Democracy Now! | Bernard Kerik: "Political Criticism is Our Enemy's Best Friend"

Newsday.com Published a week ago: "Let this be a warning from someone who's followed the man's ladder-climbing career: He's a personal and professional time bomb the Bushies will learn to regret. Don't say I didn't warn you, guys!"

Fox News has its own view of reality: "The movie 'Polar Express' takes viewers on a fantasy trip to the North Pole. The computer-generated virtual reality that the movie creates is amazing. I saw it Thanksgiving evening.
The next day a friend recorded a 2-minute segment on Fox News Channel about the 'scandal' of the United Nations' oil-for-food program. In its way, it, too, was an amazing fantasy trip into a virtual reality."

TheStar.com - U.S. media still hiding bad news from Americans

Reuters AlertNet - FEATURE-US troops on emotional rollercoaster in Iraq: "Convinced they have killed four to six insurgents in the mortar team, they are joyful. 'It was like Vietnam!' yells one. 'Warriors, dude!'"

Drying Up: The Global Water Privatization Pandemic

Zogby International: "Santa Claus 'a Democrat', Ebenezer Scrooge, Grinch 'Republicans', New Zogby Poll Finds"

Yahoo! News - Administration Misses Drug Import Deadline: "The report, mandated by last year's Medicare prescription drug law, is supposed to examine whether medicines can safely be brought into this country from Canada and elsewhere."

Activists Dominate Content Complaints: "nearly all indecency complaints in 2003 - 99.8 percent - were filed by the Parents Television Council, an activist group"

'The Power of Nightmares': Hyping Terror For Fun, Profit - And Power: "Ford's Secretary of Defense (Donald Rumsfeld) and Chief of Staff (Dick Cheney) believed it was intolerable that Americans might no longer be bound by fear. Without fear, how could Americans be manipulated?
Rumsfeld and Cheney began a concerted effort - first secretly and then openly - to undermine Nixon's treaty for peace and to rebuild the state of fear and, thus, reinstate the Cold War."

The Unofficial Paul Krugman Web Page: "since the politics of privatization depend on convincing the public that there is a Social Security crisis, the privatizers have done their best to invent one"

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | You asked for my evidence, Mr Ambassador. Here it is: "In Iraq, the US does eliminate those who dare to count the dead "

Ohio Papers Getting Nowhere on Vote Fraud Allegations: "we have found very little evidence that anything has happened in the election that didn't happen in every other [Ohio] election"

Sept. 11's Smoking Gun: The Many Faces of Saeed Sheikh This research hasn't been updated in nearly two years, but it's worth a read in light of the recent police killings of two more suspects in the Daniel Pearl case, and Musharraf's visit with Bush this week.

Reporters Without Borders notes that journalists have been denied access to Ghafoor's body, while Farooqi was reportedly shot in the face and identified by his ID card. Of four men allegedly involved in the "shootout," Farooqi was the only one killed, according to an Associated Press report.