When the U.S. Senate last Friday refused to renew the liberticidal Patriot Act -- with its provisions for spying on Americans' use of libraries and the Internet, among other Constitution-shredding provisions of that iniquitous law -- it was in part because that morning's New York Times had revealed how Bush and his White House had committed a major crime.

By ordering the National Security Agency -- the N.S.A, so secretive that in Washington its initials are said to stand for "No Such Agency" -- to wiretap and eavesdrop on thousands of American citizens without a court order, Bush committed actions specifically forbidden by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Passed in 1978 after the Senate's Church Committee documented in detail the Nixon administration's widespread use of U.S. intelligence agencies to spy on the anti-Vietnam war movement and other political dissidents, FISA "expressly made it a crime for government officials 'acting under color of law' to engage in electronic eavesdropping 'other than pursuant to statute.'", as the director of the Center for National Security Studies, Kate Martin, told the Washington Post this past weekend.

And the FISA statute required authorization of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to make such domestic spying legal. Bush and his NSA sought no such authorization before invading American citizens' right to privacy -- a blatant flouting of the law that made both wavering Democrats and libertarian Republicans mad enough to vote against extending the hideous Patriot Act, which thankfully will now expire at the end of the year.

Bush not only acknowledged, and defended, this illegal eavesdropping in a Saturday radio address, he went further in a Monday morning press conference, saying he'd "suggested" it. But as Wisconsin Democratic Senator Russ Feingold -- who, together with conservative Idaho Republican Larry Craig, led the filibuster that defeated the Patriot Act's renewal -- said this weekend, "This is not how our democratic system of government works--the president does not get to pick and choose which laws he wants to follow."

But Bush had plenty of bipartisan help from Democratic co-conspirators in keeping knowledge of this illegal spying from reaching the American public. It began in November 2001, in the wake of 9/11, and -- from the very first briefing for Congressional leaders by Dick Cheney until today -- Democrats on the Senate and House Intelligence Committees were told about it. Those witting and complicit in hiding the crime included Democratic Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, former chairman and later ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, former ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee. They knew it was a crime -- Rockefeller, for example, warned the administration against it -- and yet did not make it public. They were frightened by polls showing security hysteria at its height.

Worse, the New York Times itself was part of the coverup. When it broke its scoop last Friday, the Times in its article admitted that, "After meeting with senior administration officials to hear their concerns, the newspaper delayed publication for a year to conduct additional reporting. Some information that administration officials argued could be useful to terrorists has been omitted."

In other words, the Times sat on its story until after the 2004 presidential elections, when American voters might have been able to stop this criminal conduct by voting out the criminal. Not content with employing Judith Miller as the megaphone for relaying the Bush administration's lies about Saddam's having weapons of mass destruction, the Times again proved its servility to power by not telling its readers it knew of criminal spying on them for an entire year, until the election cycle was long past. Yet this aspect of the Times' story has gone unremarked in the mass media.

Bush's excuses for the illegal eavesdropping are indeed risible. The Times didn't mention it, but of 19,000 requests for eavesdropping the Federal Intelligence Security Court has received from the Executive Branch since 1979, only five have ever been refused. Bush claimed again on Monday that this flagrant flouting of the FISA law was necessary because fighting "terrorists" needed to be done "quickly." Yet, as the Times reported, the secret court can grant approval for wiretaps "within hours."

And the excuse Bush offered Monday morning that this illegal subversion of FISA was necessary to prevent 9/11-style terrorism is equally laughable. As the ACLU pointed out in a study of FISA two years ago, "Although the Patriot Act was rushed into law just weeks after 9/11, Congress's later investigation into the attacks did not find that the former limits on FISA powers had contributed to the government's failure to prevent the attacks."

A Zogby poll released Nov. 4 showed that, when asked if they agreed that, "If President Bush did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq, Congress should consider holding him accountable through impeachment," Americans answered yes by 53 percent to 42 percent. It is therefore not simply extremist raving to suggest that impeachment of George Bush should be put on the table.

Remember that, in the impeachment of Richard Nixon, Article 2 of the three Articles of Impeachment dealt with illegal wiretapping of Americans. It said that Nixon committed a crime "by directing or authorizing [intelligence] agencies or personnel to conduct or continue electronic surveillance or other investigations for purposes unrelated to national security, the enforcement of laws, or any other lawful function of his office."

There was no national security justification for Bush's illegal NSA wiretaps -- which could easily have been instituted by following the FISA law's provisions -- and, instead of being related to "enforcement of laws," Bush's eavesdropping was indisputably in contravention of the law of the land.

And when a president commits a crime in violation of his oath of office swearing to uphold the law, it is time to impeach.

Can Howard Dean be stopped in his bid to become the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee? That's the question the party's establishment has been asking since Dean – who'd said he'd run only if he thought he had the votes to win – jumped into the contest with a media splash last week. Instantly he became the front-runner in the field of seven candidates for party chief and prompted the establishment to embark on an Anybody-but-Dean movement.

It may not be easy for the center-right leaning power elite in the party to bar the route to the doctor from Vermont. The establishment's original candidate, former Indiana Congressman Tim Roemer, entered the race with the puissant backing of the Democrats' two congressional chiefs – Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. The handsome and articulate Roemer got a lot of face time on the tube during the 9/11 Commission hearings, where he proved himself an aggressive questioner and burnished his image on national security – the latter, the party elite thought, made him a bulletproof winner and a great public face for a party still reeling from its November defeat, in which post-9/11 security hysteria played a major role.

But Roemer has been effectively torpedoed by a bizarre alliance – a double-whammy, slash-and-burn lobbying campaign by two of the party's most influential interests: the women's groups and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). The women's groups, led by NARAL Pro-Choice America and the political fund-raising champs at EMILY's List, have targeted Roemer's extensive anti-abortion voting record, and his declarations that the party should show more "tolerance" for abortion foes and needs to eliminate its "moral blind spot" on late-term abortions. (This record has many in the party, including a lot of House members facing re-election, privately questioning Pelosi's judgment in endorsing him.)

AIPAC – the powerful, treasury-rich pro-Israeli lobby, now embroiled in accusations that it was at the center of a spy ring within the Pentagon on Israel's behalf – has been brandishing a list of what it claims are 22 "anti-Israel" congressional votes by Roemer, who's been a critic of the $6 billion plus in U.S. aid to Ariel Sharon and his "Wall of Shame." Many of the party's Jewish big contributors have become even more knee-jerk supporters of Israel's no-compromise conservative government since 9/11. "The DNC's biggest source of large-donor money is from fat-cat Jews," says a veteran Democratic fund-raiser, "and AIPAC's threat – elect Roemer and we'll shut down your Jewish big money – has been incredibly effective."

A gaggle of little-known center-right postulants for the DNC post have failed to catch fire. Donnie Fowler, a callow technocrat from South Carolina (his biggest credential is having managed the ignominiously failed presidential campaign of Gen. Wes Clark), has a Web site featuring a plug for him that begins, "He loves God." Simon Rosenberg, a former staffer for the center-right Democratic Leadership Council, runs the New Democrat Network, the DLC-oriented PAC (some would say it's a DLC front group), and has been relentless in attacking Roemer, whom he saw as the man to beat (a negative campaign that has alienated many committee members). Wellington Webb, a lackluster former Denver mayor and the only African American in the race, hasn't even generated much enthusiasm among black elected officials. And former Ohio party chairman David Leland is so unknown that some DNC members I talked to didn't even know he's in the race.

As Roemer sinks, the man who's emerged in the last week as the party establishment's Stop-Dean candidate is former Texas Congressman Martin Frost. Frost is much appreciated by party insiders for the skill in limiting his party's losses when he ran the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the '96 and '98 election cycles, during which he proved himself an adept fund-raiser and a master of organizational detail – and he's got a powerful lobbying force in the Democratic House members whose seats he helped save. Frost was deprived of his House seat last year after a gerrymander engineered by House Majority Leader and fellow Texan Tom "The Hammer" DeLay. Frost, usually labeled a party moderate, doesn't have some of the heavy baggage that has crippled Roemer: He's won a 100 percent voting-record approval on abortion from NARAL, and – as only the second Jew ever elected to Congress from Texas and a consistent supporter of aid to Israel who's also voted for every pro-Israeli, anti-Arab resolution that came to the House floor – he's more than acceptable to the AIPAC crowd. A fairly reliable liberal on economic issues who has opposed all of Bush's tax cuts, Frost is a hawk on foreign and military policy. A supporter of the Star Wars missile defense system who has voted for bloated military budgets and against cuts at the Pentagon (Texas gets a lot of military-industrial complex contracts), Frost was a big supporter of the war in Iraq, voting to shred the Constitution by approving the blank check to Bush for war and defending the war on the floor of the House.

The mood of the Democratic establishment these days is aggressively centrist, and Frost's candidacy could be boosted by Democratic governors who have an inordinate influence over docile DNC members from their states – like Michigan's Jennifer Granholm, an erstwhile progressive who last month declared the party needs "to push an agenda that is centrist and that speaks to where most people are."

It doesn't seem to matter that Dean's reputation as a liberal is exaggerated. In the lead-up to his DNC candidacy, Dean reiterated in interviews that he was a "centrist" who had governed as one in Vermont; and last year he told my colleague David Corn, "I really have a healthy mistrust of the left as well as the right." After his defeat in the Democratic primaries last year, he ran away from his opposition to the war in Iraq, telling MSNBC's Chris Matthews, "I never did base my campaign on the war" – an attempt to rewrite history which drew guffaws from people not afflicted with Alzheimer's. Dean was infinitely less leftish – and less significant – than the movement that crystallized around him. But Dean's shoot-from-the-lip, unscripted style scares the bejesus out of party powerbrokers and Democratic consultants. And even Joe Trippi, who made a lot of money from TV ad buys when he managed Dean's presidential campaign, showed he didn't stay bought when he endorsed another candidate (Rosenberg) for the DNC job. There's even a move afoot to persuade a fresh Stop-Dean centrist candidate with more charisma than the dull and wintry Frost to enter the fray: most often mentioned is ex-Sen. Bob Kerrey, another ex-9/11 Commission member and current president of New York's New School.

Even so, Dean is the man to beat. At a regional forum for the candidates for DNC chair in Missouri on Saturday, it was Dean whose every sally drew enthusiastic applause from those in attendance. And a poll for The Hotline of 187 of the 447 DNC members released late last week showed a clear Dean-Frost contest – with a first ballot choice of 58 for Dean, 30 for Frost, eight for Roemer, four each for Fowler, Rosenberg and Webb, and one lone vote for Leland, with the rest undecided. (But add all the votes in this poll for the other centrist candidates to Frost, and he edges out Dean.) The DNC meets Feb. 12 to make its choice.

Stay tuned.

Wednesday night's 60 Minutes segment on the controversy over how George Bush got a coveted slot in the Texas National Guard's "Champagne Unit," and what he did during his time in uniform, took those of us old enough to remember back in time to 1972.

It was a time when the country was already sharply divided. Nearly half of Americans had already concluded that the war in Vietnam was dirty, immoral and a hopeless quagmire. It was four years after the CBS news anchor called "the most trusted man in America," Walter Cronkite, had used his broadcast to tell the country that the war could not be won – a declaration that helped drive war president Lyndon Johnson to his decision not to seek another term as a result of the war's unpopularity.

And it was a time when a large number of draft-age males were gaming the system to avoid being sent to Vietnam if they could. Bill Clinton was one. Dubya was another. While college deferments saved many of those who could afford a university education from going, the sons of the working class and the poor were being shipped to the killing fields to decimate a country that had never done us harm – as Muhammad Ali famously put it in refusing induction, "No Viet Cong ever called me nigger." Many of those draftees came home in body bags. Schemers like Clinton and the sons of privilege like Bush avoided those plasticized tombs.

It has been a matter of record for years, after his court testimony on the subject, that Ben Barnes was the enabler of Bush's escape from Vietnam. State legislatures have long been sewers of corruption, and none more so than the Texas legislature of which Barnes was the speaker. An ambitious, equal opportunity suckup and a poster boy for Texas sleaze, by his own admission Speaker Barnes helped not just Bush but the offspring of influential fat-cats and politicians from both major parties find safe refuge from Vietnam in that Texas Guard unit where, as we proles would say, no heavy lifting was required.

On 60 Minutes, Barnes – he of the checkered and scandal-plagued political career – announced he is now "ashamed" of what he did, of the way he misused the power of "determining life and death" in his hands. Is his remorse genuine? Or is it an attempt by Barnes – now a corporate lobbyist and influence-buyer who is still working both sides of the street, and who has bundled over $100,000 in fat-cat contributions to the Kerry campaign – to cloak his televised "confession" in noble terms? I'm sure I'm not the only Baby Boomer with a memory of that bloody era who finds a creature like Barnes distasteful, and his mea culpa an attempt to curry favor with a future Kerry presidency (he agreed to the 60 Minutes interview before Kerry's meltdown in the polls).

What was really new and interesting in the CBS broadcast were the revelations of four hitherto-unpublished documents from Bush's squadron commander, the late Col. Jerry Killian, revealing that Bush disobeyed a direct order to take a physical examination, and tried to sweet-talk Killian into finding a way for him to "get out of coming to drill from now through November" because "he may not have time." Then there's the Killian memo revealing he's being pressured by higher-ups to sugar-coat his review of Bush's absenteeism, a memo entitled "CYA," which – CBS was too prudish to tell us this – is the military abbreviation for "Cover Your Ass." CBS also failed to mention that young Bush's father was Richard Nixon's UN Ambassador at the time.

Just what was Lt. Bush doing during those long months he shirked his duties and ducked orders? He was serving his political apprenticeship as the political director for the U.S. Senate campaign of Winton "Red" Blount, the wealthy head of an engineering and construction firm who was president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce before being appointed Nixon's Postmaster General (where he promptly fired some 33,000 employees as the postal service was put on for-profit basis). Blount was running against veteran Senator John Sparkman, a conservative Southern Democrat who had been Adlai Stevenson 's running mate on the national ticket in 1952.

Blount ran a filthy, race-baiting campaign against Sparkman, focused in part on the issue of busing to achieve school integration. Even though Sparkman had co-sponsored the "anti-forced busing" bill in the Senate, the Blount campaign covered the state with billboards proclaiming, "A vote for Red Blount is a vote against forced busing ... against coddling criminals ... against welfare freeloaders."

Blount was also a ferocious supporter of the Vietnam war (which Lt. Bush's daddy was vigorously defending at the UN), and young Bush was in charge of distributing the smear campaign literature that linked the conservative Sparkman (whom Blount labeled a "liberal" – sound familiar?) to the head of the Democrats' national ticket that year, the anti-war George McGovern. The smear pamphlets accused Sparkman of favoring drastic cuts in the military budget, of abandoning American POWs in Vietnam, and of supporting "amnesty for draft-dodgers" – none of which, of course, was true.

So, while Lt. Bush was avoiding Vietnam through cushy service in the National Guard, then not even fulfilling the duties which his uniform obliged him to perform, and while his commandant was getting pressure from "higher-ups" in the Nixon administration's military machine to let him off the hook, he was learning how to run a pro-war, dirty tricks, mud-slinging campaign. If 60 Minutes had bothered to tell us what Lt. Bush was doing while he was dodging his military commitments – namely, serving a political apprenticeship in sewer politics that included tarring an opponent with sympathy for those who didn't want to go to Vietnam – the odiferous hypocrisy of Bush's time in the Guard would have been startlingly apparent.

The "soft-on-terrorism" charges against this year's national Democratic ticket which were trumpeted at President Bush's Madison Square Garden coronation at the end of August echo the smears of the 1972 Senate campaign on which Bush cut his political eye-teeth. It was mendacious deceit that Bush practiced 32 years ago – as it is today. And that is the real meaning of Bush's time in the National Guard.

Ever since powerful Ohio congressman Wayne Hayes' downfall in the early '70s for putting his mistress, Elizabeth Ray, on the congressional payroll as a "secretary" (even though she couldn't type), it has been a cardinal rule of political survival that elected officials should never pay their paramour from the public coffers. But that's what New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey did – and his ringing declaration, "I am a gay American," was a carefully crafted piece of political prestidigitation designed to distract public attention from his feckless flouting of basic ethical principles.

New Jersey lost hundreds of its citizens in the attack on the Twin Towers – which one used to see from a wide swath of the Jersey coastline. In the post-9/11 climate of security hysteria in the Garden State, it was pure political folly for McGreevey to have anointed his completely unqualified 33-year-old boy toy, Golan Cipel – the governor's male Elizabeth Ray – as the state's anti-terrorism czar, at a salary of $110,000 a year (two and a half times the salary of the average Jerseyan). It was a thumbing of the nose at New Jersey voters.

And when Cipel's lack of any credentials for the job was revealed and excoriated by the press (egged on by a then-Republican-controlled state Senate) – because, as an Israeli citizen, he couldn't get the FBI security clearance the job required for information-sharing with federal Homeland Security authorities – why, McGreevey simply transferred Cipel to another job in the governor's entourage at the same inflated salary and allowed Cipel to keep his coveted office just a few feet from the governor's. All this was scandalously immoral – not because of the "consensual sexual relationship," but because the governor stuck his hand in New Jersey taxpayers' pockets to put his boyfriend on the public tit, betraying the fiduciary responsibilities that came with his oath of office.

Why was McGreevey so reckless? Because being in the closet as a gay person is a culturally-induced mental disease – a form of schizophrenia whose left-brain/right-brain imperatives compartmentalize one's identity and judgment, frequently fatally wounding the latter. For a public figure like McGreevey, the effort required to live a clandestine emotional/sexual life involves a strangulation of one's fundamental identity as a person that is all-consuming. It is psychologically, emotionally and mentally exhausting, all the more so if one is in high political office, in which image is all-determinant. It leads to cracked judgments – particularly about persons, since one's ability to see others clearly is spavined by emotional chaos, and by the need to manipulate others as well as one's most profound self in order to successfully live the lie.

When McGreevey was a boy, this was a land in which same-sex attraction was considered a sickness. Gay people were routinely dragged off to mental hospitals and tortured, hooked up to jumper cables in an effort to electroshock them out of their gayness. Being gay – the word had no visibility then, in McGreevey's pre-Stonewall youth – was condemned by the Catholic Church in which he was raised as the nadir of immorality (as it still is). The macho codes of his strict, Marine Corps father were reinforced by those of the working-class small town of Carteret, where the McGreeveys lived. In those days, there were no positive points of reference for gay youth like McGreevey who knew from their earliest days that they were different. An adolescent had to have heroic powers of resistance to the suffocating pressures to be "normal" (to which McGreevey referred in the only authentic part of his resignation statement) in order to vanquish, alone, the self-hate taught by such a cultural context.

Like many closeted people, McGreevey sublimated his same-sex emotional needs in ambition, an ambition that came to dominate his adult life – reinforcing his closet door even as, over the course of his passage through adulthood, the open cultural space for which gay people had begun at last to fight became ever larger. The conflict between that ambition and the brave new world on the other side of the door took its toll. In the wake of McGreevey's press conference, my old friend Barney Frank, the gay Massachusetts congressman, put it this way: "There was a period in my life when I was clinically depressed, on drugs, seeing a psychiatrist," Barney said of his life as a closeted politician. "I wasn't functional. You can be a dysfunctional member of Congress, but not a dysfunctional governor. In Congress, there are 434 other people. You can't put a governorship on autopilot."

McGreevey's ambition and closet-dysfunctional judgment led him to jump into bed politically with a gaggle of scum, on whom rained a hail of subpoenas – like his chief fund-raiser, the now-indicted real estate developer Charlie Kushner (who this week pleaded guilty to violating election laws, tax evasion and witness retaliation � he blackmailed his own brother-in-law by videotaping him with prostitutes in order to frustrate the prosecution of Kushner's corrupt business dealings). Closet life at McGreevey's political level is expensive. When McGreevey became smitten with Cipel in Israel, it was to the wealthy Kushner he turned, both to sponsor Cipel for a visa and to put his paramour on a Kushner payroll. After public pressure forced Cipel's eviction from supping at the public trough, it was again to Kushner that McGreevey turned. Cipel first went on the payroll of the PR firm that represented Kushner and his businesses. When Cipel proved incapable of keeping that job (he appears to have been a lazy sod), another job was found for him at the lobbying shop that also represented Kushner, this time at a salary increase to $150,000 (and an office just a block from the McGreevey statehouse).

The Kushner-Cipel connection was one scandal too many in the hydra-headed record of McGreevey's ethical delinquencies, too numerous to list here – it was the cherry on this charlotte russe of Balzacian corruption. Combined with the misuse of public funds to facilitate the governor's closeted emotional/sexual life, it was the penultimate reason why McGreevey resigned. And resignation is also a classic tactic by a politician trying to avoid prosecution (there have been several news reports that McGreevey may now himself become a target of the federal investigation into Cipel's alleged extortion – what additional favors did Kushner get as the enabler of the governor's closet existence?).

As a gay man who spent the first 23 years of life in my closet, I have compassion for the tortures McGreevey suffered in his. And I know the feeling of relief, of wholeness, he now savors at no longer having to live the lie – it was palpable at his press conference. I think McGreevey was so sick of the closet that he subconsciously wanted to be caught – hence his recklessness with Cipel.

However, McGreevey didn't come out of his own volition – he was dragged out of the closet by a jilted extortionist who embodied the corruption scandals and ethical abuses that have swirled around McGreevey's tenure as governor. McGreevey should be pitied – but, despite the initial declarations of the leading gay organizations hailing his courage, he is no gay hero. And his unethical conduct cannot be excused by the closet. Even the National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association has finally issued a warning to the straight and gay press, affirming that "it would be neither fair nor accurate to establish a cause-and-effect relationship between McGreevey's acknowledgment of his sexual orientation and his decision to resign." In the latest poll of Sopranoland, only 8 percent of New Jerseyans believe the governor's gay affair was the real reason for his resignation. Or, as P.T. Barnum put it, you cannot fool all the people all the time.

Remember how congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle deplored the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib as "un-American"? Last Thursday, however, the House quietly passed a renewed appropriation that keeps open the U.S.'s most infamous torture-teaching institution, known as the School of the Americas (SOA), where the illegal physical and psychological abuse of prisoners of the kind the world condemned at Abu Ghraib and worse has been routinely taught for years.

A relic of the Cold War, the SOA was originally set up to train military, police and intelligence officers of U.S. allies south of the border in the fight against insurgencies Washington labeled "Communist." In reality, the SOA's graduates have been the shock troops of political repression, propping up a string of dictatorial and repressive regimes favored by the Pentagon.

The interrogation manuals long used at the SOA were made public in May by the National Security Archive, an independent research group, and posted on its Web site after they were declassified following Freedom of Information Act requests by, among others, the Baltimore Sun. In releasing the manuals, the NSA noted that they "describe 'coercive techniques' such as those used to mistreat the detainees at Abu Ghraib."

The Abu Ghraib torture techniques have been field-tested by SOA graduates – seven of the U.S. Army interrogation manuals that were translated into Spanish, used at the SOA's trainings and distributed to our allies, offered instruction on torture, beatings and assassination. As Dr. Miles Schuman, a physician with the Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture who has documented torture cases and counseled their victims, graphically wrote in the May 14 Toronto Globe and Mail under the headline "Abu Ghraib: The Rule, Not the Exception":

"The black hood covering the faces of naked prisoners in Abu Ghraib was known as la capuchi in Guatemalan and Salvadoran torture chambers. The metal bed frame to which the naked and hooded detainee was bound in a crucifix position in Abu Ghraib was la cama, named for a former Chilean prisoner who survived the U.S.-installed regime of General Augusto Pinochet. In her case, electrodes were attached to her arms, legs and genitalia, just as they were attached to the Iraqi detainee poised on a box, threatened with electrocution if he fell off. The Iraqi man bound naked on the ground with a leash attached to his neck, held by a smiling young American recruit, reminds me of the son of peasant organizers who recounted his agonizing torture at the hands of the Tonton Macoutes, U.S.-backed dictator John-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier's right-hand thugs, in Port-au-Prince in 1984. The very act of photographing those tortured in Abu Ghraib to humiliate and silence parallels the experience of an American missionary, Sister Diana Ortiz," who was tortured and gang-raped repeatedly under supervision by an American in 1989, according to her testimony before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus.

The long history of torture by U.S.-trained thugs in Latin and Central America under the command of SOA graduates has also been capaciously documented by human-rights organizations like Amnesty International (in its 2002 report titled "Unmatched Power, Unmet Principles") and in books like A.J. Langguth's Hidden Terrors, William Blum's Rogue State and Lawrence Weschler's A Miracle, a Universe. In virtually every report on human-rights abuses from Latin America, SOA graduates are prominent. A U.N. Truth Commission report said that over two-thirds of the Salvadoran officers it cites for abuses are SOA graduates. Forty percent of the Cabinet members under three sanguinary Guatemalan dictatorships were SOA graduates. And the list goes on . . .

In 2000, the Pentagon engaged in a smoke-screen attempt to give the SOA a face-lift by changing its name to the Western Hemispheric Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) as part of a claimed "reform" program. But, as the late GOP Senator Paul Coverdale of Georgia (where SOA-WHINSEC is located) said at the time, the changes to the school were "basically cosmetic."

The lobbying campaign to close SOA-WHINSEC has been led by School of the Americas Watch, founded by religious activists after the 1990s murder of four U.S. nuns by Salvadoran death squads under command of one of SOA's most infamous graduates, Colonel Roberto D'Aubuisson. Lest you think that the school's links to atrocities are all in the distant past, SOA Watch has documented a raft of recent scandals postdating the Pentagon's chimerical "reform." Here are just a few of them:

In June 2001, Colonel Byron Lima Estrada, an SOA grad who was head of Guatemala's bloody D-2 intelligence unit, was convicted of Guatemalan Bishop Gerardi's murder by bludgeoning – two days after the bishop released a report concluding that the army was responsible for a majority of the 200,000 killed in his country's civil war.

In April 2002, two SOA graduates (Army Commander in Chief Efrain Vasquez and General Ramirez Poveda) helped lead a failed coup in Venezuela. The notorious Otto Reich, a failed Bush-administration appointee who sat on the renamed school's Board of Visitors, met with the generals in the months preceding the coup.

In June 2002, Colombian police arrested SOA graduate John Fredy Jimenez for the murder of Archbishop Isaias Duarte in March of that year.

In 2002, Bolivian Captain Filiman Rodriguez took a 49-week officer-training course at WHINSEC. But in 1999, he'd been found responsible for the kidnapping and torture of Waldo Albarracin, then director of the Popular Assembly for Human Rights, by a commission of the Bolivian Chamber of Deputies.

In 2003, Salvadoran Colonel Francisco del Cid Diaz was a student at WHINSEC. But the colonel commanded a unit that shot 16 residents from the Los Hojas cooperative of the Asociacion Nacional de Indigenas and threw their bodies into the river in 1983. In 1992, the OAS Inter-American Commission on Human Rights recommended prosecution of Col. Cid Diaz for the murders.

Representative Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) has spearheaded opposition in the House to SOA-WHINSEC, but his amendment to the Foreign Operations appropriation killing money for the school (which had 128 co-sponsors) was withdrawn at the eleventh hour last week after a bipartisan agreement limited the number of amendments that could come to the House floor. The last chance for killing the school's money this year now rests with the Senate – but when we called Senators Boxer and Feinstein, past SOA critics, to ask them what they planned to do, the response was a deafening silence from their offices. In light of SOA Watch's extensive lobbying, our elected representatives can't claim they don't know of the school's record on torture. So this episode calls to mind Mark Twain's observation that "there is no distinct, native American criminal class – except Congress."

SOA Watch has called a mass vigil/protest for November 19 through 21 at the school's home in Fort Benning, Georgia, expected to be led by Academy Award winner Susan Sarandon and Dead Man Walking author Sister Helen Prejean.

Lethal new regulations from President Bush's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, quietly issued with no fanfare last week, complete the right-wing Republicans' goal of gutting HIV-prevention education in the United States. In place of effective, disease-preventing safe-sex education, little will soon remain except failed programs that denounce condom use, while teaching abstinence as the only way to prevent the spread of AIDS. And those abstinence-only programs, researchers say, actually increase the risk of contracting AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).

Published on June 16 in the Federal Register, the censorious new CDC guidelines will be mandatory for any organization that does HIV-prevention work and also receives federal funds -- whether or not any federal money is directly spent on their programs designed to fight the spread of the epidemic. (The CDC is the principal federal funder of prevention education about HIV and AIDS, and its head is a Bush appointee).

It's all couched in arcane bureaucratese, but this is the Bush administration's Big Stick -- do exactly as we say, or lose your federal funding. And nearly all of the some 3,800 AIDS service organizations (ASOs) that do the bulk of HIV-prevention education receive at least part of their budget from federal dollars. Without that money, they'd have to slash programs or even close their doors.

These new regs require the censoring of any "content" -- including "pamphlets, brochures, fliers, curricula," "audiovisual materials" and "pictorials (for example, posters and similar educational materials using photographs, slides, drawings or paintings)," as well as "advertising" and Web-based info. They require all such "content" to eliminate anything even vaguely "sexually suggestive" or "obscene" -- like teaching how to use a condom correctly by putting it on a dildo, or even a cucumber.

And they demand that all such materials include information on the "lack of effectiveness of condom use" in preventing the spread of HIV and other STDs -- in other words, the Bush administration wants AIDS fighters to tell people: Condoms don't work. This demented exigency flies in the face of every competent medical body's judgment that, in the absence of an HIV-preventing vaccine, the condom is the single most effective tool available to protect someone from getting or spreading the AIDS virus.

Moreover, the CDC will now take away the decisions on which AIDS-fighting educational materials actually work from those on the frontlines of the combat against the epidemic, and hand them over to political appointees.

This is done by requiring that Policy Review Panels, which each group engaged in HIV prevention must have, can no longer be appointed by that group but must instead be named by state and local health departments. And those panels must then take a vote on every single flier or brochure or other "content" before it is issued.

This means that, under the new regs, political appointees will have a veto and be able to ban anything in those educational materials they deem "obscene" or lacking in anti-condom propaganda. With Republicans controlling a majority of statehouses, and having handed over control of the health departments to folks deemed acceptable to the Christian right and cultural conservatives in many Southern and Midwestern states -- and the rest of public-health departments notoriously subservient to political pressure from the state and local legislatures that control their appropriations -- anti-condom junk science that plays politics with people's lives will rule the day.

Under the new regs, it will be impossible even to track the spread of unsafe sexual practices -- because the CDC's politically inspired censorship includes "questionnaires and survey materials" and thus would forbid asking people if they engage in specific sexual acts without protection against HIV. For that too would be "obscene." (Questions about gay kids have already disappeared from the CDC's national Youth Risk Survey after Christian-right pressure).

So what will be left? Why, the abstinence-only ed programs dear to Bush's heart and to the Christian right. A third of all federal HIV-education money -- some $270 million more in Bush's latest budget -- now goes to abstinence-only programs, almost universally to Christian groups as part of Bush's "faith-based initiatives" (no Jewish or Muslim groups receive any funds). This is a brilliant maneuver -- Bush has turned money earmarked for fighting AIDS into political pork for his Christer base. Much of this money goes to anti-abortion groups masquerading as "women's health" or "crisis-pregnancy" centers. Others receiving such funds engage in religious propaganda -- a federal judge found that Louisiana's federally funded Governor's Program on Abstinence illegally handed out Bibles, staged anti-abortion prayer rallies outside women's clinics, and had students perform Bible-based skits.

Yet Bush's Health and Human Services Department refused demands to audit the Louisiana program, while at the same time conducting repeated harassing audits of effective AIDS-fighting groups that have vigorously protested Bush policies on AIDS, like New York's Gay Men's Health Crisis and San Francisco's Stop AIDS Project. (The latter lost its federal funding earlier this year for sex-ed thought crimes similar to those banned in the new CDC regs -- a pre-emptive warning to all other ASOs to toe the Bush-Christer line -- and subsequently got a $100 contribution from former Bush AIDS czar Scott Evertz, ousted by Bush's theocrats, to help continue what he called Stop AIDS's "good work").

Teaching about condoms doesn't increase sexual activity and certainly doesn't increase unprotected sex, but abstinence-only ed does both. For example, a Minnesota Department of Health study of the state's five-year, abstinence-only program found last year that sexual activity by students taking the program actually doubled, from 5.8 percent to 12.4 percent.

Even more alarming, a study by Columbia University Department of Sociology chairman Peter Bearman of the sex lives of 12,000 adolescents from 12 to 18 years old over a five-year period found unsafe sex much greater among youth who had signed pledges to abstain from sex until (heterosexual) marriage (a key component of most abstinence only-based education programs, which leave gay kids, who can't get married in 49 states, to face a lifetime of chastity).

The Columbia study, released last March and financed in part by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, showed that while 59 percent of teenage males who did not pledge abstinence used a condom during sex, only 40 percent of abstinence-pledging boys used a condom. As Bearman told The New York Times, telling teens "to 'just say no,' without understanding risk or how to protect oneself from risk, turns out to create greater risk" of HIV and other STDs.

In his study, 88 percent of those who had pledged chastity reported having sex before marriage. The large Bearman study confirms one published in the American Journal of Sociology in 2001, which showed that pent-up sexual desire and failure to realize risk exposure among students in abstinence-only programs made them a third less likely to use condoms than others, even if, on average, they began having sex a year and half later.

All those numbers help explain why the new CDC regs are causing outrage and anguish among leaders in the AIDS community. "Kids are being taught that condoms don't work, while real life-saving HIV education is being eviscerated across the board," fumes Sean Strub, founder of POZ, the magazine for the HIV-positive community. And, Strub points out, the Bush administration has hamstrung AIDS organizations, "which are faced with the terrible choice of prioritizing care for existing HIV-positive clients over speaking out against the new CDC rules and risking losing their federal funding."

There's only a tiny window of opportunity to try to get the new CDC censorship rules changed before they go into effect (the deadline for public comments is August 16 -- they may be e-mailed to HIVComments@cdc.gov or faxed to 404-639-3125.) But when the regs begin to be felt, just watch already-rising AIDS infection rates really soar.

Was Halliburton, the oil conglomerate once headed by Dick Cheney, involved in a massive $180 million bribery scheme in Nigeria on Cheney's watch? Hopes that the veil may finally be lifted on yet another odoriferous Halliburton scandal were raised this month, when it was announced that the Securities and Exchange Commission has finally opened a formal investigation into the alleged bribery -- which French authorities have been probing for a year. In Paris, official documents revealing that Cheney might be among those indicted on corruption charges as a result of the French investigation made front-page news there last Christmas -- but not here.

The newly launched SEC probe was undoubtedly sparked by the latest revelations in the French investigation. A Halliburton London lawyer, Jeffrey Tesler -- identified by the French investigating magistrate conducting the international bribery probe as the bagman who controlled the secret $180 million "slush fund" set up (according to French press reports) by a Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) -- admitted in mid-May, under oath, making two payments from the slush fund totaling nearly $1 million to two top KBR executives.

At the heart of the complicated scandal is a $6 billion gas-liquefaction factory -- one of the largest in the world -- built in Nigeria on behalf of oil mammoth Shell by Halliburton in partnership with a large French petro-engineering company, Technip. Nigeria has been rated by the anticorruption watchdog Transparency International as the second-most corrupt country in the world, surpassed only by Bangladesh. The French investigation is the first under a new statute, passed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and ratified by France in 2000, making bribe-giving in the course of business transactions a crime. The U.S. is one of the 30-country member signatories to the OECD conventions, and U.S. law has banned such payments for 25 years.

Judge Renaud Van Ruymbeke, France's best-known investigating magistrate who is heading the French probe of Halliburton, is notoriously independent with a reputation as "untouchable." Together with the famous Spanish investigating judge Baltasar Garzon and the former chief Geneva public prosecutor Bernard Bertossa, he was one of the initiators of a 1996 call for greater international cooperation on corruption cases signed by investigating magistrates from all over Europe and known in judicial circles as the "Geneva Appeal."

Van Ruymbeke -- no stranger to the unsavory world of oil-and-gas politics -- unearthed the existence of the $180 million fund now being investigated by the SEC. He made his name investigating a series of corruption scandals in which politicians of both right and left were convicted -- including a former cabinet member from Jacques Chirac's conservative coalition. Van Ruymbeke stumbled across the Halliburton scandal while investigating the oil giant Elf for corrupting and bribing public officials (a scandal that earned Elf's CEO, Loic LeFloch Prigent, a five-year prison sentence). Elf has had a raft of hand-in-glove dealings with Technip, the French firm now under investigation with Halliburton.

The roaming $180 million now being investigated by the SEC was first paid to the mysterious, 55-year-old Tesler -- who worked for Halliburton at the same time he was financial adviser to the late Nigerian dictator General Sami Abacha and controlled his personal fortune -- through a front company called TriStar that Tesler set up and controlled in the British tax haven of Gibraltar. TriStar, in turn, got the money from a consortium set up for the Nigeria refinery deal by Halliburton and Technip, and registered in the island fiscal paradise of Madeira.

According to Agence France-Presse, Georges Krammer -- a top official of Technip who is cooperating with Judge Van Rymbeke's investigation -- has testified that the Madeira-based consortium was a slush fund controlled by Halliburton (through its subsidiary KBR) and Technip, and that Halliburton insisted that Teslar be the intermediary in the Nigeria deal over the objections of Technip. According to Newsweek, another top Technip official interviewed by the magazine in February (Christopher Welton, chief of Technip's investor-and-analyst relations) confirmed that Halliburton's KBR subsidiary "was the chief principal and decision maker in the venture."

Judge Van Ruymbeke, according to French press reports, believed that some or all of the $180 million which Halliburton/KBR claims were "retro-commissions" were, in fact, bribes given to Nigerian officials and others to grease the wheels for the refinery deal (which required Nigerian government approval) and its construction. One of the many witnesses deposed by Judge Van Ruymbeke is the former Nigerian oil minister Dan Entete -- who is suspected of having used some of the alleged bribe money to buy himself fancy apartments in Paris and a chateau in Normandy. Entete, according to the Journal du Dimanche (a large Sunday paper), confirmed the judge's suspicions that Tesler laundered the money through offshore and secret bank accounts, and that part of the money wound up in dictator Abacha's coffers.

The French judge then launched a series of international search warrants, some of which covered Tesler-controlled bank accounts (some in the names of Tesler family members) in Monaco; Geneva, Switzerland; Madeira; and elsewhere. Documents revealed, among other things, bizarre payments to two top Halliburton/KBR officials by Tesler, according to the investigative weekly Le Canard Enchaine. With those documents in hand, Judge Van Ruymbeke then got Tesler to come to Paris for two days of testimony by telling him: Either you come voluntarily, or we'll issue an international warrant and make you come. In his sworn testimony, the French paper said, Tesler admitted making two payments from the $180 million fund to Halliburton execs: a $385,000 payment to Albert J. "Jack" Stanley, president of KBR and a close associate of Dick Cheney -- a payment which Stanley had sent to a numbered bank account in Zurich, baptized "Amal"; and another payment of $350,000 to top KBR exec William Chaudan -- who had the money routed to an anonymous bank account on the island fiscal paradise of Jersey. (Neither Stanley, Chaudan nor KBR's public relations director responded to calls seeking their comments for this story.)

If these were legitimate business payments, why route them to secret foreign bank accounts? Were they, perhaps, just old-fashioned, Enron-style boodling? Or destined to be laundered as bribes? Or were they ultimately intended for GOP coffers (one of the hypotheses Judge Van Ruymbeke is not excluding)? And where did the rest of the $180 million go?

A Department of Justice inquiry into the slush fund quietly begun earlier this year under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act has gone nowhere -- partly because it has limited itself only to asking Halliburton for documents, partly because the national press has shown almost no real interest in the story (if it did, the pressure on Justice to move more aggressively would be enormous). And obvious conflict-of-interest questions must be raised about any investigation of a company formerly run by Cheney that is controlled by Cheney's political pal John Ashcroft.

"Getting to the Brown and Root of the matter" is an old Texas expression for "follow the money." That's why the SEC's tardy investigation is good news -- as an independent agency it has some insulation from political pressure. But not, of course, as much as the incorruptible Judge Van Ruymbeke -- who last December formally notified the French Ministry of Justice that Dick Cheney could wind up among those eventually indicted in the scandal.

Super Tuesday's glitter is not gold--for there are plenty of warning signs for John Kerry's campaign in the primary exit poll results.

Take the hot-button social issue of attitudes toward lesbians and gays. Even in the two huge liberal states--New York and California--one out of five Democrats were flat-out opposed to both same-sex marriage and gay civil unions. And 27 percent held that view in Maryland. The gay marriage issue will only snowball in importance as the head-to-head Bush-Kerry confrontation becomes full-blown, thanks to the Bush-Rove decision to exploit the anti-gay backlash and the growing and well-financed propaganda campaigns by the Christian right's "independent" organizations.

But it's not only these conservative homophobes who'll be keeping this issue in the headlines. In New York, the Green mayor of New Paltz, N.Y. has just been indicted on 19 misdemeanor counts for performing gay weddings without marriage licenses, while at the same time the Democratic mayor of Ithaca has begun sending same-sex marriage licenses to the state Health Department for approval in the anticipation that they will be refused, in order to set up a court challenge to that refusal. The next city to hit the headlines on this issue may well be the nation's capitol: Washington, D.C.'s mayor--a long-time supporter of gay marriage--has asked the city's corporation counsel to find a way for him to perform gay marriages with the maximum chances of legality.

In Ohio, the numbers of those in Tuesday's primary opposed to any civil approval of gay couples were much larger: "A plurality of Democrats, 38 percent, said there 'should be no legal recognition' of unions between gay people," according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer. That number is highly significant because Ohio was the only November battleground state on the Super Tuesday ballot. If that many members of his own party shun gay couples, Kerry's muddled and self-contradictory positions on the issue will probably play even worse among the non-Democrats crucial to winning other states like Ohio (since the latest poll on the issue, by the Associated Press, shows that two-thirds of the country is opposed to same-sex marriage).

Just last week, Kerry flipped on this issue again: after having opposed an anti-gay marriage amendment to the Massachusetts Constitution in a letter to the state legislature signed by the Bay State's Democratic Congressional delegation just two years ago, Kerry has now endorsed adding a ban on gay marriages to the state Constitution this year. Since Kerry has opposed the anti-gay Federal Marriage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which Bush has now endorsed, his "I'm-for-it-but-I'm-against-it" tap dance on the gay marriage issue makes Kerry look shifty and undermines the Democrats' attempts to make Bush's credibility an issue.

Credibility is already a problem for Kerry in conservative-to-moderate Ohio: the exit polls there revealed that he lost Democrats who said their most important issue was whether a candidate was "honest and trustworthy" by 48 percent for Edwards to 36 for Kerry (and this even though Edwards had neither the money nor the time to put on much of a campaign in the state and was trounced there 52 percent to 34 percent). Moreover, the Kerry likeability gap evident in previous primary exit polls was also on display in Ohio Tuesday night: he lost those who said the most important issue was that a candidate "cares about me" to Edwards 46 to 40 percent.

These are undoubtedly some of the reasons that the Super Tuesday exit polls revealed a significant Kerry weakness among independents: he lost them in Ohio to Edwards by 42 to 39 percent. In Maryland, Kerry won independents by only 3 points. And in Georgia--where a whopping 48 percent of primary voters opposed any legal recognition of either gay marriage or civil unions--Kerry lost independents to Edwards by a huge margin, 51 to 32 percent. Kerry needs to do a lot better among independents than these numbers to have a prayer of beating Bush.

In other Super Tuesday news, Howard Dean's victory in Vermont was not terribly surprising. Not only was there a backlash against media pummeling of the state's favorite son (in endless on-air replays of the "I Have a Scream" speech, among other things), but Vermonters who knew Dean well from his 10 years as governor as a cautious centrist never bought into the national media's portrayal of the doctor as a feisty left-liberal rebel. Indeed, a must-read, detailed behind-the-curtain post-mortem on the Dean campaign in the Feb. 29 Washington Post confirmed my analysis in this space that the positions which Joe Trippi tried to graft onto the governor were never Dean's own. For example, Dean's closest and most influential confidante, longtime chief of staff Kate O' Connor, admitted to Howard Kurtz that the Trippi-crafted attacks on special interests "was not a message that was true to who Howard Dean was."

This has a lot of significance for the future of the Democrats' left-progressive wing, for--as the Feb. 27 Boston Globe reported--there is a "behind-the-scenes struggle" between Dean and Trippi "as they jockey for control of the campaign's bounty of grass-roots supporters." The Dean movement was always to the left of its candidate, so it's more than doubtful that Dean will try to mold the 630,00 people on his campaign e-mail list into a permanent electoral vehicle capable of fighting primaries against more conservative Democrats. But Trippi (known as the "$7 million man" for the amount his consulting firm was paid for creating and placing Dean's ads) seems an equally unlikely catalyst for crystallizing the Deaniacs into a lasting and truly progressive electoral force. Nor is it likely that the Dean blogosphere can coagulate on its own without coherent direction from the top.

And if the Deaniacs are asked to become simply an adjunct of the Democratic National Committee, many of them--particularly the younger and more activist cohorts who were attracted to Dean by his Trippi-scripted, anti-Washington-politics-as-usual message--may simply drop out again from the political process. That's not good news for the Democrats' November chances either.

Doug Ireland is a New York-based media critic and commentator.

Bob Shrum, the pricey Washington hired gun, is the tête pensant of John Kerry's campaign. A veteran of the latter-day JFK's Senate races, Shrummy, as he's known to friend and foe alike, attached himself to Kerry like a mollusk early on in this presidential effort. He's the first to have the senator's ear in the morning and the last to whisper in it at night. Not much gets by Shrummy, who is known for his sharp elbows.

Unless Kerry is caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy (to borrow ex-Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards' colorful metaphor for a campaign-crippling scandal), the junior senator from Massachusetts will be coronated in Boston as the Democrats' nominee. So it's not too early to pose the question: Is Shrum up to beating Karl Rove?

Shrum is a Democratic political consultant so much in demand that before he signed on to Kerry's campaign, inside-the-Beltway journalists were speculating in print on which candidate would win "the Shrum primary."

A Harvard-trained lawyer, Shrum first made his reputation as a gifted speechwriter. He wrote for New York Mayor John V. Lindsay, was the principal pen for Edmund Muskie's 1972 White House run -- then switched to George McGovern when Muskie's campaign imploded. In 1976, he signed up to work for Jimmy Carter -- but after only 10 days he quit and publicly blasted Carter in a letter that hit the front pages, telling Carter "I don't believe you stand for anything other than yourself." Most of all, Shrum crafted Senator Edward Kennedy's speeches for a decade. It was writing for Teddy that cemented the mystique of the Shrum magic touch. The most famous speech Shrum ever wrote was undoubtedly Teddy's 1980 Democratic Convention soliloquy, "The dream shall never die" -- there was hardly a dry eye in the house when it was over.

Shrum eventually left Teddy to capitalize on his connection to the Kennedy name and set up as a consultant and ad maker. His specialty: giving a populist flavor to a campaign. Shrum was the man behind the curtain in Dick Gephardt's xenophobic Japan-and-Korea-bashing '88 presidential campaign. Shrummy tried the same shtick for Bob Kerrey's 1992 White House bid -- it flopped, in part because, as Joe Klein later reported, Kerrey afterward "admitted he didn't believe a word he was saying."

Shrum didn't work for Bill Clinton -- but, during the height of the Monica mess, he faxed a speech to Clinton recommending Bubba admit to "sexual contact" with Lewinsky, say "none of this should have happened," and apologize. Clinton refused to grovel, instead choosing a nonspecific admission to a relationship that "was wrong" in a TV address attacking Ken Starr -- and got impeached. Remember Al Gore's credibility-stretching switch late in the 2000 campaign to "the people against the powerful" theme that briefly revived his sinking fortunes? That was Shrum, brought in as a doctor for the ailing Gore campaign.

Populism has made Shrum quite rich. He took on a little-known but quite wealthy trial lawyer named John Edwards and created the 1998 ad campaign that put Edwards in the Senate. The same year, Shrum took a pile of dough from a super-rich empty suit named Al Checchi and tried to make him governor of California. Shrum campaigns made election-year populists -- and senators -- out of rich-as-Croesus department-store heir Mark Dayton in Minnesota, Goldman Sachs head Jon Corzine in New Jersey, and deep-pocketed lawyer Bill Nelson in Florida.

Shrum, together with snarling strategist James Carville and pollster Stan Greenberg, formed the Democracy Corps to give guidance to Democratic candidates. Their consistent counsel in a series of influential memos: eschew debate over foreign policy, stick to domestic issues. A 2002 memo released just before the Iraq war vote counseled congressional Democrats who wanted to win to support the war -- just as Kerry did. Shrum has an ego as big as the Goodyear blimp, a take-no-prisoners personality that brooks no disagreements, and exudes a boundless self-confidence in his own judgments that has a Medusa-like effect on insecure candidates, who become addicted to Shrummy like Rush Limbaugh to Oxycontin. Shrum, who jumped on board with Kerry in February of last year, is hungry for a presidential winner after so many failed campaigns, and so has allowed little daylight between himself and Kerry ever since.

There was a movement to try to dump Shrum in the wake of Kerry's disastrous speech announcing his candidacy. Kerry's campaign manager, centrist Jim Jordan, and communications maven Chris Lehane (a Clintonista) wanted the speech to attack frontrunner Howard Dean. (Lehane had crossed swords bitterly with Shrum in the Gore campaign, demanding that Gore attack Bush's competence to be president -- which Shrum opposed.) The political press corps started writing about "the Shrum curse."

And there was the matter of Shrum's campaign help for another wealthy candidate -- Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger. There's a bit of hypocrisy in this tale. Shrum and his wife, Mary Louise Oates, have long had a particular interest in the gay-equality movement. When the Human Rights Campaign, the wealthiest gay lobby, endorsed GOP pit bull Senator Al D'Amato of New York for re-election, Shrum and his wife resigned from the HRC board in protest. (The HRC CEO who engineered that endorsement, Elizabeth Birch, is now the Dean campaign's "senior advisor" in charge of the gay vote.) But to Shrum, Arnold's Republicanism was somehow less repugnant than D'Amato's.

However, when the Kerry campaign shakeup came, it was Jordan and Lehane who were unceremoniously fired, while Shrum stayed on the Kerry campaign plane, sticking closer to his tiger than ever. Jordan was replaced by Mary Beth Cahill, like Shrum a former Teddy K. staffer with a sharp-edged, ball-crushing style. Cahill brought in a raft of new staffers, many also with Kennedy links (like communications director Stephanie Cutter).

Was Shrum responsible for Kerry's remarkable turnaround in Iowa that set the senator on the road to nomination? Not exactly, according to Kerry's hometown paper, The Boston Globe, which credits adman Jim Margolis (a member of media consultant Frank Grier's stable) with creating a spot featuring Kerry's Vietnam boat mate Del Sandusky praising Kerry's "unfailing instinct and unchallengeable leadership," an ad that overcame voter ignorance of Kerry's wartime service as revealed in focus groups. At the same time, another Kerry ad slammed candidates who want to raise taxes on the middle class (meaning Dean and Dick Gephardt). This one-two punch, coupled with an infusion of Shrum-style populism on the stump, proved the winning formula.

Shrum is the master of the slash-and-burn negative campaign ad -- a good skill to have when going up against the likes of Karl Rove. But, with his overstuffed bank account and three decades as a Washington insider, does the wealthy Shrum -- now 60 -- still have the common touch necessary to convert the NASCAR dads and soccer moms to the Kerry cause against a White House command skilled at manipulating the electorate? Put another way, can Shrummy make a credible sow's ear out of Kerry and his silk purse? Can Shrum create a campaign that resonates deeply enough with voters to withstand the inevitable gay-baiting attack on the "Boston Democrats" that the gay marriage Massachusetts court decisions affords the Republicans?

The answers may well tell us whether George Bush can be defeated in November.

By defeating Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin in the April 21 first round of France�s presidential elections to become the only candidate in the runoff against conservative President Jacques Chirac, the neo-fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen has dramatically underscored the insidious rise of rampant racism engulfing Continental Europe.

He has confirmed for skeptics the dangers posed by the mushrooming growth of xenophobic, ultra-nationalist parties of the extreme right from the Atlantic to the Black Sea, and shaken France�s democratic institutions to their very core.

One in five French voters, in the privacy of the voting booth, chose one of the two neo-fascist parties (Le Pen�s National Front, which rolled up an impressive 16.9 percent, and the tiny splinter party of former Le Pen deputy Bruno Megret, which got 2.4 percent). Le Pen is the linear descendant of Vichy France�s collaborationists with the Nazis (he got his start in politics as a young lieutenant in the crypto-fascist political formation led in the �50s by Tixier-Vignancourt, the lawyer for Marshal Petain at his treason trial); a notorious anti-Semite (he wrote a forward to the neo-Nazi tract published by Franz Schönhuber, the former SS officer and leader of Germany's fascist Republican Party in the '70s and '80s -- later declared illegal); an ex-paratrooper who tortured Algerians during the former French colony's war for independence; and a politician whose bashing of France's Arab and black African immigrant population is his stock in trade.

Le Pen won nearly a million votes more than his score in the 1995 contest for chief of state, despite the toll the actuarial charts have taken on his traditional core electoral base of nostalgics of Vichy and the Latin mass (and despite the presence of other candidates who nibbled away at his vote, including Megret; Jean Saint-Josse, leader of the Hunting-Fishing-Nature-Tradition Party, which casts itself as the representative of rural interests -- 4.3 percent; and Christine Bottin, an anti-homosexual demagogue of the Catholic right -- 1.5 percent).

Now France is faced with the nauseating choice between Le Pen and the odiferous Chirac, who has been named in eight separate investigations of political corruption, and who has been saved from likely indictment and trial only by his presidential immunity. In the days after Le Pen�s victory, France was engulfed by largely spontaneous demonstrations in the principal cities across the country, the first wave led by tens of thousands of lyceéns, most not of voting age, chanting their favorite slogan: �Votez escroc, pas Facho!� (�Vote for the crook, not the fascist!�).

Chirac will be re-elected without difficulty (and thus stay out of jail for another five years), thanks to the support of the left parties, who have called for �blocking the road� to Le Pen by voting for their recent adversary. This bizarre spectacle is made even more so by the recent revelation that, at a secret meeting during Chirac�s 1988 campaign against Socialist President Francois Mitterand, Chirac sought Le Pen�s support in the runoff. In that same campaign, in an appeal to the racist vote, Chirac referred to the bad �odors� of the immigrants (even the cuisine-mad French didn�t believe him when he later tried to explain that he was only talking about their cooking).

Omnia Gallia in tres partes divisa est, says the adage known to every Latin student -- all Gaul is divided into three parts, and that is true of the French political landscape today. Only a third of France�s registered voters cast a ballot for the traditional governing parties of the left and right; another third either abstained or cast blank ballots (a record in French presidential elections); while the remaining third cast a protest vote for one of the minor party presidential candidates in the unusually crowded field of 16.

This slap-in-the-face rejection of the political establishment of left and right by two-thirds of the potential electorate, which allowed Le Pen his breakthrough, is dominating political debate in the European press and provoking a recomposition of the French political scene. Most significant, however, is the debacle of Jospin�s governing �plural left� coalition. Jospin�s calculation that he could win the presidency (which he lost in 1995 by 6 percent) by governing to the center-right on economic matters was proven wrong.

Instead he created legions of alienated left voters who wanted to kick the Socialists back to the left, inflating the combined score of two Trotskyist candidates -- Arlette Laguiller, perennial candidate for three decades of the ultra-sectarian Workers� Struggle Party; and Olivier Bésancenot, an attractive 28-year-old mailman put forward by Alain Krivine�s less-strident Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) -- to a surprising 10 percent.

The Communist Party in particular paid for its participation in Jospin�s government, losing part of its electorate to the Trotskyists and part to Le Pen. The party that was once France�s largest achieved only a pitiful 3.4 percent -- and by failing to win the 5 percent of the vote necessary to keep its public campaign subsidies (after having lost most of its remaining mayoralties -- a key patronage source -- to the right in last year�s municipal elections) is now on life support. Indignity of indignities, the Communists are even considering merger with their former sworn enemies, the Trots of the LCR, to create a new party �on the left of the left.�

Jospin�s other important coalition partner, the Greens, also saw their score drop to just over 5 percent, losing four points from their last national electoral outing (in the elections for the European Parliament). Le Pen got twice as many working-class voters as Jospin did, according to exit polls, and also a majority of the unemployed (53 percent). And, with opinion polls having shown that between two-thirds and three-quarters of the electorate could find no difference between the programs of Chirac and Jospin, many disgusted left voters simply stayed home or waited for the runoff -- having been assured by all the pollsters that it would be a Jospin-Chirac duel. That too helped Le Pen beat Jospin by just 195,000 votes.

Jospin (and his allies) were thus penalized for having failed to learn the lesson of Italian politics -- that when a government of the left carries out the economic policies of the right (a fact of which Jospin brutally reminded the electorate at the beginning of the campaign, when he agreed to the privatization of the publicly owned electricity company), the subsequent disillusionment opens the door to the extreme right.

Deposed by the race-baiting Silvio Berlusconi and his extreme-right allies (the post-fascist Alleanza Nationale and the xenophobic Northern League), the Party of Democratic Socialism and its coalition partners in Italy have been relegated to the sidelines in the struggle against Berlusconi�s attempt to create a corporate-media state. But in March, a remarkable revolt of Italian �civil society,� disgusted with the flaccid impotence of the traditional left parties, saw the birth of a nearly spontaneous mass movement in protest against Berlusconi�s policies.

A group of women -- some veterans of the 1968 student rebellions, some never before political -- sparked the new protest movement when, in conscious imitation of the tricotteuses of the French Revolution, they created the girotondo -- demonstrations encircling the buildings that house threatened political institutions (the Justice and Education ministries, the headquarters of Italy�s three public television networks and the like).

The agitation, spread by word of mouth and the Internet, was given a further boost when the popular film director Nanni Moretti used the microphone at a rally sponsored by the center-left Olive Tree coalition to denounce its political leadership for their feeble irrelevance. Soon, intellectuals (normally absent from Italian public life) and former judges evicted by Berlusconi for trying to pursue political corruption and tax fraud cases against him and his business associates -- all emerged as leaders of the new movement, which organized huge demonstrations in the major cities on the peninsula, their ranks swelled by people from all social classes.

This unexpected revolt created the climate in which Sergio Cofferati, the leader of Italy�s largest union federation (the CGIL) felt confident enough to call a one-day, eight-hour general strike on April 15, to protest Berlusconi�s attempt to eliminate a law protecting workers from being fired �without just cause.� The strike paralyzed the entire country and drew 3 million Italians into the streets to demonstrate -- and Cofferati has now become the most important leader of the civil contestation.

April also saw good news from Hungary, where Istvan Csurka�s extreme-right MIEP party won less than 5 percent of the parliamentary vote -- but only because conservative Prime Minister Viktor Orban had adopted its xenophobic and ultranationalist themes, including making menacing expansionist noises about the ancient Hungarian lands of the Sudetenland and Transylvania. Thankfully, Orban was beaten by a left-center coalition of the Socialists (ex-Communists) and the Free Democrats (ex-refuseniks) -- if only by an eyelash.

But on the same day Le Pen won in France, the German land of Saxony-Anhalt saw the electoral crushing of the incumbent Social Democrats -- considered a harbinger of defeat for Gerhard Schrö

In Slovakia, the ultra-nationalist SNS of former prime minister Vladimir Meciar is mounting in the polls after a cosmetic political facelift (and thanks in part to Orban�s threats). And even in the normally tolerant Netherlands, the resignation en masse of Socialist Prime Minister Wim Kok�s coalition government over the Srebrenica affair creates even more fertile ground for the parliamentary ticket led by openly gay xenophobic demagogue Pim Fortuyn in the upcoming Dutch elections, which will undoubtedly see him enter into parliament with a bloc of seats large enough to become the balance of power.

Europe�s turn to the right continues with a vengeance.

Editor's Note: To find out more about the rise of the right in Europe, read Doug Ireland's "Europe's Right Turn," and Dario Fo's Mussolini's Ghost.

Jared Nayfack was 11 years old and living in the heart of conservative Orange County, California, when he told his best friend from school that he was gay -- "and my friend then came out to me," says Jared. When he turned 15, Jared celebrated his birthday by coming out to his parents and closest friends. By then, he was attending a Catholic high school, and on a school-sponsored overnight field trip, Jared and his schoolmates decided to spend their free evening at the movies seeing The Rocky Horror Picture Show. "Some of us had decided to get all costumed up to see it, and when the teacher who was with us saw us she threw a fit: She forced me to get up in front of the other twenty-one students -- many of whom I didn't know -- and tell them I was gay. Most of the kids supported me, but later that evening, one of them -- a lot bigger than I was; he had a black belt in martial arts -- came into my hotel room and beat me up. I was a bloody mess, and he could have killed me if another student hadn't heard my screams and stopped him." Instead of punishing Jared's assailant, the school's dean suspended Jared and put him on "academic and behavioral probation." "The dean told me that even though I was forced to tell the others that I was gay, I was at fault because I'd 'threatened the masculinity' of the kid who'd beat me up," Jared recalls.In fear, Jared transferred to a public high school, the South Orange County High School of the Arts. "I thought I'd be safe and could be out when I came there -- after all, it was an arts program. Boy, was I wrong. Within two weeks people were yelling 'fag' at me in the halls and in class. I was dressed a little glam, if you will -- nothing really offensive, just a little makeup. But when I went to the principal to complain, she did nothing about the harassment and told me that I was 'lacking in testosterone,'" Jared explains. To fight back, Jared and some gay and straight friends formed a club called PRIDE, which made a twenty-five-foot-long rainbow banner to put up in school decorated with multicolored hands and the slogan, hands for equality (the banner was banned). The club also made beaded rainbow bracelets that many students wore -- "even a lot of the football players," according to Jared -- but the club was forbidden by the administration "because it didn't have anything to do with the curriculum." The harassment got worse -- so bad that Jared had to leave school two months before graduation. "I had to fight to be before I could study," Jared explains, "but I left there feeling really let down and like a failure -- we hadn't gotten anywhere."When he enrolled as a freshman at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Jared says, "I was embraced by a huge and loving queer community. They told me, 'It's OK to be angry' -- that's something I hadn't heard before." Feeling a bit burned out, for his first six months at Santa Cruz Jared avoided gay activism -- until the day he attended a conference of gay youth. "There were kids pulling together -- I just knew I had to help out." He attended a youth training institute run by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN); began working with Gay/Straight Alliances (GSAs) at two high schools near the university; edited and xerox-published an anthology of adolescent writings about AIDS; created a performance piece, as part of his self-designed major in "theatrical activism," about homophobia with a cast of seven straight boys to the hit song "Faggot" by the rock group Korn; and now speaks to gay youth groups around the country. Today Jared is only 18.* * *Jared's story is fairly typical of a whole new generation of lesbian and gay adolescents: brave, tough and resilient, comfortable with their sexual identity and coming out at earlier ages, inventing their own organizations -- and victimized by violence and harassment in their schools. Says Rea Carey, executive director of the National Youth Advocacy Coalition (NYAC), an alliance of local and national service agencies working to empower gay youth: "Five or ten years ago, kids would go to a youth service agency and say, 'I need help because I think I'm gay.' Today, more and more they say, 'I'm gay and so what? I want friends and a place to work on the issues I care about.' Being gay is not their problem, it's their strength. These kids are coming out at 13, 14, 15, at the same age that straight people historically begin to experience their sexuality. But they are experiencing more violence because of that."Quantifying the number of assaults on lesbian and gay youth isn't easy. In most states, gay-run Anti-Violence Projects are woefully underfunded and understaffed (when they have any staff at all), and students are rarely aware of them, according to Jeffrey Montgomery, the director of Detroit's Triangle Foundation and the spokesman for the National Association of Anti-Violence Projects. Teachers and school administrators most often don't report such incidents. After pressure from state governments sympathetic to the Christian right, the Clinton/Gore Administration's Centers for Disease Control removed all questions regarding sexual orientation from its national Youth Risk Behavior Survey. Now the only state to include them is Massachusetts.There, according to its most recent questioning of nearly 4,000 high school students by the Massachusetts Department of Education, kids who self-identified as gay, lesbian or bisexual were seven times more likely than other kids to have skipped school because they felt unsafe (22.2 percent versus 3.3). A 1997 study by the Vermont Department of Health found that gay kids were threatened or injured with a weapon at school three times more than straight kids (24 percent versus 8). And a five-year study released in January by Washington State's Safe Schools Coalition -- a partnership of 74 public and private agencies -- documented 146 incidents in the state's schools, including eight gang rapes and 39 physical assaults (on average, a single gay kid is attacked by more than two offenders at once).With the antigay crusades of the religious right and the verbal gay-bashings of politicians like Trent Lott legitimizing the demonization of homosexuals, it is hardly surprising that homophobia is alive and well among gay kids' classmates. In November 1998, a poll of 3,000 top high schoolers by Who's Who Among American High School Students -- its twenty-ninth annual survey -- found that 48 percent admitted they are prejudiced against gays, up 19 percent from the previous year (and these are, as Who's Who proclaims, "America's brightest students").All this means that, as Jon Lasser, an Austin, Texas, school psychologist (and heterosexual parent) who has interviewed scads of gay kids for his PhD thesis, puts it, "Many have a form of post-traumatic stress syndrome that affects their schoolwork -- the fear of getting hurt really shakes them up and makes it hard to concentrate."* * *The mushrooming growth of Gay/Straight Alliances in middle and high schools in just the past few years has been the gay kids' potent response. There is strength in numbers: GSAs break the immobilizing isolation of gay students and raise their visibility, creating a mechanism to pressure school authorities into tackling harassment; educate teachers as well as other students; create the kind of solidarity among straight and gay kids that fosters resistance to bigotry and violence; provide meaningful safe-sex education; and help gay adolescents to speak and fight for themselves. The GLSEN national office has identified at least 400 GSAs, but since the GSA movement has been student-initiated and many self-starting groups are still not in touch with national gay organizations, the figure is undoubtedly much higher. There are eighty-five GLSEN chapters around the country, and while GLSEN began seven years ago primarily as an organization of teachers and other school personnel, it is making an increasing effort to include students in its organizing.Another strategy that has frightened reluctant school administrators into steps to protect gay youth has been lawsuits by the kids themselves. The first on record was brought by a 16-year-old Ashland, Wisconsin, student, Jamie Nabozny, who in 1996 won a $900,000 judgment against school authorities who failed to prevent Nabozny's torturous harassment from seventh through eleventh grades, including beatings that put him in the hospital. Currently there are nine similar suits pending, including cases in Illinois, Washington, New Jersey, Minnesota, Missouri and several in California (one brought by the first-ever group of lesbian student plaintiffs, in the San Jose area). But as David Buckel, the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund's staff attorney specializing in school matters, points out, "A lot of people call and say 'I can't afford to go to court,' or 'We live in a small town and I can't put my family through that,' or 'If we sue and win it'll raise our neighbors' taxes and we'll get bricks through our window.'" (And in late December, Orange County gay students filed a lawsuit against school officials, seeking to lift their ban on a GSA at El Modena High School on the grounds that the interdiction violated their First Amendment rights.)* * *In a civilized country, one would think, legislation to protect kids from violence and harassment in their schools should be unexceptionable. However, despite a loopy New York Times editorial praising the Republican Party for a kinder-and-gentler attitude toward gays, the GOP has taken the lead in opposing state-level safe-schools bills protecting gay kids. In Washington last year, for the second year in a row, openly gay State Representative Ed Murray -- a progressive Seattle Democrat -- led the fight for his bill that would have added lesbian and gay students to a law forbidding sexual and malicious harassment in the schools. "We had the votes to pass it this year in the House, which is split forty-nine to forty-nine -- we had all forty-nine Democrats and picked up sixteen Republicans. But because of the tie in party membership, all House committees are co-chaired by Democrats and Republicans, and the GOP education committee co-chairman refused to let the bill out of committee. If it had been sent to the Senate, where Democrats have a majority, it would have passed."The way in which the GOP continues to use same-sexers as a political football to advance its chances could be seen clearly in California, where Assemblywoman Sheila Kuehl (an open lesbian who co-starred in TV's Dobie Gillis series in the sixties) saw her Dignity for All Students Act beaten in the Assembly by one vote. GOP front groups "targeted only Democratic Latino legislators from swing districts in an unprecedented campaign-style effort," says Jennifer Richard, Kuehl's top aide. This included prayer vigils at their district offices, very sophisticated phone-banking that switched those called directly into Assembly members' offices to complain, mailings in Spanish to every Hispanic-surnamed household and full-page ads costing $8,000-$12,000 each in local papers. The mailings and ads featured photos of a white man embracing a Latino, a black man kissing a Latino and a Latino kid in a Boy Scout uniform, and called on voters to "stop the homosexual agenda," which "doesn't like the Boy Scout pledge to be morally straight." These ads were reinforced by a $30,000 radio ad blitz by the Rev. Lou Sheldon's Traditional Family Values Coalition in the targeted legislators' districts.Despite a Youth Lobby Day that brought 700 gay students to Sacramento to support the Kuehl bill, two Latino Democrats caved in to the pressure, insuring the bill's defeat by one vote. But in a shrewd parliamentary maneuver, its supporters attached a condensed version as an amendment to an unrelated bill in the senate, which passed it -- then sent it to the assembly, where it was finally approved by a six-vote margin (making California the first state to codify protections for gender-nonconforming students, who experience the most aggressive forms of harassment). Similar bills died or were defeated last year in Colorado, Delaware, Illinois and Texas (in New York, one introduced by openly gay State Senator Tom Duane is still bottled up in committee).The difference such bills can make can be seen in Massachusetts, which has had a tough and explicit law barring discrimination against and harassment of gay students since 1993, and where its implementation benefited from strong support by then-Governor William Weld (a Republican) and his advisory council on gay and lesbian issues. Massachusetts is the only state that encourages the formation of gay student support groups as a matter of policy -- which is why there are now 180 GSAs in the Bay State alone. There, the state Safe Schools program is run by GLSEN under a contract with the state's Education Department, and it organizes eight regional conferences each year for students who want to start or have just started their own GSA.There is a skein of service agencies in large cities that operate effective programs for gay youth, including peer counseling, drop-in centers, teacher training, AIDS education and assistance for victims of violence (for listings of and links to groups for gay youth, visit The Nation's website at www.thenation.com). But these programs are all dreadfully underfunded and in many places, like Texas, are denied access to the schools. Also, gay youths themselves often complain that there is a lack of support from the adult gay movement. Says Candice Clark, a 19-year-old lesbian who graduated in 1998 from a suburban Houston high school, "A lot of the older gay community here is fearful of the youth as jailbait, since so many people think that if you're gay you're a pedophile." She also notes that the failure of Congress to pass ENDA -- the Employment Non-Discrimination Act for lesbians and gays -- means that adults, expecially teachers, can be fired if their sexual orientation is discovered.* * *Richard Agostinho, 22, who founded the Connecticut youth group Queer and Active after the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, and who serves as one of the NYAC national board's youth members, says the local adult-led groups "are not building relationships with young people -- they need to go out and recruit them and engage in mentoring of sorts. There are plenty of young people who could add emotion and power to this movement. But if a 17- or 18-year-old goes to a meeting of a local group or community center in a roomful of 30- or 40-somethings, the adults frequently fail to create an atmosphere in which the youth feel comfortable contributing. It's a problem very similar to involving people of color or anyone not traditionally represented at these tables."The urgency of putting the problems facing gay adolescents on the agenda of every local gay organization is underscored by a study released last September by GLSEN. It showed that of nearly 500 gay students surveyed, almost half said they didn't feel safe in their schools: 90 percent reported verbal harassment, 46.5 percent had experienced sexual harassment, 27.6 percent experienced physical harassment and 13.7 percent were subjected to physical assault.But this new generation of adolescent activists won't be ignored. For, as Jared Nayfack says, "When you do this work you open up a whole area of your heart and soul, and when you stop, you feel it deeply. Activism is addictive -- you don't ever want to stop unless there's nothing left to do ... and that will be a long time."Resources:Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network This site offers answers to students' questions about same sex marriage and the implications of the recent Vermont decision. It also features a primer for principals and educators, a resource library and national gay-rights news. Students interested in joining GLSEN's Student Pride Network or learning about ways to fight anti-gay bias in K-12 schools can also call 212-727-0135 or email studentpride@glsen.org. http://www.glsen.orgNational Youth Advocacy Coalition NYAC is the only national organization focused solely on improving the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth through advocacy and education. Youth and adult allies can also access information or NYAC's referral service to youth groups across the country by calling 202-319-7596 or emailing nyac@nyacyouth.org. http://nyacyouth.orgDoug Ireland, who writes frequently on politics for The Nation, is a former columnist for the Village Voice and the New York Observer.