What blessings, what outrage.

The Amish child said, "Shoot me first." The survivors counseled forgiveness and prayed for the soul of the murderer. This was all too solemn and too real to be purveyed by the mainstream media as picturesque curiosity, horse-and-buggy morality in the age of the Hummer.

The Amish modeled courage and healing for the rest of America. They modeled a peace built not on intimidation and conquest but on respect and forgiveness. They shut down the cynics for almost a week. They grieved, they buried their dead and they reached out to the killer's widow.

Kneel with them, mourn with them, rise up angry.

The body count in our nation's schools over a period of barely a week was eight innocents: students, a teacher, a principal, shot point-blank by psycho-terrorists with easy access to personal arsenals. Another eight were injured and at least one of them, an Amish girl, is in grave condition. More than 400 people have died in school violence in the last dozen years, many hundreds of others have been wounded, and uncounted close calls - like the one this past Monday morning - have been averted.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Nobody else seems to be asking the obvious question about Susan B. Ralston, former administrative assistant to Jack Abramoff and, until last week, assistant to Karl Rove. She got hired by Rove at $64,700 after the 2004 election and then received a raise to $122,000. Why? I've never gotten a 100 percent raise. Did you? Is this common?

“The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves.” ---attributed to Dresden James

A caricature of a man who has wrought havoc in virtually every endeavor throughout his miserable existence has found his calling. Exuding false bravado and contrived machismo, he has swaggered his way into the deepest recesses of America’s collective psyche, fulfilling the inculcated need for a “manly” patriarch. Chest thumping, bullying, and ultimately unleashing the Hell of the Pentagon’s death machine upon those brazen enough to resist conversion to the American Way, King George IV has succeeded the tyrant American Revolutionaries toppled over 200 years ago.

Moments after hearing about North Korea’s nuclear test, I thought of Albert Einstein’s statement that “there is no secret and there is no defense; there is no possibility of control except through the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of the world.”

During the six decades since Einstein spoke, experience has shown that such understanding and insistence cannot be filtered through the grid of hypocrisy. Nuclear weapons can’t be controlled by saying, in effect, “Do as we say, not as we do.” By developing their own nuclear weaponry, one nation after another has replied to the nuclear-armed states: Whatever you say, we’ll do as you’ve done.

In early summer, with some fanfare, officials in Washington announced the dismantling of the last W56 nuclear warhead -- a 1.2 megaton model from the 1960s. Self-congratulation was in the air, as a statement hailed “our firm commitment to reducing the size of the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile to the lowest levels necessary for national security needs.” That’s the kind of soothing PR that we’ve been getting ever since the nuclear age began.

With "The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders' Cure for Royalism," John Nichols has produced a masterpiece that should be required reading in every high school and college in the United States.  Unlike several recently published books, this is not an argument for impeaching Bush, not a list of charges, not a rough draft of articles of impeachment.  Rather, "Genius" is a history and portrait of the practice of impeachment, a practice that has been used far longer, far more often, and with far greater importance than most of us imagine.

Nichols makes an overwhelming case that the regular use of impeachment is necessary for the survival of our constitutional government, that impeachment proceedings usually have beneficial consequences even if unsuccessful, that promotion of impeachment is not nearly as politically risky as is failure to do so when it is merited, that a move to impeach Bush in the U.S. House would be greeted with enthusiastic public support, and that failure to impeach Bush would contribute to an ongoing dangerous expansion of executive power from which our system of government might not recover.