Why is it so inherently unsafe for Bush that he has to fly in under darkness without anyone except a handful of top aides and Secret Service and military personnel in the know, then hide out at the airport for a couple of hours with 600 troops, but Hillary Clinton and Jack Reed can drive around the city and meet with American troops, international officials and Iraqi leaders?

He said Sessini and a special correspondent sent to Iraq, Claudine Verniez-Palliez, had been with the group for several days beforehand and were unaware they were about to witness the attack.

"They had been asked to come see caches of arms very close to Baghdad and didn't discover the real reason for the operation until the last minute," Genestar said.

They were discovered in a container consignment ordered by an Israeli Arab, a resident of Kafr Kara in the Triangle region. He was questioned and maintained that the toys, made in China, were intended to be a gimmick to be sold in Israel. [emphasis added]

Dr. Margo Thorning performed a study about four European countries [link requires Acrobat Reader req.] and estimated that the Kyoto Protocol would have a strong negative impact on the GNP of various nations: a decrease of 5.2 percent for Germany, 5 percent for Spain, 4.5 percent for the U.K., and 3.8 percent for the Netherlands.

Soon after Sino-British negotiations over Hong Kong's fate began in the early 1980s, late patriarch Deng refused to entertain suggestions by then British Prime Minister Thatcher about alternate ways to prolong Britain's lease over the crown colony.

In a heated exchange in 1982, Deng simply told the Iron Lady that times had changed, China had become much stronger -- and there could be no nonsense over Hong Kong's return to the motherland's embrace at the stroke of midnight, June 30, 1997.

Thatcher was reportedly so taken aback that upon leaving, she slipped while going down the steps of Beijing's Great Hall of the People in front of the Chinese and international press.

Meanwhile, while Islamic lobby groups and the most distinguished semiotics professors in America are analysing Johnny Hart's outhouse joke, the European Union's Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia has decided to shelve its report on the rise of anti-Semitism on the Continent. The problem, as reported in The Telegraph, is that the survey had found that "many anti-Semitic incidents were carried out by Muslim and pro-Palestinian groups", and so a "political decision" was taken not to publish it because of "fears that it would increase hostility towards Muslims".

Let's go back over that slowly and try not to get a headache: the EU's main concern about an actual epidemic of hate crimes against Jews is that it could provoke a hypothetical epidemic of hate crimes against Muslims. You couldn't ask for a better illustration of the uselessness of these thought-police bodies: they're fine for chastising insufficiently guilt-ridden whites in an ongoing reverse-minstrel show of cultural self-abasement, but they don't have the stomach for confronting real racism. A tolerant society is so reluctant to appear intolerant, it would rather tolerate intolerance.

If conservatives have such a lock on the culture these days, as Al Gore, Al Franken, and others keep insisting, why don't we just switch sides? The Left can have Fox News, the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, the lavish offices of National Review and The Weekly Standard, as well as Sean Hannity's and Rush Limbaugh's airtime. The gangs at the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation will clear out their desks, give John Podesta the code to the Xerox machine, and tell Eric Alterman where in the neighborhood to buy the best gyros.

In return, we'd like the keys to the executive bathrooms at ABC, CBS and NBC, please. We'd like the cast of Fox and Friends to take over The Today Show's studios ("and tell Couric to take her Cabbage Patch dolls with her!"). We want Ramesh Ponnuru as the editor of the New York Times and Rich Lowry can have his choice between Time and Newsweek. Matt Labash will get Esquire and let's set up Rick Brookhiser at Rolling Stone (that way they won't have to change their drug coverage). Andrew Sullivan can have The New York Times Magazine. Robert Bork will be the dean of the Yale Law School and the faculty of Hillsdale and Harvard will simply switch places. Cornell West will be airbrushed out of The Matrix and Harvey Mansfield will take his place (though convincing him say anything other than "you call that a haircut?" will be hard). NRO will get the bazillions of dollars spent by the editors of Salon and Slate, and those guys can start paying their authors with chickens and irregular tube socks made in Albania.

In other words, talk to me about how we've won the culture war when Dinesh D'Souza wins a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" and Maya Angelou has to blog about it because no one at the New York Times will run her pieces.

[I]f there was ever any doubt that President Bush would run for re-election as the commander in chief of the war on terror, it will end when the Republican Party begins broadcasting its first campaign commercial on Mr. Bush's behalf. "Some are now attacking the president for attacking the terrorists," says the ad, as it shows film of Mr. Bush warning of the potential dangers ahead.

It was inevitable that Sept. 11 was going to wind up in the messy center of presidential politics. The war against terror is by its very nature a war with no conclusion, and Democrats who lined up behind the president after the World Trade Center was destroyed cannot be expected to give him a free pass into a second term. The Republicans, meanwhile, are bound to base their campaign on the public's natural reluctance to change chief executives in dangerous times.

The Democrats need to find ways to attack Mr. Bush's stewardship without attacking his character; most Americans remember the president's firm resolve after 9/11 with admiration and do not want those memories challenged.

Mr. Bush has what may be the trickier task. He undoubtedly regards maintaining control of the White House for a second term as critical to winning the war on terror. Yet in order to maintain credibility while he runs for re-election, he must convince people that the decisions he makes are not just based on political self-preservation. On that front, so far, he has come up short.

The sight of the president in London last week, standing next to Prime Minister Tony Blair, was a study in contrasts. Mr. Blair has taken enormous political hits to support Mr. Bush, and he has done so because he believed the Iraqi invasion was in the best interests of both his own country and the rest of the world. Mr. Bush has undoubtedly been grateful in private. But in public he has failed to lend the prime minister any of his own political capital. The president, for instance, could have provided support on an issue of great concern to Europe by pressing to end Israel's suicidal expansion of its West Bank settlements. That would be good for Israel, aid the cause of Middle Eastern peace and greatly strengthen Mr. Blair's position. The fact that Mr. Bush has not made the effort suggests he is setting a higher priority on conservative Christian and Jewish lobbying groups in his own political base - groups whose support he is unlikely to lose under any circumstances, but whose enthusiasm could be helpful in both turning out the vote and collecting campaign contributions.

(Israel) should freeze settlement construction, dismantle unauthorized outposts, end the daily humiliation of the Palestinian people and not prejudice final negotiations with the placements of walls and fences.

One area in which the president has certainly damaged his image of a commander in chief above the fray is on the very delicate question of the treatment of the war dead. The White House, as is well known, has done everything in its power to keep the image of coffins and grieving families as far away from the TV screen as possible, and neither the president nor his representatives have attended the funerals of any of the fallen soldiers. One of the explanations given for this is the desire to leave the families to their private grief, but that could certainly be a decision left to the families themselves. Another is that the president and his chief lieutenants are too busy to attend so many memorials.

According to Public Citizen, which keeps exhaustive statistics on the topic, George Bush has attended 35 campaign fund-raisers since June 17 and is expected to attend at least 7 more by the end of the year. Vice President Dick Cheney has attended 31. That averages about three a week for the two men, most of them much farther away from the White House than Dover Air Force Base, where the bodies of the dead soldiers arrive back home.

We respectfully suggest that Mr. Bush change his priorities. If he wants to run for re-election as the leader in a time of war, he needs to behave like a president, not a politician. The public needs some reassurance that he is willing to sacrifice something himself to win the struggle to which he has committed us.

Whatever Davis' ulterior motive for waiving the environmental mandate on the tribes, he has deprived the new governor of what little leverage he had to renegotiate compacts with all 65 of them.

Schwarzenegger wants the tribes to pay their fair share of the estimated $5 billion in gaming revenue they are raking in each year on slot machines alone. Factor in the hefty profits from tribal-owned hotels, resorts, restaurants and table games, and their take is even greater.

The environmental mandate was the prime means of achieving that eminently equitable end. It required tribes to mitigate problems caused by their gaming facilities. These include traffic congestion, adverse effects on air and water quality, noise, sewage treatment and wildlife habitat.

Bush also discussed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, saying Israel "should freeze settlement construction, dismantle unauthorized outposts, end the daily humiliation of the Palestinian people and not prejudice final negotiations with the placements of walls and fences."

Moderate Muslims would have more faith in America's good intentions if there were at least the appearance of a distinction between the U.S. and the Sharon government — but the administration seeks votes from those who think that supporting Israel means supporting whatever Mr. Sharon does.

Peace will not be achieved by Palestinian rulers who intimidate opposition, who tolerate and profit from corruption and maintain their ties to terrorist groups. These are the methods of the old elites, who time and again have put their own self-interest above the interests of the people they claim to serve.

The long-suffering Palestinian people deserve better. They deserve true leaders, capable of creating and governing a Palestinian state.

Even after the setbacks and frustrations of recent months, goodwill and hard effort can bring about a Palestinian state and a secure Israel.

Those who would lead a new Palestine should adopt peaceful means to achieve the rights of their people and create the reformed institutions of a stable democracy.

Prosecutor Capt. Magdalena Przytulska said West should be tried, saying his actions implied that "we're no better than the enemy we're fighting."

Despite the excruciating torture he describes, Acree never yielded to the Iraqis' demands. Acree said his silence only made his captors angrier. They beat him and knocked him unconscious repeatedly as he was tied to a chair blindfolded, he said.

On his third day of captivity, Acree said, the Iraqis hit him with something that felt like a 4-by-4 or a metal pipe. "When it hit me, instead of going left or right or back, it lifted me up and back. Out of my seat."

That was the beating that fractured Acree's skull.

Dale Store, a pilot shot down in 1991 by Iraqi anti-aircraft fire, spent 33 days as an Iraqi prisoner. It was one of the worst experiences in his life, Store said.

"I was on the ground and they kicked me in the face and kidneys," he said. "Earlier, they had tortured me with electric shocks. ... When they finally stopped asking me questions, I was hoping they would kill me."

News reports that the Defense Department recently confirmed new information with respect to contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq in a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee are inaccurate.

A letter was sent to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Oct. 27, 2003, from Douglas J. Feith, under secretary of defense for policy, in response to follow-up questions from his July 10 testimony. One of the questions posed by the committee asked the department to provide the reports from the intelligence community to which he referred in his testimony before the committee. These reports dealt with the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.

The letter to the committee included a classified annex containing a list and description of the requested reports, so that the committee could obtain the reports from the relevant members of the intelligence community.

The items listed in the classified annex were either raw reports or products of the CIA, the National Security Agency or, in one case, the Defense Intelligence Agency. The provision of the classified annex to the Intelligence Committee was cleared by other agencies and done with the permission of the intelligence community. The selection of the documents was made by DoD to respond to the committee’s question. The classified annex was not an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, and it drew no conclusions.

Individuals who leak or purport to leak classified information are doing serious harm to national security; such activity is deplorable and may be illegal.

The classified annex was not an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, and it drew no conclusions.

Through an intermediary I told the editors what they could do with their offer, which was translated into something like "Mr. Goldberg graciously declines your invitation to respond."

My publisher, Al Regnery, however, did write a letter to the editor that read, "USA Today gave Mr. Goldberg the opportunity to respond in 2-3 sentences, but Al Neuharth gets 300 words? And there's no liberal bias?...

According to the memo--which lays out the intelligence in 50 numbered points--Iraq-al Qaeda contacts began in 1990 and continued through mid-March 2003, days before the Iraq War began. Most of the numbered passages contain straight, fact-based intelligence reporting, which in
some cases includes an evaluation of the credibility of the source. This reporting is often followed by commentary and analysis.

The relationship began shortly before the first Gulf War. According to reporting in the memo, bin Laden sent "emissaries to Jordan in 1990 to meet with Iraqi government officials." At some unspecified point in 1991, according to a CIA analysis, "Iraq sought Sudan's assistance to establish links to al Qaeda." The outreach went in both directions. According to 1993 CIA reporting cited in the memo, "bin Laden wanted to expand his organization's capabilities through ties with Iraq."

April 17, 2002/To: SENATOR [Kennedy]

"Elaine Jones of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund tried to call you today. . . . Elaine would like the Committee to hold off on any 6th Circuit nominees until the University of Michigan case regarding the constitutionality of affirmative action in higher education is decided by the en banc 6th Circuit. . . . The thinking is that the current 6th Circuit will sustain the affirmative action program, but if a new judge with conservative views is confirmed before the case is decided, that new judge will be able, under 6th Circuit rules, to review the case and vote on it."

"...Ultimately, if [Chairman Pat] Leahy insists on having an August hearing, it appears that the groups are willing to let [Timothy] Tymkovich [10th Circuit] go through (the core of the coalition made that decision last night, but they are checking with the gay rights groups)."

Mr. Tymkovich apparently got the gay OK.

In the eyes of his anti-war mother, Brian Slavenas was a man of peace who died while reluctantly serving in a conflict he disagreed with.

To his father and brother, both veterans, the 30-year-old helicopter pilot was an officer who loved the military life and deserved full honors.

The body of the Illinois National Guard helicopter pilot--shot down Nov. 2 in an Iraqi attack that killed 16 U.S. soldiers--was returned Wednesday to his hometown, where a visitation was held in Faith United Methodist Church.

But in a rift that mirrored their divergent views of the war, his family has wrestled over how best to remember a son and brother who will be buried Thursday in a church cemetery, not a military one.

War's painful toll was made evident not only by the family's shared grief, but also by their disagreement over the meaning of his death.

Deeply angry at a war that claimed her son, Rosemarie Dietz Slavenas refused to use a casket provided by the military and asked that the coffin not be draped with a U.S. flag. But Brian Slavenas' father, Ronald, and his older brother, Eric, say the pilot loved the uniform and would have wanted honors such as a helicopter flyover and a uniformed bugler playing taps.

As executor of her son's will, Dietz Slavenas, who is divorced from Ronald Slavenas, has the final say over arrangements.

"What I am trying to do is celebrate Brian's life," said Dietz Slavenas, who lives in Rockford. "That's what he would want us to do."

His father and his older brother, however, perceived an anti-military agenda in the arrangements.

"She doesn't want taps . . . and she doesn't want a flag draped on the coffin," Eric Slavenas, Brian's half-brother, said last week, before final arrangements had been set. "And these are just things that are spikes in my dad's and my heart."

We have let the Richard Paez's (liberal 9th Circuit judge who declared California's Three Strikes law unconstitutional -- later overturned -- and attempted to halt the recall election -- also overturned) of the world to come and undermine our Constitution. We have allowed the left to seed-in to the court system those who would destroy this Constitution. Are there not members of our side, I would ask the senator from South Carolina (Lindsey Graham), who would say: "Thank you. We never had the courage. We never had the courage to change the way the rules are here in the Senate. To make sure that we could protect, as the senator from New Jersey said, to protect our courts. We never had the courage as the senator from New Jersey said to stop judicial extremists." And so maybe what we should be doing, I ask the senator from South Carolina, is thanking the senator from Illinois Dick Durbin), the senator from North Dakota (Tim Johnson) who is here, senator from South Dakota, Sen. Daschle. Maybe what we should be, instead of protesting this, is thanking them. For giving us a tool. For giving us a tool to protect this document [holds up copy of the Constitution]. Because I assure them. Or maybe I shouldn't assure them. Maybe I should ask the senator from South Carolina. What do you think will happen now?

We'll start with an absolute oh-my-God-what-was-I-thinking howler. Surely by now someone has told Carter of this utterly astounding error he (and his fact checker, if he even has one) has made here: not knowing the difference between a trillion and a quadrillion. He'll never live this one down.

• $6.84 quadrillion (yes, quadrillion) -- Current national debt.
  
• $9.3 quadrillion -- Estimated national debt by 2008.

This puts Carter off by a factor of 1000. The Office of Management and Budget's Midterm Update for 2004 confirms that it's actually trillion (yes, trillion), which is 1000 times smaller than quadrillion (yes, quadrillion). Quadrillion (yes, quadrillion) means one followed by 15 zeros, while trillion (yes, trillion) means one followed by only 12 zeros.

The man setting the tone of the campaign so far is Howard Dean, who is reported to be quite popular with Generation X and Y voters. When asked "What is your favorite song?" at a Sept. 9 debate, he responded: "One you've never heard of, Wyclef Jean, 'Jaspora.'"

Note the pose of superiority, the floating insult that Mr. Dean's audience isn't sufficiently courant to know about Jean, this funky, Creole-singing rap artist. Mr. Dean sounds like one of the record-store clerks in the movie "High Fidelity," a hipster geek with too many songs in his mental catalog. Strange but true, the leading Democratic candidate for president is a music snob.

"About 90 percent of river fish are now under massive threat from the birds," said Oliver Born, an official from the Bavarian state fisheries union. "There are some rivers where we have shown that when Cormorants come, 95 percent of the fish disappear by the end of the winter."

But some say the government action is misguided.

"Their plan will not get us anywhere," said Andreas von Lindeiner of the Bavarian bird protection group. "We cannot destroy the bird colonies," he said.

Fishermen at Bavaria's Chiemsee lake, one of Germany's largest, say the birds are eating into their business.

The fish are reared in commercial fisheries that may look like all-you-can-eat buffets to cormorants because large numbers of fish are gathered in small areas of shallow water.

"My fishery loses some 40 tons of fish a year to the cormorants," said Holmer Lex, 75, who owns a fishery on the Chiemsee. "We only produce 90 tons a year."

To the Editor:

Regarding Arthur Sulzberger Jr.'s suggestion to the Pulitzer Prize Board that revoking Walter Duranty's 1932 prize recalled the "Stalinist practice to airbrush purged figures out of official records and histories" ("Times Should Lose Pulitzer From 30's, Consultant Says," news article, Oct. 29):

Those targeted for "airbrushing" were already murdered, languishing in the gulag or forced into exile after having been falsely accused of espionage, treason, sabotage and other "crimes."

The N.K.V.D., the predecessor of the K.G.B., then ordered libraries to expunge all mention and to relegate them to the status of non-persons, a fate that persisted for most until the Gorbachev era.

Revoking Mr. Duranty's prize is another matter altogether. He was never prosecuted for any crimes. His articles remain available in the archives of The New York Times, and his books on the shelves of major libraries.

Airbrushing was intended to suppress the truth about what was happening under Stalin. The aim of revoking Walter Duranty's prize is the opposite: to bring greater awareness of the potential long-term damage that his reporting did for our understanding of the Soviet Union.

MARK VON HAGEN
New York, Oct. 29, 2003
The writer, a professor of history at Columbia University, was hired by The New York Times to make an independent assessment of Walter Duranty's reporting.

If the senator from Pennsylvania would allow, I don't know what elections have to do with confirming nominees that have gone before the Judiciary Committee and they're qualified...

The EU has done a grand job of trumpeting its weakness as strength, but the fact remains that there's something hollow at the heart of European identity. You can't be a great power without great power: Slobodan Milosevic called the EU's bluff on that a decade ago.

Some say that Representative George Nethercutt's remark that progress in Iraq is a more important story than deaths of American soldiers was redeemed by his postscript, "which, heaven forbid, is awful." Your call.

Dick Cheney said, on the eve of war, said that Iraq has reconstituted nuclear weapons. That is untrue.

President Bush said they're trying to get nuclear materials from Niger. That was untrue.

Paul Wolfowitz said Iraqi oil would pay for reconstruction. That was untrue.

There’s a lot of money to pay for this that doesn’t have to be U.S. taxpayer money, and it starts with the assets of the Iraqi people…and on a rough recollection, the oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years…We’re dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.

Donald Rumsfeld savaged Gen. Shinseki. That was untrue.

Bowman, named yesterday to a state commission charged with reviewing responses to last week's wildfires and how to be better prepared, cited the following deficiencies:

 During the fire, San Diego firefighters ran out of batteries for their portable radios because budget cuts had diminished their supplies. That left some unable to talk to their commanders or one another.

 The city's reserve fire engines, thrust into front-line service during major emergencies such as last week's fires, lack up-to-date radios and other equipment.

 The department's fleet of engines and trucks, regular or reserve, is among the most antiquated in the nation. One rig is 45 years old.

 Water pumps and ladders were not being tested annually until this year.

 The department has no money to send commanders out of state for free training by the federal government.

 San Diego, the seventh largest city in the country, ranks 40th in firefighters per capita, behind Mesa, Ariz.; Omaha, Neb.; and Memphis, Tenn.

To meet the nationally accepted standard for fire staffing levels, San Diego would need an additional 800 firefighters.

"Jessi lost three hours," Bragg wrote. "She lost them in the snapping bones, in the crash of the Humvee, in the torment her enemies inflicted on her after she was pulled from it."

The scars on Lynch's battered body and the medical records indicate she was anally raped, and "fill in the blanks of what Jessi lived through on the morning of March 23, 2003," Bragg wrote.

"The records do not tell whether her captors assaulted her almost lifeless, broken body after she was lifted from the wreckage, or if they assaulted her and then broke her bones into splinters until she was almost dead."

"We had promised the public that we would do a fair version of the Reagans’ life," he said. "We would show the warts, but we would show the good stuff, too. Upon seeing the finished product, I felt the movie was quite biased against the Reagans. And it wasn’t the movie I promised the public."

Moonves said he sent the film to sister company Showtime, a pay cable network, because "as a broadcast network, we feel it’s a public trust. We have a news division. We do have to be fair in what we show, and a pay-cable network can be a little bit more biased in what they show. It can be an opinion piece. We can’t do that."

• older
  
• red state
  
• right-of-center
  

Dewey decided that it was more important to defeat the Germans and Japanese than to defeat Roosevelt. He decided that it was more important that the US be victorious than that the Republicans be. He made sure that the issue of intelligence failure would not be raised during the campaign. If he had used that issue, he might have won; as it was, he lost badly.

Or rather, he lost very well. I have an enormous amount of respect for Dewey because of the decision he made.

Marshall was deeply grateful, and later on a couple of occasions let Dewey see top secret information derived from codebreaking which was affecting the course of the war, so he could see just how vital it had actually been. If Dewey had acted other than as he did, the war might well have gone on another year, with thousands of additional American casualties.

Dewey was an American first, a Republican second. I wish that Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WVa) was an American first, but I am by no means certain. Rockefeller is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Democratic committee staffers appear to have written a document for him describing how to use an investigation into American intelligence regarding Iraqi WMDs to best affect the 2004 election campaign. It's not clear exactly who wrote it, but Rockefeller acknowledges that it came from his staff, saying that it had not been intended for public release. (I should think not.)

“Of all the committees, this is the one single committee that should unquestionably be above partisan politics. The information it deals with should never, never be distorted, compromised or politicized in any shape, form or fashion. For it involves the lives of our soldiers and our citizens. Its actions should always be above reproach; its words never politicized.

“If what has happened here is not treason, it is its first cousin. The ones responsible - be they staff or elected or both should be dealt with quickly and severely sending a lesson to all that this kind of action will not be tolerated, ignored or excused.

“Heads should roll!”

I live in Southeastern Michigan, an area with over 500,000 Arab-Americans. Since Sept. 11, many Arab-Americans have seen infringements on their civil liberties, like lack of due process and forced interrogations by the FBI. Sen. Lieberman, you voted in favor the Patriot Act. If you become president, how do you plan to protect the civil liberties of Arab-Americans?

Very important question and I thank you for it. The best thing we did with the Patriot Act was to sunset it. To say that it needs to be reauthorized or it will go out of existence. And we're gonna look back and see what went wrong with the Patriot Act. In fact, the Bush Administration has been typically secretive about what it did with the Patriot Act, so we don't really know yet how much it protected us or compromised our liberties.

But I know something bad that happened under immigration law under John Ashcroft as the attorney general. Almost 800 foreign nationals, immigrants, mostly Arab-Americans or people who look like Arab-Americans were arrested, put in jail, held without charges, no notification for their family and no right to counsel. That's un-American and I will fight to end that as president of the United States. We can have security and liberty. If we fight the terrorists who attacked us because of our liberties by compromising our liberties, shame on us.

One armor expert at Fort Knox, Ky., suggested the tank may have been hit by an updated RPG. About 15 years ago, Russian scientists created tandem-warhead anti-tank-grenades designed to defeat reactive armor. The new round, a PG-7VR, can be fired from an RPG-7V launcher and might have left the unusual signature on the tank.

In addition, the Russians have developed an improved weapon, the RPG-22. These and perhaps even newer variants have been used against American forces in Afghanistan. It is believed U.S. troops seized some that have been returned to the United States for testing, but scant details about their effects and “fingerprints” are available.

Still another possibility is a retrofitted warhead for the RPG system being developed by a Swiss manufacturer.

At this time, it appears most likely that an RPG-22 or some other improved variant of the Russian-designed weapon damaged the M1 tank, sources concluded. The damage certainly was caused by some sort of shaped-charge or hollow-charge warhead, and the cohesive nature of the destructive jet suggests a more effective weapon than a fragmented-jet RPG-7.

Looking back at the failed attempt by presidential candidate Forbes to rally U.S. public support behind the flat tax, Gene Sperling, a senior Clinton economic adviser who is with the Council on Foreign Relations, said wryly, "If Steve Forbes does a bus tour [of Iraq] to promote it, I hope they have adequate security."

Good editors look at the case of Stephen Glass and think, "There but by the grace of God." A smart writer who is unconcerned about his future could pass fiction off on the best editor once or twice or perhaps even five times. Who knows where the bright line is? But surely it is less than 27, the number of faked stories Glass published. Surely seven charges of fabrication by story subjects should be enough. Surely the need to respond to letters 6 times in 19 months should have woken someone up.


"SHATTERED GLASS" wants you to believe that Stephen Glass was a neurotic mastermind, against whose wiles editors were powerless. But his editors--all smart, talented, honorable people--shared a failing which the movie refuses to acknowledge. There is a particular type of journalist who spurns the input of outsiders and believes that there is no truth beyond his magazine's horizon. The impulse to dismiss those who argue with our words as acting out of political disagreement or bad faith is a failing many of us share. It is an impulse which must be fought.

Now, I'm not suggesting "irrational exuberance" again. First of all, it's not warranted (yet), and giddiness about the economy didn't really help last time. And I'm also not asking that people forget what happened during the boom. Some companies and executives absolutely earned the right to get nothing but disrespect and doubt.

If we are ever to get competitive again, though, we can't indiscriminately put a negative spin on what is legitimately good news. We live in a global economy; India and China get stronger and better every single day. To have a fighting chance, companies need to get every employee, with every idea in their heads and every morsel of energy in their bodies, into the game.