In its announcement taking responsibility for the terrorist attack at Ariel (27 October 2002), the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade mistakenly indicated that its operative Muhammad Shakir had carried out the attack at Ariel. It turns out that Shakir was not the suicide bomber involved in the Ariel attack, but he was planning to commit a different suicide attack in Israel. The erroneous announcement exposed Shakir, and early this morning IDF forces arrested him in Nablus.

Democrats are preparing to raise Florida-style objections to the conduct of the election. For example, Democrats claim the ballot is confusing because it asks voters to write an "X" by the name of the candidate for whom they want to vote. The regular ballot requires voters to darken a small box by the candidate's name, and Democrats allege the change will perplex voters.

In addition, the supplemental ballot instructs voters to "Put an (X) in the square opposite the name of each candidate you wish to vote for." That is standard wording for such ballots, but since the new supplemental ballot covers just one race, and since voters may only vote for only one choice for the Senate, Democrats claim the wording is "misleading and highly likely to result in many ballots being spoiled by voters inadvertently."

Whatever you might think of his ideology, Simon, despite a comfortable upbringing and a life of privilege, seems more grounded than Davis, who has spent his entire adult life in politics and government.

On the campaign bus, Simon spent hours in conversation with reporters, alternating with ease between the personal and the political. He either enjoyed the experience or was very good at faking it.

Simon doesn't take himself too seriously. Delivering the same stump speech four times during the day, he playfully altered a few words to see if reporters were still listening. He was a good sport -- submitting himself to an impromptu and potentially embarrassing quiz on which of five farm products were fruits: cucumbers, peppers, squash, tomatoes and corn. (Answer: all five.) He smiles easily, jokes with reporters and aides and shares genuine stories about people in his life. When he asks how your kids are doing, he seems to sincerely want to know.

And family isn't Simon's only connection to the world. For many years he has spent a considerable amount of time, and money, helping the poor through two charitable foundations he helps run. Simon has donated his business skills to help charity managers. But he also has learned from hands-on experience with several charities exactly how hard it is to turn around the life of a runaway youth or a pregnant teen.

All Ely Dahan wanted was a brief conversation with California's Gov. Gray Davis of California about an exciting article by a Nobel Prize winner that had just appeared in The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Dahan, a UCLA business professor, thought the article had valuable insights into California's electricity problems. What he got instead was a highly agitated governor ignoring the policy points, cursing the Journal as "f---ing a--h---s," and declaring: "They don't see the world realistically." End of conversation.

Mr. Dahan's encounter with Mr. Davis came on Friday, Oct. 18, after the governor had finished a taping of CNN's "Moneyline," hosted by Lou Dobbs. Prof. Dahan approached the governor along with several students. Mr. Dahan wanted to discuss an article he had just read in the Oct. 16 Wall Street Journal by Vernon Smith, a George Mason University professor who the week before had been one of two winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics. The article, "Power to the People," explained how California could take advantage of the fact that the cost of producing electricity can vary along with its pricing. California's energy crisis was born because of a state rule imposing on utilities an "obligation to serve" all customers "could not be met at times of severe stress because the unresponsive demand exceeded energy supply, and the shortfall was met by rolling blackouts." California utilities lost some $14 billion trying to avoid those blackouts. A small fraction of that would have solved the problem if utilities had been allowed to "sell less to consumers by offering a discount if they consumed less."

Mr. Dahan doesn't recall the specific words Mr. Davis used to trash the Journal, but he agrees "the cursing wasn't helpful." "I was disappointed that he didn't want to engage me on what a very smart Nobel Prize winner had written," he told me. "Perhaps the governor was still upset over what Enron had done to mess with California's market."

Jonathan Young, a junior at UCLA who was present for the governor's comments, said he was surprised at the vehemence with which the governor reacted to Prof. Dahan's question. A self-described "leftist," Mr. Young says other students who were present were also taken aback by the governor's obscenities. A CNN staffer says students told her they couldn't believe this was the same man who had minutes before calmly answered questions on television.

Ben Shapiro, a UCLA student and columnist with Creators Syndicate, said that when he called the governor's office for comment, spokesman Gabriel Sanchez told him: "I'd be very careful not to use unverified info. That could be slanderous. You weren't there, I wasn't there, you didn't hear it." Mr. Shapiro says "the implicit threat to sue was obvious." My own conversation with Roger Salazar, the governor's campaign press secretary, was much more cordial. "I don't remember the governor using that language," he told me. "He said something about the Journal wanting him to give the energy companies a 400% increase in rates, and that was a crock."

[I]n the eight years that they have wrestled over control of Chechnya, the Russian government and Chechen rebels have descended ever deeper into a hellhole of brutish behavior. The two sides reached a new low over the weekend in their deadly showdown at a crowded Moscow theater that a band of heavily armed rebels had seized earlier in the week. The number of dead hostages and rebels is still being tallied, but it is already abundantly clear that the rebels and government forces once again disgraced themselves. The Kremlin and the guerrillas should come to their senses and settle a conflict that has left thousands of civilians dead and shamed Russian and Chechen leaders alike.

The latest outrage was provoked by Chechen separatists on Wednesday evening when they took control of the large theater and the more than 750 people assembled there to see a popular musical. The Chechen fighters ? properly described by the Russian authorities as terrorists ? threatened to start killing their hostages Saturday morning if President Vladimir Putin did not begin withdrawing Russian forces from Chechnya, an ethnic enclave in southern Russia that has been a bloody battleground since Moscow tried to crush the Chechen independence movement in 1994. The Kremlin initially responded to the seizure of the theater by trying to negotiate a peaceful resolution, then assaulted the complex early Saturday morning.

"Our biggest weapon of mass destruction is George W. Bush."
-- Rio Mezta, Ocean Beach Grassroots Organization

"We need to break the cycle. Violence begets violence."
-- Lisa Lenger, 20

"You want to stop terrorism, quit bombing the crap out of people."
-- Patrick Randall

As he marched, Vietnam veteran Dave Dollins of Escondido, shouted, "Peace now, no war!"

"I'm just unhappy that we're doing this without United Nations sanctions," Dollins said, adding that the United States should exhaust every peaceful means of conflict resolution first.

"Put down your High Times and read a newspaper once in a while."

The Algerian news agency says suspected Islamic extremists have killed 21 people from the same family, including a three-month-old baby.

The attack took place in the north-western province of Chlef.

Five other people were reported to be in a serious condition with bullet wounds to the head.

Well, what, wait, listen, why don't we just send them to Libya, for God's sakes? You know, what -- why stop at Alabama? You know, I mean, if you really want to do it, just send them to a Republican jurisdiction. Is that the answer?

While hired guns do not flourish at Harvard or the University of Chicago, however, in Washington they roam in packs.

Portrait of a hired gun: He or she is usually a mediocre economist -- someone whose work, if it didn't have an ideological edge, might have been published but wouldn't have had many readers. He has, however, found a receptive audience for work that does have an ideological edge. In particular, he has learned that pretty good jobs in think tanks, or on the staffs of magazines with a distinct political agenda, are available for people who know enough economics to produce plausible-sounding arguments on behalf of the party line. Ask him whether he is a political hack and he will deny it; he probably does not admit it to himself. But somehow everything he says or writes serves the interests of his backers.

...

How can you tell the hacks from the serious analysts? One answer is to do a little homework. Hack jobs often involve surprisingly raw, transparent misrepresentations of fact: in these days of search engines and online databases you don't need a staff of research assistants to catch 'em with their hands in the cookie jar. But there is another telltale clue: if a person, or especially an organization, always sings the same tune, watch out.

It's tempting to view all of this merely as a question of character, but it's more than that. There's method in this administration's mendacity.

For the Bush administration is an extremely elitist clique trying to maintain a populist facade. Its domestic policies are designed to benefit a very small number of people -- basically those who earn at least $300,000 a year, and really don't care about either the environment or their less fortunate compatriots. True, this base is augmented by some powerful special-interest groups, notably the Christian right and the gun lobby. But while this coalition can raise vast sums, and can mobilize operatives to stage bourgeois riots when needed, the policies themselves are inherently unpopular. Hence the need to reshape those malleable facts.

What remains puzzling is the long-term strategy. Despite Mr. Bush's control of the bully pulpit, he has had little success in changing the public's fundamental views. Before Sept. 11 the nation was growing increasingly dismayed over the administration's hard right turn. Terrorism brought Mr. Bush immense personal popularity, as the public rallied around the flag; but the helium has been steadily leaking out of that balloon.

Presidential embroidery is, of course, a hoary tradition. Ronald Reagan was known for his apocryphal story about liberating a concentration camp. Bill Clinton fibbed famously and under oath about his personal indiscretions to keep a step ahead of Whitewater prosecutors. Richard M. Nixon had his Watergate denials, and Lyndon B. Johnson was often accused of stretching the truth to put the best face on the Vietnam War. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, too, played with the truth during the Gary Powers and Bay of Pigs episodes.

That this war has always been about Israel is a matter of simple geography. For all the President's palavering about the "threat to Americans" posed by Iraq, those "weapons of mass destruction" Saddam supposedly has couldn't even reach Europe, let alone the U.S. But Tel Aviv is well within range.

Indeed, the prospect of Iraqi missiles raining down on Israel has been one of the chief deterrents against a move by Israel's far-right Likud government to ethnically cleanse Palestine of Arabs - a plan that is increasingly popular among Israelis - and/or move the IDF back into Lebanon. The U.S. occupation of Iraq will eliminate that deterrent - and set up Israel to deal with Hizbollah the Syria in the regional conflagration to follow…

The Bush administration's reaction to North Korea's revelation of a nuclear weapons program last week was to point out the differences between the North Korean and Iraqi regimes and call for a peaceful end to the crisis.

It won't wash. The North Korean and Iraq regimes are similar, and to treat them differently points to the flaws in Bush's Iraq strategy. North Korea's nuclear confession, which Bush officials say was made belligerently, may even be linked to Bush's Iraq policy, challenging Bush in effect to fight two wars at once.

The question Bush must answer is this: If war is justified because Iraq might be building nuclear weapons and hiding missiles, why is war not justified with North Korea, which admits it is building nuclear weapons and has tested long-range missiles?

That strategic fact of life and death invites the question that coolly consistent sophists love to ask: If we are disinclined to attack the nuclear buildup in North Korea, why are we hot to attack a somewhat less imminent threat of mass destruction from Iraq?

Saddam Hussein is a recent, serial aggressor, while totalitarian North Korea has not launched an invasion in the past half-century. Moreover, the potentially high human cost of wiping out the Korean threat should be an unforgettable lesson to every nation: The world must not allow Iraq to gain the level of destructive power that appeasement and misplaced trust permitted North Korea to achieve.

The conclusion of your excellent review of the historical Abraham and the three great religions seemed to be that belief in Abraham might help bring Muslims, Jews and Christians closer to one another [Religion, Sept. 30]. But hasn't this been tried in vain for centuries? My conclusion: ban all these religions, cults and man-made concepts of how to worship God. Bar the different religious leaders from spreading their views as the only absolute. Mankind can always use religion as a casus belli. Forbid religions and there will be far fewer fights.

The find is a 20-inch-long limestone ossuary, a container for bones, which some assert might have been used for the burial of the skeletal remains of Jesus' older brother James--"Jacob" in Hebrew and Greek--three decades after the Crucifixion in the 1st Century. [emphasis added]

As word -- but not the details -- of the White House plan began to filter out last night, the association representing generic drug manufacturers said the proposal sounded constructive, although perhaps not as far-reaching as the companies would like.

Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), one of the main sponsors of the Senate bill, was skeptical. "This sounds like an Election Day conversion," Schumer said in an interview. "This devil will be in the details. This could be good, but given the White House's previous record, it could also be another loophole that will allow the drug companies to further delay approval of generics."

In 1994 the vogue threat changed, and hawks pressed hard for a military confrontation with North Korea. We came within an inch of going to war with North Korea, in a conflict that a Pentagon study found would have killed a million people, including up to 100,000 Americans.

In retrospect, it is clear that the hawks were wrong about confronting North Korea. Containment and deterrence so far have worked instead, kind of, just as they have kind-of worked to restrain Iraq over the last 11 years, and we saved thousands of lives by pressing diplomatic solutions.

Listen to the American hawks after a few glasses of wine, and you might be seduced into thinking that after overthrowing Saddam Hussein we're going to turn Iraq into a flourishing democracy.

But I'm afraid it's a pipe dream, a marketing ploy to sell a war.

We haven't even been able to nurture full democracy in modern, bustling Kuwait, where women still cannot vote, or in Saudi Arabia, which is more egalitarian -- neither men nor women can vote. I had a nice insight into the limits of democracy in Kuwait the other night when I was at the palatial home (come to think of it, the reason it was palatial was that it was a palace) of a top Kuwaiti.

To see how many Arab countries are in some ways even more repressive to women, consider how an invasion might play out. If American ground troops are allowed to storm across the desert from Saudi Arabia into Iraq, then American servicewomen will theoretically not be able to drive vehicles as long as they are in Saudi Arabia and will be advised to wear an abaya over their heads. As soon as they cross the border into enemy Iraq, they'll feel as if they are entering the free world: they can legally drive, uncover their heads, and even call men idiots.

Iraqi women routinely boss men and serve in non-combat positions in the army. Indeed, if Iraq attacks us with smallpox, we'll have a woman to thank: Dr. Rihab Rashida Taha, the head of Iraq's biological warfare program, who is also known to weapons inspectors as Dr. Germ.

A man can stop a woman on the street in Baghdad and ask for directions without causing a scandal. Men and women can pray at the mosque together, go to restaurants together, swim together, court together or quarrel together. Girls compete in after-school sports almost as often as boys, and Iraqi television broadcasts women's sports as well as men's.

[Y]ou may recall that George W. Bush promised, among other things, to change the tone in Washington. He made good on that promise: the tone has certainly changed.

As far as I know, in the past it wasn't considered appropriate for the occupant of the White House to declare that members of the opposition party weren't interested in the nation's security. And it certainly wasn't usual to compare anyone who wants to tax the rich ? or even anyone who estimates the share of last year's tax cut that went to the wealthy ? to Adolf Hitler.

O.K., maybe we should discount remarks by Senator Phil Gramm. When Mr. Gramm declared that a proposal to impose a one-time capital gains levy on people who renounce U.S. citizenship in order to avoid paying taxes was "right out of Nazi Germany," even the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, Charles Grassley, objected to the comparison.

But Mr. Grassley must have thought better of his objection, since just a few weeks later he decided to use the Hitler analogy himself: "I am sure voters will get their fill of statistics claiming that the Bush tax cut hands out 40 percent of its benefits to the top 1 percent of taxpayers. This is not merely misleading, it is outright false. Some folks must be under the impression that as long as something is repeated often enough, it will become true. That was how Adolf Hitler got to the top."

For the record, Robert McIntyre of Citizens for Tax Justice ? the original source of that 40 percent estimate ? is no Adolf Hitler. The amazing thing is that Mr. Grassley is sometimes described as a moderate. His remarks are just one more indicator that we have entered an era of extreme partisanship ? one that leaves no room for the acknowledgment of politically inconvenient facts. For the claim that Mr. Grassley describes as "outright false" is, in fact, almost certainly true; in a rational world it wouldn't even be a matter for argument.

You might imagine that Mr. Grassley has in hand an alternative answer to the question "How much of the tax cut will go to the top 1 percent?" ? that the administration has, at some point, produced a number showing that the wealthy aren't getting a big share of the benefits. In fact, however, administration officials have never answered that question. When pressed, they have always insisted on answering some other question.

But last year the Treasury Department did release a table showing, somewhat inadvertently, that more than 25 percent of the income tax cut will go to people making more than $200,000 per year. This number doesn't include the effects of estate tax repeal; in 1999 only 2 percent of estates paid any tax, and half of that tax was paid by only 0.16 percent of estates. The number also probably doesn't take account of the alternative minimum tax, which will snatch away most of the income tax cut for upper-middle-class families, but won't affect the rich.

Put all this together and it becomes clear that, sure enough, something like 40 percent of the tax cut ? it could be a bit less, but probably it's considerably more ? will go to 1 percent of the population. And the administration's systematic evasiveness on the question of who benefits from the tax cut amounts to a plea of nolo contendere.

First, it is important to know that a very large percentage of Americans pay no income taxes whatsoever, owing to various features of the tax code such as the standard deduction and the Earned Income Tax Credit. According to the JCT, this year 48.6 million Americans will file tax returns, meaning that they had income, but pay no income taxes. This constitutes 34 percent of the 142 million returns that will be filed. Although the bulk of these people have incomes below $20,000, almost 10 percent of all nontaxable returns reported incomes between $30,000 and $50,000.

Second, our tax system is very steeply progressive. In the aggregate, all those with incomes below $20,000 have a negative tax liability, meaning that they receive tax refunds even though they pay no income taxes. Those with incomes between $20,000 and $30,000 pay just 1.9 percent in income taxes. From there, effective tax rates rise sharply to 23.9 percent on those with incomes over $200,000.

Looking at incomes in percentage terms, the top 10 percent of tax filers pay 20 percent of their income in federal income taxes, the top 5 percent pay 22.3 percent, and the top 1 percent pay 25.7 percent.

Third, as a consequence of these high tax rates, the share of total income taxes paid by those with upper incomes is overwhelming. The top 10 percent of tax filers pay 68.2 percent of all federal income taxes, the top 5 percent pay more than half, and the top 1 percent pay 35.9 percent of the total income-tax burden. For reference, it should be noted that the top 1 percent of tax filers reported only 17.2 percent of total income.

These figures explain why just about any tax cut benefits the rich more than the poor. The poor don't pay income taxes, while the rich pay a lot. It is impossible to give any kind of income tax cut to those not currently paying income taxes, except by having some sort of spending program for such people that is simply called a tax cut. That is what the EITC is. And it is equally impossible to have a tax-rate reduction for all taxpayers without a considerable share of the benefits going to the rich, because they pay such a large share of all income taxes.

Which brings us back to the new tone in Washington.

When Ronald Reagan cut taxes on rich people, he didn't deny that that was what he was doing. You could agree or disagree with the supply-side economic theory he used to justify his actions, but he didn't pretend that he was increasing the progressivity of the tax system.

The strategy used to sell the Bush tax cut was simply to deny the facts ? and to lash out at anyone who tried to point them out. And it's a strategy that, having worked there, is now being applied across the board.

Michael Kinsley recently wrote that "The Bush campaign for war against Iraq has been insulting to American citizens, not just because it has been dishonest, but because it has been unserious. A lie is insulting; an obvious lie is doubly insulting." All I can say is, now he notices? It's been like that all along on economic policy.

You see, some folks must be under the impression that as long as something is repeated often enough, it will become true. That was how George W. Bush got to the top.

Because North Korea has now violated solemn international weapons agreements, any new understandings will have to be verified unconditionally and highly intrusively. If there is one analogy appropriate to Iraq, it is this: Keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of dictators who want them requires more than signed agreements.

People on both sides of the Iraq debate will use this alarming news to prop up their views. Hawks will say this demonstrates the futility of treaties with megalomaniacal dictators, while doves will say this gives the lie to the administration's argument that Iraq is uniquely dangerous.

U.S. officials are saying that if only the North will budge on inspections, the U.S. and its allies will start treating it like any other country. Investment would flow and the U.S. would recognize the government of Kim Il Sung, which is the same regime that began the Korean War 40 years ago by invading the South. Mr. Clinton's big carrot even includes an offer to stop "Team Spirit," the joint U.S.-South Korean military exercise.

The North Koreans must be pleased. If they'd merely lived by their 1991 commitment, they'd still be an isolated regime beset by economic woes. But having stiffed the world and threatened U.S. allies, they may be rewarded with trade, aid and the global respect they've coveted for decades. For breaking all of the rules against proliferating weapons, Kim Il Sung gets treated as a statesman we can do business with. Saddam Hussein must be thinking that if only he'd had a nuclear weapon, he might still be in Kuwait. And we can all guess the lessons that Iran's mullahs are drawing from this.

Confronted by new American intelligence, North Korea has admitted that it has been conducting a major clandestine nuclear-weapons development program for the past several years, the Bush administration said tonight. Officials added that North Korea had also informed them that it was terminating a 1994 agreement with the United States to freeze all of its nuclear activity.

North Korea's surprise revelation came 12 days ago in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, after a senior American diplomat confronted his North Korean counterparts with American intelligence data suggesting a secret project was under way. At first, the North Korean officials denied the allegation, according to an American official who was present.

The next day they acknowledged the nuclear program and according to one American official, said "they have more powerful things as well." American officials have interpreted that cryptic comment as an acknowledgment that North Korea possesses other weapons of mass destruction.

North Korea conducted an aggressive nuclear weapons program in the 1980's and 1990's that resulted in a major confrontation with the Clinton administration in 1994. Officials who served at the time said they feared the dispute could veer into war. At one point in 1994, President Bill Clinton ordered Stealth bombers and other forces into South Korea.

But a deal was struck, partly with the intervention of former President Jimmy Carter. The result was a 1994 agreement under which North Korea committed to halting its nuclear work, and the United States, Japan and South Korea, among others, agreed to provide the country with proliferation-resistant nuclear reactors to produce electric power.

Sexes wired differently, psychologist claims

Iranians, as a people, do not have problems with Western civilization. We are Muslims, but our sense of Iranian national identity dwarfs any religious identity we hold. We are proud heirs of a once-great civilization that brought forth the concept of tolerance and civility predating Islam. Iranians are comfortable with the simple fact that the West has the best-refined modern concepts of democracy, human rights, and individual opportunity.

To us, the Islamic revolution has failed. The system, in its entirely, is the problem; no Band-Aid reform will fix it. Iran's 23-year-old theocracy is as incapable of granting freedom and human rights as was the Soviet Union. No politician associated with the Islamic Republic is acceptable to us. There are no reformers in the clerical government. Our real reformers are among the 600,000 languishing in prison, or the hundreds of candidates who are disqualified in each election for believing in human rights or secularism. Do not sell out our freedom because of Khatami's meaningless double talk and irrelevant rhetoric. He is simply a smiling face of an ugly regime.

Secretary Colin Powell, Senators Arlen Specter and Chuck Hagel, please understand that Iranians are no less deserving of freedom and equality than are residents of Pennsylvania or Nebraska. You cannot fall for the so-called reformers who by design attempt to sway world opinion with promises, yet fail to deliver a single reform at home. Please understand that Iranians themselves have come to the conclusion that the only solution to our present dilemma is a Western-style democracy, complete with freedom of the press, secularism, equality between sexes, and respect for other religious and political beliefs.

Memo to professors and students leading the divestiture campaign: Your campaign for divestiture from Israel is deeply dishonest and hypocritical, and any university that goes along with it does not deserve the title of institution of higher learning.

You are dishonest because to single out Israel as the only party to blame for the current impasse is to perpetrate a lie. Historians can debate whether the Camp David and Clinton peace proposals for a Palestinian state were for 85, 90, or 97 percent of the West Bank and Gaza. But what is not debatable is what the proper Palestinian response should have been. It should have been to tell Israel and America that their peace proposals were the first fair offer they had ever put forth, and although they still fell short of what Palestinians feel is a just two-state solution, Palestinians were now prepared to work with Israel and America to achieve that end. The proper response was not a Palestinian intifada and 100 suicide bombers, which are what brought Ariel Sharon to power.

Memo to Israel's supporters: Just because there are anti-Semites who blame Israel for everything that is wrong does not mean that whatever Israel does is right, or in its self-interest, or just. The settlement policy Israel has been pursuing is going to lead to the demise of the Jewish state. No, settlements are not the reason for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but to think they do not exacerbate it, and are not locking Israel into a permanent occupation, is also dishonest.

If the settlers get their way, Israel will de facto or de jure annex the West Bank and Gaza. And if current Palestinian birth rates continue, by around the year 2010 there will be more Palestinians than Jews living in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza combined. When that happens, the demand of the college anti-Israel movements will change.

They won't bother anymore with divestiture. They will simply demand: "One Man, One Vote. Since Israel has de facto annexed the territories, and there is now just one political entity between Jordan and the Mediterranean, we want majority rule." If you think it is hard to defend Israel on campus today, imagine doing it in 2010, when the colonial settlers have so locked Israel into the territories it can rule them only by apartheid-like policies.

In a speech to the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt of Missouri accused President Bush (news - web sites) and his Republican allies in Congress of "playing politics with the economy and denying the disastrous consequences of their actions."

"The fact is America faces a clear and present danger to the economic life of working families," Gephardt said.

Re where Davis receives political contributions: What difference does it make where a prostitute conducts business; the intent is the same anywhere.

Ed Pollack
Apple Valley

So, it has come to this: a choice for governor between the bumbling nincompoop and the rapacious extortionist. I leave it to The Times' readership to decide who fits those descriptions. I have decided to return to my roots, and "waste my vote" on a minority party candidate who cannot win. That puts my selected candidate in the same shoes as the electorate in this race.

Frank Robinson
Ridgecrest

Not only is America nearing the brink of war with Iraq, but Israel has been given carte blanche to invade and re-occupy Palestinian lands. The killing of Palestinians, the destruction of their homes and society continues on a daily basis, the groundwork for the retaliation that inevitably comes.

Last week, 16 Gaza Palestinians were killed and 100 injured by a missile fired from a U.S.-made Apache gunship into a crowded neighborhood. It was a near carbon copy of the attack on a Gaza apartment house by a U.S.-made F-16 in July, killing 15 and wounding 100.

"We're sorry," said Foreign Minister Shimon Peres in July.

"I am always sorry if there are injured civilians," said Prime Minister Ariel Sharon last week.

In withdrawing both America's moral voice and its political muscle from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Bush has given Sharon free rein. If Bush takes America to war against Iraq, the Palestinian struggle for a national homeland free of Israeli occupation could be set back generations.

That is what Bush's neoconservatives want, but are they wrong? If Sharon uses Bush's Iraq obsession to crush Palestine, how does that serve either U.S. or Israeli interests in the long run? Opposing war in 1967, Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol said, "nothing will be settled by military victory. The Arabs will still be here."

By eliminating Saddam and strengthening Sharon, peace will be easier say Bush's neoconservatives.

More likely is that an American onslaught on Baghdad, one likely to cost thousands of civilian lives, will have the effect of destabilizing friendly Arab regimes, creating a reaction of violent despair among Palestinians and re-energizing terrorists against America.

Most Americans -- about 61 percent, according to a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll -- support using force to remove Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, but anti-war activists contend that is true only when people are asked the question in the broadest terms. When voters in the Post-ABC poll were asked whether the United States should launch an attack over the opposition of its allies, for example, support dropped to 46 percent.

Early last century Congress passed laws prohibiting government agencies from spending more than Congress appropriated. These laws have not been entirely successful. For example, in the 2000-2001 fiscal year the Forest Service alone overspent its budget by $1.1 billion.

Government officials Sunday called attacks the work of terrorists, while U.S. and regional intelligence officials linked the bombings to the al Qaeda terror network.

[P]resident Bush and Vice President Cheney portray Saddam Hussein as so menacing and terrifying that one might think they've lain awake at night for years worrying about him.

But when Mr. Cheney was running Halliburton, the oil services firm, it sold more equipment to Iraq than any other company did. As first reported by The Financial Times on Nov. 3, 2000, Halliburton subsidiaries submitted $23.8 million worth of contracts with Iraq to the United Nations in 1998 and 1999 for approval by its sanctions committee.

Now let me say right up front that this wasn't illegal ? or even, in my view, sleazy. This was legitimate business conducted through joint ventures that had been acquired as part of a larger takeover in September 1998. Zelma Branch, a Halliburton spokeswoman, says that the subsidiaries completed their pre-existing Iraq contracts but did not seek new ones.

So this is not evidence of scandalous conduct or egregious misjudgment. This is not like a politician being found, as former Gov. Edwin Edwards of Louisiana put it, in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.

But as we debate whether to go to war with Iraq, it's a useful reminder of how fashions change in our perceptions of rogue states. Public Enemy No. 1 today is a government that Mr. Cheney was in effect helping shore up just a couple of years ago.

More broadly, the U.S. has a long history in which Saddam, though just as monstrous as he is today, was coddled as our monster. In the 1980's we provided his army with satellite intelligence so that it could use chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers. When Saddam used nerve gas and mustard gas against Kurds in 1988, the Reagan administration initially tried to blame Iran. We shipped seven strains of anthrax to Iraq between 1978 and 1988.

These days, we see Iraq as an imminent threat to our way of life, while just a couple of years ago it was perceived as a pathetic dictatorship hardly worth the bother of bombing. What changed? Not Iraq, but rather our own sensibilities after 9/11.

"What is driving this?" asked Raad Alkadiri, an analyst at the Petroleum Finance Company in Washington. "It's not driven by any Iraqi provocation. You've got a regime there that has kept its head down. It's been driven by a domestic constituency in the U.S."

We need to be wary that we are not just pursuing the latest fashion in monsters. Iran was the menace of the 1980's, so we snuggled up with Iraq. The Soviet threat led us to cuddle with Islamic fundamentalists like those now trying to blow us up.

In 1994 the vogue threat changed, and hawks pressed hard for a military confrontation with North Korea. We came within an inch of going to war with North Korea, in a conflict that a Pentagon study found would have killed a million people, including up to 100,000 Americans.

If we spent money on hypocrisy detectors as well as anthrax detectors, they would be buzzing. For example, Republicans are trying to defeat the Democratic senator Tim Johnson of South Dakota by running commercials featuring Saddam Hussein.

(When I was writing from Iraq lately, some peeved readers suggested I stay there for good; they might have had their wish if they'd been shrewd enough to have sent effusive e-mails thanking me for the fine spying, signed George Tenet.)

The fact is that neither Tim Johnson nor any lily-livered columnist ever bolstered Saddam's government the way Vice President Cheney did ? perfectly legitimately ? in 1998-99.

Before we prepare to go to war, we need to take a deep breath and make sure we are doing so to overcome a threat that is real and enduring, not one that we are conjuring in part out of our trauma of 9/11.

Old monsters like Libya, North Korea and Iran have proved ? well, not ephemeral, but at least changeable, less terrifying today than they used to be. And the Iraqi threat, for which we're now prepared to sacrifice hundreds or thousands of American casualties, just a few years ago was simply another tinhorn dictatorship where C.E.O. Cheney was earning his bonus.

She said: "I fell apart. I couldn't believe anyone could be careless enough just to leave it lying there. That image will live with me forever."

Mum-of-three Nicola, 27, received a a full apology from the hospital but plans to sue North Glasgow NHS Trust, claiming the handling of the abortion left her psychologically scarred.

(Nicola) said: "Women need more counselling before abortions, not less.

"I will never get over what happened to me."

GOP accuses Democrats of Politicizing Prescription Drug Debate

Lott says Daschle's comments 'Outrageous'

When NASA first started sending up astronauts, they quickly discovered that ballpoint pens would not work in zero gravity. To combat the problem, NASA scientists spent a decade and $12 billion to develop a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside down, underwater, on almost any surface including glass and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to 300 C.

The Russians used a pencil.

When asked whether it was fair for Lautenberg to replace Torricelli on the ballot, 54 percent in the Quinnipiac poll said no, but only 30 percent said they would not vote for Lautenberg because of the switch.

...

"New Jersey voters don't like the way Lautenberg got on the ballot, but they are glad to see tarnished Sen. Robert Torricelli gone," (Clay F.) Richards (assistant director of the Quinnipiac Polling Institute) said. "And one in five of those voters who say a last minute candidate switch is unfair say they will vote for Lautenberg anyway."

From JASON LEOPOLD: Subject -- The New York Times, Jason Leopold, Thomas White and Salon.com. I want to bring to your attention an issue that has come to light regarding my story on Thomas White and Salon.com. This week, Salon pulled the story off its website and made statements about me that are simply untrue. This story was picked up several weeks ago by Paul Krugman, columnist for the New York Times. Because of Salon's actions, the NYT came down hard on Mr. Krugman to print a correction in his column Friday, Oct. 4, unless he could get me to reveal to him the identity of my sources and speak to them directly.

I revealed my sources on the Thomas White story to Paul Krugman, including the person who sent me the email. He spoke to each and every one of my sources and verified their employment with Enron through W-2 documents they faxed to him. In addition, he verified the authenticity of the email by speaking directly with the person who sent it. Moreover, I found that Salon had erred in stating that I plagiarized seven grafs from the Financial Times. The paper was credited three times in the original story. Only an idiot would credit a story and then at the same time plagiarize the same story.

I took these unusual steps to reveal my sources to Krugman and provided him with documents because he was told by the NYT editorial board that if he could get me to do that then he could write a column that defends me and state that he independently verified everything. This was a painstaking process, having to convince more than a dozen sources to speak up, albeit in defense of me and confirm the authenticity of documents, particularly the email.

However, when Krugman informed his editors and the editorial board of the NYT that he had independently secured confirmation from all of my sources and verified the authenticity of the email, the NYT was shocked, according to Krugman, and then told him it was not good enough, that despite all of this verification he could still not write a column in support of my story, the documents mentioned, or reveal to readers that he spoke to my sources. Krugman, to his credit, did everything in his power to get the NYT editorial board to allow him to write the column he wanted regarding the Tom White email.

Now the NYT has put me into a position where I can no longer win the trust of my sources because they broke their promise to me. Had the NYT told me or Krugman their plans for never honoring the agreement, I would have never revealed my sources to the paper. This clearly became an issue for the NYT to pursue a salacious story about me rather than pursue the story itself, which is Thomas White and whether he wrote this email.