I need not flater any man; he has nothing to give me. So imperceptibly I found myself adopting a new attitude towards the other half of the human race. It was absured to blame any class or any sex as a whole. Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do. They are driven by instincts which are not within their control. They too, the patriarchs, the professors, had endless difficulties, terrible drawbacks to contend with. Their education had been in some ways as faulty as my own. It had bred in them defects as great. True, they had money and power, but only at the cost of harbouring in their breasts an eagle, a vulture, forever tearing the liver out and plucking at the lungs -- the instinct for possession, the rage for acquisition which drives them to desire other people's fields and goods perpetually; to make frontiers and flags; battleships and poison gas; to offer up their own lives and their children's lives. Walk through the Admiralty Arch, or any other avenue given up to trophies and cannon, and reflect upon the kind of glory celebrated there. Or watch in the spring sunshine the stockbroker and the great barrister going indoors to make money and more money and more money when it is a fact that five hundred pounds a year will keep one alive in the sunshine. These are unpleasant instincts to harbour, I reflected. They are bred of the conditions of life; of the lack of civilisation.

When Just Born started making the candy, it took 27 hours to make a Peep

Time now for the "Most Ridiculous Item of the Day."

Another baseball umpire was attacked in Chicago. This time, four thugs jumped on to the field during a Royals-White Sox game. There the --and one of the men allegedly grabbed the umpire....Big spectacle. You know, everybody ran out.

This stuff has got to stop. It really has to stop....And the way to make it stop is to pass a law saying that any assault in a public arena is an act of terrorism -- domestic terrorism -- five years in prison. With security the way it is right now and terrorism always lurking, incidents like these can easily get out of control.

Jump an ump, go to jail, end of story. It would be ridiculous not to do that, OK. Do it. It will stop it.

"It's not a gimmick," said Richard Lessner, one of the owners, whose day job is as executive director of the lobbying arm of the Family Research Council. (His partners are Andrew Stein, a lawyer, and Frank Cannon, who managed Gary Bauer's run for president.) "It's high-end ice cream."

Among a dozen randomly selected taste testers assembled by this reporter, one called the taste "undistinguished," another "cheap — like the little cups of ice cream in elementary school, the kind with wooden paddles." Smaller Governmint was said to taste like toothpaste or Noxzema shave cream. Nutty Environmentalist and Iraqi Road won some compliments — except from the person who declared the latter "chalky."

• US Air Force Over-The-Rainbow Sherbet
  
• US Marine Tough Cookies & Cream
  
• School Prayerleens & Creme
  
• Gun Nut
  
• Irrelevant Belgian Chocolate
  
• I Hate the French Vanilla

"The latest target of bigotry is J. Leon Holmes, nominated by President Bush to the U.S. District Court for Eastern Alabama. Mr. Holmes is a devout, orthodox Catholic and by all accounts he is widely admired as a lawyer and for his charitable work. Both of Mr. Holmes' home state Democratic senators support his nomination. None of this, however, stopped Democrats Chuck Schumer, Dianne Feinstein, and Dick Durbin from savagely attacking Mr. Holmes in a Senate Judiciary hearing last week... Sen. Schumer and the other members of the Judiciary Committee lynch mob are in effect saying that no orthodox Roman Catholic is qualified to serve as a federal judge. Such views are not only bigoted, but unconstitutional. The Constitution expressly forbids any religious test for public office. Sen. Schumer and his fellow bigots, who bleat endlessly about the alleged constitutional right to abortion, might take some time to actually read the Constitution they claim to hold in such reverence."

Hypocrisy has been defined as the tribute that vice pays to virtue. George W. Bush lied about all these policies because the programs he pretends to favor are far more popular than the ones he puts into effect. But unless the voters and the press start paying attention, all the president's lies will have little political consequence -- except to certify that we have become something less than a democracy.

Air pollutants released by Canadian industries rose 7 per cent from 1998 to 2000, while they fell by 8 per cent in the United States. Ontario ranked No. 3 on the continent, after Texas and Ohio, in the amount of pollutants its businesses created.

In Canada, these businesses reported a 66-per-cent increase in emissions from 1998 to 2000, the latest year for which comparable figures are available. This was more than twice the percentage increase in the United States, 29 per cent over the period.

Environmentalists attributed the differences between the two countries to more extensive regulation in the United States. That country does not allow hazardous wastes to be put in dumps, a common practice in Canada, and U.S. companies retain long-term liability for their hazardous wastes. In Canada, governments tend to rely on voluntary agreements with companies to encourage pollution reductions.

Invariably, it is a nuanced and balanced approach that produces the best results. And invariably, this administration has struck the right balance.

Approve an American attack, and it would have seemed to rubber-stamp what it could not stop. Express disapproval of a war, and the United States would have vetoed the attempt. Decline to take any action, and the council would again have been ignored. Disagreement over Iraq did not doom the council; geopolitical reality did.

The [UN] charter has gone the way of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, the 1928 treaty by which every major country that would go on to fight in World War II solemnly committed itself not to resort to war as an instrument of national policy. The pact, as the diplomatic historian Thomas Bailey has written, "proved a monument to illusion. It was not only delusive but dangerous, for it ... lulled the public ... into a false sense of security." These days, on the other hand, no rational state will be deluded into believing that the UN Charter protects its security.

Today’s voting shows that many commission members are more concerned with protecting each other than protecting the victims of human rights abuse. It also highlights how Western governments have lost the political will to take action against abusive governments, particularly their newfound friends in the fight against terrorism.

You're cowards. In your vainglorious attempt to straddle some non-existent middle ground you have effectively disenfranchised and disillusioned us, your own Democratic Party. You have sold out your vote to the Republicans, rolled over to their bullying, and left us adrift.

We had hoped that you would have taken the failures of the 2002 mid-term elections to prove that the voting public wanted opposition to the GOP, not the endorsement of it. You allowed the GOP to not only control the government, you have given their PR machine the ammunition to obliterate the fact that two years before the Democrats won the popular vote for the White House.

Are you unable to hear the call of your constituency, or are you just too arrogant or too dense? I would almost be willing to give you the benefit of the doubt for token resistance over the last few weeks, but it's really far too little, far too meekly proclaimed.

We, the membership of the Democratic Party, the people who support your candidacy and your offices, are attempting to repair the damages that you have enabled with your silence, your pandering. We are attempting to build a party base that can not only remove the Republicans from the Executive Branch, but also return some semblance of balance to congress. You're not helping us. Your unwillingness to provide a balance on a national level to the extremist position of the White House on everything from foreign policy to the domestic economy knifes us in the back every day.

You're on the clock. We have less than 18 months to create an effective campaign to restore this country to some semblance of Constitutional rule. If you cannot find your way back to the Democratic Party that you work for, the coalition that we in the party are building, by choice and by necessity, with the former Greens, Naderites and other disenfranchised activists that you have shunned, will find our way without you. You cannot remain tools of the GOP and the Bush Administration by your own timidity and uncertainty. If you continue to do so, you show yourselves not only to be unfit to lead this party, but you threaten to destroy the very party you purport to represent.

Shame on you if you cannot find your Party, because your Party is trying very hard to find you.

It would be oh so refreshing to learn there was no made-for-TV movie planned on former POW Jessica Lynch. How nice it would be to hear NBC say it was giving up the idea of soldier-as-entertainment and that other networks and authors scrambling to tell larger-than-life stories of Lynch's seven recently released comrades had also pulled back from hype.

But NBC executives negotiating with the Lynch family to get the rights to the details of 19-year-old Jessica's capture and rescue have already hired a screenwriter and say they will go ahead even if the Lynches don't want to talk.

The network violates no law in going forward without the family's permission, and it certainly has the right to spin news into drama, but sensitivity and journalistic integrity are diminished in the process. At least NBC should hold off until Lynch is in less pain and can think clearly about what she might like to do -- or not do -- with her searing memories of the war.

Hopefully, the looting and shooting across Iraq will soon subside, and peace will settle over the innocents of Iraq – a people who've suffered only bloodshed and repression ever since our CIA recruited Saddam Hussein more than 40 years ago.

Blame it on the Cold War, when "Better dead than Red" became our national byword, and any useful cutthroats were automatically added to the team if they were against communism. We would have dealt with the Devil if he had offered to shoot a commie for Uncle Sam.

The rescue of Private Jessica Lynch, which inspired America during one of the most difficult periods of the war, was not the heroic Hollywood story told by the US military, but a staged operation that terrified patients and victimised the doctors who had struggled to save her life, according to Iraqi witnesses.

I'd lobbed my big question because it just seemed too obvious not to ask. Everybody here was having the same perfectly Groundhog Day experience: You woke up only to repeat the day before, and no matter what you did or said or thought, you were helpless to effect a change in the next day. So every day, everybody asked the same questions about Basra and the supply lines and the whereabouts of the WMDs and Saddam, and got the same answers. They were war correspondents after all (or trying to be). The purest form of reporting: Armies were moved, weapons deployed, kill counts tabulated. Nothing postmodern about a war reporter. Events needed to be confirmed and recorded. But behind this stripped-down facade, invisible to the public, was a secret, very pleasant theater of the absurd.

At the gleaming offices of Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), the country's state-owned oil giant, a corporate revolution is under way. Nine-to-fivers have come to think of themselves as patriots. Senior managers now eat at the same cafeteria tables as secretaries. And former soldiers have left the battlefield for the boardroom.

After PDVSA workers walked off the job last December in a bid to force Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez from office, the fiery populist hitched his social revolution to the $110 billion business: He purged the company's ranks and installed his own people. What was widely regarded as a world-class energy company before the strike has a new philosophy: to help the poor. And a new corporate culture is gradually taking shape, injected with the president's particular brand of leftist ideology.

The [Southern Baptist Convention's] International Mission Board won't appoint divorced people as career missionaries, though it will allow them to serve two- and three-year posts. Its North American Mission Board will not appoint a divorced senior pastor but it will allow service by other "biblically divorced" people — that is, those who've been abandoned or cheated on by a spouse.

Southern Baptist churches, on the other hand, are autonomous and can call whomever they want. That's what happened in the well-publicized case of 13,000-member First Baptist of Atlanta when Dr. Charles Stanley announced his divorce in 2000.

Stanley, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention and head of a thriving broadcast ministry, had stated during his separation in 1995 that "if my wife divorces me, I would resign immediately."

But then he didn't. Some members left in protest, including Stanley's own son. But Stanley and his megachurch have remained.

Since then, the SBC focused an entire annual meeting on the subject of divorce, reiterating its opposition.

In a worst-case scenario, the U.S. occupation of Iraq could resemble Lebanon's civil war, in which the dissolution of a government allowed various ethnic groups and opportunistic outsiders to act out their long-standing rivalries. Centcom's Col. Oliver was among Marines deployed to Lebanon in 1983 by President Reagan with the aim of restoring order to the country. As in the current war on Iraq, Oliver served as a spokesman for the Marines, eloquently explaining their noble intentions for Lebanon. Tragically, the Marines were sent packing by an Islamic radical with a fire in his heart and a truckful of deadly explosives. Oliver appears in Thomas Friedman's book "From Beirut to Jerusalem," standing around the rubble of the Marine barracks where 241 U.S. servicemen lost their lives. "You know," he remarks in disbelief, "these people just aren't playin' with the same sheet of music."

During the Lebanon conflict, Oliver says the Marines worked "hand-in-glove" with Pat Robertson and his Christian Broadcasting Network while he broadcast his overtly pro-American, pro-Israel sermons throughout the country. Despite the Marines' fate there and the reports of Islamic militants filtering into Iraq to wage jihad against what they view as a new "crusade," the Bush administration has not visibly discouraged ministers like Stanley and Graham from repeating Robertson's actions. With its credibility at stake, an American-led interim government looks likely to dig in in Iraq for a long and delicate occupation of Arab land with a group of Southern Baptist evangelicals by its side. And a battle of biblical proportions may be just beginning.

There were signs last week that Graham might be recalibrating his strategy. The Samaritan's Purse website, which used to talk of preparing to help "thousands of suffering families in the name of Jesus Christ," has dropped the last six words.

President Bush couldn't find a qualified Republican woman to serve on the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals ... Sources close to the process say Republican U.S. Sens. Arlen Specter and Rick Santorum thought the Mansmann seat should go to a woman, ideally from western Pennsylvania.

They recommended four of them: state Sen. Jane Earll, Fisher's running mate in his run for governor last year; Mary Beth Buchanan, U.S. attorney in Pittsburgh; and Superior Court Justices Joan Orie Melvin and Maureen Lally-Green.

Each was interviewed by White House aides. Each was found wanting. In Melvin's case, it's because the Republicans didn't want to lose her as a candidate for the state Supreme Court this year. But the others were not sufficiently conservative or pro-life.

Rep. Vic Snyder, D-Ark., agreed the bureaucracy is a problem, but said lawmakers want to be certain Rumsfeld isn't trying to bypass congressional oversight with his proposal. Part of the plan would eliminate dozens of reports required by Congress.

A speed reader looking for hints about the politics of Victor J. Wolski, a Bush nominee to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, won't get much help from the official Department of Justice biography.

"Mr. Wolski worked from 1992 to 1997 for a California-based non-profit law foundation that represents clients pro bono," reads the Justice Department bio, suggesting he might even be a lefty do-gooder.

The foundation, however, is the Pacific Legal Foundation, whose advocacy runs toward intervening in environmental cases against salmon and redwood forests.

Wolski himself has been more upfront. In 1999, he was quoted in the National Journal as saying, "Every single job I've taken since college has been ideologically oriented, trying to further my principles. I'm essentially a libertarian. I believe in limited government, individual liberty, and property rights."

A doctor of Indian descent who was taken off a plane in handcuffs then detained several hours by air marshals filed a civil rights lawsuit against the government Monday.

Dr. Bob Rajcoomar, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserves, said he hadn't done anything wrong and the two marshals singled him out because of his skin color. He was detained following a tumultuous Aug. 31 flight from Atlanta to Philadelphia, during which the marshals detained an unruly passenger, then trained their guns on passengers and ordered them not to move until the plane landed.

Rajcoomar, who lives in Palm Beach, said he had nothing to do with the disturbance and obeyed all instructions, but was arrested anyway at the end of the flight. He said one of the agents explained by saying, ``We didn't like the way you looked.''

...the strongest objection might come from the 10 percent of the population that follows no religion at all. Should they be taught "faith," as if to straighten them out?

Paige's answer to that question -- I would guess -- is "yes." He, like Bennett, links religious faith to values, as if you cannot have the latter without the former. This, though, is nonsense, and insulting nonsense at that. I know of no evidence to suggest that atheists or agnostics are more likely to commit murder or even shoplift than people who have religious faith. As for people deprived of a Judeo-Christian upbringing -- Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and even the odd pagan -- they somehow act no better and no worse than people raised on the Ten Commandments.

Diana Brown met her court-appointed lawyer for the first time on the day she pleaded guilty to several serious crimes five years ago. They spent five minutes together and have not spoken since.

"You are guilty, lady," the lawyer, Thomas Pearson, told Ms. Brown, according to her sworn statement, as he met with her and nine other defendants as a group, rattling off the charges against them.

He told her she was facing 60 years in prison for assault, drunken driving and leaving the scene of an accident, and should accept a deal for 10 years, court papers say. He gave her five minutes to decide. Offered no other defense, she took the deal

Mr. Pearson, the lawyer who handled her case, said he did not remember her. But Mr. Pearson, who no longer works for the county, defended his approach.

"They got an adequate representation," he said of his clients. "If they want Clarence Darrow, they should hire Clarence Darrow."

there probably aren't a whole lot of useful tasks for Iraqis to do. From an economic point of view, that means their time has very little value-so they might as well spend it stealing.

Turning now to the moral issue, most civilized people (my ex-wife and her attorney excluded) instinctively recognize the fundamental human right to retain one's earnings, and therefore react with abhorrence to unrestrained thievery (and, if they are intellectually consistent, to marital property laws and the taxation of income).

Florida is the only state in the nation to contract the first stage of removal of voting rights to a private company. And ChoicePoint has big plans. "Given the outcome of our work in Florida," says Fagan, "and with a new president in place, we think our services will expand across the country."

Especially if that president is named "Bush." ChoicePoint's board and executive roster are packed with Republican stars, including billionaire Ken Langone, a company director who was chairman of the fund-raising committee for New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani's aborted run against Hillary Rodham Clinton. Langone is joined at ChoicePoint by another Giuliani associate, former New York Police Commissioner Howard Safir.

And Republican power lobbyist and former congressman Vin Weber lobbies for ChoicePoint in Washington. Just before his death in 1998, Rick Rozar, president of a Choicepoint company, CDB Infotek, donated $100,000 to the Republican Party.

Waving American flags and chanting "USA, USA," hundreds attended a "Rally for the Troops, Rally for America" on the Mall. Some carried signs reading "no child left tortured" and "Anti-war equals pro-Saddam."
The crowd listened to a series of speeches by politicians, pundits and news personalities, including radio talk show host G. Gordon Liddy and former Sen. Fred Thompson, Tennessee Republican.

Jubilant crowds in Baghdad show that President Bush and his team were spectacularly right and his critics spectacularly wrong. And this says something about who are the smart guys and who are the dullards in this society--or at least, what kind of mindset leads to good judgments.

It's no accident that Mr. Cheney's critics on the environment are also his critics on the war. Thomas Sowell has written two books pondering why the same people end up on the same side of issues that have no intrinsic connection. In "A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles," he writes that this is because they operate from two different "visions" of how the world works, indeed of human nature. In "The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy," he argues that the prevailing vision in the press, academy and politics has become so dogmatic that it has lost touch with reality.

Mr. Sowell labels the competing visions "constrained" and "unconstrained." The constrained vision argues that perfection is impossible, that social policy consists of structuring incentives for self-centered men, that life is a series of trade-offs. This vision is represented by the likes of Adam Smith, Edmund Burke and Alexander Hamilton (and of course, Dick Cheney and the Bush administration mindset).

The unconstrained version argues that man's imperfections are the result of bad institutions, that pure intentions matter more than actual effects, that rationality can solve problems once and for all. In the time of Smith and Burke, this tradition was epitomized by William Godwin, whose "Enquiry Concerning Political Justice" was popular in Great Britain until the public started to witness the excesses of the French Revolution....

This is relevant today because these two visions were put to a stark test on the streets of Baghdad. Those who followed the constrained version were proved right; those associated with the unconstrained version, Mr. Sowell's "anointed," proved foolish.

The Bush team sincerely believes that the vista that "the first Arab democracy," as Wolfowitz calls it, could open up will transform the region--further encouraging already liberalizing regimes like Morocco and Qatar, pressuring the theocrats in Iran and Saudi Arabia, and demonstrating to the Arab masses that there exists a third way between Islamism and repression. In Iraq, which possesses an urbanized middle class and once boasted some of the highest literacy rates in the region, a U.S. military occupation may well make this vision a reality. Will it transform the Arab world? Maybe. Maybe not. But the impulse behind the strategy reflects the highest-minded of liberal ideals.

In fact, while Bush contends that exporting democracy is sound strategy, he also offers a classical liberal justification: No people should be governed without their consent. Or, as he puts it, "No people on earth yearn to be oppressed, aspire to servitude, or eagerly await the midnight knock of the secret police." But here we pass through the looking glass. For, while even Cheney has begun to speak the language of Eleanor Roosevelt, liberal Bush critics like Harvard Professor Stanley Hoffmann, who only a few years ago was championing humanitarian interventions and "morality in foreign policy," cannot fathom why the United States would want to change "countries that have no past experience of democracy and where repressive regimes face no experienced or cohesive opposition." Conservatives used to delight in bashing the Clinton administration for its "Wilsonianism." Now liberals bash the Bush administration for the same sin.

"My father crapped bigger ones than George Bush," says the former president's son, in a flame-throwing conversation about the war and the Bush administration's efforts to lay claim to the Reagan legacy..."The Bush people have no right to speak for my father, particularly because of the position he's in now," he said during a recent interview with Salon. "Yes, some of the current policies are an extension of the '80s. But the overall thrust of this administration is not my father's -- these people are overly reaching, overly aggressive, overly secretive, and just plain corrupt. I don't trust these people." "Nine-11 gave the Bush people carte blanche to carry out their extreme agenda -- and they didn't hesitate for a moment to use it. I mean, by 9/12 Rumsfeld was saying, 'Let's hit Iraq.' They've used the war on terror to justify everything from tax cuts to Alaska oil drilling."

"The big elephant sitting in the corner is that George W. Bush is simply unqualified for the job... What's his accomplishment? That he's no longer an obnoxious drunk?"

Reagan says his mother shares his "distrust of some of these [Bush] people. She gets that they're trouble in all kinds of ways. She doesn't like their religious fervor, their aggression."

He described his plans for the sprawling slum once known as Saddam City: armed patrols at night that he would lead, a curfew by 8 p.m. on the turf he controls, and orders that no gunfire was allowed, which he would broadcast by mosque loudspeaker.

"We order people to obey us. When we say stand up, they stand up. When we say sit down, they sit down," Shawki said, his black turban framing the long beard of religious study. "With the collapse of Saddam, the people have turned to the clergy."....

To the approval of residents, the clergy claim credit for preventing the bloodshed many feared would erupt in the tattered sector of 2 million people, which for decades bore the brunt of repression wielded by Hussein's government. But the rise of the clerics hints at the formidable challenges that may face any new government in Baghdad: Sunni-Shiite disputes, the specter of warlords seizing and administering their own territory, and the potentially dangerous jockeying for position with U.S. forces that have become the lone power in Baghdad.