"The government's top expert on Medicare costs was warned that he would be fired if he told key lawmakers about a series of Bush administration cost estimates that could have torpedoed congressional passage of the White House-backed Medicare prescription-drug plan."

Melissa Ann Rowland, 28, was charged Thursday of showing "depraved indifference to human life," ignoring medical advice to deliver her twins by C-section because she didn't want to be scarred. One nurse told police Rowland said she would rather "lose one of the babies than be cut like that."
The case could affect abortion rights and open the door to the prosecution of mothers who smoke or don't follow their obstetrician's diet, said Marguerite Driessen, a law professor at Brigham Young University.

"No paper should ever run Rall again," howls Andrew Sullivan, a Time magazine columnist who also writes the country's most prominent extreme-right blog.

As the Economic Policy Institute points out, if they hadn't dropped out, the official unemployment rate would be an eye-popping 7.4 percent, not a politically spinnable 5.6 percent.

Indeed, in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Secretary of State Colin Powell explicitly ruled out every other justification for the war. Asked about the other reasons, he said, "The President has not linked authority to go to war to any of those elements."

The questions that now cry out to be answered are, Why did the United States, standing in the midst of the Pakistani nuclear Wal-Mart, its shelves groaning with, among other things, centrifuge parts, uranium hexafluoride (supplied, we now know, to Libya) and helpful bomb-assembly manuals in a variety of languages, rush out of the premises to vainly ransack the empty warehouse of Iraq?

Why tackle the lesser problem in Iraq, the members of Congress would have had to ask themselves, while ignoring the greater in North Korea? On October 10, a week after the Kelly visit, the House of Representatives passed the Iraq resolution, and the next day the Senate followed suit. Only five days later, on October 16, did Bush's National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, reveal what was happening in North Korea.

In short, from June 2002, when the CIA delivered its report to the White House, until October 16--the period in which the nation's decision to go to war in Iraq was made--the Administration knowingly withheld the news about North Korea and its Pakistan connection from the public.

In sum, the glaring contradiction between the policy of "regime change" for already disarmed Iraq and regime-support for proliferating Pakistan was not a postwar discovery; it was fully visible before the war.

In this larger plan to establish American hegemony, the Iraq war had an indispensable role. If the world was to be orderly, then proliferation must be stopped; if force was the solution to proliferation, then pre-emption was necessary (to avoid that mushroom cloud); if pre-emption was necessary, then regime change was necessary (so the offending government could never build the banned weapons again); and if all this was necessary, then Iraq was the one country in the world where it all could be demonstrated. Neither North Korea nor Iran offered an opportunity to teach these lessons--the first because it was capable of responding with a major war, even nuclear war, and the second because even the Administration could see that US invasion would be met with fierce popular resistance.

I was on a panel recently at this conference about Iraq. I pointed out that there was a news story how the CIA had warned George Bush, before he went into Iraq, that Iraq was not responsible for terrorism against the United States, and that the only likely inspiration for Iraqi terrorism against the United States, and possibly even an Iraqi alliance with al-Qaeda, would be American invasion of Iraq. So Bush's invasion of Iraq wasn't protecting our country from any known threat, but Bush was actually creating a new threat which would result in more Americans being wounded or killed. And a professor on the panel -- I think he was a political scientist -- said that this was some secret kept in some obscure media publication. And I said, "Well, do you know where it was kept? It was kept on the front page of The New York Times. That's where I read it." That news was on the front page of The New York Times.