Canadians should be careful not to appear "boastful" to Americans, who are insecure because of the war in Iraq and admit they are annoyed by northerners showing off the red maple leaf on their luggage when they travel, a recent federal report warns.
The report says even Americans who blame the Bush administration to some extent for the country's poor relations with the world, do not seem to understand why friendly countries and neighbours such as Canada would want to distance themselves from Americans.

The plot was thwarted by Yemeni intelligence officers before the would-be bombers could get hold of explosives, the report said.

Kerry said about 25 percent of the 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq lack the latest body armor and claimed, without specifics, that some friends and family members of troops have reached into their own pockets to supply it.

The state's use of its influence in the elections was part of the "negative trend of . . . managed democracy," said Michael McFaul, a Russia expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "Whether we should continue to call it democracy I don't know.

I don't think ANY country should cooperate with the U.S. in ANY single thing. Not one. Halt trade, halt everything until the evil warlords in Washington D.C. are driven from power.

"In our opinion," we wrote, "Bush and Gore are hypocrites and whores of approximately the same gutter level, so it's almost immaterial to us which candidate ends up with the most votes."
We'd like to retract that statement now. We were wrong. Turns out it does matter which whore wins.

"It's sort of human to make categories, it's a shorthand for behavior," said Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, a professor of sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. "The problem is the drawing of boundaries is arbitrary."

In ''Inventing a Nation,'' the inimitable Gore Vidal has his own peculiar explanation for why we Americans have ''so many academic histories of our republic and its origins.'' We want to ''gaze fixedly on the sunny aspects of a history growing ever darker.'' That's why, he says, we have ignored Benjamin Franklin's dire warning in 1787 that our Republic was likely to become corrupted and end in despotism. Instead of realizing that Franklin was correct in his prediction and that we have already arrived at this awful moment of corruption and tyranny, we celebrate Franklin as ''the jolly fat ventriloquist of common lore, with his simple maxims for simple folk.''

In 1776, one-fifth of America's population was enslaved, and the institution implicated nearly everyone, Northerners as well as Southerners. Four of the five first presidents were slaveholders, including Washington and Jefferson, the principal subjects of these five books. The new United States was not just a republic, it was a slaveholding republic.