On his first day in office, Bush reinstated the Mexico City Policy, aka "global gag rule," denying U.S. family-planning funds to foreign aid groups that offer counseling, information or referrals about abortion -- even if they don't perform abortions themselves.

The RNC sent the stations a letter Friday suggesting the outlets may be complicit in breaking campaign finance laws if they air the MoveOn.org Voter Fund ads. It asked them to decline to broadcast the ads.
In the letter, RNC chief counsel Jill Holtzman Vogel wrote, "As a broadcaster licensed by the Federal Communications Commission, you have a responsibility to the viewing public and to your licensing agency to refrain from complicity in any illegal activity, specifically in this case, violations of our nation's federal election laws."

As the respected intelligence analyst Thomas Powers recently concluded in The New York Review of Books, "In the six months since the President declared an end to major combat in Iraq not a single one of the factual claims about Iraqi weapons and links to al-Qaeda has been robustly confirmed, and in most cases there has been no confirmation of any kind whatsoever."
Most egregious in virtually every case was the behavior of the Wall Street Journal editors.
In an editorial titled "Saddam and the Next 9/11," Mooney notes, the Journal dived in off the deep end to speculate that Hussein had ordered the October 2001 anthrax attacks.
The Chicago Tribune was hardly any different, complaining of the "hysterical French," and the "axis of appeasement" that opposed the Bush administration rush to war.


Republicans had boasted ahead of time how they were setting ?bear traps? for Kerry that would force him to cast difficult votes. But the scheme backfired. At issue was legislation pushed by the National Rifle Association to exempt gun manufacturers from lawsuits. Kerry opposed the bill, but voted in favor of the two gun-control amendments.
The bad news is that unlike Gore, Kerry isn?t competing for any Southern states. He doesn?t have to slow dance for Dixie. The South is gone, which means Kerry has to carry both coasts plus the battleground industrial states and the Western swing states of New Mexico and Arizona. There?s no margin for error.
Kerry?s opposition to the death penalty returns the party to its roots, but at what cost? Kerry makes an exception for terrorists

The government has eased Clinton-era oil and gas drilling restrictions on a large tract of desert grassland in New Mexico in a decision that benefits a large Republican donor in the state.

In the mid-1980s, Black escaped punishment by the SEC after it investigated alleged miscompliance with its rules by a company named Norsen with which he was involved. Lord Black was forced formally to undertake that nothing of the kind would happen again with any of his enterprises. If the SEC concludes that fraud was committed in any of Hollinger's filings, he could face criminal charges. "They can throw the book at Conrad and I believe they will," Mr Newman says.

Here are fond memories from his old teacher, Yoshi Tsurumi, who is now Professor of International Business at the City University of New York:
At Harvard Business School, thirty years ago, George Bush was a student of mine. I still vividly remember him. In my class, he declared that ?people are poor because they are lazy.? He was opposed to labor unions, social security, environmental protection, Medicare, and public schools. To him, the antitrust watch dog, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Securities Exchange Commission were unnecessary hindrances to ?free market competition.? To him, Franklin Roosevelt?s New Deal was ?socialism.?

"We have scored a 300-million-mile [484-million-kilometre] interplanetary hole in one," crowed chief scientist Dr Steve Squyres. He could never have imagined how right he was.