January 31, 2003 - In a democracy the power of government is circumscribed by the will of the people. In our Constitutional democracy the mechanisms by which the people may express their common will are codified, delimited and protected. The First Amendment to our Constitution in its enumeration of freedoms of speech, of the press, of conscience, of assembly, and of petition for redress protects an unenumerated freedom that is more basic and essential to democracy – the Freedom of Inquiry....click here for entire article

January 26, 2003 - In 1955 President Eisenhower journeyed to Vienna to meet the Soviet Premier. His mission was not to negotiate an end to the Cold War but to reassure the Soviets and a world nervous about a nuclear exchange. Eisenhower opened the summit by making the pledge, “The United States will never engage in aggressive war.” First Secretary Bulganin replied “We believe you.” After that exchange tensions between the two super power blocks have risen and fallen but the world and the Soviet Union never had reason to doubt either Eisenhower’s sincerity or that his words represented an enduring policy engrained in the American character. Not, that is until the 21st Century and the announcement of the Bush Doctrine of preemptive war....click here for entire article

January 21, 2003 - Speaking after a Security Council conference on terrorism heard Secretary of State Powell plead urgently for support for the exercise of military force. The French Foreign Minister made it clear that Powell had failed to make his case. Asked if a resolution authorizing war against Iraq faced a French veto the Foreign Minister declared that his country was prepared to stand by its principles. Asked if France supported the United States position that Saddam Hussein must go he responded that the objective was not “regime change’ but disarmament and that the inspection process seemed to be successful thus far in achieving that goal. With three of the five permanent members of the Security Council lining up against the a precipitous descent into the Hades of war it appears that in this game of international bluff and bluster Saddam has out-pointed Bush 3 to 2....click here for entire article

January 20, 2003 - January 20th, 2003 is a National Holiday. It is a day set aside by Congress to remember and celebrate the contributions of an American icon, Martin Luther King. By a coincidence of the calendar’s cycle, it is also the second anniversary of the inauguration of George W. Bush as the 43rd President of the United States. As a result it is a day full of irony.

The man whose life we remember today led the fight to chase Jim Crow from America’s society. The man whose Presidency we cannot forget has made up Jim Crow in whiteface and sent him off to dance for the Supreme Court. The man whose life we remember today embraced non-violence as the only moral way to effect social change. The man whose Presidency we cannot forget searches the trivia of arms inspection with a magnifying glass to find an excuse to unleash the most violent of human acts, war, with the most violent of man’s inventions....click here for entire article

January 17, 2003 - They call it “managed care”. Anyone who is covered by a health plan is or will be familiar with it. It is the privatized version of socialized medicine in which you must obtain the plan administrator’s permission to be sick. They come in two varieties. One variety is the PPO plan in which you get to choose from a menu of health care professionals, not necessarily MDs, who have contracted with the insurance company to provide the most economic – not necessarily the latest and most effective – health care. That Primary Care Provider is supposed to manage your care under the supervision, of course, of the plan administrator, usually an MBA. Then there is the HMO, usually operated by a consortium of health care providers one of whom you select or are assigned to as your Primary Care Provider to manage your care. Again your care is managed under the supervision of that new class of health care professional, the administrator whose job it is keep the cost of caring for you as low as possible. For either variation the cost of coverage is not low averaging from $4-6000 per person. In most families cost of coverage is partially paid as a benefit of full time skilled or professional employment. For many families whose incomes put them in the neighborhood of the government poverty line, working two or more part-time jobs to feed, house and clothe their children those job benefits are non-existent and coverage on an individual basis is beyond their resources. They must rely on governmental health care programs either entirely or partially funded by public money. They have no alternative....click here for entire article

January 17, 2003 - A little over two years ago when the then Governor of Texas was pursuing the Presidency he coined a borrowed phrase when he promised that in the Bush administration no child would be left behind. It was a good slogan and a catchy one and he told us that he would be vigilant in seeing that every child would be offered the opportunity to share in the promise of the American dream. It was high flying and full blown rhetoric from a compassionate conservative. Now, two years later we can measure those promises against the record....click here for entire article

January 16, 2003 - Yesterday morning the media warned us that the bubonic plague, the Black Death that decimated Europe in the Middle Ages, was on the loose when 30 vials of the bacteria went missing at Texas Tech in Lubbock. At the same time the news that anthrax may have been detected at the Federal Reserve building in Washington and the Post Service was testing at the DC sorting facility that handled the central bank’s incoming mail moved on the wire services. At the same time the warnings were going out FBI headquarters was telling the public that while there were probably a lot of Al Qaida sleeper cells in the US there were no top commanders here....click here for entire article

January 15, 2003 - Pat Buchanan writes in a column castigating Illinois outgoing Governor George Ryan published on World Net Daily:

“A decision on who gets the death penalty in the United States is as arbitrary as who gets hit by a bolt of lightning," declares Ryan. This is demagoguery. To get hit by a bolt of lightning, one need only be outdoors. To get a death sentence in Illinois, one must commit an act of deliberate murder against a citizen of Illinois.

As usual Pat is overly simple in his analysis. To get a death sentence in Illinois one must only be convicted of an act of deliberate murder. The condemned need not have actually committed it....click here for entire article

January 14, 2003 - The United States struck a surface to surface missile site near Basra justifying that strike by saying that the installation was a threat to western shipping in the Persian Gulf. That sortie and the justification for it make it awfully hard to maintain the fiction that the American led Second Iraqi War has not already begun. In every previous air strike on Iraqi territory the public justification has always been the protection of allied fliers patroling the US proclaimed "no fly zones" by destroying radars and command and control facilities when patroling planes have been allegedly targeted. No such excuse has been offered for this strike....click here for entire article

January 8, 2003 - They came like ghosts in the night to burn a cross in the interracial couple’s lawn. It wasn’t in the twenties or thirties when the glow of crosses illuminated the strange fruit hanging from the live oak trees. It wasn’t the sixties when it was Sunday morning dynamite calling the faithful to worship in Birmingham. It was in Trent Lott’s Mississippi and just seven years ago. The leader of the wolf pack was caught, he was prosecuted and brought to trial before the Honorable U.S. District Judge Charles Pickering. It was one of  “all these problems we have had all these years.” But it was the nineties and a Mississippi jury convicted the Klansman. It was then that the Honorable U.S. District Judge Charles Pickering had to act. He picked up the telephone and called the Justice Department and first cajoled and then threatened to grant a new trial unless the District Attorney backed off asking for the sentence that the mandatory sentencing guidelines demanded....click here for entire article

January 7, 2003 - The President’s mid-term present to say “Thank you” to the well-to-do came today. It was all nicely wrapped and done up with a 674 Billion Dollar bow. It is a mighty nice gift but it does reflect the economic smog that has clouded the atmosphere since he was first elected two years ago. You remember the present he handed out just after his election? It was worth 1.350 Trillion Dollars. This one is worth just half that much. But then when times get tough you just have to cut back....click here for entire article

January 1, 2003 - It is the dawn of a New Year and President Bush is faced with what is perhaps the most serious challenge to his Presidency. What is at stake is nothing less than his place in history as the leader of the Western World. No American President has ever been faced with such a serious and intractable problem as that posed by Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi dictator, the corporeal embodiment of the Axis of Evil has proved to be an evil foe indeed. The Butcher of Baghdad, that master of deceit has thwarted the President’s every move at bringing him to bay. Saddam has been engaged in that most frustrating of techniques of international intrigue. He has aggressively cooperated with the international community’s disarmamen....click here for entire article