In Texas and California, Republicans have launched high-drama campaigns to get rid of their opponents, using dubious techniques that are likely to come back to haunt everyone. Both states are rapidly failing, dragged into a trap of policy paralysis, bitter partisanship, blame and political wreckage.
In these two great states, Republican zealotry and over-reaching are alienating reasonable people and making a mockery of democracy. The losers are each state's citizens, and each state's reputation.

Americans are three times as likely to believe in the Virgin Birth of Jesus (83 percent) as in evolution (28 percent).

Meanwhile, employment is chasing a moving target because the working-age population continues to grow. Just to keep up with population growth, the U.S. needs to add about 110,000 jobs per month.
All this is, of course, an indictment of our economic policy — a policy that has managed the remarkable trick of generating immense budget deficits without giving the economy much stimulus.

The biggest problems have been airbrushed out of the White House report, making it read more like a Bush campaign flier than a realistic accounting to the American people. Many of today's problems in Iraq can be traced to the Bush administration's tendency to credit what it wants to believe rather than more realistic accounts

The most stunning religion survey I found is the one in which 47 percent even of American non-Christians say they believe in the virgin birth. The source of that data is a Harris Poll from Aug. 12, 1998, with a sample of 1,011 adults. That survey found that 94 percent of adults believe in God, 86 percent believe in miracles, 89 percent believe in Heaven, and 73 percent believe in the Devil and in Hell.

TONY BLAIR and his Defence Secretary, Geoff Hoon, personally intervened in the Government's handling of weapons expert David Kelly, ordering tougher treatment of the scientist, an inquiry heard yesterday.
Documents tabled yesterday showed defence spokesmen were instructed to play down his credentials. One government spokesman later suggested Kelly might have been a "Walter Mitty" fantasist.

Iraqis who have suffered for months with little electricity gloated Friday over a blackout in the northeastern United States and southern Canada and offered some tips to help Americans beat the heat.

Hitler was TIME Magazine's Man Of The Year in 1938. Stalin was TIME Magazine's Man Of The Year for 1939 and 1942.

The dustup over Saudi secrets is exquisitely convenient. It obscures George W. Bush's relentless hold on U.S. secrets and on information he maintains should be secret, though it has not necessarily been before now.

Reporters Without Borders today rejected a US military enquiry which has reportedly concluded that a tank crew acted in self-defence when it fired on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad on 8 April,

Watergate revealed the way the Nixon administration targeted political opponents and put them on an "enemies list," treating them like traitors or criminals. It exposed the Committee to Reelect the President, which made campaign dirty tricks a way of life.
a government becomes truly dangerous to its people only when it engages in what the Declaration of Independence called "repeated injuries and usurpations."

The AP has sent its own reporting down the memory hole. Here's the key paragraph, for posterity:
However, amateur video footage obtained by Associated Press Television News showed a Black Hawk helicopter hovering about three feet from the top of the tower and apparently trying to tear down the banner. The footage showed US Humvees driving by and the crowd throwing stones at them. Heavy gunfire broke out and the demonstrators hit the ground.

The Philadelphia court. has twice ruled that COPA unconstitutionally restricts free speech.

Despite the oath that the attorney general took to support and defend the Constitution when he was sworn in office, John Ashcroft has chosen to knowingly, intentionally, and deliberately disobey Judge Brinkema’s order by refusing to produce Binalshibh for testimony.

The following article from the Reuters newswire appeared in exactly one US media outlet, the New York Post. A search at Google News shows that across the world, only four other media outlets--none of them major--ran the story: Hi Pakistan, the New Nation (Bangladesh), the New Zealand Herald, and Khilifah.com.

But what christie did not say was just how much of the alleged missile plot was a government setup from start to finish. . "One would have to ask yourself, would this have occurred at all without the government?" said Gerald Lefcourt, a criminal defense attorney.

"People have expressed concern over what they consider entrapment and questioned how realistic it would be to get these things without the `cooperation' of the [Russian Federal Security Service] and Russian government," said Jim O'Halloran, a weapons trade specialist and editor of Jane's Land-Based Air Defence

The bureau’s plan was to quickly flip Lakhani, a British citizen of Indian extraction, and then use him as an undercover informant who could lead agents to real-life Osama bin Laden operatives seeking sophisticated weapons. / For all the hoopla over the case, the official confirmed, it was essentially a government-arranged “sting” that never involved any contact with actual terrorists.

Britain has expelled a Saudi diplomat, described as an intelligence officer, after allegations that he bribed a Metropolitan police officer.

They said the ultimate aim of the elaborate sting was to catch Mr Lakhani - who has no terrorist links - and turn him into a government informant who might lead them to terrorists trying to buy weapons.

Well, he asked around a bit - presumably he owned a Russian phrasebook which had stuff like "Do you know where I can buy a surface-to-air missile launcher?" alongside "Do you know the way to the town hall?" - and was eventually pointed towards the Krasnoyarsk region.

The source described Mr Lakhani as an "idiot", who "apparently went to Moscow in March on the off-chance" he would find something. "He was then directed [by persons unknown] to a purported production facility of the system in the Krasnoyarsk region", the source said.

ENTRAPMENT - A person is 'entrapped' when he is induced or persuaded by law enforcement officers or their agents to commit a crime that he had no previous intent to commit; and the law as a matter of policy forbids conviction in such a case.

"The fact that we're able to sting this guy is a pretty good example of what we're doing in order to protect the American people," Mr. Bush said.