Newspapers across the United States and beyond told readers Wednesday about sensational new statements by a former top assistant to Colin Powell when he was secretary of state. After interviewing Lawrence Wilkerson, the Associated Press reported he “said that wrongheaded ideas for the handling of foreign detainees after Sept. 11 arose from a coterie of White House and Pentagon aides who argued that ‘the president of the United States is all-powerful,’ and that the Geneva Conventions were irrelevant.”

AP added: “Wilkerson blamed Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and like-minded aides. Wilkerson said that Cheney must have sincerely believed that Iraq could be a spawning ground for new terror assaults, because ‘otherwise I have to declare him a moron, an idiot or a nefarious bastard.’”

Such strong words are headline grabbers when they come from someone widely assumed to be speaking Powell’s mind. And as a Powell surrogate, Wilkerson is certainly on a tear this week, speaking some truth about power. But there are a few big problems with his zeal to recast the public record: 1) Wilkerson should have spoken up years

The stench of panic in Washington hangs like a winter fog over Capitol Hill and drifts down Pennsylvania Avenue. The panic stems from the core concern of every politician in the nation's capital: survival. The people sweating are Republicans, and the source of their terror is the deadly message spelled out in every current poll: Bush's war on Iraq spells disaster for the Republican Party in next year's midterm elections.

Take a mid-November poll by SurveyUSA: In only seven states did Bush's current approval rating exceed 50 percent. These consisted of the thinly populated states of Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Alabama and Mississippi. In 12 states, including California, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Michigan, his rating was under 35.

You have to go back to the early 1970s, when a scandal-stained Nixon was on the verge of resignation, to find numbers lower than Bush's. Like Bush, Nixon had swept to triumphant reelection in 1972. Less than two years later, he turned the White House over to Vice President Ford and flew off into exile.

On Tuesday, November 29, 2005, well-known Columbus attorney, author, and radio host Dr. Bob Fitrakis will announce his bid to be the next Governor of the State of Ohio.  The announcement will be made on the west side of the State Capitol building along High Street in Columbus starting at 12:30 pm.  Dr. Fitrakis has written several books and numerous newspaper columns on the irregularities and outright fraud that were rife during the last few elections in Ohio.  Winner of many community and journalism awards, he has been endorsed by the Green Party of Ohio and will be seeking the party's nomination as candidate for Governor next spring, along with two other fraudbusting veterans: Anita Rios (Lt. Governor) and Tim Kettler (Secretary of State).  Together they will spearhead the Green Party campaign to clean up the sleaze that has become so entrenched with the two major parties and their big money patrons.

Where Dick Cheney clearly just infuriates because he is the sort of vicious spit-worthy heart defective (in all ways) citizen who should no more be in public office than Jeffrey Dahlmer, they trot out Condolessa to sound academic in her defense of why Saddam Hussein was all along a "threat" and how we are rewriting history to insist on them not fabricating evidence to hype the menace. She Gets an "F."

No - Saddam was not shown to have had WMDs, he had no mobile long range ballistic missiles that could hit us in the US hidden on trucks, he had no navy really to write home about, he had no nuclear fissile material or yellow cake or anything that looked like a nuclear program-not even for civilian use above the usual- and no, he had nothing directly to do with 9-11. But they tried to make us believe otherwise.

One of the most wildly inaccurate pre-election polls in memory, which was off by over 40 points on some predictions, may prove to be deadly accurate as an indicator of the problems we face as a nation with our voting process - and democracy itself.

But you won't learn this by reading the Columbus Dispatch, the newspaper that conducted the poll just prior to Ohio's Nov. 8 election. The paper's public affairs editor conceded to me that the poll results the Dispatch wrote about, wrongly indicating massive public support for several proposed constitutional amendments, were, in essence, the journalistic equivalent of the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.

"Much like the American space program, both our triumphs and our shortcomings are out there for all to see," Darrel Rowland said in an e-mail. Unlike NASA, however, which did manage to find that faulty O-ring, the newspaper's powers that be don't seem particularly interested in learning how their big public flop occurred. "We'll certainly double-check the poll mechanics," he said, "but see no reason to discontinue a methodology that's proven accurate for decades."