And now this response to Bush's inaugurial speech, from our very best friend, the Canadians:
"This is the boldest, most visionary and most ambitious, but also the most hubristic and vainglorious foreign policy program ever enunciated by an American president. Even World War I leader Woodrow Wilson only wanted to remake Europe.

It was impossible not to be impressed. Phrases like, "The moral choice is between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right," are the kind of inspirational language the world community needs to lift its sights above the timid and the tired.

It was equally impossible not to be scared as hell. This wasn't a vision for a Brave New World. It was Bush's personal vision. The world's role is to listen, to agree and then to applaud.

Right after Bush's speech, White House aides scurried around to tell reporters that Bush hadn't meant what he'd said. Or, since presidents are never wrong, that the reporters had been wrong to write that he was presenting his personal vision of a re-ordered world."

And from the South America:
"all the evidence suggests that the administration's actions abroad, and particularly in Latin America, will continue to be marked by a unilateralism stunning in its arrogance and an ignorance equally appalling in its breadth. It is to be hoped that a day will eventually arrive when Washington can begin to recoup the damage to its hemispheric reputation inflicted by this president's explosive combination of ideological fervor, a reckless disregard for the truth and a staff more adept at serving up elemental neoconservative dogma than sound foreign policy"

It's been almost a month since I posted a link to the latest distressing bit of news about our not so democratic, free or good governmental doings and consequences.

Since Jan 1:
I'm disturbed by the willingness of our "elected" to plan the dismantlement of a social "security" net to give more money to the gambling establishment of "Wall Street" . It feels like a governmental replacement of "humanity" by "greed". I've been following Josh Marshall for most of this unfolding.

Then I watch in sadness and disbelief as the Bush adminstration moves the country "from the frying pan into the fire". From Ashcroft who thinks all nude statues should be clothed and that the "Patriot Act" did not encrouch on personal liberties to Gonzalez who thinks that "torture" is OK for the president to ratify and that the Geneva Convention is a irrelevent contract. From Colin Powell who at least had the gumption to warn the President "you break it, you own it" and some humility, to C. Rice who for a smart lady... lies and covers major misdeeds. Wonder who we'll get to replace the younger Powell at the FCC. My bets are on someone who will continue the dismantling of a free press.

What I wonder is, how much worse does it get before we hear a ROAR from an "opposition" party rather than the lone voices.

And now following Seymour Hersh's New Yorker article "Annals of National Security - The Coming Wars" ... it seems like we are becoming a terrorist state against the world and our own people. Tom Dispatch has an excellent thread on this.
"Put another way, the legal theory that first came to light in the "torture memos" that emerged from the White House Legal Counsel's office -- that, in his role as commander-in-chief in "wartime," the President was essentially unfettered by Congress or the courts and could act as he wished -- turns out to reach way beyond the issue of torture"

The BBC aired a video last fall, The Power of Nightmares, about the use of FEAR by the government to control the people and maintain their power. "The Power of Nightmares assesses whether the threat from a hidden and organised terrorist network is an illusion. In the concluding part of the series, the programme explains how the illusion was created and who benefits from it."