A team of suspected terrorists involved in an alleged UK plot to blow up trans-atlantic airliners escaped capture because of interference by the United States, The Independent has been told by counter-terrorism sources.

An investigation by MI5 and Scotland Yard into an alleged plan to smuggle explosive devices on up to 10 passenger jets was jeopardised in August, when the US put pressure on authorities in Pakistan to arrest a suspect allegedly linked to the airliner plot.

As a direct result of the surprise detention of the suspect, British police and MI5 were forced to rush forward plans to arrest an alleged UK gang accused of plotting to destroy the airliners. But a second group of suspected terrorists allegedly linked to the first evaded capture and is still at large, according to security sources.

It sounds like a late-night parody of President Bush’s bad habit of filling key posts with extreme ideologues and incompetents. To head family planning programs at the Department of Health and Human Services, Mr. Bush has tapped Eric Keroack, a doctor affiliated with a group vehemently opposed to birth control and someone nationally known for his wacky theory about reproductive health.

Before his appointment, Dr. Keroack served as the medical director of A Woman’s Concern, a network of pregnancy counseling clinics across Massachusetts whose method of trying to dissuade women from having an abortion includes spreading the scary and medically inaccurate myth that having an abortion steeply increases the risk of breast cancer. The group also has a policy against dispensing contraception even to married women. It has stated on its Web site that the distribution of contraceptive drugs or devices is “demeaning to women, degrading of human sexuality and adverse to human health and happiness.” Dr. Keroack now claims that he disagrees with these approaches, a repositioning that seems very belated.

When speaking at abstinence conferences across the country, and in his writings, Dr. Keroack has promoted the novel argument that sex with multiple partners alters brain chemistry in a way that makes it harder for women to form bonding relationships. One of the researchers cited by Dr. Keroack has called the claim “complete pseudoscience” unsupported by her findings.

Armed with these credentials, Dr. Keroack has been drafted to lead the federal office that finances birth control, pregnancy tests, breast cancer screening and other critical health care services for five million poor people annually, and to advise Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt on family planning issues. Americans who were expecting a more moderate administration in the wake of this month’s elections may find all this shocking. But to the unchastened Bush White House, apparent opposition to contraceptives, abortion and science was the opposite of disqualifying. It was a winning trifecta.

Two bombs exploded in northern Iraq on Friday, killing at least 22 people and wounding 26, police said. It was the first major attack by suspected insurgents since bombings in Baghdad's Sadr City Shiite district killed more than 200 people the day before during widespread sectarian violence in the capital.

Followers of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr warned Friday they will suspend their membership in parliament and the Cabinet if Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki meets with U.S. President George W. Bush in Jordan next week, a member of parliament said. Bush and al-Maliki were scheduled to meet Wednesday and Thursday in Amman, the Jordanian capital.

The al-Sadr bloc in parliament and government is the back bone of al-Maliki's political support, and its withdrawal, if only temporarily, would be a severe blow to the prime minister's already shaky hold on power.

Legislator Qusai Abdul-Wahab, an al-Sadr follower, said in a statement that U.S. forces were to blame for Thursday's bombings in Sadr City that killed 215 people and wounding 257 because they failed to provide security.

"We say occupation forces are fully responsible for these acts, and we call for the withdrawal of occupation forces or setting a timetable for their withdrawal," Abdul-Wahab said.

Al-Sadr's followers hold six Cabinet seats and have 30 members in the 275-member parliament.

The attack in Tal Afar, 260 miles northwest of Baghdad, involved explosives hidden in a parked car and in a suicide belt worn by a pedestrian that detonated simultaneously outside a car dealership at 11 a.m., said police Brig. Khalaf al-Jubouri. He said the casualties — 22 dead, 26 wounded — were expected to rise.

Unchastened by the catastrophe of the Iraq war or the setback delivered to the White House and Republicans in the midterm elections in part as a result of it, Iran hawks have organized new efforts to promote U.S. support for regime change in Tehran.

Among the latest efforts is the creation earlier this month of the Iran Enterprise Institute, a privately funded nonprofit drawing not just its name but inspiration and moral support from leading figures associated with the American Enterprise Institute. The Iran Enterprise Institute is directed by a newly arrived Iranian dissident whose cause has recently been championed by AEI fellow and former Pentagon advisor Richard Perle. Amir Abbas Fakhravar, 31, served time in Iran’s notorious Evin prison before arriving in Washington in May, with Perle’s help. Fakhravar, who advocates U.S. intervention to promote secular democracy in Iran, now seeks Washington’s backing to lead an organization that would unite Iranian student dissidents. (I profile Fakhravar in this month’s Mother Jones). Some other Iranian activists and journalists say Fakhravar and his supporters exaggerate his importance as a dissident leader in Iran. "Student circles and journalistic circles don’t recognize him as a student leader,” says Najmeh Bozorgmehr, the Financial Times’ Tehran correspondent who closely followed the 1999 pro-democracy Tehran student uprisings.

Incorporation papers received last week by the Washington, D.C., corporate registration office indicate that among those on the Iran Enterprise Institute's initial board of director are Fakhravar; Bijan Karimi, a professor of engineering at the University of New Haven; and Farzad Farahani, the Los Angeles-based half-brother of the U.S. leader of the exile Iranian political party, the Constitutionalist Party, which is closely tied with Fakhravar.

The Institute was created after a three-day meeting in Washington last month. According to one of the Iranians who participated in the meetings and who asked that his name not be used, among those in attendance were Fakhravar; Reza Pahlavi, son of the ousted shah of Iran; former Reagan era official and AEI scholar Michael Ledeen; a Dallas-based Iranian rug dealer who has funded anti-Tehran dissidents; and several other young Iranian oppositionists. According to sources, the group’s initial funding will come primarily from Iranian exiles. Perle’s office did not immediately respond to an inquiry to his office about the new group.

According to Iranian sources, the shah’s son, Pahlavi, announced at the meeting that the group should right then and there form a new leadership council for the Iran opposition movement, consisting mostly of the younger people present at the meeting rather than the aging cadre of monarchist supporters who have debated how to overthrow the mullahs for 25 years.

I’ve been starving for the past two months, actually, and that’s precisely what the party is about: My dinner guests—five successful urban professionals who for years have subsisted on a caloric intake the average sub-Saharan African would find austere—have been at it much, much longer, and I’ve invited them here to show me how it’s done. They are master practitioners of Calorie Restriction, a diet whose central, radical premise is that the less you eat, the longer you’ll live. Having taken this diet for a nine-week test drive, I’m hoping now for an up-close glimpse of what it means to go all the way. I want to find out what it looks, feels, and tastes like to commit to the ultimate in dietary trade-offs: a lifetime lived as close to the brink of starvation as your body can stand, in exchange for the promise of a life span longer than any human has ever known.

Calorie-restricted dieters cut their food intake drastically, to around 1,200-1,400 calories a day for a woman and 1,800-2,000 for a man, depending on the individual's height and weight. Those meager metrics of tastiness must be further apportioned to constitute 30 percent protein, 30 percent fat and 40 percent carbs. It's an eating regimen that is greatly aided by calculators, computer software and postal scales.

Part of what's so damaging about diseases like anorexia and bulimia -- besides the body-image distortions -- is their fixation on control. What could be more tightly controlled than CR?

As Bob Cavanaugh, secretary for the Calorie Restriction Society, wrote in a letter to New York, "CR practitioners must be in the habit of monitoring their micronutrients. Balancing caloric intake with essential nutrition requires diligence." A diet like this sounds like a full-time job, one that could impede the rituals and opportunities of a full life. Restaurant dinners, accepting invitations to friends' houses, traveling to countries where dietary information is in another language -- all made more difficult by a voice in your head ascribing some higher value to keeping calories at an absolute minimum. Forget even the satisfaction of a particular food. What about the contentment of coming home after a busy day, ordering Chinese, putting your feet up and watching a movie?

And who gets to do this thing right? People with access to spreadsheets and dietitians, yes, but also those with the time to shop for specialties and fiddle-faddle with microproteins at every meal. In other words: not people who get 15 minutes for lunch, work night shifts, and just want to sit with friends over a bottle of wine or a six pack on the weekend.

Diligently monitoring and balancing and weighing and considering and adding and subtracting and measuring and constantly, constantly contemplating every morsel that enters your body, including the two Brazil nuts and two-thirds bag of microwave popcorn: How much time do these people have on their hands anyway? Oh right, centuries.

As CR dieter Paul McGlothin asked on "Today," "Who wouldn't really like to experience the joys of life for a little bit longer?" And McGlothin's CR buddy Meredith Averill crowed to Lauer about "planning [her] 125th birthday for absolutely decades now!"

Bully for McGlothin and Averill, though one would hope that neither has the misfortune of getting hit by a bus or contracting a degenerative disease like CR god Roy Walford. Walford pioneered calorie restriction after his years in Biosphere 2, wrote the book "Beyond the 120 Year Diet : How to Double Your Vital Years," and died at 79 from ALS. If these bodies are all juiced to live for more than a century, let's hope they are also hermetically sealed against dementia, stroke, broken hips, and other afflictions that could make all those additional decades more endless hell than ultimate reward.

And while the CR dieter is enjoying all the moral and physical superiority that comes with self-abnegation and endless gnawing hunger, what toll must it take on friends and loved ones? Imagine spending time with people who eat one-third of what you do and make you feel like a glutton on a suicide mission when you spoon yourself an extra helping of squash. In fact, one of the horrifying things about this diet is the creeping realization of how easy it would be to come to see your every tasty snack as a sin against yourself, every culinary concoction a reason for self-flagellation.

I think about the new pizza place near me. It has weathered yellow walls and a chef whose focused attention to the blistering crust and sweet creamy full-fat ricotta on his menu recalls Nicholas Cage in "Moonstruck." I consider the dinner I just ate at an Italian place: short-rib ravioli in a sauce of smoked marrow, Brussels sprouts with a poached egg and pancetta, chicken liver mousse with fig jam, and pickled green beans on toast. I think about the carafes of wine, the first briny sip of a hard-earned martini, the malty cool of a second beer at a sultry summer barbecue.

And I think: From my side of the short-rib ravioli, immortality really is overrated.

A 150-year life sounds sort of tiring. Isn't it the sort of thing that makes vampires so grumpy? Imagine living through all those wars, all the tragedies. You think teenagers and their loud music and LOL-isms annoy you now? Imagine if there were 100 culturally unbridgeable years between you and them. Think of all those presidential administrations you'd have to endure! Those of us who, barring illness or accident, can expect to live several more decades are probably already looking down the barrel of a Jenna Bush administration. Do you really need to live through George VI?

Former U.S. president George H.W. Bush was forced here Tuesday into a defense of his son, current U.S. President George W. Bush, whose Mideast policies were derided by a hostile audience.

"My son is an honest man," Bush told Gulf Arabs attending a leadership conference here. "He is working hard for peace. It takes a lot of guts to get up and tell a father about his son in those terms when I just told you the thing that matters in my heart is my family."

Bush added: "How come everybody wants to come to the United States if the United States is so bad?"

Although former leader, who served as president from 1989-1993, claimed to have faced tougher audiences, he conceded that attacks on his sons hurt more than those on him. As curiosity mounts regarding the advice James Baker, the senior Bush's secretary of state, is giving Washington on the war in the Iraq, the former president declined to reveal how he had counseled his son on the conflict.

The oil-rich Persian Gulf used to be safe territory for former president Bush, an oil man who brought Arab leaders together in a coalition that drove Saddam Hussein's troops out of Kuwait in 1991.

But gratitude for the elder Bush, who served as president from 1989-93, was overshadowed by the foreign policy of his son, whose invasion of Iraq and support for Israel are deeply unpopular here.

"We do not respect your son. We do not respect what he's doing all over the world," a woman audience member bluntly told Bush after his keynote speech.

Bush appeared stunned as the audience of young business leaders whooped and whistled in approval.

The retired president had just finished a folksy address on leadership by telling the audience how deeply hurt he feels when his son the president is criticized.

"This son is not going to back away," Bush said, his voice quivering. "He's not going to change his view because some poll says this or some poll says that, or some heartfelt comments from the lady who feels deeply in her heart about something. You can't be president of the United States and conduct yourself if you're going to cut and run. This is going to work out in Iraq. I understand the anxiety. It's not easy."

THE idea seems like something out of a Superman comic: a machine or missile shoots tonnes of particles into the atmosphere that would block the Sun's rays, cool down the overheated Earth, and reverse global warming.

But at the weekend scientists gathered in a closed session organised by NASA and Stanford University to discuss researching such a strategy. The idea is called geo-engineering: using technology to tinker with the Earth's delicate climate balance.

Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, said his modelling showed the idea worked. "We found that if you blocked 20 per cent of the sunlight over the Arctic Ocean it would be enough to restore sea ice," he said.

She had only token opposition, but Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton still spent more on her re-election — upward of $30 million — than any other candidate for Senate this year. So where did all the money go?

It helped Mrs. Clinton win a margin of victory of more than 30 points. It helped her build a new set of campaign contributors. And it allowed her to begin assembling the nuts and bolts needed to run a presidential campaign.

But that was not all. Mrs. Clinton also bought more than $13,000 worth of flowers, mostly for fund-raising events and as thank-yous for donors. She laid out $27,000 for valet parking, paid as much as $800 in a single month in credit card interest and — above all — paid tens of thousands of dollars a month to an assortment of consultants and aides.

Throw in $17 million in advertising and fund-raising mailings, and what had been one of the most formidable war chests in politics was depleted to a level that leaves Mrs. Clinton with little financial advantage over her potential rivals for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination — and perhaps even trailing some of them.

The campaign’s financial record has fueled some criticism among Democratic activists and prompted concern among Mrs. Clinton’s supporters, including complaints from some of her fund-raisers that her top aides exercised a lack of discipline.

The remarks form Clinton's camp come after Charles Schumer and Donnie Fowler backed Howard Dean and the fifty-state strategy, the Association of State Democratic Chairs did the same, and after Dean scored a 96% approval rating on the latest Dailykos leadership poll. The latter two are particularly key, because over the past two years, Howard Dean's base of support in the party has come primarily from two sources: state parties and the progressive movement. Although lacking in nuance, it would not be inaccurate to characterize the current modus operandi of the DNC as follows: small donations from progressive movement activists flow to the DNC in record amounts, and most of those donations end up being spent on direct grants to state parties and in the form of state-level field organizers. This is a novel path for Democratic money to take, especially since it generally bypasses both Washington, D.C. based consultants and wealthy donors. It is also exactly why Carville's base of supporters hate Dean so much.



Although this is obviously lost on most pundits and journalists, it is interesting how this seemingly odd alliance between state parties and the progressive movement is based not upon ideology. Rather, it is based upon both a shared strategic principle, the fifty-state strategy, and a shared chip on the shoulder: the sense that both have been long ignored by the party leadership. It is a sort of Alliance of the Ignored. When this alliance runs afoul of the Carville's and Begala's of the world, once gain it does so primarily because of strategic differences, not because of ideology. Carville and Begala generally represent an older tactical vision for the Democratic Party. This was a vision that was dominant from 1988-2004, when Democrats heavily employed triangulation, focused almost entirely on the narrow targeting of a few "swing" districts and demographics, and when television advertisements and repetitious talking points aimed mushy-middle, low information voters where the primary tools utilized in all national Democratic campaigns. Wealthy donors and high-level consultants liked that strategy because it kept money flowing to the latter in the form of hefty commissions, and because it kept Democratic policy where the former would like it to be. Most state parties and progressive activists hated that strategy because it basically dictacted that their electoral concerns were either not important, or something that the Democratic Party needed to actively distance itself from. Whatever ideological differences there may or may not be between the two feuding camps, ultimately their dispute is grounded in a difference in tactical vision: narrow targeting versus the fifty-state strategy.



Right now, the fifty-state strategy is ascendant, and so are state parties and the progressive movement. Fifty-state strategy candidates appear to have the votes to win the DNC Chair for the foreseeable future. Long-ignored state parties will probably keep voting for it, and the long-ignored activists in the progressive movement will probably keep funding it. It is in this way that state parties and the Democratic activist working class have bandied together to form an Alliance of the Ignored to which even the Clinton camp must now pay respect. Best of all, even when Dean's tenure is up in two years, the progressive movement can maintain our power and the Alliance of the Ignored with the state parties through another DNC chair who would be willing to continue the fifty-state strategy. In all likelihood, every once and a while some wealthy donors and high-level consultants will back another pundit like Carville in an attempt to replace a fifty-state strategy chair with a narrow targeting, triangulation, low-information voters chair. However, as long as we make certain the fifty-state strategy is healthy and functioning, these donors and consultants will continue to fail. The old Washington, D.C. based CW clearly does not have the votes to overcome the new fifty-state strategy coalition in the Democratic Party.



In this environment, Clinton's camp understandably wants to distance itself from Carville's remarks. The consensus in the Democratic Party is clearly against him on this one. Carville may have perceived power as a long-time insider, strategist and pundit for the party, but the Alliance of the Ignored between state parties and progressive movement activists have achieved power through the fifty-state strategy. Most higher-ups in the Democratic Party like Clinton and Schumer know this, and that is one of the main reasons why they pay respect to the fifty-state strategy and The Alliance of the Ignored (that, and the fifty-state strategy seems to be working). Because of this alliance, it is no longer possible for people who want to lead the party to dismiss either state parties or the working class of the Democratic activist universe. As power as flowed away from the disgruntled, narrow-targeting clique that has been backing Carville these past ten days, it has flowed to the members of the new alliance. Given this, I wouldn't want to anger us now, either. Power achieved. Narrow targeting strategy crushed for another two years. Now, in order to maintain this power, we must make certain that the fifty-state strategy continues to work.

He is about 77 years old. I say about because WWII bombing raids destroyed most of his family, the hospital where he was born and all his birth records. He knows that in 1946, when the war ended, he was 16 or 17, and that was the worst year of his life.

His world didn't just fall around him once, his war started after the Allies moved in, and in full view of the Allied Occupation.

My friend's name is Henrich, but for decades he has been Henry, living comfortably on the Gulf Coast. I made his acquaintance in an airport, and he told me an incredibly important story about what war does to people.

When the war started, the Jews in my area were gathered up and taken to a camp nearby. My father was a printer and had friends make new IDs. We moved from Berlin to Brandenburg when Hitler took power in 1933. I was a baby. But my parents hid their Jewishness successfully and until a certain moment, I will get to that later, no one knew any better.

To get to my story we have to fast forward a few years and get to the end of the war. Allied bombing killed more of my friends than the German Army or the SS. On two separate days, bombs managed to destroy my home, killed my mother, my father and my brother. My biological father was killed by a German mob when I was little. I was taken in by a second cousin, a frail and lonely spinster who lived in a third story brownstone apartment in a nice little town east of Cottsbus. I called her Aunt Z. Her name was Zelda. Actually her name was Gita, she was of Hungarian descent but changed her name because German thought the European near the Balkans were all mixed race white people. So she took on a more German sounding name when she moved.

Across the street and down a little twisting road was a family called Reisenshtaller. The Reisenshtallers had seven kids, four boys and three girls. The oldest boy, Max, was my nightmare. His father was an SS Commander and Max dressed and acted like his father, even though he was just 16. The Reisenshtallers still kept a Swastika inside one of their windows. The Russians had to tell them to take it down. That's how crazy the Reisenshtaller family was. He was tall and strong for his age and incredibly intimidating. He was a mix between handsome and cruel and naturally strong. He was like that guy in the show the Office. He laughs at all his jokes and so do his toadies, but he is really disgusting. You know whom I am talking about? One morning, after the war, I walked to the market to get supplies it was free food supplied by the Russian Army as we were inside a Russian controlled sector.

My nightmare started when I was in line with a coupon for the food. I heard a voice behind me.

"Take your food and leave it at my door. We have a lot of family members and there is nothing but you and that old witch," Max R was staring down at me. "Why did your father not serve in the Wehrmacht?" he stood in front of me and behind him were three or four of his now Furherless Hitler Youth friends. One of them wore a Wolfshead logo on his hat; another had a Werewolf logo on his infantry jacket. It was cold outside and all I could do was shake with fear. I could see my breath and see theirs and knew trouble would come of this no matter what. There were people in our neighborhood who were very patriotic and when they saw Russian flags in yards or on cars, they tore them down. Someone had put a Russian flag up on the corner around our little cottage. We did not touch it. These teenagers, in a broken German economy, with nothing to do but relive their broken promises to the Reich were going to fill their emptiness by picking on me, an orphan.

"He was killed in a bombing raid," I answered.

"I never see your flag out. Why do you have no pictures of the Furher on your walls?"

"The Furher is dead," I answered.

One of the little Hitlers said "I heard your father was a Communist." The fact is, my father was a Communist and that is why he was killed. Hitler Youth who found his archives and arrest records in the town he was born beat him to death.

And I saw it. I saw it as he walked to his trolley stop with a trench coat and briefcase. I could see t from our third story brownstone. My mother started screaming and the neighbors tried to intervene bus Hans, my immediate next door neighbor got a blackjack across the back of his head. They jumped on my father like these cage fighters. Just pounded him and kicked him and called him Stalin's lover until he was unconscious. They strung him up down at the town center but no one would let me see him. Neighbors cut him down and buried him I guess. I never saw him again. That was of course three years before Herr Reisenshtaller showed up.

I remember a few days later we all heard a huge explosion in the train-yard. Some kids in the neighborhood had found an unexploded bomb and started kicking it around. It killed 5 children and maimed the rest.

When the war was over, we were being fed by the Russian relief organizations. They simply fed us the food they either fund or had shipped to them by the British relief organizations. Most of the infrastructure of Germany was not working. But we had lights. Sometimes the power went out. No one had a real job. People would baby sit, or do healthcare, or work removing the rubble from the streets. Buildings, half collapsed filled the center of the town, the victim of British Lancasters, and made perfect playground for the bored and fully indoctrinated children of the White Supremacists Nazis. In these buildings, people were dragged and raped and robbed and beaten.

I will get back to that. Anyway, I did not leave the food from the market on Reisenshtaller's porch.

That night a flaming projectile came through the kitchen window on our home and gutted the dining room. Aunt Z. was beside herself. It was dining room/den that held the only things she had after that war- memories, faded photographs and so forth. Outside I could hear the children yelling.

Which brings us to Hans, my immediate next-door neighbor. Hans yelled at them from his balcony. "The war is over. Haven't we all suffered enough? Go home."

"You have only begun to suffer. We know what you do at night."

Hans lived with another man and believe it or not I had not ever heard of homosexuality the way it really. When I was a kid growing up in Nazi Germany, I thought homosexuals were just effeminate. I asked Aunt Zelda and she told me what in fact they did at night.

Anyway that weekend Hans' partner's body was found under a bridge abutment. He had been tortured. He had his eyes poked out and fingers cut off.

So even though Hitler had died, there were those ho could not let go of him. Ancestor worship almost. Nazis killed themselves because they couldn't imagine living without National Socialism. They kept networks alive and even killed a few Russians in my area. But mostly, they were dinosaurs and they knew it. All they had was fear. Fear of communists, fear of homosexuals, fear of the Americans. Fear of Jews. Fear fear fear. That's how they fuel their power. From time to time one of those assholes comes back and tells us what will happen if Gays are allowed to teach schools or if Jews lend money. They rewrite history to justify their hatred. But deep inside, they know they are the last of the Mohicans.

Aunt Z packed her bags and went to her sister's in a little farm town just south of the Russian sector. I never saw her again either, and worse, I was now 16, and living alone in a little apartment home with a schnauzer named Schnapzie. Hans stayed where he was, and hardly ever came except to shop. You have to understand that Germans were still suffering greatly. No one had anything to give me and in fact no one knew for a few weeks, but one day there was a knock on the door and Russian soldiers were there. One of them spoke perfect German and he asked me where my family was and why I was living alone.

His named was Yuri and he eventually returned the next day with a box of groceries. There were military meals, powdered milk, bread and jelly and so forth. He came in and visited with me and wanted to make sure I knew how to cook and so forth.

I told Yuri about Herr Reisenshtaller and how he was terrorizing me because my father was a Communist. He listened carefully and wrote it down, and said he would come back and see me the next day. He was going to give me food coupons I could redeem at the market. When he went out the door Schnapzie ran out too. I don't know why, but never worried because she always ran out and came back soon thereafter.

I did not see her. I turned on the radio and fell asleep. About midnight I heard Schnapzie yelping, really long painful yelps. I yelled out the door, "Schnapzie!!!"
Hans yelled from his window for me to stay inside. Then I heard Reisenshtaller yelling my name. "Heinrich the Communist. We have your Communist dog. Come get her."

I heard a neighbor yell at the boys to leave the dog alone. "Shut up witch," one of them yelled. "We are teaching a Communist a lesson." Another brick came through the window, the same one we repaired earlier. Later that night I noticed that there was something tied to the brick. It was one of Schnapzie's paws.

By the time the Gendarme got there it was over.

About 2:30 AM, Schnapzie stopped yelping. Reisenshtaller and his little torturers had finally finished her off and left pieces of her. I had locked the door and pushed a chair up in front of it.

The next morning I awoke to shovels poking into the ground. Yuri and two other soldiers were digging a grave in the garden down below the living room window. They put a thing in it wrapped in a blanket. I knew it was Schnapzie. I cried so hard. I don't even know why. I didn't love Schnapzie, I just guess I was so tired of being afraid, of not having a safe place to sleep. A neighbor sat watching the Russians bury the dog while he sipped tea. That's what war does. It make violence remarkably dull and ordinary. Later I pulled the furniture away from the door and Yuri and the soldiers came in.

"Take these coupons and go to the market and come right back here," Yuri told me. "When you get back I will pick you up and I will have some friends with me. Then we are going to find Reisenshtaller."

"Do I have to come with you? I know where he lives."

Out they went and I followed. Before they went to a garrison nearby they spoke with some of my neighbors. And I went to the market.

I never made it to the market. Reisenshtaller and three of his friends found me. First with a rock that bloodied me right between the eyes and I never even saw them. I took off to the town center and started screaming. No one lend the slightest hand as they beat me in the town square. Four 16 year olds beating another 16 year old. The assailants wearing ragtag Nazi paraphernalia. This was Germany 1946. "He is a communist," my assailants yelled.

They broke my elbow. They knocked three teeth out. They put cuts all over me.

{He extended his elbow to show me he still could not extend his arm all the way out.}

One of them grabbed my lapel and started dragging me. I was prone, being dragged into a back alley, watching neighbors avert their eyes, maybe yell something to the boys to try and stop them, but nothing stopped this endless trip. I was numb and started feeling a sort of peace. I knew death was around the corner and there was nothing could do to stop the inevitable. I would die in a town square, yet completely alone. My neighbors, Germans, would act like the animals they so screamed about. The veil of civilization is so thin, my friend. It is so thin.

I did pray once in my life. And my prayer was answered. I said "God help me. Please."

Ultimately it wasn't the die hard Nazis or the Russians or the bombs all over the place that we had to fear. Likewise Bush is just a boogeyman, Cheney is a phantom. You should beware of your neighbors. Yes. They are more dangerous than all the terrorists in the world. Like the neighbors we had that believed in the war when it happened...went along with everything...and then slowly disappeared when it was over. The neighbors who could not see you when you were suffering.

This is what wars do. They do not end on the battlefield. They destroy people. People who once could see nothing wrong with a neighbor suddenly see a racially impure thing. War creates hates and destroys long after the bombs have stopped falling. Look at America now. Openly hating Gay people, calling war heroes cowards, questioning the authenticity of science itself and the advice of reasonable people. This is the punishment war wreaks on those who wage it. It creates a lower quality citizen. One inured to cruelty and or their own mistakes. Americans all around who have never been out of the country lecture me on foreign policy because they have just had a primer from Rush Limbaugh or that O'Reilly fool.

The only county in the whole world where one third of the population thinks Bush is a good president is the United States. It is that one third that will happily stand by if you are beaten. It is that one third of the country that will piss on laws and tell lies, all because they believe they are acting to protect something higher than law. The other day a reporter or a pundit asked a Muslim congressman to prove he wasn't a terrorist.

That is what war does. It creates bigots. It destroys brain cells. It burns reason to a crisp. Every explosion results in resentments

Anyway, I heard a thud, and the dragging ended. Then someone else dragged me somewhere else. I looked up and it was a Russian soldier, a field medic, who started feeling for broken bones. An older couple also came and helped him put me on a gurney.

What happened was that Yuri and about a dozen Russian soldiers found Reisenshtaller and his little friends. I would detail what they did to him, but this may be more than I can do today Judah. I will venture to say that even though they killed the dog and beat me and scared me, none of them deserved what the Russians did to them. But I can't. I can hardly even think about it. I cannot even talk about this anymore.

{Henry started crying. I turned off my machine and put my pencil down and hugged him. He was an old man. And crying set him back fifteen minutes or so with handkerchiefs and nose blowing and glasses wiping.}

{ He continued and finished his story.}

I made it here and live in between here and Mexico. I have made a good life and a good pension. I will show you this {he pulled out a picture of his son} This is my son. I named him Yuri.

{I packed my stuff, and shook his hand and said hello.}

"It's time for me to go Henry. I am so sorry I awakened that pain in you." I apologized to him.

"That's OK friend. Sometimes old wounds need to be opened and drained and redressed."

I turned and headed back to the airport.

But let’s be clear: This fight is not over. There is too much at stake for any of us to walk away. And there is too much promise for us not to build on the foundation that we established.

Simply stated, our work is not done.

To that end, my inclination is to run again – to continue leading this fight over the next two years. Before I make a final decision, however, I must first spend some time with my family and close friends.

In the meantime, I just want to say a big "Thank You" to those of you who were a part of our campaign family. By supporting our effort – through your money, your hard work, or your prayers – you helped turn an ambitious idea into a full-fledged, nationally-recognized, “winning” campaign. For that, I will always be grateful.

So, rest up...have a wonderful Thanksgiving…and stay tuned for an official announcement in the near future...

James Carville's attempt to topple Howard Dean as chairman of the Democratic National Committee failed after state party officials and even a vocal critic of Dean crushed the coup, officials said.
Insiders from the Clinton camp winced at Carville's untimely remarks last week calling for Dean's ouster in favor of unsuccessful Senate candidate Harold Ford of Tennessee.

"It was not coming from [Sen. Hillary Clinton] and they made a real effort to distance themselves from James' comments," said a source close to the Clintons.

The Clintonistas don't want an undeserved backlash from the activist wing of the party that overwhelmingly supports Dean, especially because some anti-Clinton Democrats have blamed Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) for the attack by Carville, a longtime Clinton insider. Those forces claimed Carville's motive was to topple Dean in favor of a chairman more favorable to Sen. Clinton's bid for President.

[snip]

"We applaud Chairman Dean for his commitment to ensuring Democratic candidates and state Democratic parties have the resources and tools needed to compete and win, and we remain committed to the hard work of rebuilding our party for the future," said Mark Brewer, president of the Association of State Democratic Chairs.

Brewer's organization endorsed Dean's $30 million effort that helped win six new Democratic governorships and control of 10 more state legislatures. Dean is credited with launching a "50 state program" to rebuild the party at the grass roots, as the GOP so successfully has done for the past 25 years.

"No question Dean can survive because this is a mathematical equation: He has the votes on the DNC because he has been investing in the state parties," said party activist David Sirota.

Carville did not respond to attempts to contact him.

Even Dean-basher Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and an exadviser to former President Bill Clinton, called Dean last week to say Carville was acting alone, and one-time DNC Chairman Don Fowler referred to Carville as an "ill-advised" voice.

"Why do the Washington people think that they have a special prerogative to dictate what the Democratic Party needs?" Fowler wrote in an e-mail to the party faithful. "Why should anyone want to mess with the team that won these remarkable [election] results?"

The political party formed by U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman after he lost the Democratic primary in August has a new chairman - and it's not Lieberman.

However, according to the bylaws adopted by its new chairman, Lieberman critic and Fairfield University professor John Orman, the senator is an eligible party candidate.

According to bylaws established by Orman, anyone whose last name is Lieberman may seek the party's nomination - or any critic of the senator.

Orman seized control of the Connecticut for Lieberman Party this week after registering as its sole member and electing himself as chairman.

Orman has triggered a process that will force Lieberman and state elections officials to decide the future of a party created solely to return the senator to Washington.

"It's an interesting little wrinkle," said Michael Kozik, managing attorney for the secretary of the state's legislation and elections administration division. Orman has forwarded his intention to register with the party and keep it alive to the secretary of the state for review.

"I'm just trying to get the ball rolling so the state will say if it is a legitimate party or not," Orman said yesterday.

[snip]

With Connecticut for Lieberman having achieved its victory earlier this month, Orman made his move. He contacted the secretary of the state, learned the new minor party had no registered members, then visited the registrar in Trumbull, where he lives, to switch from a Democrat to a Connecticut for Lieberman-ite.

"Then I went home and called a meeting of all registered Connecticut for Lieberman members to reflect on our party's victory in the U.S. Senate race (and) organize and submit rules to the secretary of the state," Orman said.

He nominated himself chairman, seconded the nomination, cast his vote for himself and proceeded to establish party rules.

Orman said the "party" is upset that Lieberman has abandoned it and says he is an "Independent Democrat."

Fox News Channel might air two episodes of a "Daily Show"-like program with a decidedly nonliberal bent on Saturday nights in late January, with the possibility that it could become a weekly show for the channel.

The half-hour show is executive produced by "24's" Joel Surnow and Manny Cota and creator Ned Rice, who previously wrote for "Politically Incorrect" and "Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson" through This Just In Prods. It would take aim at what Surnow calls "the sacred cows of the left" that don't get made as much fun of by other comedy shows.

"It's a satirical news format that would play more to the Fox News audience than the Michael Moore channel," Surnow said. "It would tip more right as 'The Daily Show' tips left."

A classifed draft CIA assessment has found no firm evidence of a secret drive by Iran to develop nuclear weapons, as alleged by the White House, a top US investigative reporter has said.

Seymour Hersh, writing in an article for the November 27 issue of the magazine The New Yorker released in advance, reported on whether the administration of Republican President George W. Bush was more, or less, inclined to attack Iran after Democrats won control of Congress last week.

A month before the November 7 legislative elections, Hersh wrote, Vice President Dick Cheney attended a national-security discussion that touched on the impact of Democratic victory in both chambers on Iran policy.

"If the Democrats won on November 7th, the vice president said, that victory would not stop the administration from pursuing a military option with Iran," Hersh wrote, citing a source familiar with the discussion.

Cheney said the White House would circumvent any legislative restrictions "and thus stop Congress from getting in its way," he said.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Major Miscount of Vote in 2006 Election:
Reported Results Skewed Toward Republicans by 4 percent, 3 million votes

Election Defense Alliance Calls for Investigation

BOSTON, MA - November 16, 2006

CONTACT: Jonathan Simon 617.538.6012

Election Defense Alliance, a national election integrity organization, issued an urgent call for further investigation into the 2006 election results and a moratorium on deployment of all electronic election equipment, after analysis of national exit polling data indicated a major undercount of Democratic votes and an overcount of Republican votes in U.S. House and Senate races across the country. “These findings raise urgent questions about the electoral machinery and vote counting systems used in the United States,” according to Sally Castleman, National Chair of EDA. This is a national indictment of the vote counting process in the United States!

As in 2004, the exit polling data and the reported election results don’t add up. “But this time there is an objective yardstick in the methodology which establishes the validity of the Exit Poll and challenges the accuracy of the election returns,” said Jonathan Simon, co-founder of Election Defense Alliance. The Exit Poll findings are detailed in a paper published today on the EDA website.

The 2006 Edison-Mitofsky Exit Poll was commissioned by a consortium of major news organizations. Its conclusions were based on the responses of a very large sample, of more than 10,000 voters nationwide*, and posted at 7:07 p.m. Election Night, on the CNN website. That Exit Poll showed Democratic House candidates had out-polled Republicans by 55.0 percent to 43.5 percent – an 11.5 percent margin – in the total vote for the U.S. House, sometimes referred to as the “generic” vote.

By contrast, the election results showed Democratic House candidates won 52.7 percent of the vote to 45.1 percent for Republican candidates, producing a 7.6 percent margin in the total vote for the U.S. House — 3.9 percent less than the Edison-Mitofsky poll. This discrepancy, far beyond the poll’s +/- 1 percent margin of error, has less than a one in 10,000 likelihood of occurring by chance.

By Wednesday afternoon the Edison-Mitofsky poll had been adjusted, by a process known as “forcing,” to match the reported vote totals for the election. This forcing process is done to supply data for future demographic analysis, the main purpose of the Exit Poll. It involved re-weighting every response so that the sum of those responses matched the reported election results. The final result, posted at 1:00 p.m. November 8, showed the adjusted Democratic vote at 52.6 percent and the Republican vote at 45.0 percent, a 7.6 percent margin exactly mirroring the reported vote totals.

The forcing process in this instance reveals a great deal. The political party affiliation of the respondents in the original 7:07 p.m. election night Exit Poll closely reflected the 2004 Bush-Kerry election margin. After the forcing process, 49-percent of respondents reported voting for Republican George W. Bush in 2004, while only 43-percent reported voting for Democrat John Kerry. This 6-percent gap is more than twice the size of the actual 2004 Bush margin of 2.8 percent, and a clear distortion of the 2006 electorate. There is a significant over-sampling of Republican voters in the adjusted 2006 Exit Poll. It simply does not reflect the actual turnout on Election Day 2006.

EDA’s Simon says, “It required some incredible distortions of the demographic data within the poll to bring about the match with reported vote totals. It not only makes the adjusted Exit Poll inaccurate, it also reveals the corresponding inaccuracy of the reported election returns which it was forced to equal. The Democratic margin of victory in U.S. House races was substantially larger than indicated by the election returns.”

“Many will fall into the trap of using this adjusted poll to justify inaccurate official vote counts, and vice versa,” adds Bruce O’Dell, EDA’s Data Analysis Coordinator, “but that’s just arguing in circles. The adjusted exit poll is a statistical illusion. The weighted but unadjusted 7 pm exit poll, which sampled the correct proportion of Kerry and Bush voters and also indicated a much larger Democratic margin, got it right.” O’Dell and Simon’s paper, detailing their analysis of the exit polls and related data, is now posted on the EDA website.

Election Defense Alliance continues to work with other election integrity groups around the country to analyze the results of specific House and Senate races. That data and any evidence of election fraud, malicious attacks on election systems, or other malfunctions that may shed more light on the discrepancy between exit polls and election results will be reported on EDA’s website.

This controversy comes amid growing public concern about the security and accuracy of electronic voting machines, used to count approximately 80 percent of the votes cast in the 2006 election. The Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy, in a September 2006 study, was the latest respected institution to expose significant flaws in the design and software of one of the most popular electronic touch-screen voting machines, the AccuVote-TS, manufactured by Diebold, Inc. The Princeton report described the machine as “vulnerable to a number of extremely serious attacks that undermine the accuracy and credibility of the vote counts it produces.” These particular machines were used to count an estimated 10 percent of votes on Election Day 2006.

A separate “Security Assessment of the Diebold Optical Scan Voting Terminal,” released by the University of Connecticut VoTeR Center and Department of Computer Science and Engineering last month, concluded that Diebold’s Accuvote-OS machines, optical scanners which tabulate votes cast on paper ballots, are also vulnerable to “a devastating array of attacks.” Accuvote-OS machines are even more widely used than the AccuVote-TS.

Similar vulnerabilities affect other voting equipment manufacturers, as revealed last summer in a study by the Brennan Center at New York University which noted all of America’s computerized voting systems “have significant security and reliability vulnerabilities, which pose a real danger to the integrity of national, state, and local elections.”

The most prudent response to this controversy is a moratorium on the further implementation of computerized voting systems. EDA’s O’Dell cautioned, “It is so abundantly clear that these machines are not secure, there’s no justification for blind confidence in the election system given such dramatic indications of problems with the official vote tally.” And EDA’s Simon summarized, “There has been a rush by some to celebrate 2006 as a fair election, but a Democratic victory does not equate with a fair election. It’s wishful thinking at best to believe that the danger of massive election rigging is somehow past.”

EDA continues to call for a moratorium on the deployment of electronic voting machines in U.S. elections; passage of H.R. 6200, which would require hand-counted paper ballots for presidential elections beginning in 2008; and adoption of the Universal Precinct Sample (UPS) handcount sampling protocol for verification of federal elections as long as electronic election equipment remains in use.

The Exit Poll analysis is a part of Election Defense Alliance’s six-point strategy to defend the accuracy and transparency of the 2006 elections. In addition to extensive analysis of polling data, EDA has been engaged in independent exit polling, election monitoring, legal interventions, and documentation of election irregularities.

*The sample was a national sample of all voters who voted in House races. It was drawn just like the 2004 sample of the presidential popular vote. That is, precincts were chosen to yield a representative (once stratified) sample of all voters wherever they lived/voted--including early and absentee voters and voters in districts where House candidates ran unopposed but were listed on the ballot and therefore could receive votes. As such, the national sample EDA worked with is exactly comparable to the total aggregate vote for the House that we derived from reported vote totals and from close estimates in cases of the few unopposed candidates where 2006 figures were unavailable but prior elections could be used as proxy. It is a very large sampling of the national total, with a correspondingly small (+/-1%) MOE. There were four individual districts sampled for reasons known only to Edison/Mitofsky

ABOUT ELECTION DEFENSE ALLIANCE

The purpose of EDA is to develop a comprehensive national strategy for the election integrity movement, in order to regain public control of the voting process in the United States. Its goal is to insure that the election process is transparent, secure, verifiable, and worthy of the public trust. EDA fosters coordination, resource-sharing, and cohesive strategic planning for a nationwide grassroots network of citizen election integrity advocates.

Jonathan Simon, Co-founder, Election Defense Alliance. He is an attorney who prior work as a polling analyst with Peter D. Hart Research Associates helped persuade him of the importance of an exit poll-based election “alarm system.” 617.538.6012

Bruce O'Dell is head of the Election Defense Alliance Data Analysis Team. His expertise is in the design of large-scale secure computer and auditing systems for major financial institutions. 612.309.1330

Sally Castleman, Co-founder and National Chairperson, Election Defense Alliance. She lends her skills in conceptualizing, designing, implementing and managing programs as well as her experience as a strategist. She has a long career in grassroots political activism. SallyC@ElectionDefenseAlliance.org 781.454.8700

In 1999, the “moderate” version of John McCain said that overturning Roe v. Wade would be dangerous for women and he would not support it, even in “the long term.” Here’s McCain in the San Francisco Chronicle:

I’d love to see a point where it is irrelevant, and could be repealed because abortion is no longer necessary. But certainly in the short term, or even the long term, I would not support repeal of Roe v. Wade, which would then force X number of women in America to [undergo] illegal and dangerous operations.

This morning on ABC, McCain — now aggressively courting the likes of Jerry Falwell — expressed his unequivocal support for overturning Roe v. Wade.

Transcript:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me ask one question about abortion. Then I want to turn to Iraq. You’re for a constitutional amendment banning abortion, with some exceptions for life and rape and incest.

MCCAIN: Rape, incest and the life of the mother. Yes.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So is President Bush, yet that hasn’t advanced in the six years he’s been in office. What are you going to do to advance a constitutional amendment that President Bush hasn’t done?

MCCAIN: I don’t think a constitutional amendment is probably going to take place, but I do believe that it’s very likely or possible that the Supreme Court should — could overturn Roe v. Wade, which would then return these decisions to the states, which I support.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And you’d be for that?

MCCAIN: Yes, because I’m a federalist. Just as I believe that the issue of gay marriage should be decided by the states, so do I believe that we would be better off by having Roe v. Wade return to the states. And I don’t believe the Supreme Court should be legislating in the way that they did on Roe v. Wade.

The sense of Bush abandonment accelerated during the final weeks of the campaign with the publication of a former aide's book accusing the White House of moral hypocrisy and with Vanity Fair quoting Adelman, Richard N. Perle and other neoconservatives assailing White House leadership of the war.

Since the Nov. 7 elections, Republicans have pinned their woes on the president.

"People expect a level of performance they are not getting," former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said in a speech. Many were livid that Bush waited until after the elections to oust Rumsfeld.

"If Rumsfeld had been out, you bet it would have made a difference," Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said on television. "I'd still be chairman of the Judiciary Committee."

And so, in what some saw as a rebuke, Senate Republicans restored Trent Lott (Miss.) to their leadership four years after the White House helped orchestrate his ouster, with some saying they could no longer place their faith entirely in Bush.

Some insiders said the White House invited the backlash. "Anytime anyone holds themselves up as holy, they're judged by a different standard," said David Kuo, a former deputy director of the Bush White House's faith-based initiatives who wrote "Tempting Faith," a book that accused the White House of pandering to Christian conservatives. "And at the end of the day, this was a White House that held itself up as holy."

Richard N. Haass, a former top Bush State Department official and now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said a radically different approach to world affairs naturally generates criticism. "The emphasis on promotion of democracy, the emphasis on regime change, the war of choice in Iraq -- all of these are departures from the traditional approach," he said, "so it's not surprising to me that it generates more reaction."

[snip]

The arc of Bush's second term has shown that the most powerful criticism originates from the inside. The pragmatist crowd around Colin L. Powell began speaking out nearly two years ago after he was eased out as secretary of state. Powell lieutenants such as Haass, Richard L. Armitage, Carl W. Ford Jr. and Lawrence B. Wilkerson took public the policy debates they lost on the inside. Many who worked in Iraq returned deeply upset and wrote books such as "Squandered Victory" (Larry Diamond) and "Losing Iraq" (David L. Phillips). Military and CIA officials unloaded after leaving government, culminating in the "generals' revolt" last spring when retired flag officers called for Rumsfeld's dismissal.

On the domestic side, Bush allies in Congress, interest groups and the conservative media broke their solidarity with the White House out of irritation over a number of issues, including federal spending, illegal immigration, the Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers, the response to Hurricane Katrina and the Dubai Ports World deal.

Most striking lately, though, has been the criticism from neoconservatives who provided the intellectual framework for Bush's presidency. Perle, Adelman and others advocated a robust use of U.S. power to advance the ideals of democracy and freedom, targeting Hussein's Iraq as a threat that could be turned into an opportunity.

In an interview last week, Perle said the administration's big mistake was occupying the country rather than creating an interim Iraqi government led by a coalition of exile groups to take over after Hussein was toppled. "If I had known that the U.S. was going to essentially establish an occupation, then I'd say, 'Let's not do it,' " and instead find another way to target Hussein, Perle said. "It was a foolish thing to do."