justice is not legal training, but historical understanding and philosophical learning.

He or she should be well-read in history and understand economics. This justice should recognize the problems and dangers that result when sinful human beings use the coercive power of government. And this appointee should understand the philosophical premises undergirding the constitutional system created by the nation's founders.

Last month at its "World Summit" in New York, the United Nations took another big step toward destroying national sovereignty – a step that could threaten the United States in the future. The UN passed a resolution at this summit that, among other things, establishes a "Peacebuilding Commission," creates a worldwide UN "democracy fund," and most troublingly codifies the dangerous "Responsibility to Protect" report as part of UN policy. The three are certainly interrelated.

Bush had a chance for greatness in remaking the Supreme Court, a chance to succeed where his Republican precedessors from Nixon to his father all failed. He instinctively recoiled from it. He blew it. His only hope now is that Harriet Miers, if confirmed, will not vote like the lady she replaced, or, worse, like his father’s choice who also had “no paper trail,” David Souter.

It seems clear that Judith Miller and her lawyers aren't telling the truth. What isn't obvious, is why. Three possibilities:

1) Miller went to jail because she wanted to pose as a martyr, and she just needs an excuse for why she now wants to go home. That's plausible as far as it goes, but it doesn't explain why Miller stayed in jail for another week and a half after getting Libby's "clarification," while her lawyer negotiated with the prosecutor.

2) Miller went to jail because she didn't want to answer questions about her tipping off a terrorist-supporting group that the FBI was about to execute a search warrant, an episode that also could have come before Fitzpatrick's grand jury. She and her lawyer laid the blame on Libby so that the public wouldn't learn about the other episode, which is pretty much unknown. Plausible, and consistent with what we've been told about her lawyer's deal with the prosecutor--if, indeed, the terrorist tipoff was something that Fitzgerald could have pursued. I'm not sure whether that's correct or not.

3) The third alternative is the most sinister: Miller went to jail to protect not Libby, but another source or sources, and the prosecutor has agreed not to ask her about those other sources. If that's true, it suggests that someone in the administration--presumably, either Karl Rove or Scooter Libby--is being set up.

In answer to a growing swell of interest in realistic responses to the excesses of the present American empire, The Middlebury Institute has been launched by a group of activists and professionals to promote the serious study of separatism, secession, self-determination and similar devolutionary trends and developments, on both national and international scales.

Heterosexual marriage is based on a woman surrendering worldly power to a man who is dedicated to her and their children's welfare. Trust and surrender is the way a woman empowers and loves a man. This is the essence of heterosexual marriage. The man earns this trust through a patient process of courtship. The woman must consider her choice carefully.

The photo on Page 3 of the Washington Times was a metaphor for the Bush administration and the Republican Party.

It is a shot of the most powerful vice president in history, hunched over, gazing down, as he slowly mounts the steps of the White House, with the aid of a cane. But where Dick Cheney is recuperating smoothly from knee surgery, the administration appears in need of resuscitation.