AUSTIN, Texas -- As Riley used to say on an ancient television sitcom, "This is a revoltin' development." There seems to be a bit of a campaign on the right to blame Newsweek for the anti-American riots in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other Islamic countries.

Uh, people, I hate to tell you this, but the story about Americans abusing the Koran in order to enrage prisoners has been out there for quite some time. The first mention I found of it is March 17, 2004, when the Independent of London interviewed the first British citizen released from Guantanamo Bay. The prisoner said he had been physically beaten but did not consider that as bad as the psychological torture, which he described extensively. Jamal al-Harith, a computer programmer from Manchester, said 70 percent of the inmates had gone on a hunger strike after a guard kicked a copy of the Koran. The strike was ended by force-feeding.

History is slowly being rewritten. Hard to believe yet harder to deny is the increasing frequency and fervor with which those on the religious right are asserting that the United States was founded on Christian principles. Every day, on editorial pages and radio talk shows across the country, more and more unapologetic Christian crusaders are stating as fact fantastic claims of our founding fathers’ providential mission to create a nation based on the Ten Commandments and a Biblical worldview.

You may be tempted to chuckle, but you must not. You must take this seriously, very seriously, for unknown to many of you America has become engaged in nothing less than an epic battle, one whose outcome will shape world history for the next century and beyond. It is not a battle against radical Islamic terrorism, though that is a separate fight we must also win, but a battle that pits reason against faith, the Enlightenment against the Dark Ages, the light against the cave.

Hello,
I am writing (May 13) from St. Louis where I am attending the National Conference for Media Reform. I intend to share what I am learning when I return. I wanted to relate a bit of what I am experiencing so far. You can read about it perhaps see/hear some recorded content at www.freepress.net

There are 2300 people here from all 50 states and 8 countries. It is very clear we are winning the battle for media reform. Numerous legal setbacks have dealt a blow to broadcasters’ efforts to keep their control of our airwaves. Soon the battle will go to Congress where the big media and telecom companies will try to regulate the open digital networks so only they can be the content providers.

The battle ahead * the 2006 Telecom Act for one * will be about the individual right to speak through digital spectrum without having to get the permission of Verizon or any other network owner.

There is a lot of buzz here about “municipal broadband,” cities providing broadband to citizens like a public utility. Philadelphia will be offering citizens broadband for as little as $9 a month. The

At the height of the nuclear arms race, those who marched against it used to say that in the ashes of a nuclear war, no one could tell a capitalist from a communist. "Not necessarily," others would joke, "Richard Perle could tell." For Perle, even total annihilation would have its victors and losers, and he knew which side he wanted to be on.

Perle has continued to preach the virtues of usable nuclear weapons while helping orchestrate our invasion of Iraq. Now he's a key allied strategist of an administration willing to obliterate democracy itself if they don't get their way on judicial nominees and everything else.

I'm thinking of the ease with which Trent Lott, Bill Frist, and other Republicans have talked of a "nuclear option" to intimidate the Democrats into capitulating on every right wing judge that Bush sends to Congress. Although Republicans have backed off from using the phrase since it began polling negative, it may reveal more than they intended about their Party. They doesn't just seek to enact particular programs, but have done their best to turn politics into total war, seeking to annihilate the opposition completely.

Justifying my long years of public devotion to her intelligence and beauty (also the fact that she is the frail hawser linking G.W. Bush to reality), Laura Bush fired off those jokes at the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner, mostly minted by Landon Parvin. And don't start whining about her stuff being "scripted." You think FDR wrote that thing about the Four Freedoms, or Dwight Eisenhower made up that phrase about the military industrial complex? It's what they decide to read aloud that counts, not who wrote it.

Laura chose some edgy lines: "George and I are complete opposites -- I'm quiet, he's talkative; I'm introverted, he's extroverted; I can pronounce nuclear ..."

She accurately called her ghastly mother-in-law "actually more like ... hmm ... Don Corleone," made fun of George's pretensions to being a rancher, had some cracks about male strip clubs and "Desperate Wives."