LONDON -- As one who once wrote a book titled "The Golden Age Is in Us," I took myself off on a Saturday to see Paradise, an exhibition at the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square. The traveling show had already been shown in Bristol and Newcastle, attracting 160,000 people, apparently double what they would have expected normally in those galleries. People want to know the lineaments of paradise, whose earthly possibilities utopians used to spend much time usefully describing, though not much anymore.

            The show turned out to be patchy, with the curator scraping together a show from available ingredients, such as a Boucher, a Gauguin, a Constable, a Monet, a Rothko, a couple of Renaissance paintings and so forth. But making my visit entirely worthwhile was one marvelous painting, one of Stanley Spencer's Cookham paintings about the Last Judgment, done in 1934. It shows a dustman resurrected in his beefy wife's arms, she in "ecstatic communion with the dustman's corduroy trousers," as Spencer put it. Other dustmen and women, plus a cat, surround the couple.

            "I feel, in this Dustman picture," Spencer wrote, "that it is

It does appear that some apologies may be in order ... my transmitting to several lists the Al Martin "Raw" allegation that Karl Rove is the grandson of the Nazi-era Gauleiter of Oldenburg was certainly premature, and I do very sincerely apologize for it.

Historian and scholar Michael Rademacher of Germany is the author of a book about Roever. His statement here makes it very unlikely that Roever's recognized or traceable descendants include a grandson.

What we have here is apparently a similarity in name only. My own research also uncovered the fact that Rove is a name known in Scandinavia.

The Recent Counterpunch story is fantastic! Listening to Working Assets this morning, only reinforces that. Am sending the link to ask many people as I can.

Best, Michelle Sura
Columnist, Bolinas Hearsay News

Arnold Schwarzenegger is an authoritarian serial sex fiend and Rush Limbaugh is a drug-addicted racist, and neither one of them is fit to govern.

And for these two role models of the American right, what goes around, comes around.  

For California voters, there should be only one overriding question about someone's candidacy for governor:  how would she or he handle the job?

But with Arnold, it's not so simple.

For starters, there's no indication he knows anything about running a government.  His one memorable advocacy position has been for the termination of the state's Environmental Protection Agency.  He originally said it duplicated the fine job being done by George W. Bush's national EPA.  But he's since backed off.

Otherwise, Arnold's sworn his love for de-regulating the industries that fund the Republican party. That brave stance is underscored by his Chief Advisor, Pete Wilson.  As governor in 1996, Wilson signed the infamous AB1890 utility deregulation bill that destabilized the state to the tune of $100 billion.  

NEW YORK CITY -- Are you confused yet? Two weeks ago, President Bush said, "There's no question that Saddam Hussein had Al Qaeda ties." In September 2002, he said, "You can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam." But Bush also said two weeks ago, "We have no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the Sept. 11."

            That helpful clarification came after Vice President Dick Cheney was asked on "Meet the Press" why he thought 70 percent of Americans believe Saddam was behind Sept. 11. "It's not surprising that people make that connection," said the veep. Back in 2001, Cheney had said it was "pretty well confirmed" that Iraq and the Sept. 11 hijackers had coordinated. But most recently he said, "I don't know" if Saddam was connected to Sept. 11.

            On the thoroughly discredited report that the lead hijacker Mohammad Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in 2001, Cheney said, "We've never been able to develop any more of that yet either in terms of confirming it or denying it." In fact, the report has been disavowed by Czech intelligence, and American intelligence found that Atta