Remember when FOX was considered more liberal--or at least more p[rogressive--than the Big 3 networks?
What happened?
Was it the invasion of Iraq?
Was there a groundswell of anti-liberal sentiment?
Was it something in the drinking water?
Watching all the bad news from Iraq I feel like a
genius. Of COURSE the war is going to go badly
if you don't have a timetable and a plan...
Meanwhile the dollar continues to fall and the
deficit grows ...
Sigh...

DeLay, Deny and Demagogue
By MAUREEN DOWD






Oh my God, we really are in a theocracy.

Are the Republicans so obsessed with maintaining control over all branches of government, and are the Democrats so emasculated about not having any power, that they are willing to turn the nation into a wholly owned subsidiary of the church?

The more dogma-driven activists, self-perpetuating pols and ratings-crazed broadcast media prattle about "faith," the less we honor the credo that a person's relationship with God should remain a private matter.

As the Bush White House desperately maneuvers in Iraq to prevent the new government from being run according to the dictates of religious fundamentalists, it desperately maneuvers here to pander to religious fundamentalists who want to dictate how the government should be run.

Maybe President Bush should spend less time preaching about spreading democracy around the world and more time worrying about our deteriorating democracy.

Even some Republicans seemed appalled at this latest illustration of Nietzsche's observation that "morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose."

As Christopher Shays, one of five House Republicans who voted against the bill to allow the Terri Schiavo case to be snatched from Florida state jurisdiction and moved to federal court, put it: "This Republican Party of Lincoln has become a party of theocracy. There are going to be repercussions from this vote."

MI6 chief told PM: Americans ‘fixed’ case for war

Nick Fielding

THE HEAD of MI6 told Tony Blair that the case for war against Iraq was being “fixed” by the Americans to suit the policy, according to a BBC documentary that will reignite its battle with the government.

Blair followed the US lead by failing to reveal publicly doubts about the quality of intelligence that he had requested to support the case for war, the programme claims.

Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6, briefed Blair and a select group of ministers on America’s determination to press ahead with the war nine months before hostilities began.

After attending a briefing in Washington, he told the meeting that war was “inevitable”. Dearlove said “the facts and intelligence” were being “fixed round the policy” by George W Bush’s administration.

The allegations against Blair just weeks before a general election are likely to reopen the feud between the government and the BBC that came to a head over the death of Dr David Kelly, the former weapons inspector. It led to the resignations of Gavyn Davies, its chairman, and Greg Dyke, its director-general.

The documentary — to be shown on BBC1’s Panorama tonight — reveals that Britain and America were anxious to present a united front on Iraq despite a paucity of new data on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

It quotes from a leaked memo on the presentation of intelligence sent by Peter Ricketts, political director of the Foreign Office, to Jack Straw, foreign secretary, in March 2002.

The memo says: “There is more work to ensure that the figures are accurate and consistent with the US. But even the best survey of Iraq’s WMD programmes will not show much advance in recent years.”

The programme argues that Blair had signed up to follow Bush’s plans for regime change in Iraq as early as April 2002. It quotes Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary who resigned as leader of the Commons over Iraq, arguing that the threat of WMD was not Blair’s true reason for going to war.

Cook says: “What was propelling the prime minister was a determination that he would be the closest ally to George Bush and they would prove to the United States administration that Britain was their closest ally. His problem is that George Bush’s motivation was regime change. It was not disarmament. Tony Blair knew perfectly well what he was doing.

Rice Gives Diplomacy New Focus
Secretary of State Reshapes State Department in White House Image

By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer


SEOUL, March 19 -- Since becoming secretary of state two months ago, Condoleezza Rice has transformed the language and image of U.S. diplomacy, offering a relentless and consistent message that has turned the State Department into an adjunct of the White House communications machine.

"We are not going to turn a blind eye to the human desire for freedom anywhere in the world," Rice told students Saturday at Tokyo's Sophia University. Later, after flying to a military command center buried in a mountain south of Seoul, near the North Korean border, she hailed U.S. and South Korean troops as being on the "front lines of freedom."

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice greets students from a women's university on her arrival in Seoul. Rice hailed U.S. and South Korean troops as being on the "front lines of freedom." (Ahn Young-joon -- AP)






Similarly, speaking to U.S. troops in Afghanistan on Thursday, Rice declared, "Desire for freedom is spreading. It spread to Iraq. It spread to Lebanon. It's spreading throughout the Middle East."

Colin L. Powell, Rice's predecessor, had forged an identity as an independent operator, representing the views of the State Department in the foreign policy debate within the administration. That attitude irritated many officials in the White House, who believed that the president's promotion of democracy was viewed skeptically inside the agency