Every four years the naive half who vote are encouraged to believe that if they can elect a really nice man or woman President everything will be all right. But it won't be. Any individual who is able to raise $25 million to be considered presidential is not going to be much use to the people at large. He will represent oil, or aerospace, or banking, or whatever moneyed entities are paying for him. Certainly he will never represent the people of the country, and they know it. Hence, the sense of despair throughout the land as incomes fall, businesses fail and there is no redress.

The Decline and Fall of the American Empire - Gore Vidal


Vidal predicted that America ceased to exist the moment it transferred from the worlds largest creditor to the worlds largest debtor nation. America did not disappear on that day, clocks still ticked the sun still shined and it was business as usual but what was set in motion that day can not be ignored. That snowball is picking up tremendous speed

like I said, i hope they don't expect Canada to hold that bag

Have you watched "You've been warned!" on CNN last weekend? It predicted that the price of oil is going to to go up to $8 / gallon. Then they showed tar sand in Alberta and said that hopefully Canada will hook them up with oil. The problem with that is we will have to pay as much as Americans for our gas. Canada extracts 3 bil barrels / day, but consumes 2 bil barrels at the same time. As Americans need more oil, I predict that we will leave less and less to ourselves (= price goes way up) and more to our South neighbor. AND THAT SUX!

The United States Congress has stepped in to find nearly $300m in humanitarian and reconstruction funds for Afghanistan after the Bush administration failed to request any money in the latest budget.

One mantra from the Bush administration since it launched its military campaign in Afghanistan 16 months ago has been that the US will not walk away from the Afghan people.

President Bush has even suggested a Marshall plan for the country, and the Afghan leader, Hamid Karzai, will visit Washington later this month.

But in its budget proposals for 2003, the White House did not explicitly ask for any money to aid humanitarian and reconstruction costs in the impoverished country.

The chairman of the committee that distributes foreign aid, Jim Kolbe, says that when he asked administration officials why they had not requested any funds, he was given no satisfactory explanation, but did get a pledge that it would not happen again

'Too early'

A spokesman for the US Agency for International Development, which distributes the money, says the reason they did not make a request was that when budgetary discussions began in 2002, it was too early to say how much money they would need.

Jim Kolbe has expressed surprise at the administration's oversight.

The US will spend over $16bn in foreign aid this year.

The main beneficiaries will be Israel, Jordan and a number of anti-Aids programmes.

However, Mr Kolbe says that should there be a military conflict in Iraq, he believes the US will have to find billions more, not only to help Iraq, but also Turkey, Jordan and Israel.

zero- well it seems this is also good.. flash vid showing this little oversight