Deep in the recesses of the Pentagon is the Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA is where Vice Adm. John Poindexter (USN ret.) hangs out these days, working on TIA. TIA stands for Total Information Awareness. The project, which is budgeted at $10 million this year and expected to get more next year, has been getting bad press. That is in part because its Orwellian-sounding purpose is to create a centralized database of personal information about Americans.

This is a defeat that the Democrats need to quickly demystify. They did not lose this election because they were too far left but rather because they did almost nothing to rally either their diehard or their sometime supporters. If they misread this month's mournful numbers -- if they shun a progressive-populist economics, or flee from a defense of environmental or pro-choice policies -- then they cede all the wedge issues to Karl Rove's Republicans.

Civil libertarians argue that he fear of police abuses in a war on terror is neither speculative nor paranoid. In New York, Chicago and San Francisco, police spying and surveillance has a long and ignoble history.

"We are seeing a national phenomenon where, in the name of protecting national security against a new and subtle danger, there is a massive effort to eliminate protections for political protest," said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. "These safeguards were put in place in the aftermath of a documented history of systematic spying, infiltration and dirty tricks by police agencies and the FBI."

Arab satellite television has also done well in on-the-ground spot news reporting (if with obvious bias in their national perspectives [offers] a mirror image of Fox channel’s using the fluttering American flag as a routine on-screen backdrop, Dan Rather and other broadcast anchors wearing US flag lapel pins, and Geraldo Rivera packing a gun on the air and going after the bad guys in Afghanistan). Hey, in the commercial media world, you gotta do what you gotta do to keep the viewers viewing and sell those deodorant advertisements, in the New World and the Old World alike.

If all this, as the US would have us believe, is the work of a single shadowy terrorist network, with tentacles stretching across the world, then the way to defeat it is to cut off its head and then destroy its offshoots one by one. This is what America and its allies are trying to do. But what if the West is grappling with an altogether different phenomenon? What if the war on terror being waged is fundamentally wrong-headed? [Instead, Seale argues, a more logical] possibility is that the “enemy” is not just a terrorist network but a broad, militant, grassroots rebellion against American military and political interventions in the Arab and Muslim world, against Western arrogance, racism and bullying.

For decades now, but especially under the Bush administration, America’s triumphalism, its contempt for the views and interests of others, its boastful displays of military power, its refusal to recognize and address the “roots of terror,” its apparent indifference to international law, its economic supremacy ­ all these have created a worldwide backlash which has put Americans at risk in many countries. History suggests that any power which dominates others will inevitably create violent opposition to it. If this is true, then what we are witnessing is nothing less than an anti-imperialist movement of the 21st century.... Although often expressed in Islamic terms, the movement of rebellion is essentially political. It aims to liberate the Arab and Muslim world from the suffocating embrace of the West ­ and above all from American neo-imperialism and its Zionist handmaiden. ... Many separate streams feed the river of rebellion. There is no doubt that the epidemic of anti-American sentiment raging from Morocco to Indonesia is fed by American support for Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people. This is the main spring of the rebellion. But there are many others. [Read the rest of his argument]

This week Al Gore said the obvious. "The media is kind of weird these days on politics," he told The New York Observer, "and there are some major institutional voices that are, truthfully speaking, part and parcel of the Republican Party." ... In short, we have a situation rife with conflicts of interest. The handful of organizations that supply most people with their news have major commercial interests that inevitably tempt them to slant their coverage, and more generally to be deferential to the ruling party. There have already been some peculiar examples of news not reported. For example, last month's 100,000-strong Washington antiwar demonstration an important event, whatever your views on the issue was almost ignored by some key media outlets.

The political agenda of Fox News, to take the most important example, is hardly obscure. Roger Ailes, the network's chairman, has been advising the Bush administration. Fox's Brit Hume even claimed credit for the midterm election. "It was because of our coverage that it happened," he told Don Imus. "People watch us and take their electoral cues from us. No one should doubt the influence of Fox News in these matters." (This remark may have been tongue in cheek, but imagine the reaction if the Democrats had won and Dan Rather, even jokingly, had later claimed credit.)

For the time being, blatant media bias is still limited by old rules and old norms of behavior. But soon the rules will be abolished, and the norms are eroding before our eyes.

Do the conflicts of interest of our highly concentrated media constitute a threat to democracy? I've reported; you decide.

...More Iranians are choosing sides in an explosive debate that pits Islamic rule - defined by Iran's unelected conservatives, who have held key levers of power since the Islamic revolution - against popular democracy..

A Western diplomat says that the current regime "is under more pressure than at any time since the revolution. Something has to give," he says. "Reformers are no longer prepared to compromise. [President Mohamad] Khatami is still regarded as the only one who can peacefully bring about change, and that's what people really want."

"If [the system] survives the next year intact, I think it will survive," says the diplomat, adding that the conservative camp may not grasp the changes afoot. "It's the same with all dictators - they do not see their own demise."...

Such views are sacrilege to Iran's conservative leaders. But Ayatollah Tabrizi notes that proreform views are now as prevalent among martyrs 'families, the Revolutionary Guards corps, and clerics, as they are in liberal circles.

...Where the country's health care crisis is concerned, we have on the left that famous, wacky liberal dreamer, Al Gore, now pushing what is most accurately called national health insurance.

In the center, there is a more famous apostle of moderate and mixed-bag policy wonkery who relies heavily on the private sector for his latest proposal - Edward Kennedy.

On the right, there is the familiarity that ought to breed contempt - President Bush, still trying to fit the square peg of tax credits into the round hole of immense gaps in basic coverage for working families....

Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the heart surgeon who helped reclaim the Senate for the Republicans, is plunging into his next political challenge, one fraught with risks and opportunities for his president and his party: overhauling Medicare, the popular; and costly; health insurance program for the elderly.

Most Republicans are keenly aware that they need to deliver prescription drug benefits to the nation's elderly in the next two years. They have repeatedly promised to do so and now control both Congress and the White House. Democrats, who assert that the Republicans simply paid lip service to the issue to get through the elections, are certain to hold them accountable if they fail.