He wielded extraordinary power in Washington for more than three decades, eventually holding sway over nearly $800 billion a year in federal spending.

But outside the halls of the U.S. Senate, which is a world of personal wealth so rarified some call it "the Millionaires' Club," Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) had struggled financially.

Then, in 1997, he got serious about making money. And in almost no time, he too was a millionaire - thanks to investments with businessmen who received government contracts or other benefits with his help.

Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska dismissed calls Friday from activist groups that he resign as chairman of the Appropriations Committee and disputed a newspaper report that said he used his powerful position to enrich himself and others.

If they think I am going to resign because of a story in a newspaper, they're crazy," he said at a news conference here.

Stevens, a Republican who has been in the Senate nearly 35 years, said he had done nothing illegal, immoral or unethical.

The Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday that the senator has grown wealthy from investments with people who benefited from legislation he helped write.

Stevens, 80, said he has been a senator so long that it would be hard to find any Alaska investment that people would not see as a conflict.

"I know this state and I believe in its future, and this is where I want to invest my money when I have it ," he said.

Presidential hopeful Joe Lieberman warned Friday against replacing "one divisive leader with another divisive leader," a swipe at both President Bush and the front-runner for the Democratic Party's nomination, Howard Dean.

[edit]

Lieberman, a Connecticut senator struggling in the race to gain the 2004 nomination, on Friday added to his earlier criticism that Dean was taking Democrats backward by arguing that the former Vermont governor was a "divisive force" within the party.

"We're too divided," Lieberman said as he toured a technology plant in Delaware. "I don't want to replace one divisive leader with another divisive leader."

"While Bill Clinton said that the era of big government is over, I think we have to enter a new era for the Democratic Party, not one where we join Republicans and aim simply to limit the damage they inflict on working families."

Over the past week, almost every major news outlet has carried front-page stories on the rising tide of conservative discontent. Many people who support the president's tax cuts and his conduct of the war can no longer stomach his expansion of big government via big spending. If Bolten's response to the critics in the Wall Street Journal represents the best case the administration can make for itself, the criticism is only going to spread and multiply.

Bolten begins by trotting out the same tiresome excuses we've been hearing for several years: The deficit was caused, first, by declining federal revenues resulting from a sluggish economy and, second, by the need to spend money to fight terrorism. These explanations are partly true. But the administration could have responded to these trends by cutting low-priority areas of the budget. Instead, Bush signed every spending bill that crossed his desk.

Bolten argues that the president hasn't vetoed a single spending bill because "He hasn't had to." Wrong. The president hasn't vetoed a single spending bill because he didn't want to - he just doesn't have the political will. Each spending bill that has come across his desk has represented an apparently irresistible vote-buying opportunity.

[I]t would be nice if the White House were as good at controlling spending as it is at spin.

*Right after Saddam Hussein's capture, the Pew Research Center asked Americans whether they felt President Bush "has explained clearly his plans for bringing the situation in Iraq to a successful conclusion ..." The answer? A clear majority (59%) said Bush had not clearly explained his plans to accomplish this goal.

*The Pew poll went one step farther and played devil's advocate—after all, just because Bush has yet to explain these plans doesn't necessarily mean that no such plan exists, right? Yet even when asked a question of this nature, the public doesn't seem terribly confident of this White House. Asked whether they thought President Bush "has a clear plan for bringing the situation in Iraq to a successful conclusion," 45% of Americans said no clear plan exists and 44% said such a plan did exist. These are not numbers that make it easy for Karl Rove to get a goodnight's sleep.

Rumor is that Bush and Saddam Hussein will share the title of Time's Man of the Year: Saddam for believing Bush was not stupid enough to invade Iraq, and Bush for meeting that challenge.

A federal court judge ruled Friday that the Ann Arbor Public Schools violated a former Pioneer High School student's Constitutional right to free speech and equal protection when the student was not allowed to express her religious views on homosexuality in March 2002.

U.S. District Judge Gerald Rosen also ruled that school officials violated the Constitutional establishment clause when they allowed a panel of clergy to present only one religious viewpoint on homosexuality.

In 2002, a panel on homosexuality and religion included: two Episcopalian ministers, a Presbyterian minister, a Presbyterian deacon, a rabbi and a pastor of the United Church of Christ.

All the religious officials expressed positive views of homosexuality. Hansen wanted to be a part of the panel to express an opposing view, but she was denied. In her July 2002 lawsuit, she claimed she was prevented by school officials from expressing her view that homosexuality is immoral and sinful.

Hansen was allowed to give a two-minute speech at a separate assembly. She claimed in the lawsuit that her written speech was censored to exclude a passage which said in part, that she could not "accept religious and sexual ideas or actions that are wrong."

Rosen wrote that the case "presents the ironic and unfortunate paradox of a public high school celebrating 'diversity' by refusing to permit the presentation to students of an 'unwelcomed' viewpoint on the topic of homosexuality and religion, while actively promoting the competing view."

Antigay group pickets in Ann Arbor

A group of about 10 picketers from a Baptist Church in Kansas carried neon-colored signs, with antigay slogans on them, in front of Pioneer High School and then the Ann Arbor school district's Balas I administration building this morning.

District spokeswoman Liz Margolis said the group first picketed at the corner of Stadium Boulevard and Main Street, near the high school, and later moved to State Street, near the entrance of the administration building. Their signs bore slogans such as, "God hates fags."

[The court] decision was not out yet however when the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan., announced its picketing plans in an epithet-filled press release Nov. 26. In addition to picketing Pioneer and the administration building, the release stated plans for picketing several Detroit churches, the University of Michigan and the U.S.-Canada border on Dec. 14.

Donald H. Rumsfeld went to Baghdad in March 1984 with instructions to deliver a private message about weapons of mass destruction: that the United States' public criticism of Iraq for using chemical weapons would not derail Washington's attempts to forge a better relationship, according to newly declassified documents.

[edit]

An earlier trip by Rumsfeld to Baghdad, in December 1983, has been widely reported as having helped persuade Iraq to resume diplomatic ties with the United States. An explicit purpose of Rumsfeld's return trip in March 1984, the once-secret documents reveal for the first time, was to ease the strain created by a U.S. condemnation of chemical weapons.

[edit]

Publicly, the United States maintained neutrality during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, which began in 1980.

Privately, however, the administrations of Reagan and George H.W. Bush sold military goods to Iraq, including poisonous chemicals and deadly biological agents, worked to stop the flow of weapons to Iran, and undertook discreet diplomatic initiatives, such as the two Rumsfeld trips to Baghdad, to improve relations with Hussein.

The Associated Press-Ipsos poll on Iraq, terrorism and President Bush is based on telephone interviews with 1,001 randomly selected adults from all states except Alaska and Hawaii. The interviews were conducted Dec. 15-17 by Ipsos-Public Affairs

[edit]

2. I'm going to read two statements. Please tell me which comes closer to your view: The U.S. military presence in Iraq is an important part of the campaign against terrorism; the U.S. military presence in Iraq is a distraction from the campaign against terrorism.

* Important part of campaign against terrorism, 70 percent

* Distraction from campaign against terrorism, 27 percent

* Don't know-refused, 3 percent

3. All in all, thinking about how things have gone since the United States went to war there in March, do you think the Bush administration made the right decision or a mistake in going to war in Iraq?

* Right decision, 67 percent

* Mistake, 29 percent

* Don't know-refused, 4 percent

It's not entirely clear to me why I've taken such an intense dislike to Howard Dean. Yes, I find him arrogant and frequently dishonest. Yes, I'm certain his nomination would lead to a political disaster of historic, and possibly biblical, proportions. And, yes, I'm continuously dumbfounded that a number of highly intelligent people I know have convinced themselves that his nomination is a good thing, or at least that it's not an unambiguously bad thing. But somehow the whole of my loathing for Dean is greater than the sum of its parts. So I've decided to start a blog on TNR's website to indulge that loathing.

LAUER: Number one on the best seller list. You have bumped past Al Franken's book. Is there a little ecstasy in that for you?

BILL O'REILLY: We've outsold that guy all over the place. We're running against Hillary for most copies of non-fiction books sold this year. That's who we want to beat, and that's why I'm here talking with you. It's a delightful experience on the TODAY show as always.

7. Living History - Hillary Rodham Clinton

21. Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken

60. Dude, Where's My Country? -Michael Moore

63. Who's Looking Out for You? - Bill O'Reilly

Digital voting giant Diebold Election Systems took a staggering blow Wednesday as California officials reported that Diebold ran uncertified -- and in some cases untested -- software in all 17 counties where it counted votes in the state's last two elections.

What began as a scandal in Alameda County swept statewide as every county served by Diebold realized its software was not state certified, and three counties, including Los Angeles, found that some of their software never had been tested by a federally designated lab.

Diebold officials portrayed the software certification issue as more or less cosmetic, saying the differences were negligible between state-certified software and versions used to count at least a quarter of votes in California's recall and last municipal elections.

That's not altogether clear, said Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, a Sacramento-based nonprofit that studies voting systems.

State officials note there's no evidence that the use of uncertified or untested software resulted in lost or manipulated votes.

"While nobody is undervaluing the significance of uncertified and unqualified software, this is not about uncounted or miscounted votes," said Douglas Stone, a Shelley spokesman. "What we're trying to establish is a strong procedure that ensures every voter has confidence in the integrity of our system and in the counting of their vote."

But Alexander says current e-voting systems provide no way to be certain. A recount would be a digital clone of the original count.

David Kay, the head of the U.S. effort to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, has told administration officials he plans to leave before the Iraq Survey Group's work is completed and could depart before February, U.S. military and intelligence officials said.

The move comes as more of Kay's staff has been diverted from the weapons hunt to help search for Iraqi insurgents, and at a time when expectations remain low that any weaponry will be discovered.

Kay requested the change for personal and family reasons, officials said. When he accepted the job in June, they said, he expected to quickly find the expansive evidence that the administration had claimed as its primary reason for going to war. Rather, Kay's preliminary report in October said the group had so far discovered only that Iraq was working to acquire chemical and biological weapons, had missile programs under various stages of development and possessed only a rudimentary nuclear program.

We also conclude that Padilla’s detention was not authorized by Congress, and absent such authorization, the President does not have the power under Article II of the Constitution to detain as an enemy combatant an American citizen seized on American soil outside a zone of combat.

The capture of Saddam Hussein has given President Bush his highest job-approval rating in six months, improved his standing against Democrats who want his job and increased confidence that U.S. goals in Iraq will be accomplished.

A USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll on Monday and Tuesday found that 63% of Americans approve of the overall job the president is doing. His rating just before Saddam's arrest on Saturday was 54%.

It's not quite Soviet-style airbrushing, but the Bush administration has been using cyberspace to make some of its own cosmetic touch-ups to history.

White House officials were steamed when Andrew S. Natsios, the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said earlier this year that U.S. taxpayers would not have to pay more than $1.7 billion to reconstruct Iraq -- which turned out to be a gross understatement of the tens of billions of dollars the government now expects to spend.

Recently, however, the government has purged the offending comments by Natsios from the agency's Web site. The transcript, and links to it, have vanished.

For the first time, the chairman of the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks is saying publicly that 9/11 could have and should have been prevented, reports CBS News Correspondent Randall Pinkston.

"This is a very, very important part of history and we've got to tell it right," said Thomas Kean.

"As you read the report, you're going to have a pretty clear idea what wasn't done and what should have been done," he said. "This was not something that had to happen."

Appointed by the Bush administration, Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, is now pointing fingers inside the administration and laying blame.

"There are people that, if I was doing the job, would certainly not be in the position they were in at that time because they failed. They simply failed," Kean said.

BEIJING (AP) A Chinese court sentenced two people to life in prison Wednesday for organizing a sex party for hundreds of Japanese tourists that caused an uproar in China, the government said.

According to earlier Chinese news reports, about 400 Japanese men and as many as 500 Chinese hostesses had sex at the Zhuhai International Conference Center Hotel over a three-day period ending Sept. 18.

That was the anniversary of a Japanese attack on a city in northeast China in 1931 that many Chinese regard as the start of Japan's wartime invasion and occupation.

The trial began Friday and ended Saturday amid tight security in the Zhuhai Intermediate Court. The public and nonessential court employees were barred from the courthouse by officials who cited privacy concerns.

[A]s any balanced account must make clear, Reagan acceded to political compromises as all presidents do once in office--and on many occasions did so willingly. In fact, however often unintentionally, many of his actions as president wound up facilitating liberal objectives. What this clamor of adulation is seeking to deny is that beyond his conservative legacy, Ronald Reagan has bequeathed a liberal one.

When Tolkien stole Wagner's ring, he discarded its most significant property -- that it can be forged only by one who has forsworn love.... It is the little ring that brings out the lust in men and in hobbits. And what, honestly, do people want in it? .... Tolkien mutes the romance of medieval stories and puts us out in self-abnegating, Anglican-modernist, T. S. Eliot territory. The ring is a never-ending nightmare to which people are drawn for no obvious reason. It generates lust and yet gives no satisfaction.

"As you and your family prepare to send out Christmas cards this month, why not add three more people to your list? Send a card to the Governor, Senate President, and Speaker of the House in Massachusetts.

"Ask them to support a Constitutional Amendment on February 11th, so that the people of Massachusetts can decide for themselves if they want marriage redefined. Protecting marriage in Massachusetts is the first step to protecting marriage across America."

U.S. citizens classified as enemy combatants should gain access to attorneys only after they have disclosed everything they know about terrorist operations, federal law-enforcement officials said Tuesday.

Three senior Justice Department officials outlined the policy for the first time and said it is the proper way to balance national security and constitutional protections for people in government custody as part of the war on terror.

One of the officials said the goal has never been to deny counsel, only to delay it until interrogations are finished.

You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to be speak to an attorney, and to have an attorney present during any questioning. If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you at government expense.

DIANE SAWYER: "... Vice President Cheney has spoken out in favor of (gay) civil unions. In the 2000 election, you said pretty much it was a state issue."

PRESIDENT BUSH: "That's right. Except and unless judicial rulings undermine the sanctity of marriage. In which case, we may need a Constitutional amendment. "

DIANE SAWYER: "Are they sinners? Are gays sinners?"

PRESIDENT BUSH: "We're all sinners. We're all sinners, and that's important for —"

DIANE SAWYER: "No distinction."

PRESIDENT BUSH: "I think we're all sinners .... and having said that, however, I do believe in the sanctity of marriage."

sanctity: 1. Holiness of life or disposition; saintliness. 2. The quality or condition of being considered sacred; inviolability. 3. Something considered sacred.

"For better or worse, whether you like it or not, Houston has become the epicenter of this discussion, the battleground of a new struggle for freedom."

DIANE SAWYER: But stated as a hard fact, that there were weapons of mass destruction as opposed to the possibility that he could move to acquire those weapons still —

PRESIDENT BUSH: So what's the difference?

20,000 Galveston County blacks are put into the 22nd District of U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Sugar Land [WBA]...."If you want to reduce the African-American impact on an election, that is how you would do it," Deshotel said.

The Federal Election Commission has determined that Attorney General John D. Ashcroft's unsuccessful 2000 Senate reelection campaign violated election laws by accepting $110,000 in illegal contributions from a committee Ashcroft had established to explore running for president.

In documents released yesterday by the FEC, Garrett M. Lott, treasurer for the two Ashcroft committees, the Spirit of America PAC and Ashcroft 2000, agreed to pay a $37,000 fine for at least four violations of federal campaign law. Lott agreed "not to contest" the charges.

"Spirit of America PAC and Ashcroft 2000, respectively, violated the [law] by making and receiving this excessive contribution. Additionally, Spirit of America PAC and Ashcroft 2000, respectively, violated the [law] by failing to disclose the making or receipt of the excessive contribution," the FEC declared in a news release.

Under the law, the Spirit of America PAC was allowed to give the Ashcroft 2000 committee only $5,000 for the primary and $5,000 for the general election, which it did. The commission found that the Spirit of America PAC far exceeded these limits by illegally transferring to the Ashcroft 2000 committee $110,000 derived from the rental of its donors list.

The FEC vote to fine the Ashcroft committee was 5 to 1, and the one dissenter sought harsher penalties and tougher findings.

Joe Lieberman was first into this much-needed breach, as you'd expect from a candidate who has been strong on Saddam all along. "This news makes clear the choice the Democrats face next year," he said on NBC's Meet the Press. "If Howard Dean had his way, Saddam Hussein would still be in power today, not in prison, and the world would be a much more dangerous place."

...offering a choice, and not a post-Vietnam echo of Mr. Dean, and we hope they keep it up. By taking the debate to the front-runner, they may help save their party from repeating its post-Vietnam Cold War mistake of showing weakness on national security. After September 11, this is a losing platform.

SOUNDS LIKE A FIND
LONDON, Dec 16 (AFP) - British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Tuesday that the US-led Iraq Survey Group hunting for weapons of mass destruction had found "massive evidence of a huge system of clandestine laboratories" in Iraq.

Blair did not go into detail, but a spokesman for the prime minister said that the findings were part of an interim report produced several months ago by the Iraq Survey Group, which is hunting for weapons of mass destruction.

"The Iraq Survey Group has already found massive evidence of huge system of clandestine laboratories, workings by scientists, plans to develop long range ballistic missiles", Blair said in an interview with the British Forces Broadcasting Service.

A close reading of the actual, unclassified report—which Kay delivered as testimony on Oct. 2 to a panel of several congressional committees—reveals not only that Bush's critics are closer to the mark, but something much more significant: that Saddam wanted and, in some cases, tried to resurrect the weapons programs that he had built in the 1980s, but that the United Nations sanctions and inspections prevented him from doing so.

I’ve been following the international news for quite some time and was astounded how many news European magazines have had reporters tag along with the still emerging Iraqi resistance. Interestingly enough, many of the interviewed fighters didn’t think much of Saddam, nor were they connected to Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda gang. They fought for other objectives, such as religion, their families and liberation from western corruption and domination.

When asked about the main American weakness, one group leader pointed to intelligence. “We’re not talking on the phone and we’re communicating in Iraqi Arabic. Even Palestinians and Egyptians have a problem understanding us. Most American intercept experts have no clue.”

The Democrats' hateful, moronic comments are beyond the pale, and the Democrats know it, but they don't care because they have nothing to offer the public debate but rage, resentment and quackery. Until other Democrats stand up against this hysteria, they're admitting to the country their party has no claim to national leadership.

"... Senator John McCain dared to challenge (George W.) Bush in the Republican primaries, only to be smeared in South Carolina as the father of an illegitimate black daughter -- a twisted reference to the Bangladeshi girl McCain and his wife had adopted."

"Because the President is the Commander in Chief, I must think about our men and women in uniform ... if we vote not guilty on the articles on these facts, what message do we send to our soldiers about duty, honor, and country? Given that the President is the Chief Law Enforcement Officer, if we vote not guilty, what message do we send American citizens about respect for the rule of law? For that matter, what message do we send our children and grandchildren for generations to come about the consequences of not telling the truth?

Although international legal specialists acknowledged the importance of trying Hussein first, they expressed concern about making the tribunal's initial case one that would be so complicated and closely watched.

Chalabi, a nephew of the Iraqi political leader Ahmed Chalabi, said legal specialists involved in setting up the tribunal would have to "tread a line between moving quickly to appease Iraqi political pressure and slowly enough to make sure we don't stray outside the scope of internationally recognized due process of law."

The Court's jurisdiction will be limited to the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole. It will therefore have jurisdiction with respect to the crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, all of which are fully defined in the Statute and further elaborated by the Elements of Crimes.

As near as I can determine, I was assigned to the Court of Appeal so I would have months to consider the problems my colleagues on the trial bench resolve in twenty minutes.

For the past three years, the Bush administration has quietly but efficiently dropped a shroud of secrecy across many critical operations of the federal government--cloaking its own affairs from scrutiny and removing from the public domain important information on health, safety, and environmental matters. The result has been a reversal of a decades-long trend of openness in government while making increasing amounts of information unavailable to the taxpayers who pay for its collection and analysis. Bush administration officials often cite the September 11 attacks as the reason for the enhanced secrecy. But as the Inauguration Day directive from Card indicates, the initiative to wall off records and information previously in the public domain began from Day 1.

Stahl: Let me raise the whole question, for lack of a better term, torture. Let's say he's not forthcoming. Would we deprive him of sleep, make it very cold where he is, or very hot? Are there any restrictions on the way we treat him to get him to cooperate more than he has been?

Secretary Rumsfeld: You know, to even raise the word torture in terms of how the United States military would treat this person seems to me is a unfortunate. We don't torture people and here's a man who has tortured to death tens of thousands of people, conducted rape and brutality the likes of which would be difficult to find a more vicious and brutal dictator in our adult lifetimes. And I just told you he would be treated according to the Geneva Conventions and to suggest that any one would be engaged in torture or conduct inconsistent with the Geneva Convention seems to me isn't on the mark at all.

We're talking about a foreign policy here that's confused. President Bush has got to start to straighten this stuff out. And here's something else we just learned. He calls Mulroney up in Canada and says, hey, don't worry about this. We're not going to hold you on Iraq. He's trying to get Canada, which should not have been included in this Department of Defense memo because Canada has lost guys in Afghanistan, and already paid $190 million to help out in Iraq. So that was dumb, too.

After decades of denials, the family of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) acknowledged yesterday a claim made by a 78-year-old Los Angeles schoolteacher that she is the senator's mixed-race daughter, a charge that had dogged her throughout her otherwise quiet life and shadowed Thurmond during his public career as a leading voice of racial segregation.

There's not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Negro race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes and into our churches

President Bush indicated Wednesday he opposes extending marriage rights to homosexuals, saying he believes marriage "is between a man and a woman."

Bush said it is "important for society to welcome each individual," but administration lawyers are looking for some way to legally limit marriage to heterosexuals.

"I believe marriage is between a man and a woman, and I think we ought to codify that one way or another," Bush told reporters at a White House news conference. "And we've got lawyers looking at the best way to do that."

The public remains deeply divided as to whether "the war with Iraq was worth fighting," with 53 percent agreeing it was, and 42 percent saying it was not -- unchanged from last month.

... Meanwhile, more Americans say the war in Iraq is going worse than expected (27 percent) than say it is going better than expected (14 percent). The majority said it is turning out much the way they had anticipated.

"Today we hear calls to give Saddam Hussein more time. But we should ask: How long should we wait? … should we wait until Saddam Hussein finishes preparing weapons of mass terror—weapons that will further endanger our troops, or which he can use on the Iraqi people as he has in the past? Those very weapons are the source of our concern."

"Disarming Saddam's weapons of mass terror is a second front in the war on terrorism."

McCLELLAN: "I think the President has always spoken out about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. And, obviously, in those speeches I think you're referring to, there were a lot of issues he covered."

REPORTER: "But why not weapons of mass destruction?"

McCLELLAN: "We're confident that we will uncover the full extent of the weapons of mass destruction programs."

"I think that the burden, again, falls on the people who are criticizing the President here, for them to explain how and when Saddam Hussein destroyed [WMDs]."

"We forget how quickly people forget. Problems, once solved, disappear. Voters take for granted what has been accomplished. Each success, initially framed by the president as an end in itself, is reframed by the challenger as a means to a further, unfulfilled end.
...
Dean seems to understand. "Our troops are to be congratulated on carrying out this mission with the skill and dedication we have come to know of them," he said this morning. "This development provides an enormous opportunity to set a new course and take the American label off the war. We must do everything possible to bring the U.N., NATO, and other members of the international community back into this effort. Now that the dictator is captured, we must also accelerate the transition from occupation to full Iraqi sovereignty."

Notice how Dean repeats every element of the 2000 Bush approach. Somebody other than the president—in this case, our troops—gets the credit. The mission becomes history. Capturing Saddam becomes a means to a more difficult end: getting the United Nations into Iraq, and getting the United States out.
...
It's clear from interviews Dean gave to reporters Saturday (written up in Sunday's Washington Post and New York Times) that he's repositioning himself as a more hawkish candidate in the general election. He was planning to claim that position tomorrow in a major foreign policy speech. Now he'll have maximum attention as he does so. Bush's aides would be unwise to assume that Dean can't make their latest triumph vanish into history. They should know."

George W. Bush enjoys neither royal nor religious status that would place him beyond criticism. Whether or not he is a real conservative, he is no friend of limited, constitutional government. And for that the American people should be very, very angry.

My take on the capture of Saddam will appear in tomorrow’s National Post. I’ll post a link as soon as the Post has the story on line. For now, let’s say that while the President’s opponents have made much sport of the idea that God called George Bush to the presidency, it’s becoming increasingy difficult to doubt that God wants President Bush re-elected.