Bears have stopped hibernating in the mountains of northern Spain, scientists revealed yesterday, in what may be one of the strongest signals yet of how much climate change is affecting the natural world.
In a December in which bumblebees, butterflies and even swallows have been on the wing in Britain, European brown bears have been lumbering through the forests of Spain's Cantabrian mountains, when normally they would already be in their long, annual sleep.
Bears are supposed to slumber throughout the winter, slowing their body rhythms to a minimum and drawing on stored resources, because frozen weather makes food too scarce to find. The barely breathing creatures can lose up to 40 per cent of their body weight before warmer springtime weather rouses them back to life.
But many of the 130 bears in Spain's northern cordillera - which have a slightly different genetic identity from bear populations elsewhere in the world - have remained active throughout recent winters, naturalists from Spain's Brown Bear Foundation (La Fundaci�n Oso Pardo - FOP) said yesterday.
The change is affecting female bears with young cubs, which now find there are enough nuts, acorns, chestnuts and berries on thebleak mountainsides to make winter food-gathering sorties 'energetically worthwhile', scientists at the foundation, based in Santander, the Cantabrian capital, told El Pais newspaper.
'If the winter is mild, the female bears find it is energetically worthwhile to make the effort to stay awake and hunt for food,' said Guillermo Palomero, the FOP's president and the co-ordinator of a national plan for bear conservation. This changed behaviour, he said, was probably a result of milder winters. 'The high Cantabrian peaks freeze all winter, but our teams of observers have been able to follow the perfect outlines of tracks from a group of bears,' he said."

Introductions are so hard. Do I begin with the guilt I am feeling for writing such an 'off the cuff' piece, meant to honor a man, who brought all the facts in my head together into one logical view. Maybe, I begin with the an anecdote concerning the miracle of life, and tie it back to a famous quote, book, or theory of his. Then again, maybe I should just continue to ramble.

I read "Cosmos" during high school. I dragged a chair to the river, cleared some brush (which took more than one day) plopped the chair down, and read it over the next few weeks. It was summer, the river was flooded and came up to my feet. The solitude was refreshing, and not in the way growing up in a small town can't be. When you first realize how truly lonely we are in this universe your feelings of despair, loneliness, and aimlessness: well, they sort of float down the river.

One might be inclined to think that learning of our universal solitude might make depression sink in a little more. But, Sagan had a way of turning our infinitesimally small human ability into a beacon of pulsar hope and supernovae light. He made me marvel in my own existence and intelligence.

Did you know Komodo dragons can reproduce without sexual activity. Yeah, thats right, they can fertilize their own eggs; virgin dragons if you will. Literally. Mary has nothing on dragons. In "The Dragons of Eden" he illuminates so many quirks and foibles of life and evolution it is enough to leave your head spinning. From the evolution of the forebrain in mammals from birds from reptiles from fish, to the inability of the right eye to understand what the lefthand is drawing in patients who have undergone hemisphere removal, and the theories of recapitulation. Oh my.

Before Sagan the knowledge I obtained was all strewn about on a plane. After Sagan, that plane gained dimension, and I saw the world for what it was: round. I can't continue, there is simply too much to say of the man and his writings, and I have to work early. I LOVE YOU CARL!

Last week, MTV celebrated its 25th anniversary, marking a quarter of a century after having conceived of the first actually new thing in popular television entertainment since "American Bandstand" and "Soul Train."
The music video became a big deal through MTV and not only updated the old "soundies" once shown in movie theaters to feature singers and instrumentalists. It also revolutionized the making of films by acclimating its audience to the extremely fast crosscutting that had been pioneered in television commercials, where the faster the message arrived, the better. In the process, the MTV audience learned to see much more quickly and recognize what sometimes quite surreal montages were saying or what they were alluding to - no small accomplishment.

Of course, that is not the whole story of MTV, which also came to project the most dehumanizing images of black people since the dawn of minstrelsy in the 19th century. Pimps, whores, potheads, dope dealers, gangbangers, the crudest materialism and anarchic gang violence were broadcast around the world as "real" black culture.

At first, far too many black people were taken in by the cult of celebrity and the wealth that came to these gold- toothed knuckleheads and mindless hussies to realize what was happening. The lowest possible common denominator was seen as the norm. The illiteracy and rule-of-thumb stupidity was interpreted as a "cultural" rejection of white middle-class norms.

It was as if these dregs had the same heroic position in our time as the largely uneducated Southern black poor of the civil rights movement. Those Southern black people, like the marvelous Fannie Lou Hamer, proved to this nation and to the world that they not only deserved their constitutional rights, but had something both noble and soulful to add to our American understanding of the richness of the human spirit. We are a much greater nation because of the success of the civil rights movement. As they emerged from beneath the bloody rock of segregation, those Southern black people brought to our national identity a compassion and a bravery of immeasurable value.

Unfortunately, the crabbed thug culture that was popularized through MTV brought nothing big with it other than some paychecks.

Twenty-five years later, Christina Norman is the president of the network - and a black woman with a new problem on her hands. Part of that problem is Lisa Fager, a black woman who is president and co-founder of Industry Ears (industryears.com). Fager is disturbed by an MTV "satire" called "Where My Dogs At?" which has a cartoon figure strongly resembling Snoop Dogg who enters a pet store with two black women walking on all fours with leashes around their necks. At the end of the "parody," they defecate on the floor.

Fager's problem is that the spot was shown at 12:30 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon and will, no doubt, perpetuate among younger viewers the misogynist and dehumanizing images we have become accustomed to in too many rap videos.

That's the way big money goes. We can be sure that Christina Norman will have a simplemindedly liberal justification for the material, but I doubt that Lisa Fager will want to hear it. Nor will the millions of black women who oppose this kind of material and are beginning to rise into the sorts of positions that will make them an influential special-interest group. I don't know how long it will take, but change is on the way.

Last week, MTV celebrated its 25th anniversary, marking a quarter of a century after having conceived of the first actually new thing in popular television entertainment since "American Bandstand" and "Soul Train."
The music video became a big deal through MTV and not only updated the old "soundies" once shown in movie theaters to feature singers and instrumentalists. It also revolutionized the making of films by acclimating its audience to the extremely fast crosscutting that had been pioneered in television commercials, where the faster the message arrived, the better. In the process, the MTV audience learned to see much more quickly and recognize what sometimes quite surreal montages were saying or what they were alluding to - no small accomplishment.

Of course, that is not the whole story of MTV, which also came to project the most dehumanizing images of black people since the dawn of minstrelsy in the 19th century. Pimps, whores, potheads, dope dealers, gangbangers, the crudest materialism and anarchic gang violence were broadcast around the world as "real" black culture.

At first, far too many black people were taken in by the cult of celebrity and the wealth that came to these gold- toothed knuckleheads and mindless hussies to realize what was happening. The lowest possible common denominator was seen as the norm. The illiteracy and rule-of-thumb stupidity was interpreted as a "cultural" rejection of white middle-class norms.

It was as if these dregs had the same heroic position in our time as the largely uneducated Southern black poor of the civil rights movement. Those Southern black people, like the marvelous Fannie Lou Hamer, proved to this nation and to the world that they not only deserved their constitutional rights, but had something both noble and soulful to add to our American understanding of the richness of the human spirit. We are a much greater nation because of the success of the civil rights movement. As they emerged from beneath the bloody rock of segregation, those Southern black people brought to our national identity a compassion and a bravery of immeasurable value.

Unfortunately, the crabbed thug culture that was popularized through MTV brought nothing big with it other than some paychecks.

Twenty-five years later, Christina Norman is the president of the network - and a black woman with a new problem on her hands. Part of that problem is Lisa Fager, a black woman who is president and co-founder of Industry Ears (industryears.com). Fager is disturbed by an MTV "satire" called "Where My Dogs At?" which has a cartoon figure strongly resembling Snoop Dogg who enters a pet store with two black women walking on all fours with leashes around their necks. At the end of the "parody," they defecate on the floor.

Fager's problem is that the spot was shown at 12:30 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon and will, no doubt, perpetuate among younger viewers the misogynist and dehumanizing images we have become accustomed to in too many rap videos.

That's the way big money goes. We can be sure that Christina Norman will have a simplemindedly liberal justification for the material, but I doubt that Lisa Fager will want to hear it. Nor will the millions of black women who oppose this kind of material and are beginning to rise into the sorts of positions that will make them an influential special-interest group. I don't know how long it will take, but change is on the way.

It's no secret to anyone who's accidentally tuned into the Hannity & Colmes show on Fox News and thought they stumbled across an over-the-top Saturday Night Live sketch, that Sean Hannity doesn’t have a real firm grasp on reality. I mean, this is the same man who once offered a liberal guest the Hobson's choice of "Is it that you hate this president or that you hate America?"

Hannity's also been known to claim that the Constitution doesn't say anything about the separation of church and state and, in a May 2004 edition of his television show, asked a clergyman if they could "pray for the re-election of George Bush."

So it didn’t really surprise me today when I went to Hannity's web site and saw a poll on the front page that asked his erudite fans "What do you think about WMD's being found in Iraq?" This is on his main page right now, not four years ago.

Note to Sean: You may want to stop praying for Bush and give him a call with this news. I'm sure he'll be happy to hear it.

Hannity started college but never finished -- he didn't drop out to join the military either -- so it looks like he never got to take a statistics class where one might learn about clean survey methodology, because the choices given to his viewers and listeners on the WMD question are, well, I'll just show you.......

July 20 (Bloomberg) -- The day before Tuesday's U.S. Senate
vote backing embryonic stem-cell research, Republican Sam
Brownback appeared with several Snowflakes, the name given to
children born from frozen embryos. It was a lovely tableau, proof
of the wisdom of kissing every baby on the campaign trail.
With polls showing a large majority of Americans favoring
federal funds for such research, Snowflakes are the last redoubt
of a minority of a minority within the Republican Party adamantly
opposed to it.
President George W. Bush mounted a similar pageant at the
White House before a House vote in May 2005 to expand federal
funding, his little guests wearing T-shirts saying, ``This embryo
was not discarded.''
That's true for his T-shirt-wearing visitors and about 125
others born of ``adopted'' embryos, those left after couples
undergoing fertility treatments have had their children and no
longer need the extra embryos produced as backup. Yet they're a
fraction of those approximately 400,000 unimplanted specks --
with the feelings, soul and brains of a gnat -- at clinics across
the country that the Senate bill would rescue for research.
Bush yesterday exercised his first-ever veto to stop that
from happening, an action that spokesman Tony Snow explained was
motivated by a conviction that ``murder's wrong.''
No argument there. But if salvaging a few embryos to be used
in research is murder, what is the production of thousands of
embryos destined for destruction?"
Big Lies

Bush and Senator Rick Santorum, a Pennsylvania Republican, along with Brownback of Kansas, the most ardent exponent of Bush's view, would have us believe the extra embryos are lovingly and humanely kept in perpetuity. They know that isn't so, just as everyone knows their other claims are big lies: that the stem cell lines in use at the time of Bush's August 2001 decision to limit federal funding for research would be enough for scientists to proceed, and that adult stem cells are just as useful.

Bush ignores what is happening to embryos left over from in vitro fertilization. No politician wants to commit political suicide by taking on infertile yuppies. In fact, the president went out of his way to praise IVF in the speech announcing his policy in 2001.

I don't want the president to shut down fertility clinics because they're committing murder. I want him to open the door to stem-cell researchers because they aren't. I want him to acknowledge that my brain-damaged brother is as worthy as any infertile couple of being rescued by an embryo. Instead, he chooses to favor one over the other with no recognition of the contradiction.

Not the Money

It can't be that one uses federal funds and the other doesn't. Leaving aside that hospitals doing in vitro fertilization treatments get federal funds, and some insurance plans pay for it, if it's really murder we're talking about, the issue can't be who's paying for it.

Fertility treatments get a pass and always will, until that day when the photo-op of a grandmother with Alzheimer's can compete with the baby born of a frozen embryo, like the little one Santorum kept clutching in the anteroom of the Capitol on Tuesday.

Santorum fears slippery slopes. So, you moral ninny, the reasoning goes, you think embryonic stem-cell research is OK? Well what about pregnancies induced for research? What about cloning Dolly the Sheep? Britney Spears? Well, he didn't go there but his argument is so shaky, he might as well have.

Still Waiting

I called Santorum's office to find out if his fierce protection of embryos makes him want to regulate fertility clinics, especially now with Bush's charge of murder. I was told someone would get back to me. When I called again, I was promised an answer by 3 p.m. yesterday. I'm waiting.

The atmosphere on the Senate floor during the vote was strikingly congenial compared to three weeks ago when Republicans accused Democrats of ``cutting and running'' in Iraq. They're lucky that Democrats no longer recognize a winning issue when they have one and are happy to welcome them into the fold, including Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist.

As a physician and a prospective presidential candidate, Dr. Frist found himself on a political respirator after becoming the congressional doctor of record for Terri Schiavo, the brain- damaged Florida woman who was maintained on life-support against her husband's wishes. Frist finally broke with the president and returned to his original belief that embryonic stem-cell research holds the best hope for the medical breakthroughs that only occur with federal backing. It may not save his political life, but it may eventually save others.

Next Year

Senator Arlen Specter, a warrior for stem-cell research, spoke minutes before the vote. When challenged earlier by Brownback to say when life begins, Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, said he didn't know, but he said he didn't believe it started in a Petri dish. Specter -- his hair just returning after chemotherapy for Hodgkin's lymphoma -- said he was ``a lot more concerned at this point about when my life is going to end.''

At the White House yesterday, Bush again surrounded himself with Snowflakes as he vetoed the legislation. The House of Representatives failed to override his rejection of the bill last night, so the Senate won't bother to act.

The fight isn't over. Four Republican senators who voted with Bush -- Mike DeWine of Ohio, Jim Talent of Missouri, Conrad Burns of Montana and Santorum -- are in tough re-election races. If they all lose, Specter will have enough votes to override a Bush veto next year. Holding an hourglass with the sands of time running out as he spoke, Specter was a picture as compelling as any Snowflake. He'll get this done, if it's the death of him.

By FRANK RICH
TWO weeks and counting, and the editor of The New York Times still has not been sentenced to the gas chamber. What a bummer for one California radio talk-show host, Melanie Morgan, who pronounced The Times guilty of treason and expressly endorsed that punishment. She and the rest of the get-the-press lynch mob are growing restless, wondering why newspapers haven't been prosecuted under the Espionage Act. 'If Bush believes what he is saying,' taunted Pat Buchanan, 'why does he not do his duty as the chief law enforcement officer of the United States?'
Here's why. First, there is no evidence that the Times article on tracking terrorist finances either breached national security or revealed any 'secrets' that had not already been publicized by either the administration or Swift, the Belgian financial clearinghouse enlisted in the effort. Second, the legal bar would be insurmountable: even Gabriel Schoenfeld, who first floated the idea of prosecuting The Times under the Espionage Act in an essay in Commentary, told The Nation this month that the chance of it happening was .05 percent.
But the third and most important explanation has nothing to do with the facts of the case or the law and everything to do with politics. For all the lynch mob's efforts to single out The Times %u2014 'It's the old trick, go after New York, go after big, ethnic New York,' as Chris Matthews put it %u2014 three papers broke Swift stories on their front pages. Even in this bash-the-press environment, the last spectacle needed by a president with an approval rating in the 30's is the national firestorm that would greet a doomed Justice Department prosecution of The Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Los Angeles Times.
The administration has a more insidious game plan instead: it has manufactured and milked this controversy to reboot its intimidation of the press, hoping journalists will pull punches in an election year. There are momentous stories far more worrisome to the White House than the less-than-shocking Swift program, whether in the chaos of Anbar Province or the ruins of New Orleans. If the press muzzles itself, its under-the-radar self-censorship will be far more valuable than a Nixonesque frontal assault that ends up as a 24/7 hurricane veering toward the Supreme Court.

Will this plan work? It did after 9/11. The chilling words articulated at the get-go by Ari Fleischer (Americans must "watch what they say") carried over to the run-up to the Iraq war, when the administration's W.M.D. claims went unchallenged by most news organizations. That this strategy may work again can be seen in the fascinating escalation in tactics by the Bush White House's most powerful not-so-secret agent in the press itself, the Wall Street Journal editorial page. The Journal is not Fox News or an idle blogger or radio bloviator. It's the establishment voice of the party in power. The infamous editorial it ran on June 30 ("Fit and Unfit to Print"), an instant classic, doesn't just confer its imprimatur on the administration's latest crusade to conflate aggressive journalism with treason, but also ups the ante.

The editorial was ostensibly a frontal attack on The Times, accusing its editors of not believing America is "really at war" and of exercising bad faith in running its report on the Swift operation. But an attack on The Times by The Journal's editorial page is a shrug-inducing dog-bites-man story; the paper's conservative editorialists have long dueled with a rival whose editorials usually argue the other side. (And sometimes the Times opinion writers gleefully return the fire.) What was groundbreaking and unsettling about the Journal editorial was that it besmirched the separately run news operation of The Journal itself.

By any standard, The Journal is one of the great newspapers in the world, whether you agree with its editorials or not. As befits a great newspaper, its journalists are fearless in pursuit of news, as tragically exemplified by Daniel Pearl. Like reporters at The Times, those at The Journal operate independently of the paper's opinion pages. Witness The Journal's schism during the Enron scandal. Its editorial page belittled the scandal's significance most of the way, resisting even mild criticisms of Enron (it was "partly a victim of its own success") until it filed for bankruptcy. The dearly departed Ken Lay, after all, was the leading Bush financial patron; to the Journal editorialists, the "Clintonian moral climate" of the 1990's was a root cause of Enron's problems. Meanwhile, The Journal's investigative reporters had gone their own way months earlier, helping unearth the scandal. So much so that Mr. Lay tried to argue his innocence in the spring by testifying that a "witch hunt" by the paper's reporters had more to do with his company's demise than he did.

It was a similarly top-flight Journal reporter, Glenn Simpson, who wrote his paper's Swift story. But the Journal editorial page couldn't ignore him if it was attacking The Times for publishing its Swift scoop on the same day. So instead it maligned him by echoing Tony Snow's official White House line: The Journal was merely following The Times once it knew that The Times would publish anyway. As if this weren't insulting enough, the editorial suggested that the Treasury Department leaked much of the story to The Journal and that a Journal reporter could be relied upon to write a "straighter" account more to the government's liking than that of a Times reporter.

This version of events does not jibe with an e-mail sent by The Journal's own Washington bureau chief, Gerald Seib, on the day the Swift articles ran. "I was surprised to see your news story about the New York Times 'scoop' on the government program to monitor international bank transactions," Mr. Seib wrote to Joe Strupp of the trade publication Editor & Publisher. "As you could tell from the lead story on the front page of The Wall Street Journal today, we had the same story. Moreover, we posted it online early last evening, virtually at the same time The Times did. In sum, we and The Times were both chasing the story and crossed the finish line at the same time — and well ahead of The Los Angeles Times, which posted its story well after ours went up."

In other words, The Journal's journalists were doing their job with their usual professionalism. But by twisting this history, the Journal editorial page was sending an unsubtle shot across the bow, warning those in the newsroom (and every other newsroom) that their patriotism would be impugned, as The Times's had been, if they investigated administration conduct in wartime in ways that displeased the White House.

Any fan of The Journal's news operation expects it to stand up to this bullying. But the nastiness of the Journal editorial is a preview of what we can expect from the administration and all of its surrogates this year. In "The One Percent Doctrine," the revelatory book about wartime successes and failures now (happily) outpacing Ann Coulter at Amazon.com, the former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind explains just how tough it is for a reporter in this climate: "to report about national affairs and, especially, national security in this contentious period demands at least a spoonful of disobedience — a countermeasure to strong assurances by those in power that the obedient will be rewarded or, at the very least, have nothing to worry about."

The trouble is we have plenty to worry about. For all the airy talk about the First Amendment, civil liberties and Thomas Jefferson in the debate over the Swift story and the National Security Agency surveillance story before it, there's an urgent practical matter at stake, too. Now more than ever, after years of false reports of missions accomplished, the voters need to do what Congress has failed to do and hold those who mismanage America's ever-expanding war accountable for their performance in real time.

As George Will wrote in March, all three members of the "axis of evil" — Iraq, Iran and North Korea — are "more dangerous than they were when that phrase was coined in 2002." So is Afghanistan, which is spiraling into Taliban-and-drug-lord anarchy, without nearly enough troops or other assistance to secure it. On the first anniversary of the London bombings, and on a surging wave of new bin Laden and al-Zawahiri videos, the two foremost Qaeda experts outside government, Peter Bergen and the former C.I.A. officer Michael Scheuer, both sounded alarms that contradict the insistent administration refrain that the terrorists are on the run.

We can believe instead, if we choose to, that all is well and that the press shouldn't question our government's account of how it is winning the war brilliantly at every turn. (The former C.I.A. analytical chief, Jami Miscik, decodes this game in "The One Percent Doctrine": the administration tells "only half the story, the part that makes us look good," and keeps the other half classified.) We can believe that reporters, rather than terrorists, are the villains. We can debate whether traitorous editors should be sent to gas chambers or merely tarred and feathered.

Or we can hope that the press will rise to the occasion and bring Americans more news we can use, not less, at a perilous time when every piece of information counts.

Nation cringes as the worst president ever continues long, painful slog to the end
by Mark Morford
It is like some sort of virus. It is like some sort of weird and painful rash on your face that makes you embarrassed to walk out the door and so you sit there day after day, waiting for it to go away, slathering on ointment and Bactine and scotch. And yet still it lingers.
Some days the pain is so searing and hot you want to cut off your own head with a nail file. Other days it is numb and pain-free and seemingly OK, to the point where you think it might finally be all gone and you allow yourself a hint of a whisper of a positive feeling, right up until you look in the mirror, and scream.
George W. Bush is just like that.
Everyone I know has had enough. Everyone I know is just about done. There is this threshold of happy deadened disgust, this point where the body simply resigns itself to the pain, a point where the disease, the poison has seeped so deeply into the bones that you just have to laugh and shrug it all off and go for a drink. Or 10.
I was having cocktails recently with a group of people, among whom were two lifetime Republicans, each in his 60s, corporate businessmen, one admittedly slightly more moderate than the other (to the point where, after once hearing a senator read off a long list of Bush's hideous environmental atrocities, actually let his conscience lead his choice and ended up voting for Kerry) but nevertheless both devoted members of the party.
Bush came up, as a topic, as a cancer, as a fetid miasma in the air. They were both shaking their heads. They were sighing heavily. They were both, in a word, disgusted. The more staunchly conservative of the two even went so far as to say he was so embarrassed and humiliated by this president, by this administration, so appalled at all the war atrocities and the wiretapping and the misuse of law, the fiscal irresponsibility and the abuse of the lower classes and the outright arrogance, that if the Dems could somehow produce a decent moderate candidate with a brain, he'd have zero problem switching allegiances and voting for him. Or her."
It may not sound like much. It may not seem like a major shift. But it is, in its way, sort of massive. For thoughtful Repubs with a conscience (they actually exist, I have seen them), there is little left to defend. There is little this administration has done among all categories of ostensible GOP values that they can look to with any sort of pride. Medicare? Shrinking the budget? Smaller government? Less intervention in our lives? Reduced spending? Increased respect in the international community? Responsible international citizen? Ha. Name your topic, BushCo has failed. Spectacularly. Intentionally.

Indeed, countless Dems were disappointed with Clinton's behavior during Monicagate. Many were ashamed that he would cheapen the office so badly by such trashy moral behavior.

But that was just a cheap little affair (our allies never understood all the fuss anyway). This was never the attitude toward Clinton's politics, his capacity to understand complex issues, his astounding political savvy. No one anywhere doubted he made the country richer, more environmentally conscious, more stable, more respected and admired. Clinton was globally adored not only for his charisma but for his contributions to world peace. Plus he could actually point to Afghanistan on a map.

What a difference a handful of years makes. Now, overseas, we are a joke. A threat. A toxin. We are considered reckless and arrogant and ignorant, dangerous not just to the rest of the world but to the overall health of the planet. No one anywhere understands how a man like Bush can be the leader of the Free World, stolen election or no.

Sure, smarter Europeans know full well that the United States is deeply divided between the pseudo-religious right-wing warmongers who control a tiny cadre of the powerful elite, and, well, everyone else. It does not matter. America's reputation as a powerful and respected diplomatic peacekeeper, as the nation that sets the standards for human rights and economic freedom and choice, is hobbled. Crippled. Is very nearly dead. How quickly can we recover? How much damage has been done? History will tell, and it will be ugly indeed.

Interesting feature interview with Al Gore in Rolling Stone recently. Gore mentions two amazing things: one is the discussion he's had with generals regarding Iraq, with one coming right out and admitting that Bush's disastrous Iraq war will go down as the worst invasion in American history, our greatest misstep, our most costly and debilitating mistake. Among top brass in the know, of this there is little question.

The other was about the discussions Gore's had with various major corporate CEOs about Gore's pet issue, global warming, and how obvious it is that 15 minutes after BushCo leaves office, we will have a radically new global warming policy. In other words, Bush won't do a thing about it in the next two years, despite how obvious it shall become that we are in crisis, simply because he can't risk finally coming out and admitting yet another enormous policy disaster. Not to mention how nearly six years of enviro policy abuse, from air quality to water to forestry to pollution deregulation on all his industrial pals, can't be undone with a smirk and a prayer.

Which is just another way of saying we are currently stuck. We are swirling around the bottom of the drain, clinging on to anything that might hold us from going under for just a little while longer. We have to let the neocon disease run its course, and just pray that at the end of it all the scarring and the pain and damage will not be so permanent, and so hideous, that we can't be seen in public for a decade.

This is where it stands: Bush can in no way risk alienating the ultra-right-wing bonk-job contingent that put him in office (they are, considering Bush's 32-percent approval rating, the only ones left even remotely supporting him -- even though, according to many estimates, they're starting to abandon him, too), and hence all policy and all agenda items from here on out will be even more vicious and desperate in an attempt to shore up the base. Hence trying to mutilate the Constitution to ban gay marriage. Hence attacking the New York Times and claiming newspapers are endangering American lives.

In other words, Bush's latest nasty, Rove-designed salvos and upcoming attacks to save a sliver of power and pride and sneering GOP control are just the beginning.

However -- praise Jesus and pass the scotch -- they are the beginning of the end.