... All said they were impressed with Kerry's national security credentials, but they talked more about domestic issues. Kathryn Paolilli, 46, a mother of four who voted for Bush in 2000, said her main complaint about the president is his infusion of Christianity into politics. She smiled widely and nodded when Kerry said: "I don't want to claim that God is on our side. As Abraham Lincoln told us, 'I want to pray humbly that we are on God's side.' "...

... Obama's father was a goat herder in Africa who won a scholarship to study in America. He described his mother's youth in Kansas, raised by a couple who built a good life with educations they obtained through the GI Bill and a home they got with a federal loan.

"My parents shared not only an improbable love, they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation," ...

The American general [Karpinski] who headed the U.S. military prison at Abu Ghraib personally witnessed abuses there, an Iraqi man alleged in a federal lawsuit protesting his treatment. ...

... SPEAK NOT: [The] GOP [doesn't] seem too bothered by the fact that ... Ron Reagan will address the Democratic convention tonight. They're clearly more troubled, however, by the fact that Reagan's mother, Nancy, apparently won't be speaking at theirs. It's no secret that Mrs. Reagan is dismayed by George W. Bush's restrictions on embryonic stem cell research, which holds enormous promise for future disease cures. Researchers admit the near-term potential of stem cells for Alzheimer's patients like Ronald Reagan is quite limited, but Mrs. Reagan doesn't seem to care: "I do not expect her at our convention," Republican chairman Ed Gillespie admitted in a press briefing here this morning.

But Gillespie wasn't content to leave reporters with the impression that Mrs. Reagan was boycotting the convention over stem cells. Instead, he cast her as a traumatized old widow. "Let's be a little thoughtful here," the GOP chairman lectured inquisitive reporters. "Mrs. Reagan's been through a lot this year. And whether she determines she wants to come to our convention this year is Mrs. Reagan's decision, and no one else's. ... Just keep in mind for a moment the year Mrs. Reagan has had, and be understanding."

Nancy Reagan is undoubtedly drained and in mourning. But that wasn't enough to keep her from speaking last month at the public christening of an aircraft carrier named after her husband. Sure, a national convention is a much bigger ordeal than a ceremony naming an aircraft carrier. But I have a feeling that's not what's going on here--and that Gillespie knows it.

--Michael Crowley

... One of the revelations in the 9/11 commission report was the casualness of the resort to war. On the afternoon of Sept. 11, Donald Rumsfeld spoke of attacking Saddam Hussein, and President Bush began asking about Iraq the next day. Older men blithely found a war for younger men and women to die in.

The result is the unbearable emptiness in homes like the Walters's all across America - and, even more often, in Iraq. The American victims are disproportionately from working-class families, not well represented either in White House meetings or in this newspaper's readership. It is those families of the dead and wounded who are bearing 99.9 percent of the burden of this war.
When hawks say that the Iraq war was worth the price, they should remember that that price is measured in the lives of people like Don Walters, forever young, forever heroes, forever gone. ...

... Rangel believes a draft would help deter unilateral, preemptive American action against Iraq by raising the political cost of war. A draft would also result in a more equitable class representation in the nation's military, which Rangel correctly describes as "Americans making the sacrifice for this great country."...

...Those findings are bad news for Democrats assembled in Boston for their national convention, because white evangelicals and born-again Christians far outnumber blacks and Hispanic combined. ...

... And the ‘liberals’ whose entire cause is their cult of secular humanism, find the expansion of economic liberty and democratic values anathema to their evil designs...

The latest polling results released on CNN indicates that the majority of Americans feel no more secure now than on 9/11. No wonder. Despite all the words written about the Commander in Chief’s about homeland security, America’s borders are just as porous today as they were on the day before the attack on New York’s Twin Towers: 9/10/01. .... [Ditto] on our Commander in Chief ‘s doctrine of preemption: invading and fighting the terrorists over there so that we will not have to fight them here at home? We were lead to believe that by invading Iraq and destroying its nonexistent WMD, we would strike a mighty blow right in the heart of terrorism at its root, capturing and stopping the terrorists over there in Iraq, before they strike us again at home. It should be noted that many of us did not buy in to that phony claim. Still, the question remains, “Does America now feel safer against a terrorist attack than you did on 09/10/01. The majority of Americans say, “No.” ...

... John Yoo, now a California law professor, too, has all the credentials that President Bush wants, including a clerkship with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, two years’ service to Attorney General John Ashcroft, and authorship of the key memos that say the President as Commander in Chief can disregard any laws, national or international, on the treatment of prisoners. As a sign of what a second Bush term holds for judicial appointments, regardless of the embarrassing revelations about Yoo’s authorship of the torture memos, the Commander in Chief just appointed Yoo to the Nazi War Crimes Interagency Working Group.

....One August day in 1994, while gossiping about politics over lunch on Nantucket, Richard Mellon Scaife, the Pittsburgh billionaire and patron of conservative causes, made a prediction. "We're going to get Clinton," Joan Bingham, a New York publisher present at the lunch, remembers him saying. "And you'll be much happier," he said to Bingham and another Democrat at the table, "because Al Gore will be president."

Bingham was startled at the time, but in the years since – as Clinton has struggled with an onslaught from political enemies – Scaife's assertion came to seem less and less far-fetched.

Scaife did get involved in numerous anti-Clinton activities. He gave $2.3 million to the American Spectator magazine to dig up dirt on Clinton and supported other conservative groups that harassed the president and his administration. The White House and its allies responded by fingering Scaife as the central figure in "a vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president," as Hillary Rodham Clinton described it. James Carville, Clinton's former campaign aide and rabid defender, called Scaife "the archconservative godfather in [a] heavily funded war against the president." ...

... One year ago, conventional political wisdom held that the Democratic presidential nominee would be in trouble right now. After spending all his cash in a tough primary battle, the thinking went, the candidate would have to spend April through June scrambling to raise money for the general campaign. In the meantime, Bush's team would be free to use that three-month window to define the Democrats' front-runner through attack ads the latter couldn't afford to counter.

Things turned out differently: the attack ads flung at Senator John Kerry have not gone unanswered. In fact, in addition to Kerry's own ads, more than $15 million of political advertising has run in the past three months, most of it bashing Bush, most of it in key battleground states–without costing the Kerry campaign a dime. The ads have been created and paid for by organizations known as "527s," named for the tax-code section that defines them. These groups do not fall under Federal Election Commission (FEC) regulations, as long as they limit their activities; most significantly, they cannot support a candidate directly or coordinate their efforts with a candidate's campaign.

They can, however, accept contributions of unlimited size, from anybody. Depending on your perspective, this is either an unsavory back-door maneuver around campaign-finance reform, or an exciting new outlet for political discourse.

Either way, it's probably a big reason why John Kerry entered July in a dead heat in the polls despite the tens of millions of dollars spent on negative advertising against him–and one of the reasons why Bush's favorability ratings are at an all-time low.

The best-known of these 527s is probably the MoveOn.org Voter Fund, formed last September by the progressive California-based MoveOn.org; its most recent television ad, running in Ohio, blames George W. Bush for losing American jobs to outsourcing. The most ambitious group, however, is an interrelated trio planning to spend more than $100 million on this election: Americans Coming Together (ACT), the Media Fund, and Joint Victory Campaign 2004, all operating out of Washington, DC. Its TV and radio ads include "No Oil Company Left Behind" and "Bush and Halliburton."

They include a range of people, from the business elite (George Soros, Lewis Cullman) to the glitterati (Stephen Bing, Susie Tompkins Buell), from the well-born (Anne Getty Earhart, Alida Rockefeller Messinger, Linda Pritzker) to the self-made (Andrew Rappaport, Marcy Carsey, Agnes Varis). There's even a drug-reformer billionaire (Peter Lewis)–and an environmentalist (John A. Harris). ... [read on]

…Democrat John Kerry has widened his lead over President Bush among Latino voters nationwide, a finding that suggests Republicans have failed to gain traction within that critical constituency, according to a new poll…

… At first appearing a bit nervous, Bush quickly loosened up, exchanging quips with several in the audience, including Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton, a recent contender for the Democratic presidential nomination.

At one point, the crowd burst into applause when Bush acknowledged: "I know, I know. The Republican Party has got a lot of work to do. I understand that."

As the din faded, he said to Jackson: "You didn't need to nod your head that hard, Jesse."…

... Brazile, who is black, says Kerry has done an effective job of reaching out to African-Americans who initially were critical of what they called a paucity of black staffers in his campaign.

Kerry assuaged these complaints by taking on former New York Deputy Mayor Bill Lynch and former Labor Secretary Alexis Herman as campaign advisers. "John Kerry responded well to the criticism," Brazile said. "I now feel I can get in a foxhole with him."...

... [a] statewide poll, conducted around the same time by Mason-Dixon, put the [nc] race much closer: 48 percent for Bush-Cheney to 45 percent for Kerry-Edwards, with 7 percent undecided. The telephone poll of 625 registered voters had a margin of sampling error of no more than plus or minus 4 percentage points.

... "For the president who won here by such a large margin (in 2000) to be mired in the mid-40s is not a good thing,"...

Did new Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi pull out a pistol and cold-bloodedly execute as many as six suspected insurgents at a Baghdad police station, just days before the United States handed control of the country to his interim government?

"They say the prisoners - handcuffed and blindfolded - were lined up against a wall in a courtyard adjacent to the maximum-security cell block in which they were held at the Al-Amariyah security center, in the city's south-western suburbs." the story states. "They say Dr. Allawi told onlookers the victims had each killed as many as 50 Iraqis and they 'deserved worse than death.' "

The witnesses told the Australian newspaper that Allawi had shot each young man in the head as about a dozen Iraqi policemen and four Americans from the prime minister's personal security team watched in stunned silence. They said that the murdered prisoners had been foreign insurgents and that Allawi had wanted to show Iraqi police how to deal with them.

Not surprisingly, the story has generated sweeping denials all around. Allawi's office said the new prime minister - reportedly once a member of Saddam Hussein's spy service before a falling out with the dictator - had visited the police station and did not carry a gun.

"If we attempted to refute each [rumor], we would have no time for other business," a U.S. embassy spokesman said. "As far as this embassy's press office is concerned, this case is closed."

But the reputed eyewitnesses said that not only did the killings happen, but they were the right thing to do. "Any terrorists in Iraq should have the same destiny," one said.

"This is the new Iraq."

If the latest in [Tim Lahaye's] "Left Behind" series of evangelical thrillers is to be believed, Jesus will return to Earth, gather non-Christians to his left and toss them into everlasting fire:

"Jesus merely raised one hand a few inches and a yawning chasm opened in the earth, stretching far and wide enough to swallow all of them. They tumbled in, howling and screeching, but their wailing was soon quashed and all was silent when the earth closed itself again."

These are the best-selling novels for adults in the United States, and they have sold more than 60 million copies worldwide. The latest is "Glorious Appearing," which has Jesus returning to Earth to wipe all non-Christians from the planet. It's disconcerting to find ethnic cleansing celebrated as the height of piety.

If a Muslim were to write an Islamic version of "Glorious Appearing" and publish it in Saudi Arabia, jubilantly describing a massacre of millions of non-Muslims by God, we would have a fit. We have quite properly linked the fundamentalist religious tracts of Islam with the intolerance they nurture, and it's time to remove the motes from our own eyes.

In "Glorious Appearing," Jesus merely speaks and the bodies of the enemy are ripped open. Christians have to drive carefully to avoid "hitting splayed and filleted bodies of men and women and horses."

"The riders not thrown," the novel continues, "leaped from their horses and tried to control them with the reins, but even as they struggled, their own flesh dissolved, their eyes melted and their tongues disintegrated. . . . Seconds later the same plague afflicted the horses, their flesh and eyes and tongues melting away, leaving grotesque skeletons standing, before they, too, rattled to the pavement."

One might have thought that Jesus would be more of an animal lover.

These scenes also raise an eschatological problem: Could devout fundamentalists really enjoy paradise as their friends, relatives and neighbors were heaved into hell?

As my Times colleague David Kirkpatrick noted in an article, this portrayal of a bloody Second Coming reflects a shift in American portrayals of Jesus, from a gentle Mister Rogers figure to a martial messiah presiding over a sea of blood. Militant Christianity rises to confront Militant Islam.

This matters in the real world, in the same way that fundamentalist Islamic tracts in Saudi Arabia do. Each form of fundamentalism creates a stark moral division between decent, pious types like oneself — and infidels headed for hell.

No, I don't think the readers of "Glorious Appearing" will ram planes into buildings. But we did imprison thousands of Muslims here and abroad after 9/11, and ordinary Americans joined in the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in part because of a lack of empathy for the prisoners. It's harder to feel empathy for such people if we regard them as infidels and expect Jesus to dissolve their tongues and eyes any day now.

I had reservations about writing this column because I don't want to mock anyone's religious beliefs, and millions of Americans think "Glorious Appearing" describes God's will. Yet ultimately I think it's a mistake to treat religion as a taboo, either in this country or in Saudi Arabia.

I often write about religion precisely because faith has a vast impact on society. Since I've praised the work that evangelicals do in the third world (Christian aid groups are being particularly helpful in Sudan, at a time when most of the world has done nothing about the genocide there), I also feel a responsibility to protest intolerance at home.

Should we really give intolerance a pass if it is rooted in religious faith?

Many American Christians once read the Bible to mean that African-Americans were cursed as descendants of Noah's son Ham, and were intended by God to be enslaved. In the 19th century, millions of Americans sincerely accepted this Biblical justification for slavery as God's word — but surely it would have been wrong to defer to such racist nonsense simply because speaking out could have been perceived as denigrating some people's religious faith.

People have the right to believe in a racist God, or a God who throws millions of nonevangelicals into hell. I don't think we should ban books that say that. But we should be embarrassed when our best-selling books gleefully celebrate religious intolerance and violence against infidels.

That's not what America stands for, and I doubt that it's what God stands for.

The Congressional investigation into the abuse of Iraqidetainees at Abu Ghraib prison has virtually ground to halt, as a senior Senate Republican said Thursday that no new hearings would be held on the matter until this fall at the earliest.


The Republican-controlled House Armed Services Committee made it clear weeks ago that it believed that the several current military investigations of the scandal were sufficient, and that summoning commanders to Washington would only hinder American operations in Iraq. [Isn't it ironic that one of the Repub's House leaders has the name "Delay"!]

That left the issue to the Senate Armed Services Committee, whose chairman, Senator John W. Warner, a Virginia Republican, has held a series of hearings, but none since May 19. On Thursday, Mr. Warner said he would hold off calling any more witnesses until several criminal prosecutions and seven pending Pentagon inquiries were completed.

But some of those inquiries are running weeks behind.The pivotal investigation of the role that American military intelligence officials played in the abuses, which officials once expected to wrap up in June, now is not likely to be completed and reviewed by senior Pentagon officials until mid-August. Congress will soon recess until September.

"We're not in a position to try to have an independent investigation at this point," Mr. Warner told reporters after senators received a classified briefing on Thursday on Red Cross reports about detention operations at American-run prisons in Iraq. "There are so many ongoing investigations going on, we cannot in any way jeopardize the right of individuals being investigated."...

The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling, and the worst part is the soundtrack, of the boys shrieking....this is your government at war.

Rumsfeld, for years the most public face of the Bush administration's war on terrorism, has suddenly become scarce.

Burdened by the Iraq prisoner abuse scandal and constrained by the presidential election campaign, the Pentagon chief who spearheaded the Afghanistan and Iraq wars has been relegated to a less visible role.

Once seemingly in danger of being fired over the prisoner abuse, Rumsfeld appears to have survived. Yet some wonder whether the White House might still conclude he is a political liability and prefer he leave this summer.

"Donald Rumsfeld has gone from being the most popular spokesperson for the Bush administration policies to something of a pariah," said Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute, a think tank.

"Whereas before the White House was happy to see him speaking in public whenever he chose, now it kind of cringes for fear of what the results might be," Thompson added.

Since an April 27 news conference -- one day before CBS News broadcast photographs of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqis at the Abu Ghraib prison -- Rumsfeld has appeared in the Pentagon briefing room just twice, on May 4 and June 17. In April he had four Pentagon news conferences; in March he had three. ...

..."I don't think you fix the problem by changing the No. 2 horse, but Bush is facing so much heavy baggage going into November, he's going to have to throw some of that baggage off," said the Republican, who insisted on anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue...

...The attacks against coalition and Iraqi targets have been the result of a combination of at least three different factors (visible in varying proportions over time):

(1) Baathists and Sunnis who perceive they have the most to lose as a result of "regime change;"

(2) other Iraqis opposed to the US military occupation and what they believe is a US-appointed government that is not representative of the Iraqi people; and

(3) foreign terrorists seeking to sow the seeds of jihad (made easy by Iraq's porous borders and inviting targets in their own neighborhood).

Each of these elements requires a different strategy and set of tactics. And what might be a successful approach against one group may be counterproductive for battling the others.

The point is that since the unstable security situation in Iraq is not the result of a single threat, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to the problem.

... The procedural vote leaves Kerry, D-Mass., and Edwards, D-N.C., with an excuse not to participate. Kerry's campaign said Tuesday the two senators would be prepared to vote against the amendment if it came up but would not feel obliged to vote on procedural matters.

"Most people think that Kerry's probably better off that there's no up-or- down vote, because if there were, his vote against the constitutional amendment could be used by Republicans to rally their base," said Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College.

"But the way this is working out, it wouldn't have hurt Kerry very much .. . because it's just not acting as the kind of wedge issue that everyone thought it would."

Vice President Dick Cheney's wife's equivocation on the matter Sunday only provided more cover for Democrats and fodder for a new $1 million, multistate advertising assault by the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest gay and lesbian lobbying group.

Lynne Cheney told CNN that she agreed with her husband's initial position in the 2000 campaign -- as she put it, that "people should be free to enter into their relationships that they choose" and "that when it comes to conferring legal status on relationships, that is a matter left to the states."

The vice president now supports the [amendment]

...Apart from the fact that Edwards is someone who is incredibly energetic and charismatic, Kerry's selection of Edwards is much more of a socio-economic play. It is a concerted effort to reach downscale white voters, who may or may not live in small towns and rural America, who might be more open to a message delivered by Edwards than Kerry, and who might better identify with Edwards' roots more than Kerry's. While I still expect Vice President Dick Cheney to remain on the Republican ticket, I am beginning to have some doubts about this for the first time this cycle. The dynamics of this race do not look good for President Bush.

The political mortality rate for well-known, well-defined incumbents tied at 45 percent is extremely high, even if there are 3 percentage points or so that are likely to go to independent and third party candidates. The mortality rate for incumbents with 48 percent job approval ratings is not much better. While this is almost certainly going to be a very, very close race, I'd rather be John Kerry today than George W. Bush.

Stipulating that dumping a totally loyal, integral part of his inner circle is something that is absolutely not in George W. Bush's DNA, losing with plenty of notice does not appear to be part of his genetic make up either.

Bush, Cheney and company got caught off-guard in 2000, losing the popular vote and coming within 537 votes of losing the election when they thought they were in better shape than that. This time, the Bush campaign is on notice that it is in trouble.

President Bush's fate is inextricably tied to circumstances almost completely beyond his control. Despite the transfer of sovereignty, the situation in Iraq is not getting better.

Also, the economy that looked to be booming earlier this year is still growing at a very healthy rate, but not nearly as aggressively as Bush needs it to.

This is especially true in hard-hit states such as Michigan and Ohio, where voters are less likely to recognize and appreciate the growth that has occurred. As a result, the president badly needs something to shake this race up, and I can think of just one thing. Cheney may need to watch his back.

As Americans learned details of a Senate committee report that found flaws in the intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq, many who had always staunchly favored an invasion said that their support remained firm, and many who had strongly opposed the war said the report merely added to their list of reasons.
But for the people in between — those whose opinions about Iraq have changed, sometimes more than once, over 16 months of conflict — the conclusion that government assessments of Iraq's weaponry were overstated stirred new uncertainty and anxiety, renewed sadness over lives lost, and a sense of helplessness about when and how the conflict would end....

...Even as President Bush turns his doctrine of pre-emptive action against powers threatening the United States into a campaign theme, Washington is using a far more subdued, take-it-slow approach to the dangers of unconventional weapons in Iran and North Korea.

There are many reasons for the yawning gap between Mr. Bush's campaign language and the reality. One of the most important is woven throughout the searing, 511-page critique of the intelligence that led America to war last year, released Friday by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The report details, in one painful anecdote after another, misjudgments that the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies made as they put together what the committee called an "assumption train" about Iraq's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs. That same train powered Mr. Bush's own justification for a pre-emptive strike against Saddam Hussein, down to his now-discredited argument that the Iraqi leader was developing unmanned aerial vehicles capable dropping biological weapons on American troops in the Mideast, or perhaps even the United States itself.

The sweeping nature of that report is already fueling a new debate over pre-emption, on the campaign trail and among the nations the United States must convince as it builds its case against North Korea and Iran. On Sunday, Senator Pat Roberts, the Republican chairman of the intelligence committee, said on NBC's "Meet the Press" that the urgency of those problems meant there was not much time to fix the intelligence community.

"Let's do it very quickly," he said, "because in a dangerous world, if you're going to have a policy of pre-emption, whether it be North Korea or whether it be whatever threat we face," including a possible terror attack on the United States before the election, "we have to get it right."

Mr. Bush's aides say other countries are citing Iraq to make the argument that America can never again be sure it is getting it right and thus must back away from the pre-emption doctrine enshrined in Mr. Bush's 2002 "National Security Strategy of the United States."

China has been the most outspoken proponent of this view, suggesting publicly that the administration cannot be trusted when it asserts that North Korea has secretly started up a second nuclear weapons program — one based on enriching uranium. Administration officials say the Chinese are exploiting the Iraq findings for political convenience, because finding a solution to the North Korean problem will be far simpler if the evidence of a uranium program can be ignored.

"It hurts us, there is no question," a senior aide to Mr. Bush conceded on Friday, as the Senate report was published. "We already have the Chinese saying to us, `If you missed this much in Iraq, how are we supposed to believe that the North Koreans are producing nuclear weapons?' It just increases the pressure on us to prove that we are right." ...

...The betting ... is that they will manage to swim together again rather than sink the Government.

... sources tell NEWSWEEK, Ridge's department last week asked the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel to analyze what legal steps would be needed to permit the postponement of the election were an attack to take place. Justice was specifically asked to review a recent letter to Ridge from DeForest B. Soaries Jr., chairman of the newly created U.S. Election Assistance Commission. Soaries noted that, while a primary election in New York on September 11, 2001, was quickly suspended by that state's Board of Elections after the attacks that morning, "the federal government has no agency that has the statutory authority to cancel and reschedule a federal election." Soaries, a Bush appointee who two years ago was an unsuccessful GOP candidate for Congress, wants Ridge to seek emergency legislation from Congress empowering his agency to make such a call. Homeland officials say that as drastic as such proposals sound, they are taking them seriously—along with other possible contingency plans in the event of an election-eve or Election Day attack. "We are reviewing the issue to determine what steps need to be taken to secure the election," says Brian Roehrkasse, a Homeland spokesman.

In May 2001, Enron's top lobbyists in Washington advised the company chairman that then-House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) was pressing for a $100,000 contribution to his political action committee, in addition to the $250,000 the company had already pledged to the Republican Party that year.

DeLay requested that the new donation come from "a combination of corporate and personal money from Enron's executives," with the understanding that it would be partly spent on "the redistricting effort in Texas," said the e-mail to Kenneth L. Lay from lobbyists Rick Shapiro and Linda Robertson.

The e-mail, which surfaced in a subsequent federal probe of Houston-based Enron, is one of at least a dozen documents obtained by The Washington Post that show DeLay and his associates directed money from corporations and Washington lobbyists to Republican campaign coffers in Texas in 2001 and 2002 as part of a plan to redraw the state's congressional districts.

DeLay's fundraising efforts helped produce a stunning political success. Republicans took control of the Texas House for the first time in 130 years, Texas congressional districts were redrawn to send more Republican lawmakers to Washington, and DeLay -- now the House majority leader -- is more likely to retain his powerful post after the November election, according to political experts. ...

Former Howard Dean did whatever he could Friday to persuade Ralph Nader to drop out of the presidential race. He pleaded, argued, complimented and even used a little humor.

But after an hourlong debate at the National Press Club in Washington, Nader's answer remained the same.

"I am never going to betray our supporters and before the election say, 'Sorry, in a few (swing) states, we're cutting out,' " the independent candidate said. "It is baffling that the Democrats will not focus on 10 times more votes they can get back (from Democrats who voted for President Bush in 2000) and whine and carp about a third-party candidacy."

But that candidacy was exactly what the discussion focused on as Democrats fearful of losing key votes to Nader in November relied on Dean, one of Nader's closest political allies in the party, to make their case.

The debate, aired on National Public Radio, was less an argument over policy as it was a disagreement over how to achieve their shared objectives. By running for president, Dean said, Nader threatens many of his own supporters.

During Friday's debate, Nader called the Democrats' efforts to stop his candidacy "the politics of fear." Dean said he disagreed with other Democrats' attempts to keep him off the ballot but called Nader's tactics "fatally flawed."

Taking questions from an audience of about 200 people and NPR moderator Margot Adler, the two agreed on a host of campaign issues, including the reform of the Electoral College system and the inclusion of more candidates in the fall presidential debates.

But it was because of those and many broader agreements between Nader and Kerry that Dean asked Nader to reconsider his candidacy.

"In the long run, this is about American people who can't defend themselves against the kind of administration that George Bush has," Dean said. "And that's why I wish you were on our team, Ralph, because we really need you."

... [W]e have started to see the beginnings of public resistance to rapacious pricing and other dubious practices of the pharmaceutical industry. It is mainly because of this resistance that drug companies are now blanketing us with public relations messages. And the magic words, repeated over and over like an incantation, are research, innovation, and American. Research. Innovation. American. It makes a great story.

But while the rhetoric is stirring, it has very little to do with reality.

First, research and development (R&D) is a relatively small part of the budgets of the big drug companies—dwarfed by their vast expenditures on marketing and administration, and smaller even than profits. In fact, year after year, for over two decades, this industry has been far and away the most profitable in the United States. (In 2003, for the first time, the industry lost its first-place position, coming in third, behind "mining, crude oil production," and "commercial banks.") The prices drug companies charge have little relationship to the costs of making the drugs and could be cut dramatically without coming anywhere close to threatening R&D.

Second, the pharmaceutical industry is not especially innovative. As hard as it is to believe, only a handful of truly important drugs have been brought to market in recent years, and they were mostly based on taxpayer-funded research at academic institutions, small biotechnology companies, or the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The great majority of "new" drugs are not new at all but merely variations of older drugs already on the market. These are called "me-too" drugs. The idea is to grab a share of an established, lucrative market by producing something very similar to a top-selling drug. For instance, we now have six statins (Mevacor, Lipitor, Zocor, Pravachol, Lescol, and the newest, Crestor) on the market to lower cholesterol, all variants of the first. As Dr. Sharon Levine, associate executive director of the Kaiser Permanente Medical Group, put it,

If I'm a manufacturer and I can change one molecule and get another twenty years of patent rights, and convince physicians to prescribe and consumers to demand the next form of Prilosec, or weekly Prozac instead of daily Prozac, just as my patent expires, then why would I be spending money on a lot less certain endeavor, which is looking for brand-new drugs?[4]

Third, the industry is hardly a model of American free enterprise. To be sure, it is free to decide which drugs to develop (me-too drugs instead of innovative ones, for instance), and it is free to price them as high as the traffic will bear, but it is utterly dependent on government-granted monopolies—in the form of patents and Food and Drug Administration (FDA)–approved exclusive marketing rights. If it is not particularly innovative in discovering new drugs, it is highly innovative— and aggressive—in dreaming up ways to extend its monopoly rights....

... Senate Select Committee on Intelligence said either the intelligence community "overstated" the evidence that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons and was actively reconstituting its nuclear program, or that the claims were "not supported by the underlying intelligence."

The report refutes every major weapons assessment laid out in a key 2002 intelligence estimate provided to lawmakers before the war and cited by Bush administration officials to justify publicly the case for an invasion. The findings also offer a broad indictment of the way the CIA carried out its core mission, accusing the agency's leadership of succumbing to "group- think," of being too cautious to slip spies into Iraq and of failing to tell policymakers how weak their information really was. ...

[t]he Iraq insurgency is far larger than the 5,000 guerrillas previously thought to be at its core, U.S. military officials say, and it's being led by well-armed Iraqi Sunnis angry at being pushed from power alongside Saddam Hussein.

Although U.S. military analysts disagree over the exact size, dozens of regional cells, often led by tribal sheiks and inspired by Sunni Muslim imams, can call upon part-time fighters to boost forces to as high as 20,000 — an estimate reflected in the insurgency's continued strength after U.S. forces killed as many as 4,000 in April alone.

And some insurgents are highly specialized — one Baghdad cell, for instance, has two leaders, one assassin, and two groups of bomb-makers.

The developing intelligence picture of the insurgency contrasts with the commonly stated view in the Bush administration that the fighting is fueled by foreign warriors intent on creating an Islamic state.

"We're not at the forefront of a jihadist war here," said a U.S. military official in Baghdad, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The official and others told The Associated Press the guerrillas have enough popular support among nationalist Iraqis angered by the presence of U.S. troops that they cannot be militarily defeated. ...

...[m]ilitary records that could help establish President Bush's whereabouts during his disputed service in the Texas Air National Guard more than 30 years ago have been inadvertently destroyed, according to the Pentagon.

It said the payroll records of "numerous service members," including former First Lt. Bush, had been ruined in 1996 and 1997 by the Defense Finance and Accounting Service during a project to salvage deteriorating microfilm. No back-up paper copies could be found, it added in notices dated June 25.

The destroyed records cover three months of a period in 1972 and 1973 when Mr. Bush's claims of service in Alabama are in question.

The disclosure appeared to catch some experts, both pro-Bush and con, by surprise. Even the retired lieutenant colonel who studied Mr. Bush's records for the White House, Albert C. Lloyd of Austin, said it came as news to him.

The loss was announced by the Defense Department's Office of Freedom of Information and Security Review in letters to The New York Times and other news organizations that for nearly half a year have sought Mr. Bush's complete service file under the open-records law. ...

... called the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib a "war crime" and again blasted the Bush administration for actions that he said are intensifying the threat of terrorism.

"We have a major problem and we have not improved it over the last three years," Clarke said Thursday at the annual conference of the American Civil Liberties Union. "It, in fact, has gotten worse."

An unlikely medley of speakers, including former Republican congressman Bob Barr and FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley, joined Clarke to talk about the increasing tension between civil liberties and national security. Later Thursday, Colorado Gov. Bill Owens, a Republican, debated former Democratic presidential contender Howard Dean on the same issue.

Clarke leveled the worst of his volleys against the Bush administration for its handling of terrorism, which he said had helped al-Qaida mutate into an uncontrollable entity "that no longer need Osama bin Laden to direct it..."

...As for the black youth who so exercise Cosby, their pregnancy rates aren't "soaring," as he reportedly claimed; in fact, they're lower than they've been in decades. Ditto with crime rates. And if Cosby's worried about poor grammar and so forth, why isn't he ranting about the Bush 2005 budget, which would end a slew of programs for dropout prevention, recreation and school counseling?

Or, if he's looking for tantrum fodder, what about the fact that a black baby has a 40 percent chance of being born into poverty? You can blame adults for their poverty — if you're mean-spirited enough — but you cannot blame babies, and that's, in effect, what we're talking about here.

As the sociologist Michael Males, who monitors youth-bashing outbreaks, told me: "Younger black America today is struggling admirably against massive disinvestments in schools, terrible unemployment, harsh policing and degrading prejudices, and they're succeeding amazingly well. They deserve respect, not grown-up tantrums."

But it must be fun to beat up on people too young and too poor to fight back, or the elderly rich wouldn't do it. Cranky old rich people: now there's a demographic group that qualifies as a genuine Menace 2 Society.

... Putting a Southerner on the ticket was essential. Since 1960 five of the eight Democratic tickets that included a Southerner have been elected. The tickets without a Southerner went 0 for 3. Edwards allows Democrats to contest North Carolina, Florida, Louisiana, Virginia and Arkansas. Democratic optimists -- yes, it's a stretch -- think Edwards's native South Carolina might also be in reach.

Forcing [Bush] to compete on terrain he had mostly considered safe alters the election's dynamics. And in the primaries, Edwards's appeal seemed strongest in constituencies that the Democrats must win over. He ran especially well among rural voters and appealed simultaneously to blue-collar whites and upper-middle-class professionals.

The key to Edwards's twin appeal -- to upscale voters and to those trying to climb the ladder or helping their kids do it -- was explained many years ago by the great American sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset. Lipset argued that the two core American values were "equality" and "achievement." Americans want a level playing field and don't like people who put on airs. But they also admire strivers. Edwards can give his "two Americas" and "dad in the mill" speech as someone who used the education system to rise up and get rich. That's the American story. ...

I saw an individual there that I hadn’t had the opportunity to meet
before, and I asked him what did he do there, was he an interpreter ­ he
was clearly from the Middle East,” Karpinski told British Broadcasting
Corp. radio in an interview broadcast Saturday. “He said, ‘Well I do some
of the interrogation here. I speak Arabic, but I’m not an Arab; I’m from
Israel.’ “I was really kind of surprised by that ... He didn’t elaborate
any more than to say he was working with them and there were people from
lots of different places that were involved in the operation.

The similarity of techniques used to humiliate and break Arab prisoners at
Abu Ghuraib with those employed by the Israelis against the Palestinians
has long suggested an Israeli connection to close observers of the Middle
East. Karpinski's statement nails it down. Of course, it was all denied by
the Israeli government, the Iraqi government, and probably will be by the
US government, because the charge is an explosive one in the Middle East.

The US has no standing to promote democracy or liberty in the Middle East
from the point of view of most in the Arab world, because the US supports
to the hilt the large-scale theft of Palestinian land and the expropriation
and impoverishment of the Palestinian people. One can only imagine how 19th
century European-Americans would have responded to a claim by Mexico's
Santa Ana, who reduced the Alamo, to be spreading liberty in Texas.

That the US employed Israeli expertise in its torture of prisoners at Abu
Ghuraib would, for most Arab observers, only underline American
illegitimacy in the region and the true nature of its enterprise in
Iraq--not bringing democracy and liberty but rather stealing sovereignty
and rights, and visiting humiliation on locals.

The complete failure of the United States to act as an honest broker in the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the ever more rapacious demands of the
ruling Likud Party in Israel for Lebensraum in the West Bank (at the least)
are major engines of the terrorism directed toward the United States.
Recent 9/11 Commission findings reported that Usama Bin Laden wanted to
move the attack on the World Trade Towers up to May in order to respond
more directly to the Israeli crushing of the Palestinians. (This finding
was largely buried by the US press, since the standard--and wholly
ridiculous--story in the US is that al-Qaeda doesn't care about the
Palestine issue.)

The Likud, with its racist attitudes toward Arabs, has dragged the US into
one disaster after another in the Middle East, endangering the US homeland
and helping create the long-term disaster at Abu Ghuraib.

Dick Cheney's ape-like breast-beating about strong US action reducing
terrorism notwithstanding, terrorism is getting worse and worse. The reason is that you need a two-pronged approach in counter-insurgency. You have to move violently against the violent, but then you have to deny them public support by winning hearts and minds and turning off potential recruits and enablers. Cheney's approach, like that of the Likud, fails miserably on the second count. The Iron Fist can cow people for a while. It cannot stop a powerful movement like al-Qaeda as long as things like the Israeli annexation of half the West Bank and the US torture of prisoners at Abu Ghuraib alienate the wider Muslim public and make them willing to tolerate al-Qaeda in their midst.

The former head of the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad has for the first time accused the American Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, of directly authorising Guantanamo Bay-style interrogation tactics.

Brig-Gen Janis Karpinski, who commanded the 800th Military Police Brigade, which is at the centre of the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal, said that documents yet to be released by the Pentagon would show that Mr Rumsfeld personally approved the introduction of harsher conditions of detention in Iraq....

... Will the United States emerge from this strange historical episode triumphant in its feeling that it can go around the world with its armed forces and change regimes at will and whimsy, or will the United States be humbled by its experience since March 2003 and reduce its dependence on unilateral militarism?

Iraqis have much to do in the coming year. The transfer of authority ceremony Monday was not an auspicious start. Like most other recent American policies and actions in Iraq, it was hastily planned, decided in secret, held behind many layers of security walls, determined largely in response to a security agenda set by the assorted groups of people attacking Iraqi, American and other foreign targets, conducted with hand-picked Iraqi officials of untested legitimacy in the eyes of their Iraqi compatriots, and capped shortly afterward with a televised speech by former occupation administrator Paul Bremer that was typically condescending and simplistic.

The fact that he had to secretly sneak out of Iraq ahead of schedule in a U.S. Air Force transport aircraft surrounded by armed guards is not exactly the same humiliating retreat as the American helicopters that fled from the roof of the American embassy in Saigon when the United States left South Vietnam some three decades ago -- but the similarities should be too close for comfort for American officials and citizens alike....