One of the nation’s leading pollsters, Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center, wrote a few weeks ago that among Americans “there is little potential support for the use of force against Iran.” This month the White House has continued to emphasize that it is committed to seeking a diplomatic solution. Yet the U.S. government is very likely to launch a military attack on Iran within the next year. How can that be?

In the run-up to war, appearances are often deceiving. Official events may seem to be moving in one direction while policymakers are actually headed in another. On their own timetable, White House strategists implement a siege of public opinion that relies on escalating media spin. One administration after another has gone through the motions of staying on a diplomatic track while laying down flagstones on a path to war.

Several days ago President Bush said that “the doctrine of prevention is to work together to prevent the Iranians from having a nuclear weapon” -- and he quickly added that “in this case, it means diplomacy.” On April 12 the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, urged the U.N.

Every day brings new surprises in the wild and wacky world of the Bush Monarchy. One day its WMD lies, the next day illegal wiretappings, the next day leaks of classified data, and now news that the Busheviks and the GOP may be central figures in the 2002 phone-jamming scheme that kept New Hampshire Democrats from voting in that year's midterm elections, according to court documents.

Phone records show that Bush campaign operative James Tobin made dozens of calls to the White House in the immediate days leading up to New Hampshire's election for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Robert C. Smith. Tobin and two others were convicted in December 2005 of hiring Virginia-based GOP Marketplace on behalf of the New Hampshire GOP to jam another phone bank being used by the state Democratic Party and the firefighters' union to get-out-the-vote for then-governor Jeanne Shaheen. John E. Sununu, the Republican candidate, won 51% to 46%. The phone records show that most calls to the White House were from Tobin, who became Bush's presidential campaign chairman for the New England region in 2004.

George W. Bush is at it again. This time, reports Sy Hersh in The New Yorker, it'll be Iran. (Those of us who guessed it would have been Syria first apparently underestimated his hubris.) And this time he wants to be able to use nukes.

In the novel 1984 by George Orwell, the way a seemingly democratic president kept his nation in a continual state of repression was by keeping the nation in a constant state of war. Cynics suggest the lesson wasn’t lost on Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon, who both, they say, extended the Vietnam war so it coincidentally ran over election cycles, knowing that a wartime President’s party is more likely to be reelected and has more power than a President in peacetime.

This wasn’t a new lesson, however, and Orwell was not the first to note that a democracy at war was weakened and at risk.

On April 20, 1795, James Madison, who had just helped shepherd through the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and would become President of the United States in the following decade, wrote, “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.”

CORNUCOPIA, WI: The Cornucopia Institute has filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking to compel the USDA to provide public records sought through several Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. The Institute is a Wisconsin-based farm policy research group and organic food watchdog.

"We have gone into federal court because the USDA has been unwilling to provide us with important records that would help us and our farmer-members and consumers understand why the USDA has delayed enforcement of key federal organic farming standards for five years," said Will Fantle, the Institute's Research Director. "These are documents that they are obligated, by law, to share with the public."

At issue is the record of correspondence and discussions that have taken place at the USDA between USDA staff and corporate lobbyists, farm organizations, and the public, concerning the requirement that organic dairy cows have access to pasture and obtain a significant portion of their feed from grazing.

The lawsuit comes amidst a growing national debate occurring in the organic farming community over the rise of factory farms in organic dairying,