It is always good to know as a citizen that your leaders think everything is under control, for this reason I can only begin to imagine the relief people in the United States must feel when President Bush publicly acknowledges; "I believe that our economy has got the fundamentals in place.” I must admit however that I struggle to understand where the president is getting his data from and I dread to think what things will look like by the time he admits that “fundamentals” are not really “in place”. According to Alan Greenspan “as of right now, U.S. economic growth is at zero”, “home prices will continue to weaken” and a boom in oil prices is going to "go on forever". As he puts it, the US is “clearly on the edge.”

I remember the time when General Motors Corp. was considered a pillar of the American dream, a fundamental of the economic miracle. Now, after reporting a quarterly loss of $722 million, compared with a profit of $950 million a year earlier, and offering buyouts to all of its 74,000 United Auto Workers employees, GM is clearly not a part of the sound fundamentals which President Bush likes to describe. The same seems apparent with MGIC

“I want you to feel that Iraqi life is precious,” he told them.

Well, that’s not going to happen. Here, at the level of basic humanity, the occupation of Iraq — indeed, the entire Bush administration — begins to unravel. We can see this with excruciating clarity as requests for an apology waylay the smooth, legal cover-up (one in a series) of the latest spasm of panic and target practice by Blackwater thugs, which left 17 Iraqis dead in Baghdad’s Nisoor Square in September.

Even the embedded media, so valiant in their attempts to cast the American presence as well-intentioned and, you know, doing the best it can (under the circumstances), couldn’t help but convey, as they reported on the investigation of the Blackwater killings, the humanity of the grieving Iraqis. In so doing, the coverage hinted, unavoidably, at the truth about the occupation: that we are, to put it mildly, the bad guys, that what we’re doing there is barbaric, racist, insane.

The story claiming requiring voter ID's is a Republican plot to steal elections is a real joke. The history of stolen elections is a long proud tradition of Democrats going back to 1960 where legions of the dead voting for Kennedy in Cook county gave him Illinois and the presidency and is beyond dispute. The 2000 and 2004 election had Democrats voting in New York and Florida, and Democrat leaders urging illegals to register so please be balanced when you push these fairy tales of yours. The Democrats are masters of voter fraud and stolen elections.

Frank Fawcett
Cameron Park Ca.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- When Burma's biggest enemy the United States offered to send emergency cyclone relief, it probably sounded like North Korea wanting to send its warships and troops to New Orleans to rescue people in the aftermath of Katrina.

Imagine North Korea simultaneously trumpeting their purported benevolence with public insults against Washington for not warning Americans, or providing them with escape routes, before Hurricane Katrina hit the coast.

To complete the comparison, this through-the-looking-glass North Korea would also be successfully strangling the U.S. with harsh international economic sanctions, fueling widespread unemployment, a shattered banking system and other woes for most Americans in a failed bid to change Washington's policies.

Little wonder why Burma, a xenophobic Southeast Asian country also known as Myanmar, recoiled in silence when Washington said it just wants to help.

Then the Pentagon offered to send its nearby USS Kitty Hawk and USS Nimitz to Burma's cyclone-stricken Irrawaddy River delta.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Wounded and terrified survivors waited for help on Tuesday, picking through flimsy bamboo, thatch and wooden wreckage in villages flattened by Cyclone Nargis, which Burma's military regime said killed more than 22,000 people on the exposed Irrawaddy River delta.

International and local relief agencies, medical teams, food convoys and clearance teams grappled with paperwork, debris-covered roads, swollen rivers and a lack of telecommunications, unable to reach most victims along Burma's worst-hit southern coast.

Punishing winds and horizontal sheets of rain, lifted from the warm Bay of Bengal, caused death and destruction in a diagonal path across the delta after hitting the coast at noon on Saturday and shoving northeast past Bogalay town toward the port of Rangoon 12 hours later.

The weakening storm has since crept further northeast across mountainous terrain on the Burma-Thailand border, but survivors stuck on the delta are now in danger of disease, hunger and neglect.