Israeli start-up Actelis Networks, which develops solutions for broadband communications over copper platforms, has landed a major contract with US telecommunications company Qwest Communications International (NYSE: Q). The contract is estimated to be worth $60 million and will be spread over a period of four years.

Actelis’s main product, “MetaLight Platform” enables service providers and enterprises to deliver high-bandwidth over multiple copper wires to customers to customers and organizations that do not have access to optical communications services, or do not wish to change their existing copper wire infrastructure.

Co-founded in 1998 by president and CEO Tuvia Barlev and chairman Kamran Elahian, Actelis has raised $97 million to date in four financing rounds. The company’s key investors include in venture capital firms Walden International, Vertex Venture Holdings, The Carlyle Group, France Telecom venture subsidiary Innovacom and ATA Ventures.

FERGUSON: Who said war was easy?

RHODES: Our troops don't get the support they need. They're there without the proper troop numbers.

FERGUSON: Because you guys are say that it's a quagmire.

RHODES: They are there without the proper body armor. They're there without the proper exit strategy. FERGUSON: You're right. There's no support from the left because you say it is a quagmire, it's a waste of time, we shouldn't be there. We need to come home.

RHODES: There is no leadership. Eight generals have come out, and maybe they know a little more than you do...

FERGUSON: They don't need your support, you're absolutely right.

RHODES: ...Ben and Dennis Prager.

FERGUSON: Randi, I have friends in Iraq, OK?

RHODES: Listen, you should be in Iraq. You're 22. When I was 22, I was in the military. Why aren't you there?

FERGUSON: I'm 24 years old.

RHODES: Why aren't you there? Then go.

FERGUSON: And just because I support something doesn't mean I have to always go fight.

RHODES: You go. You go. Go ahead. You go and then you come back because you know what happens when we come back?

FERGUSON: I support the Yankees doesn't mean I wear their uniform.

Now, whatever you consider yourself, friends, you should be afraid. You should be very afraid. With over 200 million Americans targeted, this domestic spying program is so widespread, it is so random, it is so far removed from focusing on al Qaeda suspects that the president was talking about today, that it‘s hard to imagine any intelligence program in U.S. history being so susceptible to abuse.

You know, I served on the Judiciary Committee and the Armed Service Committee in Congress for four years, and no program I studied while using security clearances ever came close to the scope of this massive spy program. It is dangerous, it breaks FCC laws, and it endangers all Americans‘ right to privacy.

But you know what? The villains in this spy program are pretty easy to target, almost as easy as your phone records. First you have the president, who‘s shown that he will break laws if they get in his way of spying. Second, Democratic leaders—they complain now, but where were they? They reviewed the program. Why no protest? Don‘t hold your press conferences now, Nancy Pelosi. Tell us about it when you learn about it!

And finally, the phone companies, who actually profited from the government reading all of your phone bills. They should be sued and their CEOs fired.

Hey, memo to the president and congressional leaders who signed up on this lousy program; We don‘t trust you anymore. We don‘t trust you with our phone bills. We don‘t trust you with our bank records. We don‘t trust you with our medical histories. From now on, if you want to look at Americans‘ private records, get a damn search warrant!

The two Massachusetts women walk down a fly-infested alley where sewage from mud huts drains onto the dirt walkway. In a tiny backyard, they find two dozen chickens, five children -- and one Afghan war widow.

Patti Quigley of Wellesley and Susan Retik of Needham -- whose husbands were killed in the Sept. 11 attacks -- decided to use the financial support they received afterward to help war widows in Afghanistan, where the Al Qaeda planners of the terrorist strikes found harbor.

Yesterday, they met for the first time one of the recipients of their donations -- an Afghan mother who now has a small chicken farm.

The Americans, their heads wrapped in scarves out of respect for local tradition, peppered her with questions: How many chickens do you have? How many eggs do you get? What do you do with the money?

She answered: The chickens produce 10 eggs a day. The family eats some of them and sells the rest. She buys food and school supplies with the money.

Retik then asked what she had traveled across the world to learn: Is your life better because of this program?

The woman, whose small home has dirt floors and drapes for doors, answered honestly:

"It's OK, but not great," said Ahqela, who has only one name and says she is 35, but looks far older. Her husband died in Afghanistan's civil war in the 1990s. "I can at least buy some things with this money."

Quigley and Retik were both pregnant when hijacked jets carrying their husbands crashed into the World Trade Center in 2001, and met after the attacks. Retik saw an Oprah Winfrey show on Afghan women soon after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, and the two widows decided to help Afghan women.

"The differences were so stark between what we were receiving and what they had," said Retik, 38, who has a son, 8, and two daughters, 6 and 4.

"We already had everything we could want," said Quigley, 42, who has two daughters, ages 10 and 4.

[snip]

Then in 2004, they created Beyond the 11th, a nonprofit foundation to aid widows in areas touched by conflict. They have held two fund-raisers -- bike rides from ground zero to Boston -- raising $325,000. They hope to raise $250,000 this year.

They have ignored past promises and refused to deliver more than a trickle of broadband to customers.

They have been given a monopoly on DSL, with competitors thrown out by courts and regulators.

They have been allowed to merge willy-nilly, putting the old Bell System back together again, this time without regulation.

They have been allowed to steal frequencies intended for small businesses through dummy corporations.

They have been supported in efforts to blackmail large Web businesses and destroy network neutrality, the guiding principle of the Internet.

Why? Why was this corruption allowed? Why was this theft not checked?

Now we know.

Christians have an obligation, a mandate, a commission, a holy responsibility to reclaim the land for Jesus Christ -- to have dominion in civil structures, just as in every other aspect of life and godliness.

But it is dominion we are after. Not just a voice.
It is dominion we are after. Not just influence.
It is dominion we are after. Not just equal time.
It is dominion we are after.

World conquest. That's what Christ has commissioned us to accomplish. We must win the world with the power of the Gospel. And we must never settle for anything less...

Thus, Christian politics has as its primary intent the conquest of the land -- of men, families, institutions, bureaucracies, courts, and governments for the Kingdom of Christ

What we have here is a clandestine surveillance program of enormous size, which is being operated by members of the administration who are subject to no limits or scrutiny beyond what they deem to impose on one another. If the White House had gotten its way, the program would have run secretly until the war on terror ended — that is, forever.

Congress must stop pretending that it has no serious responsibilities for monitoring the situation. The Senate should call back Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and ask him — this time, under oath — about the scope of the program. This time, lawmakers should not roll over when Mr. Gonzales declines to provide answers. The confirmation hearings of Michael Hayden, President Bush's nominee for Central Intelligence Agency director, are also a natural forum for a serious, thorough and pointed review of exactly what has been going on.

Most of all, Congress should pass legislation that removes any doubt that this kind of warrantless spying on ordinary Americans is illegal. If the administration finds the current procedures for getting court approval of wiretaps too restrictive, this would be the time to make any needed adjustments.

President Bush began his defense of the N.S.A. program yesterday by invoking, as he often does, Sept. 11. The attacks that day firmed the nation's resolve to protect itself against its enemies, but they did not give the president the limitless power he now claims to intrude on the private communications of the American people.

WHEN THE New York Times revealed the National Security Agency's domestic wiretapping program late last year, President Bush assured the country that the operation was carefully limited to international calls, targeted only al-Qaeda suspects and did not involve snooping on law-abiding Americans. That turns out to be far from the whole truth.

We don't contend that data-mining is illegitimate. With appropriate controls and oversight, it has a role to play in modern intelligence and law enforcement. But a giant government database detailing which phone numbers called which other phone numbers -- the NSA data, according to USA Today, do not include people's names or addresses or the contents of their communications -- is a massive intrusion on personal privacy.

[snip]

The goal must be to modernize the rules of anti-terrorism surveillance within the United States, allowing for the uses of new technologies unimagined when Congress wrote current law but insisting on proper limits and systemic judicial and legislative oversight. This cannot begin to happen without a sustained congressional effort to find out what the NSA is doing.

Since 9/11 the American public has been willing to rely on the assurances of government leaders that they are preserving our privacy while fighting terrorism.

Unfortunately, and perhaps understandably, many Americans no longer believe them.

The government apparently has even bigger plans "to create a database of every call ever made within the nation's borders" to identify and track suspected terrorists.

Think about that. Every phone call ever made.

No, not so fast.

This sounds like a vast and unchecked intrusion on privacy. President Bush's assurance Thursday that the privacy of Americans was being "fiercely protected" was not at all convincing.

We need to know more about this. The government, though, didn't offer confirmation or elaboration on Thursday. Based on the newspaper's reporting, this effort appears to go far beyond any surveillance effort that would be targeted at terrorist operations.

At first blush this program carries troubling echoes of Total Information Awareness, a proposed Defense Department "data-mining" expedition into a mass of personal information on individuals' driver's licenses, passports, credit card purchases, car rentals, medical prescriptions, banking transactions and more. That was curbed by Congress after a public outcry. It seems the people who wanted to bring you TIA didn't get the message.

[snip]

Why would the government seek and store records of every telephone call to your doctor, your lawyer, your next-door neighbor?

Tell us.

No one is listening in on domestic phone calls, as the NSA is doing to a limited number of international calls involving Americans suspected of terrorist links.

What this database does is record phone numbers, in search of calling patterns that might tip terrorist activity.

No names, no addresses. No personal information. Just phone numbers.

[snip]

President Bush, while not confirming the existence of the alleged program, stressed that "we're not mining or trolling the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans individual privacy is being "fiercely protected."

Indeed, all of the outrage neglects the stark fact that preventing another 9/11 demands the use of any sophisticated investigative techniques now available to law enforcement. Sophisticated enough to stay one step ahead of the terrorists.

"If you're looking for a needle, making the haystack bigger is counterintuitive. It just doesn't make sense."

"Certain people are more suspicious than others...They make frequent trips back-and-forth to Afghanistan, for instance. "So you start with them. And you work two steps out. If none of those people are connected, you don't have a cell. Because if one was there, you'd find some clustering. You don't have to collect all the data in the world to do that."

President Bush’s job-approval rating has fallen to its lowest mark of his presidency, according to a new Harris Interactive poll. Of 1,003 U.S. adults surveyed in a telephone poll, 29% think Mr. Bush is doing an “excellent or pretty good” job as president, down from 35% in April and significantly lower than 43% in January.

Roughly one-quarter of U.S. adults say “things in the country are going in the right direction,” while 69% say “things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track.”

JACK CAFFERTY: I don't know about wisdom but you'll get a bit of outrage. We better hope nothing happens to Arlen Specter, the Republican head of the Judiciary Committee, because he might be all that's standing between us and a full blown dictatorship in this country. He's vowed to question these phone company executives about volunteering to provide the government with my telephone records and yours, and tens of millions of other Americans.

Shortly after 9-11, AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth began providing the super secret NSA with information on phone calls of millions of our citizens, all part of the war on terror, President Bush says.

Why don't you go find Osama Bin Laden and seal the country's borders and start inspecting the containers that come into our ports?

The President rushed out this morning in the wake of this front page story in USA Today and he declared the government's doing nothing wrong and all of this is just fine.

Is it? Is it legal?

Then why did the Justice Department suddenly drop its investigation of the warrantless spying on citizens? Because the NSA said Justice Department lawyers didn't have the necessary security clearance to do the investigation.

Read that sentence again.

A secret government agency has told our Justice Department that it's not allowed to investigate it. And the Justice Department just says okay and drops the whole thing.

We're in some serious trouble here boys and girls.

Here's the question.

"Does it concern you that your phone company may be voluntarily providing your phone records to the government without your knowledge or permission?"

If it doesn't it sure as hell ought to.

In the first poll of its kind, OpEdNews.com, in the second OpEdNews/Zogby People's poll has learned that except for viewers of right wing news show, Fox News, poll respondents believe that the 2004 presidential election was stolen.

Overall, the poll found that 39% said that the 2004 election was stolen. 54% said it was legitimate. Shortly after the election, the NY Times suggested that a few fringe extremists and bloggers were concerned about the theft of the election.

But let's look at the demographics on this question. Of the people who watch Fox news as their primary sourc of TV news, one half of one percent believe it was stolen and 99% believe it was legitimate. Among people who watched ANY other news source but FOX, more felt the election was stolen than legitimate. The numbers varied dramatically:

Here are the stats by network listed as first choice by respondent and whether the respondent thought the election was stolen or legitimate.
Network Stolen Legitimate
ABC 56% 32%
CBS 64% 31%
CNN 70% 24%
FOX .5% 99%
MSNBC 65% 24%
NBC 49% 43%
Other 56% 28%

San Francisco- Officials overseeing elections in three states have directed local authorities to take additional security measures with a popular type of electronic voting machine to prevent election fraud.

California, Iowa and Pennsylvania issued the voting directives in recent weeks after researchers discovered a feature that could allow someone to load unauthorized software on Diebold Election Systems computerized machines.

Diebold is a unit of Green, Ohio-based Diebold Inc.

A hacker theoretically could use the software to rig or sabotage an election or to perform some other unauthorized function, said Michael Shamos, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

"It's worse than a hole," said Shamos, who has been briefed on the vulnerability of the Diebold machines. "It's a deliberate feature that was added by Diebold that we all believe is unwise."

In the wake of the ballot-tabulating problems that plagued the 2000 presidential election, electronic voting has become a flash point for many people concerned about fair elections. Critics charge that electronic voting machines are too susceptible to fraud and error to be trusted and should not replace traditional balloting until proper safeguards are installed.

Diebold spokesman David Bear said there is no evidence electronic results have been subject to tampering. He added it would be hard for anyone to exploit the recently discovered flaw if officials follow security procedures already in place, but that Diebold is developing a permanent solution to address concerns.

So just how much Soviet style bullshit are Bush supporters willing to put up with? Is there any limit at all to what Bush can do?

Man, I can’t wait for the Rapture to come and suck all these maroons up to the big Walmart in the sky so the rest of us can have America back.

Enough already with the analyses ad nauseam of the strategies and tactics and philosophies that the Democratic Party should pursue to regain power in upcoming elections.

We've been listening to this armchair chatter for years: The Democrats need new ideas. They need big ideas. They need to move to the center. They need to wave the flag. They need to go to church. They need the soccer moms and the Nascar dads. They need to run from the blacks. They need to run from the gays.

I have no more patience with this perennially pathetic patient, this terminally timid Democrat who continues to lie cowering and trembling on the analyst's couch, wondering why the Demolition Derby Republicans control virtually all of the levers of power in the United States.

The Democrats are thinking too much and doing too little. This is a party in need of a moxie transplant. It's time for the patient to climb off the couch, walk outside and mix it up with the gang that has made a complete and utter mess of the country that was entrusted to it.

[snip]

What the Democrats need more than anything, with midterms coming up in the fall and a presidential election two years later, are personable candidates of strong character who have at least some measure of political courage and are willing to stand up for what they truly believe. This is the stuff that leaders are made of.

It's time to climb off the couch, Democrats, present yourselves to the public, and take a stand. If you're personable, and possessed of just a little bit of courage, you're halfway home.

The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.

The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren't suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.

"It's the largest database ever assembled in the world," said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA's activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency's goal is "to create a database of every call ever made" within the nation's borders, this person added.

For the customers of these companies, it means that the government has detailed records of calls they made — across town or across the country — to family members, co-workers, business contacts and others.

[snip]

The NSA's domestic program, as described by sources, is far more expansive than what the White House has acknowledged. Last year, Bush said he had authorized the NSA to eavesdrop — without warrants — on international calls and international e-mails of people suspected of having links to terrorists when one party to the communication is in the USA. Warrants have also not been used in the NSA's efforts to create a national call database.

In defending the previously disclosed program, Bush insisted that the NSA was focused exclusively on international calls. "In other words," Bush explained, "one end of the communication must be outside the United States."

As a result, domestic call records — those of calls that originate and terminate within U.S. borders — were believed to be private.

Sources, however, say that is not the case. With access to records of billions of domestic calls, the NSA has gained a secret window into the communications habits of millions of Americans. Customers' names, street addresses and other personal information are not being handed over as part of NSA's domestic program, the sources said. But the phone numbers the NSA collects can easily be cross-checked with other databases to obtain that information.

Darwin Morgan, a public information officer for the Nevada Test Site, confirmed Tuesday that the 700-ton ammonium nitrate-fuel oil blast has been postponed for at least three weeks. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency and the National Nuclear Security Administration proposed the test 150 miles west of St. George to gather data about the effects of both large conventional weapons and low-yield nuclear weapons.

Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, released a statement Tuesday morning indicating that he hopes the postponement will help get all the facts "out for public view." Matheson and Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, have both been persistent in questioning federal officials about the blast.
Cheri Abdelnour, a DTRA spokeswoman, said the Department of Energy's Nevada Site Office decided to postpone the experiment "due to scheduled legal proceedings." Downwinders in both Nevada and Utah, along with members of the Western Shoshone tribe, filed a lawsuit in April to stop the blast because of the possibility of disrupting radioactively contaminated soil and spreading it downwind.

Robert Hager, a Reno, Nev. attorney representing the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said the postponement is good news for his clients and all Downwinders. But he said the agencies conducting the test need to produce the data that indicates it will be safe.

"Some of the things that the NNSA says are flat out untrue," Hager alleged, referring to government assertions there is no radioactive soil at the blast site. "Until they come forward with data that will support their opinion that the blast will be safe we will continue to stop them in court."

An appendix to the government's environmental assessment indicates the nearest man-made radioactivity is approximately 1.1 miles from the blast site. Despite this factor, the NNSA and the DTRA still released a finding of no significant impact, stating, "the proposed action is not a major federal action significantly affecting the quality of the human environment."

President Bush suggested Wednesday that he'd like to see his family's White House legacy continue, perhaps with his younger brother Jeb as the chief executive.

The president said Florida Gov. Jeb Bush is well-suited for another office and would make "a great president."

"I would like to see Jeb run at some point in time, but I have no idea if that's his intention or not," Bush said in an interview with Florida reporters, according to an account on the St. Petersburg Times Web site.

The president said he had "pushed him fairly hard about what he intends to do," but Jeb has not said.

[snip]

"Yesterday I checked in with my brother," President Bush said as he took the stage. "Make sure everything's going all right"

As if rallying fading public support for keeping more than 100,000 U.S. troops in a disintegrating Iraq and preparing the ground for a possible military attack on Iran were not enough, some influential hawks are now promoting a more confrontational stance against Russia and China, as well.

Their eagerness to take on new and bigger enemies, signaled by Vice Pres. Dick Cheney's blistering verbal assault on Russia Thursday, could be a calculated effort to intimidate the two Eurasian giants at a moment when the U.S. and the European Union (EU) appear to have forged greater unity on key foreign policy issues than at any time since Washington invaded Iraq three years ago.

Russia and China, which were initially treated as allies in the "global war on terror", are now seen as the two biggest obstacles to Washington's drive to impose U.N. Security sanctions against Iran, the administration's current top foreign policy priority. Hardliners may believe that putting them on the defensive at this moment could persuade them to show greater flexibility, at least with respect to Iran.

At the same time, however, a more aggressive stance toward the two powers risks driving them further together in opposition to U.S. geo-strategic designs, particularly isolating Iran and asserting more control over the flow of oil and gas out of Central Asia and the Caucasus.

It could also revive trans-Atlantic tensions despite the convergence between the major western European powers and the United States at the Security Council over Iran. That unity could turn out to be fleeting, particularly if Washington fails to heed increasingly urgent pleas by its allies to offer the Islamic Republic security guarantees in exchange for a verifiable freeze on its nuclear programme.

"I don't see how antagonising (Russian President Vladimir) Putin at this particular moment will make it any easier for him to support you on Iran," said one Congressional foreign policy aide. "And I can't imagine that the Europeans think this is such a good idea at this moment either."

The administration's position toward both Russia and China has gradually hardened over the past year for a number of reasons, including what appears to be their joint strategy of pushing the U.S. military out of bases in Uzbekistan and elsewhere in Central Asia; their relations with what the administration considers hostile or rogue states, such as Sudan and Belarus; their failure to "deliver" Iran and North Korea in negotiations over their nuclear programmes; and their refusal to respond to U.S. bilateral concerns, from human rights to trade.

While Beijing had come to expect hawkish statements from the Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, Chinese leaders - as well as her hosts in Australia - were taken aback when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sounded alarms about Beijing's becoming a "negative force" in Asia during a swing through Southeast Asia in March.

The administration's ongoing and increasingly ardent courtship of both Japan and India as strategic allies against Beijing in what it calls its "hedge" strategy has also done little to promote greater trust.

In that context, the many procedural slights and disruptions - from introducing the national anthem of "The Republic of China" to permitting a well-known Falun Gong activist to infiltrate the White House welcoming ceremony - that soured President Hu Jintao's visit here two weeks ago have reportedly been interpreted in Beijing as deliberate efforts by at least some forces in the administration to embarrass the Chinese leader.

Similarly, Cheney's blast against Russia - the harshest U.S. attack on Moscow since the Bush administration took power - delivered right next door at a NATO-EU conference in Vilnius, Lithuania and just two months before Putin plays host to the G-8 Summit in St. Petersburg, strongly suggests that the hawks are once again ascendant.

Among other points, Cheney accused Moscow of using its control over energy supplies as tools of "intimidation or blackmail" against its neighbours, "undermin(ing) (their) territorial integrity", and "interfer(ing) with democratic movements".

"Russia has a choice to make," he declared in terms that reminded some observers of the "Iron Curtain" speech delivered by former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in Missouri at the outset of the Cold War and prompted others to predict that hardliners around Putin would be strengthened.

"When making these kind of statements, you always have to keep in mind what the reaction from the other side will be, and it's difficult for me to imagine that Russia is simply going to agree with these reproaches." Vyacheslav Nikonov, a Moscow political analyst described as close to the Kremlin, told the Financial Times.

Indeed, it is likely that Washington's growing hawkishness will strengthen hardliners in both Beijing and Moscow and make it harder for the administration to enlist their help with respect to either Iran or the " global war on terror."

A purported al Qaeda document published by the U.S. military may or may not be authentic but its message that the Sunni Islamist guerrillas face problems in Iraq could reflect reality, security experts said on Tuesday.

The U.S. military published late on Monday what it said was a captured document that showed the militant group recognized it was weak and unpopular in Baghdad.

The document, an apparent review of the group's strategy in the capital where it has claimed some of postwar Iraq's bloodiest attacks, was seized with videos on April 16 near Yusufiya, just southeast of Baghdad, a U.S. statement said.

A translation of the undated, three-page document suggested al Qaeda was reviewing tactics in the city, currently focused on car bombs and other guerrilla tactics, and proposing improving its military capabilities to hold territory in any civil war.

Security experts reacted with caution and skepticism to its publication, noting a long-running public opinion battle between the United States and the Iraqi government it backs on the one side and Sunni Arab insurgents including al Qaeda on the other.

"I have a question mark to say the least," said Mustafa Alani, an Iraqi senior consultant of the Gulf Research Center based in Dubai. "Who wrote this, we don't know."

"It is true that they (al Qaeda in Iraq) have problems but why produce such a document to highlight the problems?" he said.

"Why admit all the weaknesses in a written document?"

The document was mentioned in a news briefing last week at which the U.S. military also aired what it said were outtakes from a video promoting Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al Qaeda's best known leader in Iraq, that was posted on the Internet.

A spokesman mocked the Jordanian's competence with a gun and his choice of American sports shoes, seen in the unedited film.

"There is a strategy to ridicule al Qaeda and Zarqawi," said Magnus Ranstorp at the Swedish National Defense College. "It could also be part of a U.S. psychological campaign."

While director of the National Security Agency, Gen. Michael V. Hayden contracted the services of a top executive at the company at the center of the Cunningham bribery scandal, according to two former employees of the company.

Hayden, President Bush's pick to replace Porter Goss as head of the CIA, contracted with MZM Inc. for the services of Lt. Gen. James C. King, then a senior vice president of the company, the sources say. MZM was owned and operated by Mitchell Wade, who has admitted to bribing former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham with $1.4 million in money and gifts. Wade has also reportedly told investigators he helped arrange for prostitutes to entertain the disgraced lawmaker, and he continues to cooperate with a federal inquiry into the matter.

"We must get out of our political foxholes and be willing to clearly and specifically point out what a strategic error the Iraq invasion has been," Feingold, D-Wis., told a National Press Club audience.

He said some Democrats in Congress gave in to "intimidation" by the Bush administration when they voted to authorize the war in 2002, and warned: "If we do not show both a practical and emotional readiness to lead in the fight against terrorism, we will lose in '06 and we will lose in '08, just like we did in '02 and '04."

In March, Feingold called for the censure of Bush over the administration's warrantless surveillance program. So far, only two Democrats, Tom Harkin of Iowa and Barbara Boxer of California, have signed on as co-sponsors.

Feingold, who also has proposed that U.S. troops leave Iraq by the end of the year, rejected criticism that such a move could lead to chaos.

"I believe the situation would probably get better" if U.S. troops left, he said. "The lesson of insurgency is when the occupying power leaves, it tends to lessen, rather than increase, the level of violence."

White House spokesman Alex Conant responded: "We must defeat the terrorists by denying them safe haven and the president will continue to listen to our commanders for what troop levels are needed. The U.S. must stand with the brave citizens of Iraq as their new democracy grows."

Despite all his successes -- and eight years of peace and prosperity is nothing to sneeze at -- he never broke the 50-percent mark in his two elections. Regardless of the president's personal popularity, Democrats held fewer congressional seats at the end of his presidency than before it. The Democratic Party atrophied during his two terms, partly because of his fealty to his "third way" of politics, which neglected key parts of the progressive movement and reserved its outreach efforts for corporate and moneyed interests.

While Republicans spent the past four decades building a vast network of small-dollar donors to fund their operations, Democrats tossed aside their base and fed off million-dollar-plus donations. The disconnect was stark, and ultimately destructive. Clinton's third way failed miserably. It killed off the Jesse Jackson wing of the Democratic Party and, despite its undivided control of the party apparatus, delivered nothing. Nothing, that is, except the loss of Congress, the perpetuation of the muddled Democratic "message," a demoralized and moribund party base, and electoral defeats in 2000, 2002 and 2004.

Those failures led the netroots to support Dean in the last presidential race. We didn't back him because he was the most "liberal" candidate. In fact, we supported him despite his moderate, pro-gun, pro-balanced-budget record, because he offered the two things we craved most: outsider credentials and leadership.

And therein lie Hillary Clinton's biggest problems. She epitomizes the "insider" label of the early crowd of 2008 Democratic contenders. She's part of the Clinton machine that decimated the national Democratic Party. And she remains surrounded by many of the old consultants who counsel meekness and caution. James Carville, the famed longtime adviser to the Clintons, told Newsweek last week, "The American people are going to be ready for an era of realism. They've seen the consequences of having too many 'big ideas.' "

[snip]

Afraid to offend, she has limited her policy proposals to minor, symbolic issues -- such as co-sponsoring legislation to ban flag burning. She doesn't have a single memorable policy or legislative accomplishment to her name. Meanwhile, she remains behind the curve or downright incoherent on pressing issues such as the war in Iraq.

On the war, Clinton's recent "I disagree with those who believe we should pull out, and I disagree with those who believe we should stay without end" seems little different from Kerry's famous "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it" line. The last thing we need is yet another Democrat afraid to stand on principle.

Few people have ever heard of Jonathan Tasini. He's a low-key labor organizer and writer from Upper Manhattan who is trying to piece together a primary challenge to the re-election bid of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, primarily because of her stance on the Iraq war.

Mr. Tasini is against the war and wants American troops pulled out of Iraq forthwith.

Senator Clinton's position is — well, that's a problem. It's not at all clear what Senator Clinton's position is. And for a Democratic Party that has suffered a succession of brutal defeats with excessively cautious candidates, Mrs. Clinton's indecisiveness on the war may be a hint of yet another disaster in the making.

Mr. Tasini is not so deluded that he thinks he can hijack the Democratic Senate nomination from Mrs. Clinton. He said, "People often ask me, 'Don't you think this race is impossible?' My answer is, 'Of course! You're dealing with someone who has enormous name recognition and celebrity.' "

But celebrity, he said, is no substitute for an honest and vigorous debate on a matter as fundamentally important as war.

[snip]

After more than three years of fighting and more than 2,400 American deaths, you still need a magnifying glass to locate the differences between Mrs. Clinton and the Bush administration on the war. It's true, as the senator argues, that she has been a frequent and sometimes harsh critic of the way the war has been conducted. In a letter to constituents last fall she wrote, "I have continually raised doubts about the president's claims, lack of planning and execution of the war, while standing firmly in support of our troops."

But in terms of overall policy, she seems to be right there with Bush, Cheney, Condi et al. She does not regret her vote to authorize the invasion, and still believes the war can be won.

It seems that for a sizable number of young men, the fact that they can get sex whenever they want may have created a situation where, in fact, they're unable to have sex. According to surveys, young women are now as likely as young men to have sex and by countless reports are also as likely to initiate sex, taking away from males the age-old, erotic power of the chase.

"I know lots of girls for whom nothing is off limits," says Helen Czapary, a junior at the University of Maryland. "The pressure on the guys is a huge deal."

Combine performance anxiety with binge drinking and the abuse of drugs on campus and it's no wonder that problems are showing up at college clinics in numbers that give the lie to the adage that impotence is reserved for the old (Bob Dole) or crazy (Jack Nicholson in "Carnal Knowledge"). The younger models who now appear in commercials for Viagra and its pharmaceutical clones reveal that the drug makers know (hope?) what the rest of us don't: Some members of the Game Boy generation are losing their game.

[snip]

Jon Pryor, head of urologic surgery at the University of Minnesota, tells medical students that 30 percent of his patients with erectile dysfunction, or ED, are under 30 years old. Other specialists note that the proportion of men experiencing at least occasional problems increases steadily with age, to 70 percent of men over 70.

In certain young men, impotence can be a result of diabetes, cardiovascular disease or other organic problems. But for students such as the ones Brodie and other mental health professionals see, experts point to lifestyle. An increasing number of students arrive on campus taking antidepressants, some of which reduce libido and sexual function. They consume larger amounts of alcohol at one time than in years past, killing performance. Smoking, lack of exercise and anxiety also may be factors.

Demands by their female partners also contribute, according to educators such as Robin Sawyer, who teaches human sexuality at the University of Maryland. Sawyer recalls a young man who came to his office after class one day confessing that he hadn't been physically aroused in more than two years. "He was 20 years old, good-looking," Sawyer says. "I told him once he was in a relationship, things would get better. He said he could never get to the relationship because when he went out with a woman, she wanted to have sex almost immediately. He never got comfortable enough to tell them he had a problem, so he stopped dating."

One can argue that a young woman speaking her mind is a sign of equality. "That's a good thing," says Sawyer, father of four daughters. "But for some guys, it has come at a price. It's turned into ED in men you normally wouldn't think would have ED."