Congress has become avarice writ large, taking more and more money from the American people for projects the people never see, use, or need but enrich pols and the special interests to which they are allied. In any other context this would be called theft. In Congress it is called outreach to constituents or government services. The real crisis, in other words, is not this or that avaricious clown (who is usually too inept to conceal his corruption like his colleagues) but a widely held corrupt political philosophy that normalizes avarice as a routine practice of the federal government.

When the ultra-left Anti-American Southern Poverty Law Center attacked Virginia Abernethy, the head of FAIR (Dan Stein) joined the chorus of jackals. Rather than earning the gratitude of the SPLC, they pointed out his hypocrisy in taking money from a known scientific racist and then attacking the “racism” of a scholar who politely pointed out that most people like to spend time with their own ethnic group.

The think-tank critics of US immigration policy are all one or another brand of neoconservative. Having no roots in a country that they do not try to understand, the “professionals” are interested only in generating a sufficient paper flow to justify their salaries and expense accounts. If you ask them why the old American stock is not reproducing, they either stare blankly or talk cheerfully about hardworking Asians.

But the worst thing about a guest-worker program is what it would do to American freedom. The president’s proposal would institutionalize a separate workforce in our country that would not enjoy the same economic rights as free citizens.

It would convert a portion of our free-market economy--where workers and employers freely negotiate for jobs, wages, promotions and salary increases--into an unfree economy, where “guest” workers, allowed to live in our country for as long as six years, could take only certain jobs, could work only for the lowest wages, and could not be rewarded for excellence by being promoted into a higher paying job that an American would be willing to do for the same pay.

And instead of the Woodward/Bernstein team, we have Judy Miller (and the reborn Bob Woodward). Only a tiny handful of reporters at the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times (all with sinking circulations), 60 Minutes and almost uniquely the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh have been doing the kind of serious, in-depth investigative journalism that was done by many in the Watergate era. On-line reporters, able to circulate a single story at lightening speed around the world, are fueled by the same obsessive zeal as their age of Watergate print compatriots but have radically less money to support investigations of any sort. As Carl Bernstein pointed out recently in Vanity Fair, the Bush administration, like Nixon's, has succeeded only too well "in making the conduct of the press the issue -- again in wartime with false claims and smears directed at political opponents, reporters, newspapers, magazines and broadcast organizations for supposedly undermining national security." If only the media of our era had actually justified such attacks.

Hey, immigration patriots got the rhetoric in Tucson—and that’s an improvement.

But we still need the reality—particularly because the President’s rhetoric disguises yet another attempt to foist his illegal alien non-deportation plan on America.

Among the most unconscionable attempts to unsort people who sorted themselves out by behavior are government programs to relocate people into neighborhoods where they could not afford to live without subsidies. Often the people in those neighborhoods have sacrificed for years to live where they could raise their children in decent surroundings and not in fear of hoodlums -- only to have the government import the bad neighbors and hoodlums they tried so hard to escape.

Almost never do the social experimenters relocate dysfunctional and dangerous people into their own elite neighborhoods. They unsort other people's neighborhoods and embitter other people's lives.

Recent headlines charge that Bob Woodward has withheld information on a major national story. Nothing new there. Thirty-three years ago, Woodward was in the same business.

Withhold the news, then downplay it when it appears elsewhere, and not disclose his inherent conflict of interest--even, supposedly, to his editors at the Washington Post. In the recent Valerie Plame identity leak story, the circumstances are somewhat different than they were with Moorer-Radford, but Woodward's methods and those he is trying to protect by these methods, his right-wing and militaristic sources in the government, remain the same.

But what the White House still hasn’t grasped is that Americans will not tolerate amnesty, no matter what you call it. When the President proposes allowing illegal aliens in the U.S. to stay for six years—a privilege not granted to the millions who are waiting to come here the right way—he doesn’t punish lawbreakers as our laws provide. By rewarding lawbreaking, the President only encourages more of the same.

“Unless the president throws his support behind genuine immigration enforcement, such as H.R. 4313, Duncan Hunter and Virgil Goode’s TRUE Enforcement Act, there is no reason to believe he is leveling with the American public,” said Stein. “The White House may have read some polls and reworked the president’s rhetoric, but the bottom line is that Mr. Bush is touting a plan that will be full of rewards for illegal aliens and employers, and full of empty promises for the American public.”

Opinion polls taken in recent years consistently show that most Americans want illegal and/or excessive immigration controlled. However, Senator Arlen Specter's draft immigration bill would increase legal immigration into the U.S. by one million per year.

Here are a few examples of opinion polls that indicate that most Americans oppose President Bush’s “guest worker” amnesty proposal:

• In a January 7, 2004 CNN poll, 63 percent of respondents said they disagreed with President Bush’s amnesty scheme.

• A poll taken by Fox News on the same day about the same topic found 68 percent disagreeing with the President.

• Another poll on the same topic, taken shortly after the others by the Palm Springs Desert Sun, showed a whooping 96.1 percent disapproval of the Bush plan.

Of all the misapplications of the word “conservative” in recent memory, Nisbet wrote in the 1980s, the “most amusing, in an historical light, is surely the application of ‘conservative’ to … great increases in military expenditures. ... For in America throughout the twentieth century, and including four substantial wars abroad, conservatives had been steadfastly the voices of non-inflationary military budgets, and of an emphasis on trade in the world instead of American nationalism. In the two World Wars, in Korea, and in Viet Nam, the leaders of American entry into war were such renowned liberal-progressives as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy. In all four episodes conservatives, both in the national government and in the rank and file, were largely hostile to intervention; were isolationists indeed.”

Although France has banned religious symbols in schools and has expensive measures to keep poor Muslims fed, housed, and educated, the resentment against a European culture has never stopped growing. Le Pen warned about this long ago, but to no avail. The sophisticated elite who have shown such contempt for Le Pen do not, of course, live near the working-class sections north and west of Paris. These are no-go areas for whites and non-Arabs. I drove through such a section recently, from la Gare du Nord towards the airport Charles De Gaulle, and it was like being in the center of Algiers. No one attacked me, but one could feel the hostility.

Yet when I wrote in the Spectator that happiness was waking up and learning that Le Pen had won against the socialists and would be going up against Chirac, it was as if I had written a pro-Hitler essay in an Israeli paper. The crooks who run Europe in general, and France in particular, need to apologize to Le Pen, but don’t hold your breath. Mind you, the next thing you’ll smell while breathing is a French car burning, which will not exactly make me teary-eyed.

Doris Kearns Goodwin is a museum-quality specimen of a "court historian" – an intellectual or pseudo-intellectual who is devoted to pulling the wool over the public’s eyes by portraying even the most immoral, corrupt, and sleazy politicians as great, wise, and altruistic men. Far better men than their subjects, in fact. She earned this designation by writing so-called "psychohistories" of FDR, Lyndon Johnson, the Kennedy family and, most recently, Lincoln.

The reception was even more rapturous at FreeRepublic.com, the cyber-Jonestown of the Bush-cult. “This brought me to tears! BEAUTIFUL!!!!!” raved one Freeper. Another saw the video as an irresistible evangelical tool: “I wish they would use exactly this, as a commercial for the last two weeks in all the swing states. It just reminds a person of all the wonderful reasons there are to love, and vote for, this President. May God Bless him always.”

The Sailer Scheme for Europe:

Deport criminal immigrants, cut transfer-payment subsidies, and lengthen prison terms to push the destructive Muslims with legal residency out of Europe and back to their ancestral countries.

Combine that with "buyout offers" paying $25,000 (or more, if necessary) to pull the Muslims out.

Bottom line: it's time for Europeans to gin up their courage and start discussing practical plans for saving their civilization.

His biggest addition, though, is the increase in green card totals, or legal immigration.

A review by NumbersUSA, which advocates lower immigration levels, found that the level of legal, permanent immigration could double from its current level of more than 900,000 in fiscal 2004.

Rosemary Jenks, the group's director of government affairs, said Mr. Specter increases the cap on family-preference immigrants by 254,000 a year, raises the cap on employment-based visas by 150,000 a year, "recaptures" unused visas and exempts hundreds of thousands of family members from caps as well.

But here is the rub: We are not going to get out of Iraq without suffering terrible consequences for having gone in. And when we come out, we no longer control what goes on within.

Once we depart, there is no guarantee the insurgents will be defeated, no guarantee that thousands of those who cast their lot with us will not be massacred, no guarantee Iraq will remain one nation, no guarantee there will not be chaos and civil war.

The war in Iraq will not go away until George W. Bush goes away. If there is one fact of Bush's personality that should be obvious to everyone by now, it is this: he does not learn – not from mistakes, not from political polls, and not from reading.

Antiwar critics should accept this and plan in terms of it. He will not bring the troops home by Christmas – any Christmas.

Here we have one of the most widely derided presidents in the history of the United States and a war abhorred by a majority of all Americans and the Democrats have near zero traction as a credible party of opposition. The sequence of events after Representative Jack Murtha's speech on Capitol Hill on November 17 tells the story.

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The American people are overwhelmingly opposed to the war in Iraq and want an immediate end to it, and yet these millions of ordinary people remain invisible and unwelcome to the Left wing of the antiwar movement, represented by such organizations as United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) and Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (A.N.S.W.E.R). Whatever their conflicting views of the Democratic Party and the timing of withdrawal, the Left organizations are united in their contempt for people who do not pass the Left’s litmus tests of civic virtue: support for gay marriage, gun control, affirmative action, and unlimited abortion rights. The Left wing of the antiwar movement remains united in the conscious exclusion from its movement of the great majority of Americans who oppose the war.

On October 20 the U.N.'s cultural wing, UNESCO (the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization), adopted an insidious treaty to preserve the world's "cultural security" — a locution concocted by U.N. Chinese delegates in support of the proposition that culturally weak nations should be able to protect against the influence of culturally powerful ones by barring cultural imports and subsidizing their own culture. The vote in Paris was 148-2, with only the United States and Israel opposed.

The pact, disingenuously titled the "Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions," is larded with doublespeak, which columnist George F. Will has deciphered. Cutting to the quick, Will observes that the treaty in fact enables countries to " 'protect' their 'cultural expressions' against diversity arising from cultural imports that can be stigmatized as threats to social cohesion. . . ."

UN pirates sailed into Tunis this November 16-18, looking to take the helm of Internet supervision from U.S. hands.

Do you treasure the freedom to wade out into the vast sea of information that is the Internet and surf the World Wide Web? Then look out for what is coming over the horizon: a fleet of ships is bearing down on you and your little surf(key)board, and they are flying the blue Jolly Roger of the United Nations.

A recent Pew Research Center poll that shows, as MSNBC put it,

"Americans' appetite for world leadership has waned significantly since before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, with more than two-fifths saying the United States should mind its own business."

The Pew poll in question is on "America and Its Place in the World," conducted every four years. The last poll was undertaken in August 2001, so it offers a pretty good benchmark of how Americans felt before the terrorist attacks and how they feel about the aftermath, including the U.S. response.

"They've been in power too long," Mr. Nofziger says of Republicans. "Any time you put any political party in power for too long, it becomes corrupt. It loses its focus. It forgets why it came there."

"To me, conservative means believing in a minimum amount of government and a maximum amount of freedom -- and keeping government out of people's lives and business -- and leaving people alone," Mr. Nofziger says. "I recognize you have to have national defense and have to finance the government. But government does not have to be the be-all and end-all."

I didn't hear the man say one word I disagree with. You should understand by now that President Bush represents global corporations. What he and the World Bank - which we control - want to impose on other countries is the type of unrestrained capitalism we got rid of in this country in the 1930s. That's exactly why there is so much poverty in Latin America today. His idea of a free-trade zone is to turn Latin America into one gigantic sweatshop for global corporations, and to heck with the people and their environment. His idea is for Latin American countries to eliminate whatever social safety nets they have in order to pay their interest on their international loans. His idea is that we deal with the rich few and let the rest starve in their slums.

Woodward has been the consummate insider while cultivating the image of the hard charging investigative reporter. He is anything but, and it is time to blow the whistle on his incestuous relationship with certain government officials. The fact that the Washington Post is still covering for this joker says volumes about the decline of the Post . . .

"I only wish he was a journalist, not a front for the right wing military for the past 35 years." - Ms. Goudreau

On this Thanksgiving Day, I am truly thankful for all the conservative men and women that make a difference in America. They should be saluted for wishing to return to the concepts of the Founding Fathers. They should be respected and admired for admonishing liberals at every turn in the road.

And they should be thanked for fighting the good fight, a fight to return to our American roots.

There are at present four exit strategies:

A. The John McCain strategy of sending 10,000 more U.S. troops, taking as long as needed to train the Iraqi army and staying as long as necessary to achieve victory.

B. The Bush strategy of “Stay the Course,” with the present complement of forces staying as long as it takes to win.

C. The exit strategy envisioned in the bipartisan resolution in the Senate last week that passed with 79 votes, calling for Bush to give the Congress benchmarks of success, leading to withdrawal.

D. The Democratic option, supported by all but five Democratic senators, to set benchmarks and a timetable for getting out.

Almost since the moment Congressman John Murtha (D-Pennsylvania) took the stage last Thursday to call for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, the left and the media that supports them have gone out of their way to construct a picture of this Vietnam veteran that is somewhat inconsistent with the truth.

Add it all up, and Congressman Murtha’s statements last Thursday – contrary to the way they’ve been depicted by his party members and a disturbingly fawning press – are not only nothing new, but, instead, largely representative of the views Murtha has been expressing on this subject for more than three years.

Wish I made a fraction of what the war pimps make. You know the ones--Krauthammer, Coulter, Boot, Safire, Limbaugh, Will, O'Reilly, Hannity, Ledeen - those media guys doing the well-paid work of Dick Cheney and doing it well...while earning big paychecks along with Dick and his gang.

Good morning, and thank you all very much.

At 11:04:45 AM ET Monday CNN was airing Vice President Dick Cheney's speech live from the American Enterprise Institute in Washington -- when a large black 'X' repeatedly flashed over the vice president's face!

The 'X' over Cheney's face appeared each time less than a second, creating an odd subliminal effect.

"Iraq syndrome" seems to be playing out, too, with the American public. The just-released quadrennial survey of American attitudes toward foreign policy - produced jointly by the Pew Research Center and the Council on Foreign Relations - shows a revival of isolationism. Now, 42 percent of Americans say the US should "mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own" - up from 30 percent in 2002.

The fear of terrorism, however, eclipses most people's concerns about traditional violence. In the fiscal year that just ended, the Border Patrol had 155,000 arrests of illegal immigrants from countries "other than Mexico"; 649 were from "special interest countries," including Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen. In fiscal year 2002, only 37,316 OTM immigrants, as they are called, were caught in the Border Patrol's net. "It's a whole different type of immigrant coming over the border," asserts Texas Sen. John Cornyn. Some 83 percent of OTM arrests were in Texas last fiscal year, and Cornyn says he has met residents of the Rio Grande Valley there who are "terrified to go outside their homes."

Yet by refusing to question the war or respond to changing circumstances on the ground, Republicans risk driving the country into the left’s arms. An inability to rethink military action while combat is ongoing prevents a realistic assessment of our current policy—a policy that a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found 52 percent of Americans no longer believe to be worthwhile.

It does no disservice to our troops to question the policies of their civilian leaders. It is not surrender to abandon a course if it was misconceived from the beginning. We must not continue to spend blood and treasure in Iraq based on premises as faulty as those which led us into war in the first place.

It has long been clear that for the U.S. the war is unwinnable. We Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity took a strong position on that more than two years ago . As Murtha indicated in his November 17 speech, he too has been saying for over a year that the Iraq war cannot be won “militarily.” Since there are precious few fresh troops to be “mobilized,” and since reconstituting the draft appears out of the question, Murtha decided to do the honest thing and call for the troops to be withdrawn, rather than blithely tolerate a handful of casualties a day in order to “stay the course” —whatever that may mean in present circumstances.

Unfortunately, common sense isn't a subject taught in the law schools, not even our most prestigious law schools. On the contrary, the more clever the lawyer, the more he may delight in reaching excessively clever -- or "counterintuitive" -- conclusions, such as that the Constitution protects abortionists.

Let's not pretend that reading the Constitution is harder than it really is. The Framers' original intent is clear enough, because it's expressed in the words they agreed on, not in musty archives or arcane theories. Most of the problems arise only when lawyers try to substitute modern words for those of the text. The chief "qualification" for a justice should be good sense.

The House Republican leadership did a smart thing by calling what amounted to the Murtha plan to a vote, but sharply diminished its effectiveness by not using Murtha's precise language. Democrats loud to praise Murtha for his "courage" were unwilling to put their names on his prescription.

The Senate GOP should correct the House's mistake by bringing Murtha's precise "resolved" clause to a floor vote. This would compensate for whatever harm was done by the resolution the Senate earlier adopted on Iraq (now that Ed Morrissey has recanted, I'm apparently the only conservative blogger who thinks it wasn't much), and would put those Senate Democrats who want to run for president (which, apparently, is most of them) on record on a question they would just as soon avoid.

This bipartisan unanimity over the inevitability of an interventionist foreign policy is what got us into Iraq, and its maintenance will keep us in there until doomsday. That's why Murtha's dissent has caused such a refreshing ruckus. The Establishment is shaken to its core because a non-marginal actor in what had been a cooperative bipartisan effort has suddenly defected. A long as he gets away with it he provides an example – and, in Murtha's case, even an inspiration – to others. The aura of inevitability – the idea that, of course we can't have it any other way – vanishes, and their game is up.

Let's face it, folks: We have allowed our political system to deteriorate to the point where it attracts incompetents, crooks and mountebanks. Public office is the only place where many of these people can hope to make a decent living. Ask yourself if you had ever heard of your representative before he or she got into politics. In most cases, the answer will be no. We no longer attract leaders; we manufacture office-seekers.

These draconian measures reach far beyond a handful of hard-core terrorists. According to the Pentagon's own figures, more than 21,000 innocent people have been caged without due process in Iraq alone, The Guardian reports. Hundreds more have been unjustly imprisoned around the world. A regime that thrives on fear requires a steady stream of "enemy combatants" to justify its unlimited "war powers." The belly of this beast will never be full.

Liberal foundations have been spending millions of dollars to cause people of deep faith – Jews and Christians – to become sidetracked from addressing important moral issues, diverting resources toward addressing a problem of science that is highly speculative and has divided the scientific community. Their effort had started to permeate the Washington leadership of a prominent evangelical organization. Responsible leaders and the grassroots must start campaigning to assure that the leftward drift is completely halted and that its Washington leadership respects the wishes and values of the churches and congregations outside the Beltway. Let’s hope the grassroots becomes motivated to halt this leftward drift on global warming and other issues. Otherwise we will be a much poorer nation both spiritually and materially.

As the acknowledged general of such propaganda warfare, Rendon insists that the work he does is for the good of all Americans. "For us, it's a question of patriotism," he says. "It's not a question of politics, and that's an important distinction. I feel very strongly about that personally. If brave men and women are going to be put in harm's way, they deserve support." But in Iraq, American troops and Iraqi civilians were put in harm's way, in large part, by the false information spread by Rendon and the men he trained in information warfare. And given the rapid growth of what is known as the "security-intelligence complex" in Washington, covert perception managers are likely to play an increasingly influential role in the wars of the future.

Tucker Carlson claims to be a Libertarian—and yet he believes his government wouldn’t attack its own citizens and those who do should leave the country. In fact, Carlson is not a Libertarian—he is a statist working for the corporate media as a shill for Bushcon policies.

In the wake of the Scooter Libby indictment, and the collapse of support for the war – even in the Republican congressional caucus – the bad guys are desperately trying to make a comeback, and what a pathetic sight it is.

If Woodward's first source was Cheney, why would the latter have called Fitzgerald on November 3? The admission by Cheney that he had spoken to Woodward could derail Libby's prosecution and also undercut possible charges of a breach of the Espionage act, by playing into the line Woodward took on the Larry King Show and elsewhere, that this was no dreadful affront to national security but indeed "gossip" and "chatter".

So much for the fortune's wheel. From Nixon's nemesis to Cheney's savior.

An executive of Phoenix North America television was arrested last month as part of a Chinese spy ring that obtained defense secrets through a contractor in Los Angeles.

Tai Wang Mak was among four people arrested Oct. 28 following a year-long FBI investigation that found that U.S. defense technology, including naval data, had been passed to China.

The supporters of the euro deny any link between the introduction of the euro, and inflation and social crises in the member states. But this does not mean much. The discrepancy in thinking between the political establishment and the general population could hardly be greater. Trust in politics and democracy has reached a low point; the attitude of many, fed up with politics, in the recent months, has turned into real contempt, which indeed carries with it the potential for future state crises.

National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley was the senior administration official who told Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward that Valerie Plame Wilson was a CIA officer, attorneys close to the investigation and intelligence officials tell RAW STORY.

Is keeping "one nation under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance Christianizing America? Is maintaining the traditional definition of marriage (you know, the one found in that Jewish book, Genesis) Christianizing America? Is public display of The Ten Commandments Christianizing America? In Hebrew school, they forgot to tell me that Moses was a Christianizer.

We cannot be sure how much of this is bluff by Bush -- to what extent he hopes or believes that Muslim nations will surrender to him without a fight. The prudent assumption is that not much of it is bluff, and that Bush, the radical Christians, the Christian Zionists, the nation's military-industrial conglomerates, and their Israeli allies -- all of whom today call the tune in U.S. foreign policy -- are willing and in some cases actually wish to involve the United States in further wars.

More than 40 world leaders, including Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, are set to attend, and the ownership of the World Wide Web itself is at stake. What the delegates won't discuss is the creeping spectre of censorship.

As Wag the Dog suggested, war itself is not the only way to distract public attention from the president's domestic woes. An atmosphere of crisis in which rumors of war or preparations for war come to overshadow all else might well do the trick - and administration officials don't need fresh armies to accomplish this, only plausible scenarios for the escalation of existing foreign troubles. These, unfortunately, are all too easy to find.

A sober assessment of the available evidence makes it very difficult to avoid this very disturbing conclusion: high officials of the Clinton Justice Department and FBI committed murder (possibly several murders) to hide details of the OKC bombing from the American public. They also committed perjury, falsified and hid documents, and kept the guilty from being punished. How safe is anyone in America if the guilty aren't held accountable for these heinous crimes? The succeeding Bush administration has not only continued the Clinton coverup but has promoted many of the guilty.

Former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal and former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury Dr. Paul Craig Roberts expressed his dire warning that the US government has fallen into the hands of psychopaths and that the Neo-Cons in the Bush administration may be set to stage another terror attack in the US as part of a black operation to demolish growing dissent and coerce the public to rally behind the government once again.

Until recently it was widely assumed that the Republican Party is America's conservative party. But increasingly it has been argued that the Republican Party is anything but a conservative party.

But conservatism's first wave, which culminated in Barry Goldwater's nomination in 1964, bears little resemblance to the kind of conservatism that is now ascendant in the party. I'll mention two crucial differences. To begin with, first-wave conservatives fervently opposed Big Government, which they considered not merely economically inefficient but morally corrupting as well. They believed that Big Government would eventually slide into socialist and totalitarian rule. This was Hayek's "road to serfdom," made all the more ominous by the foreign threat of the Soviet Union. One might almost say that early conservatives made a theology out of their opposition to Big Government.

A second distinguishing feature of early conservatism was its traditionalism. Many of conservatism's early thinkers were genuinely anti-modern in their outlook. Depending upon the individual writer, they tended to enshrine at the center of their program Anglo-American peoplehood, or the Southern "way of life," or the God-centered universe of the Middle Ages. They tended to believe in social hierarchy and social order, and tended to attack the American Founding for its Enlightenment and egalitarian elements.

What Bush was saying in Pennsylvania is this: You may accuse me of falsifying intelligence, but you are falsifying history. And you will not get away with it. I am going to fight it out on this line, even if it costs me my presidency. But if I am going down, you are going down with me.

If Iraq is lost to chaos and civil war and this is an historic defeat and strategic disaster for the United States, Bush is saying, I will charge you with cutting and running, abandoning our troops under fire, and losing the Iraq war. No wonder Bill and Hillary seem wary of throwing in with the Cindy Sheehan crowd.

Congressmen, defending their conservative credentials, remark that spending would be a lot worse if left in the hands of Democrats. Perhaps. But such a defense dances around the corpse of the spirit of 1994, when the party's mission was made clear in bullet points. The sign "Under New Management" was probably a misnomer. Given the past 10 years, it is disingenuous for Rep. Davis to claim that the lack of growth in Republican control of Congress has been a result of unreasonable fastidiousness to conservatism.

You see, whenever a political conservative is assigned the task of tapping into a political force powerful enough to effect meaningful change -- which can only mean the defeat the regnant elites -- he quickly discovers that he must inject group conflict based on genetic relatedness back into politics. Otherwise, his conservatism is so much navel gazing and lawn bowling in Laguna Beach.

And that, in a nutshell, is why conservatism is in its death throes. William F. Buckley, Jr. has unwittingly confessed his total surrender to Marxism as he looks upon Africans rioting in France, but sees the only relevant policy classification as one based on economic occupation -- namely "welfare recipient" -- and sees the most relevant political classification of the troublemakers as universalized "young revolutionaries" -- thereby dissipating the motivational force of the specific group threat they pose to his followers, and rhetorically conceding the legitimacy of their violence to his political opponents.

Comfort to the enemy. Interesting phrase. It's been used before -- by a Republican; in fact, by "Mr. Republican," Robert A. Taft, who was speaking against the Roosevelt administration.

Taft, the conservative Ohio senator who is a hero to many of today's conservatives, gave a speech at the Executive Club of Chicago in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. There are a number of paragraphs that are just grand, but here's the best one, which is worth quoting in full:

"As a matter of general principle, I believe there can be no doubt that criticism in time of war is essential to the maintenance of any kind of democratic government ... too many people desire to suppress criticism simply because they think that it will give some comfort to the enemy to know that there is such criticism. If that comfort makes the enemy feel better for a few moments, they are welcome to it as far as I am concerned, because the maintenance of the right of criticism in the long run will do the country maintaining it a great deal more good than it will do the enemy, and will prevent mistakes which might otherwise occur."

Of all the pending controversies in Washington, few may be as perilous for the Republican majority as the one swirling around former powerhouse lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

But what gives this scandal so much scope is the number of members of Congress, federal officials, and top conservative activists it potentially involves. More than just the saga of a rogue lobbyist, it opens a window on a high-stakes, high-fee lobbyist culture that is transforming Beltway business.

On March 23, 2006, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System will cease publication of the M3 monetary aggregate. The Board will also cease publishing the following components: large-denomination time deposits, repurchase agreements (RPs), and Eurodollars.

In other words, conservatism , (READ NEO Conservative - Farah still doesn't "get it") as we know it today, is a strictly reactionary movement – limited to fighting against the inevitable advances of liberalism.

Further, conservatism is a movement almost exclusively limited to the battleground of politics.

Liberals don't have to win elections to achieve their goals. They press their agenda through the culture.

Cheryl Benard of the RAND Corporation stated in The Christian Science Monitor, “Ironically, France's new secular dress code may end up taking Islamic society a step forward by sending Muslims back to their own religious texts for review,” in regard to French legislation banning school girls from wearing the “hijab,” or Muslim head scarf in public school. In other words, Muslims in France are too stupid to understand their own faith, so they must be forced by the state to go study it. Who cares that the “hijab” is a cultural norm for many Muslims and not wearing it in public is tantamount to a sexual assault on a young girl. But liberals do not like it, so away it goes. “Take your scarf off, your welfare check home, and shut up,” is how Europe has dealt with the differing beliefs of its minorities. Over decades the Muslim community has refused to fall into line, so the liberals have systematically ostracized it.

In his October 31 column for The Nation, iconoclastic left-wing writer Alexander Cockburn let slip some revealing comments about the foundation-funded green lobby and its ties to elements of the oil industry. He also took a provocative stab at the "peak oil" theory and several other current varieties of alarmism.

Cockburn is a leftist, which means he gets some crucial details wrong, and his enthusiasm for environmental “militancy” is at best misplaced. But his account of the entente between some elements of Big Oil and Big Green is sound. The same can be said of his treatment of “peak oil,” “global warming,” and the latest environment-related phobia, avian flu.

In America, conservatives are winning the battle of ideas on almost every front--and few are more important than the battle over the judiciary. The outcome of that debate will shape the course of human events. And the reason we will prevail rests in large measure on the good work of the Federalist Society--and those of you in this room this evening.

Geez, Judy, any decent reporter knew at the time, as did most of the world, that the "intelligence" you were fed wasn't "merely wrong" or "exaggerated," it was a pack of lies cooked up by the neocons in the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, the White House Iraqi Group (WHIG) and No. 10 Downing Street. But why let the facts get in the way of a good story?

Judy, Judy, Judy, you are a disgrace to the journalism profession.

The US-orchestrated 9/11 provided the “new Pearl Harbor” needed to shock a nation into submission, and into supporting (to use the infamous words of Zbigniew Brzezinski) “imperial mobilization” -- an endless “war on terrorism,” a sequential region-by-region conquest for oil, and a police state within the US.

Now a November 10 report published by Capitol Hill Blue (reprinted below in its entirety) reveals that Bush/GOP operatives are contemplating how another “devastating attack” on US soil could do the trick for Bush again.

Conservative Christians today, rather than recognizing the state as the greatest temporal enemy of the faith and of human freedom, have thrown in their lot with a political party which betrays them and the teachings of their Savior at every turn and with a president who, while claiming to be a Christian, violates those same teachings and, further, bluntly denies the central tenet of the faith, namely, that Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life and that no man comes to the Father except through him. (Don’t think I’m shilling for the Democrats; they’re no better.)

It is time for Christians to stop being court jesters for the Republican Party—for they are played for fools by practically every politician claiming to be on their side—and to start being courtiers of the only One who can save them.

The closely-guarded memo lays out a list of scenarios to bring the Republican party back from the political brink, including a devastating attack by terrorists that could “validate” the President’s war on terror and allow Bush to “unite the country” in a “time of national shock and sorrow.”

The memo outlines other scenarios, including:

--Capture of Osama bin Laden (or proof that he is dead);

--A drastic turnaround in the economy;

--A "successful resolution" of the Iraq war.

A sizeable portion of the public is catching on to at least the basic dihonesty of the leaders, trust in the administration is plummeting -- even in wartime -- and ever-increasing numbers of people are reading websites that are exposing their real game.

The public is finally waking up, and the momentum has shifted away from the bad guys.

So How is A Peaceful Revolution Carried Out?

Perhaps the biggest absurdity, at the moment, is the continuing, somewhat distracted response of the international media -- especially the French media -- to the revolution that has begun in France. They persist in characterizing the revolutionists as “disadvantaged French youth”, and pretend their uprising has only incidentally to do with Islam.

The same cultural deathwish prevails in Spain, Italy, Germany, the Low Countries, Britain, Scandinavia -- and Canada, by the way. It is called “multiculturalism” in this generation, but in another generation will be called something else.

Contrast that with the unbridled immigration (much of it illegal) that floods our cities and agricultural communities today. Our officials cannot be sure how many immigrants are within our borders, where they reside, or what activities they are engaged in. Wary of mainstream society, many immigrants live in a subculture that provides little incentive to learn English or to interact socially with more established Americans. Effectively marginalized, but aware of (and often envious of) the prosperity around them, they remain festering, until the time comes when an “incident” will ignite riots even worse than those now occurring in France.

To an extent that would surprise many Americans misled by immigration-enthusiast propaganda, France too sees itself as a “Proposition Nation.” Its national self-image is built not around race, but around mastering French language and culture.

The French believe in the assimilative power of their language so much that, for 175 years, they've taken criminals from around the world, given them new French names and taught them French, and molded them into perhaps the finest fighting unit in the world: the Foreign Legion.

Is the Vermont secession for real or is it at least partially intended to dull the impact of a truly significant change taking place in New Hampshire - where free-market oriented individuals have signed up to help make that state a truly classical liberal habitat by moving there.

Le Pen said people with immigrant backgrounds who commit crimes should be stripped of their French nationality and sent "back to their country of origin."

Reminded that the vast majority of youths taking part in the arson and rioting are French, born in France to immigrant parents, he said: "What does that mean? Are they French because they have a French identity card?"

A woman's purpose comes with her at birth, and even those women who reject that purpose still carry that sense of quiet purpose within them, as a fallback meaning to their lives.

A man comes with the purpose of finding a purpose. And so a man's journey is often more tortured, more difficult, more magnificent and more maniacal.

Women like order because they want a safe place to raise kids.

Men like disorder because with it comes the freedom to shape the world anew, to fulfill their inner purpose of creating a purpose within the world.

The Bush administration, however — which is supposedly staffed by people learned in the wisdom of classical- conservative thought and informed by revelation from America's traditional religious heritage — is just darn sure that the government is the best and only means to handle a crisis such as this.

A dazzling display of absurdity and chutzpah — that's what the Bush press conference on the flu was. Even if the flu does come, and taxpayers have coughed up, the government will surely have a ball imposing travel restrictions, shutting down schools and businesses, quarantining cities, and banning public gatherings.

If France's population of immigrant origin -- mostly Arab, some black -- is today quite large (more than 10% of the total population), it is because there was a government and industrial policy during the post-World War II boom years of reconstruction and economic expansion which the French call "les trentes glorieuses" -- the 30 glorious years -- to recruit from France's foreign colonies laborers and factory and menial workers for jobs which there were no Frenchmen to fill. These immigrant workers, primarily from North Africa, were desperately needed to allow the French economy to expand due to the shortage of male manpower caused by two World Wars, which killed many Frenchmen, and slashed the native French birth-rates too.

France has been rewarding those who ignored the inevitable collision of Islam and its culture while punishing dissenters who merely noticed it. It fined for "hate crimes" French authors who warned that the assimilation of Muslims would prove impossible and elected preening liberals who waved the problem away. The former were "heartless" and the latter "humane," yet who's position now tempts France to draconian measures? Who's position has placed France in an insoluble crisis?

In promoting drug industry immunity from legal damage suits, the President claims he is ‘breaking down barriers to vaccine production.’ In reality he is taking steps to create an environment which not even the Nazi doctors and drug companies during the Third Reich enjoyed—they had to be secretive about their actions. This is a very alarming precedent should it become law. The real question to ask is what could be so important to compel the President of the United States to put his own population at risk in such an unfettered drug environment?

"Separatism is a Christian principle," says Cory Burnell, president of Christian Exodus, which aims to relocate thousands of Christian constitutionalists to South Carolina to "redeem" that state's government. "We talk about secession as potentially necessary because history has demonstrated that where one people stand up, there tends to be another people to rule over them."

The Free State Project (FSP) is another group determined to reclaim constitutional liberty. Its libertarian members have pledged to move to New Hampshire to restore limited government.

What is different now is that Republicans are doing exactly the same thing. Their purpose seems to be to prove to the American people once and for all that it makes absolutely no difference which party controls Congress-the same utterly stupid policies are pursued under both Republican and Democratic control. And Republicans wonder why their party's base is evaporating, with many political analysts now predicting heavy losses for the GOP in next year's congressional elections.

Americans should take note. France's riots are the logical consequence of awful urban, multiculturalist, and socio-economic policies. Rather than bringing people together multiculturalism keeps people apart. Rather than freeing people economically, welfare causes resentment. Add to the mix wrongheaded labor and affirmative action policies and you've got a ticking fragmentation bomb. Perhaps I am getting a bit carried away; nonetheless the next time I hear a liberal educator stress the importance of multilingual and multicultural education I will remember Paris burning.

Severed from the civilization and cultures of their parents, these Arab and Muslim youth may hold French citizenship and carry French passports, but they are no more French than Americans who live in Paris are French. Searching for a community to which they can truly belong, they gravitate to mosques where the imams, many themselves immigrants, teach and preach that the West is not their true home, but a civilization alien to their values and historically hostile to their nations and Islam.

Nor should Americans take comfort in France’s distress. By 2050, there will be 100 million Hispanics in the United States, half of them of Mexican ancestry, heavily concentrated in a Southwest most Mexicans still believe by right belongs to them.

A documentary to be aired on Tuesday by Italian state satellite TV channel RAI News 24 alleges that US troops used chemical weapons during their assault on the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah in November last year. The documentary - 'Fallujah - the hidden massacre' - uses witness accounts from former US soldiers, Fallujah residents, video footage and photographs, to support its claim that contrary to US State Department denials, white phosphorous was used indiscriminately on the city, causing terrible injuries to civilians, including women and children.

It's not just the failure to gain any movement on overhauling Social Security that has disenchanted the Republican right wing, but the failure of the president's tax-reform commission to embrace radical plans to scrap the income tax. Then there's the real prospect of even more congressional "emergency" spending for Hurricane Katrina relief, bird-flu prevention and Iraq, without any sign of the serious budget cuts of federal social programs that the GOP conservative base was once promised.

MULTICULTURALISM IS not an attempt to "enrich" White cultures by adding sundry non-White cultures. It is an attempt to replace White cultures with non-White cultures—or, more precisely, with fantasies, lies, and sanitized half-truths about non-White cultures designed to make them seem spiritually and morally superior. The purpose is to induce racial guilt in gullible Whites which can be exploited for the purpose of White dispossession.

The real cause of the French intifada is the enormous growth, dysfunctionality, and arrogant self-confidence of the Muslim immigrant community within France, coupled with the cultural enfeeblement and demographic decline of the French nation. The mix is dangerous. Its result has been stated with haughty arrogance by Tariq Ramadan, professor of Islamic studies at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland and a grandson of Hasan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. Ramadan proposes through his teachings and writings that Muslims in the West should conduct themselves not as hyphenated citizens seeking to live by “common values” but as though they were already living in a Muslim-majority society and were exempt on that account from having to make concessions to the faith of others.

Eliot's point is this: Without a broad-based belief among a people in the dignity and worth of each man and woman as a child of God, thus having inalienable rights no state can violate, you risk a Hitler coming to power – should you entrust your nation's fate to whatever outcome the democratic process produces.

President Bush and Secretary of State Rice, in their latest rationale for the Iraq war – that it is part of a grand design to democratize the Islamic world – are taking the exact risk about which Eliot warned.

Neoconservatives, in their worship of democracy and utopian belief in its beneficent powers, refuse to entertain the idea that the very end they seek may destroy the dream they have. Perhaps they will hearken to the latest warnings about the potential perils of Islamic democracy – to the nation of Israel – from hard-right Likudnik Dore Gold, a close adviser to Ariel Sharon.

But what critics haven’t noticed is that the decision simply expands the Court’s approval of a practice that state and local governments have long used to bring about urban renewal or economic development. More important, they have also failed to notice that, over its long history, this practice has almost never worked. The Court’s decision fails not just on moral but also on utilitarian grounds.

George Clooney's new movie Good Night and Good Luck continues the smear campaign against Senator Joseph McCarthy and lionizes leftist reporter Edward R. Murrow. (To understand how the term "McCarthyism" is based on a myth read "McCarthyism: Forty questions and answers about Senator Joseph McCarthy.")

Expectedly, Clooney’s movie reinforces the myth that McCarthy was “wrong 100 percent of the time,” and those uninformed about the historical facts regarding McCarthy’s investigations are as likely to fall for the line as Clooney’s liberal audience at Harvard Square.

The People twice elected President Bush, in part not on a promise to continue the jurisprudence of any individual Justice, but to nominate Justices who will interpret the Constitution as it is written. This is what has been done with the nomination of Judge Alito. Now Sen. Schumer, Sen. Biden, Sen. Kennedy, Sen. Durbin and Sen. Leahy will attempt to prove that Judge Alito is not qualified for the Court, merely because he might not mimic the Justice whom he happens to be nominated to replace. They will fail because this is not now, nor has it ever been, the standard that nominees to the Court are held.

The neo-con band of criminals running Washington, trampling on civil rights at home and invading countries at will overseas, has led a large group of strong-minded Vermont freedom-fighters with no choice but to secede from the United States.

And last Friday at the state capital building in Montpelier, a historic independence convention was held, the first of its kind in the United States since May 20, 1861, when South Carolina decided to leave the Union.

As it turns out, Michael Moore owns Halliburton stock. Joseph Farah’s website expects us to be surprised and angered by such hypocrisy. However, this “revelation,” one of many featured in a book by Peter Schweizer, is not surprising, nor are other insights into the disingenuous behavior of Nancy Pelosi, Noam Chomsky, Barbra Streisand, Ralph Nader, and other so-called liberals and Democrats.

Liberals outside of Congress also tried their best to undermine the law that could send "Scooter" Libby to prison. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) slammed it as a "clearly unconstitutional infringement on the right of free speech." Morton H. Halperin, director of ACLU's Center for National Security Studies, not only promised to provide legal assistance to people who outed CIA agents, he also publicly stated that covert operations should be banned. Bill Clinton, a man who refused to lower himself to face-to-face daily CIA briefings, tried to appoint Mort Halperin to the Defense Department.

Now Latin America is just another headache on Mr Bush’s onerous foreign policy agenda. He is disliked more there than perhaps anywhere outside the Arab world. A poll last week for Latinobarómetro, a Chile-based polling organisation, found that in every single South American country favourable impressions of the US have declined sharply in the five years of Mr Bush’s presidency. To his chagrin, his approval ratings in the region trail those of Hugo Chávez, the rumbustious President of Venezuela who has made himself popular mainly by the vigour of his anti-Bush rhetoric.

I believe today's Democratic leadership contains some very good liars. They know that whatever Libby's guilt the President has nothing to apologize for. Yet they want to create as much scandal as possible. Some say it is payback time for the Clinton scandals. The difference, of course, is that Clinton was caught and even admitted his guilt in an affidavit for the independent counsel. Bush has had nothing to do with the present scandal, and at this point it is unclear anyone committed a crime -- unless it is a crime for an Administration aide to defend the Administration against another of the liberals' liars, Joe Wilson IV. Historians will get to the truth here, but by the time they do liberals will not care. They might not even exist.

It's vital to understand that Dr. Panitchpakdi is not seeking to expand participation in authentic free trade, in which private interests engage in mutually beneficial commerce without government intrusion. Rather, his vision calls for each national government to regulate trade and economic policy according to mandates handed down from the WTO and administered through regional trade blocs, such as NAFTA, CAFTA, and the proposed FTAA.

Judge Alito is too cautious and conventional to have given much indication during his years on the bench that he is capable of being the sort of transformative justice that most conservatives believe the Court needs.

This doesn’t mean that Alito is destined to be a disappointment. He is undeniably both talented and conservative. The record clearly shows that Judge Alito is adept at justifying the most conservative interpretation Supreme Court precedent will bear.

Liberals may try and explain this away. But from the very beginning, faithful adherence to biblical principles was so common in this land it was unquestionably considered by others to be the American way of life. Furthermore, this was the source of strength that enabled thirteen colonies--so loosely knit as to have operated nearly as independently as separate nations, possessing no joint military capabilities whatsoever, and almost none independently--to unite quickly in the face of extreme danger and overwhelming odds, going on to defeat the most powerful nation with the mightiest army on the face of the earth.

This Americans did in winning their independence, for the sake of establishing a nation where freedom in general, and certain individual liberties in particular, were to be defined as inalienable rights--rights which were claimed on the basis of allegiance to a sovereign God whose precepts were regarded as the only sure foundation for law and government.

The essence of the debate we are about to have is:

1) Do we want the Federal Government to be bound by, and pay attention to, the Constitution?

2) Or, do we want our Federal Government to be able to disregard the Constitution when the expedience of the moment provides them with cover?

Stare decisis has become a euphemism for the expectation that justices will bow before those great moments in liberal jurisprudence when the court rejected stare decisis to invent a new right or declare settled laws unconstitutional according to "evolving standards" of indecency. Under this willful construction of stare decisis, a liberal judge who disregards a precedent he dislikes is not in violation of "the doctrine"; only conservative judges who reject precedents of liberal courts can be.

“Precisely what views must an individual hold to be a “right-wing extremist”?

If anyone actually does press Chuck Schumer for an answer, no doubt this Harvard Law School graduate will try to weasel out of it by pointing out that leading Republicans have never defined the phrase: “left-wing extremist.” (Republican leaders don’t use it,