DAVOS, Switzerland - Free nations, working together, must not shy from using force if diplomacy cannot deter terrorism and check the spread of the world's most dangerous weapons, Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites) told Europe on Saturday.
"Direct threats require decisive action," Cheney said in a speech to the World Economic Forum (In his second foreign trip since taking office,) and he urged European allies to "act with all the urgency that this danger demands."
Cheney said the world is becoming safer, but alliances and international partnerships must remain strong in fighting terror because "We are not safe yet." "There comes a time when deceit and defiance must be seen for what they are," Cheney said.
After his speech, Cheney flew to Italy, where he is visiting until Tuesday. He will meet with Premier Silvio Berlusconi, a major backer of the Iraq invasion, and Pope John Paul

"One of the most meaningful things that's happened to me since I've been the governor ? the president ? governor ? president. Oops. Ex-governor."?George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Jan. 9, 2004

"People who hate America tend to love Michael Moore - and that's all you need to know." Bill O'Reilly

For anyone to dare to suggest that Israel is the cause of the climate of hatred in Muslim countries, the attitude that generates, encourages, and supports the groups who are adversaries in the War on terrorism; is going to the greatest thing that stifles questioning the correctness of allowing 3 million Israelis to hold 300 million Americans hostage; namely, the worst barrier to free speech and objective inquiry - the epithet of being Anti-Semitic.
How many more terrorist attacks can our poorly defended country suffer; how many thousands, if not millions of casualties can we absorb: before public opinion will balk at further support for Israel?

85 % of the Republicans think the War on Iraq was right but 54 % of the Democrats think it was a big mistake. 72 % of the Democrats demand more help for the needy in their own country and are supported by only 39% of the Republicans. With other issues the gap is similarly wide.
Every week the New York Times List of best-selling Books give proof of this theory. Since months this list is topped by conservative stirrers like Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter or trouble-makers like Michael Moore and Al Franken.
It is hard to conceive that a varied country with a 300 million population can split in two camps of the same size, so thousand voters or a single judge can decide the nation's destiny. How did this nation with its huge powers of integration fell apart into two halves?
Four years ago the majority of the singles voted for Gore while the married voted for Bush. 61 % of weapon owners have voted republican while 70 % of those who have claimed themselves to be homosexual voted democratic. 90 % of the black population voted for Gore.

"The pictures of Texas on the wall, to me, remind me of who I am, just little old Barbara Bush's son."
"The Oval Office is the kind of place," bush said, "where people stand outside the door and say, `I can't wait to get inside; I'm going to tell him what for.' They walk in this place, the first words out of their mouth are, `Mr. President, man, you're looking good.' "
mred - (im not sure whether its scarier that this line was part of a script, or if it actually came from inside his addled head.)

NOVAK: Worse yet was Clarks refusal to condemn leftist propagandist Michael Moore for libeling President Bush as a deserter.

NOVAK: Ms. Steenburgen, I'm just dying to know if you agree with your candidate, General Clark, that the president of the United States is a deserter? Desertion is one of the most heinous crimes. It's a felony. You put people in prison. Do you think -- do you think -- do you agree with that?

NOVAK: And get off Dick Cheney's back. It's really getting sickening.

NOVAK: I wondered, Ms. Steenburgen, if it's a matter of actors, such as you and your husband, feeling that General Clark is a kindred soul, because he's obviously reading lines that somebody else prepares for him, just as you do when you go before the cameras.

NOVAK: It's never been -- that's never been proved on the AWOL. AWOL, of course, is a crime and could be brought before a court-martial. That's never been the case. But he is not a deserter. And for General Clark, who knows what a deserter is... to sit there and not say that's wrong is disgraceful.

Chossudovsky discusses how the Washington Post marginalized the story about an unusual breakfast meeting that took place between top-ranking members of Congress and the Pakistani Lieutenant General named Mahmoud Ahmed, who was the head of the ISI on 9/11/01. (Ahmed is also said to have been the money man who wired $100,000 to alleged hijacker Mohamed Atta.)

"Those going into teaching have the lowest SAT and ACT scores of any profession in the United States," Kerry observed.
He asked how was it that the percentage of black children living with both parents through the age of 17 had gone to 6 percent from 50 percent?

It was 9/11, Daalder and Lindsay write, that provided the catalyst for Bush to blend what could be called the assertive nationalism of Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice; the neoconservative vision of Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle; and his own view, formed long before 9/11, that success requires a clear resolve and the will to use power, into a vision and a mission. That the mission could be perceived as a pernicious new form of imperialism was totally alien to Bush.
''When President Bush says, as he does frequently, that 'freedom' will prevail, in fact he means that America will prevail,'' Soros writes, adding: ''I am rather sensitive to Orwellian doublespeak because I grew up with it in Hungary, first under Nazi and later Communist rule.''

Surmising, for example, why American generals did nothing to protect the cultural treasures of Baghdad, Ali writes: ''Having stirred their soldiers to fight and destroy the 'ragheads,' portrayed in briefings as uncivilized barbarians responsible for 9/11, perhaps they were now fearful of admitting that the 'ragheads' were a people with a culture.''
Robert Jay Lifton, an American psychiatrist and writer, perceives an ideologically driven administration locked in an apocalyptic death-dance with Islamic radicals.
Todd says he used to see the United States as a model, as his ''subconscious safety net.'' Now, he declares, it is solely a ''predator,'' living way beyond its means, racking up video-game victories over defenseless nations and undermining human rights.
I confess I was taken aback to have my country depicted, page after page, book after book, as a dangerous empire in its last throes, as a failure of democracy, as militaristic, violent, hegemonic, evil, callous, arrogant, imperial and cruel.
The more moving judgment comes from Soros, a Jew from Hungary who lived through both German and Soviet occupation: ''This is not the America I chose as my home.''

"I don't think there's any question that (comprehensive testing of all students) is preferable."
?U.S. "Drug Czar" John Walters

Pewaukee High School is developing a proposal to test students in the drama club, jazz band and other activities. The cost -- around $30 per student -- "is something that we've taken into account,"
Legal observers say constitutional barriers to suspicionless searches probably bar random drug testing of entire student bodies, given the presumption that all American children are entitled to attend public school.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in dissenting to a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld testing students in extracurricular activities, argued that the policy "targets for testing a student population least likely to be at risk from illicit drugs."
Herro cited a study by University of Michigan researchers who last year looked at survey data from 1998 through 2001 drawn from 772 high schools and middle schools. They found virtually identical rates of usage in schools that test and schools that do not.

kagan:
As the French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, put it, the struggle was not so much about Iraq as it was about "two visions of the world." The differences were not only about policy. They were also about first principles.
Opinion polls taken before, during and after the war have shown two peoples living on separate strategic and ideological planets.
In her essay, Ms. Rice derided "the belief that the United States is exercising power legitimately only when it is doing so on behalf of someone or something else." But for the rest of the world, what other source of legitimacy can there be? When the United States acts in its own interests, Ms. Rice claimed, as would many Americans, it necessarily serves the interests of everyone.
"To be sure," condi argued, "there is nothing wrong with doing something that benefits all humanity, but that is, in a sense, a second-order effect."
But can the United States cede some power to Europe without putting American security, and indeed Europe's and the entire liberal democratic world's security, at risk in the process?
Europeans thus may succeed in debilitating the United States, but since they have no intention of supplementing American power with their own, the net result will be a diminution of the total amount of power that the liberal democratic world can bring to bear in its defense ? and in defense of liberalism itself.

The small Cessna Citation was just over Grand Rapids, Mich., when the secure phone rang. Attorney General John Ashcroft listened intently, interrupting the caller repeatedly. After hanging up, he turned to his small staff. "The world," he said, "has changed forever."
Ashcroft, as the nation's top law enforcement officer, would have to turn more than a century's worth of jurisprudence on its head and begin enforcing the nation's laws in a fundamentally new way. Traditionally, the Justice Department's role was to punish miscreants after the fact. That, as President Bush told Ashcroft bluntly after the attacks, was no longer good enough. "John," Bush said, "don't let this happen again."
"I may be the person more responsible for trying to shape the national consciousness in saying that prosecution is not enough for the Justice Department anymore," he said. "It has to be actively involved in prevention."
Ashcroft's name alone is a guaranteed applause line for the Democratic hopefuls.

Party politics largely serves as a smokescreen. It is, therefore, unlikely that the Democrats would undo either the war agenda or, for that matter, the dreaded Patriot Act.

"But, in fact, I DON'T accept that Old Adolf offed the 'Six Million'...and for several reasons. For one thing, the Jewish population statistics barely changed over the entire interwar period. For another, no 'Hitler order' has ever been found. For another, the nazis were desperate for labor, so why should they eliminate those useful to them? For another, the official death books of Auschwitz -- supposedly the prime 'death camp' -- show nothing about 'exterminations', in spite of the fact that Germans were meticulous-to-a-fault record keepers (In fact, the Auschwitz administration was sent a written order that every effort was to be taken to REDUCE THE DEATH RATE!). For another, the primary testimony of the Auschwitz camp commandant, which is the source of most of the 'Six Million' number, was obtained by torture and is completely bogus. For another, the work of Fred Leuchter, Germar Rudolf and others has completely disproved the existence of 'gas chambers' at Auschwitz -- the supposed primary means of execution -- the evidence for which was characterized by well-known Jewish historian Arno Mayer as 'at once rare and unreliable'. For another, the extermination of 'Six Million' was ALSO claimed by Jews in WW1, and, in fact, the 'Six Million' is a mystical cabalistic number pertaining to the number of Jews who must be 'cleansed' before Israel can be re-established. "
New York Times story of a few years ago recognized that the original Auschwitz number was bogus by reporting the changing of the plaques at the Aushwitz gates - to DOWNSIZE the original claim of 4 million killed to 1.1 million.


It was very predictable that the Bush slime administration would do everything they could to shut Saddam up. Categorizing him as a prisoner of war allows them to say that he has the right to remain silent. And that's exactly how they want him.
Now, it's interesting, that Saddam, who basically laid down for the US military and hardly put up a fight, is called a prisoner of war, while the Taliban prisoners who fought aggressively, are held in gitmo and are classified instead as enemy combatants who are eligible for torture and who have very limited rights. Very handy. If you're going to get in the habit of routine lying and fraud, little details like this don't bother you.
My guess is that with the proper friendly incentives, meaning, without torture, Saddam would be thrilled to spill the beans. This is what Bush and his gang will attempt to thwart at all costs. I wouldn't be surprised to find Saddam dead pretty soon. He's a very serious threat and liability to Bush now. At least, now that the rest of the world knows that the Kurds caught him, the Republicans aren't touting his capture so boastfully.

Securities regulators are examining a surge in options trading just before Wednesday's announcement that J.P. Morgan Chase agreed to buy Bank One for $58 billion, according to people familiar with the situation.


"How can you be certain they mean it?" I asked him. "What if it was just a smartass speechwriter?" Kristol politely quashed my speculation. "In any other speech, at any other time, I'd be concerned," he explained. "But not the State of the Union. It's too important. Every sentence is fully vetted and deeply considered. Nothing gets in there that they are not sure they mean."
In his memoir The Right Man, Frum admitted that he originally came up with the idea because his boss, chief speechwriter Michael Gerson told him to find a way to justify a war against Iraq and he thought it would be really cool to make up one of those axis-things we had to fight against in World War II. I swear I?m not making this up. His original term, ?axis of hatred," was later transmuted into ?evil? to take advantage of "the theological language that Bush had made his own since September 11."

As O?Neill tells it, he woke up on the day of the address to read on the front page of the New York Times that the president was planning on using some cockamamie calculation?provided by a mistaken midlevel OMB employee?to justify nearly $700 billion in tax cuts. Furious and nearly shaking with disbelief, O?Neill tried to head it off but was informed that since the document had already been leaked to the media by the White House political staff, it was too late to correct it. How in the world, he wondered, could Rove and company ?decide to do things like this and no even consult with the people in government who know what?s true or not? Who was in charge here? This is complete bull****.??
Of course, the past was mere prelude to the big lie of the 2003 State of the Union when the president told the nation the phony story of Iraq?s alleged purchase of uranium from an unnamed African nation - a story many people in government knew to be untrue.

Michael Kinsley ruminated on the modus operandi that distinguished this White House from previous ones: ?Bush II administration lies are often so laughably obvious that you wonder why they bother. Until you realize: They haven't bothered. If telling the truth was less bother, they'd try that too. The characteristic Bush II form of dishonesty is to construct an alternative reality on some topic and to regard anyone who objects to it as a sniveling dweeb obsessed with ?nuance,? which the president of this class, I mean of the United States, has more important things to do than worry about.?

In his third State of the Union, Bush moved from nuance to nonsense. The president pretended that his original invasion had been inspired by something he termed ?weapons of mass destruction program-related activities? instead of the weapons themselves.
How much else of what Bush and his representatives claim would crumble to dust with only a little journalistic investigation?

A senior US diplomat in London has ruffled feathers in Britain's foreign policy establishment by publicly implying that a reference to the "Jewish lobby" in the United States is an anti-Semitic remark.

...the incoming chief inspector indicated that he will shift the focus of the hunt from finding weapons to learning what became of Hussein's weapons programs.