People and industries that are still ranting and raving about Janet Jackson's breast need to shut up.

We live every single day with our young men and women in danger and dying in a war that is proving itself each and every day to be a thousand times more obscene than a breast being shown on national TV.

If anyone was watching the commercials for the Super Bowl they would have noticed that there is a very real aggression and negative view to women in general and hints of violence and aggression permeated these thirty-second spots.

I, of course blame George Bush and the whole conservative mind set that is going on in this country right now.  Any time we are at war citizens immediately become more, "moral" and conscious.  This is a mechanism used to keep us from looking at the corruption and lies that are going on right under our noses with our government and especially the news programs that give us the information. The bandwagon that has been transported into a witch-hunt over a one-second view of Janet Jackson's breast is more disturbing than anything I can remember.

LONDON -- In a way, it was heartbreaking to watch the Mother of Parliaments deal with half of a particularly nasty problem in an impressive way. It was sad and depressing for an American because the United States seems so unable even to begin to address the first half of the same problem -- how and why were we so badly misled about the reasons for going to war with Iraq. Did our leaders lie to us, knowingly distort or exaggerate? Or was their own intelligence that bad, and if so, why? And why isn't something being done about it.

            In Britain, the debate was over the accuracy of a British Broadcasting Co. -- the state-owned radio and television network -- report that the government had "sexed up" a prewar dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. The BBC's claim was traced to a respected weapons inspector and expert Dr. David Kelly, who was outed by the government itself and who later committed suicide. With that, the uproar became so great -- and you haven't seen uproar until you've seen the British tabloid press in full cry -- that an independent commission was named to investigate the whole mess, and Blair's political life was on the line.

The field of battle is littered with the dead and the dying.

            Senator Joe Lieberman had pinned his hopes on Delaware, the state of ten thousand corporations, whose motto, "nihil a me alienum puto," translates as "We don't care if they make Zyklon B, so long as they file their articles of incorporation in Wilmington." Lieberman barely broke 10 percent and finally quit.

            Dennis Kucinich had pinned his hopes on New Mexico, where his presidential ambitions flowered under the aegis of the New Age goddesses but fell to earth with a meager 5 percent. We cannot officially bury his campaign because a sepulchral silence has fallen over Camp Kucinich, but it surely cannot be long before his campaign gets carried out in a box.

Dear Harvey,

I only wish that someone would write a set of responses to those "shut them up" lines used by the conservatives today, and one of them seems to be "you can't deny that the world is safer now that Saddam Hussein is out of power".

I'd truly like to see an article entitled WE ARE NOT SAFER. It should not only show that there was no threat from Iraq in the first place, that the "gathering threat" argument is mere propaganda, and that there were no weapons of mass destruction. It shouldn't just document that our military, which in 2000 was in it's highest and strongest period of readiness in our history, is now stretched too thin for any real new threat, and that we have thousands of relatively untrained reservists working (and dying) in a desert war zone filled with terrorists. It shouldn't even stop with the fact that Iraq has become America's Palestine, a country occupied by a foreign power, filled with angry displaced people living with the perceived (and perhaps accurate) lies that swift progress will be made to return power to the people and the resources of the country will be used for their

"The trappings of a state of siege trap us in a state of fear ..."

Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis open up their new collection of essays with the extraordinary speech - "A Prayer for America" - that Dennis Kucinich delivered two years ago, when the wound of 9/11 was fresh and the Bush Administration had just begun to serve notice how it intended to exploit it.

Reading Kucinich's words again, and the 50-plus essays that follow it in "George W. Bush vs. the Superpower of Peace," all of them chronicling events that unfolded after the 2000 election, leaves me reeling anew from the hits we've taken as a nation since W assumed control of the office he lost. The two authors, whose investigative pieces originally appeared in the alternative publications Columbus Alive and the Columbus Free Press, have been around a long time, writing and agitating for peace, economic justice and a sane energy policy, among other things. Their book is unstinting in its critique of the Bush crew, dredging up its covert agenda and creepy