The art of the deal is a media dream: Savvy achievers get to the top. Guile and artifice -- even outright deception -- may well be part of the game, but there's nothing like success. One way or another, money and centralized power end up calling the tunes. Or so the media script often goes.

From its beginnings a half-century ago, the Pacifica radio network set out to be quite different. Listeners tuned in for something else -- a much more inclusive embrace of human creativity and political dissent. Like most endeavors, there were failures and crises along the way. But even with Pacifica's tumultuous history, the last three years have been times of extraordinary upheaval.

Two words -- "censorship" and "democracy" -- summarize much of what has been at stake in the national battle over Pacifica.

Now, some very good news: Democracy is winning.

As the owner of noncommercial radio stations based in five metropolitan areas -- San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, New York and Washington -- the nonprofit Pacifica Foundation operates with a national

From Frederick Douglass to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for more than a century, the dominant political perspective within the Black Freedom Movement was “integrationism.” This political approach emphasized the deep commitment and sacrifices African Americans had made to enrich and expand America’s democracy.

African Americans had, afterall, fought in all of America’s wars, and had made enormous social and economic contributions to the nation’s welfare. Blacks believed in the Constitution and the inherent fairness of democratic institutions. Therefore, according to this argument, it only was reasonable to accept blacks as being full civil partners in the construction of the American nation. All structural barriers which impeded the free and fair access by African Americans to economic development, political decision-making and individual advancement should be eliminated.

AUSTIN -- And a happy New Year to all the friendly folks at the Henry Cisneros' special prosecutor's office, now coming up on its seventh year. Cisneros, who left office five ago as Clinton's housing secretary, is back in San Antonio doing good works in the area of affordable housing. But his special prosecutor David Barrett, like Ol' Man River, he just keeps rolling along.

Cisneros, having long since pleaded to a misdemeanor and paid a $10,000 fine, is no longer a target of investigation, but Barrett is reportedly still investigating someone who did or did not tell him something about Cisneros. It's bound to be a high crime, since the entire flap was over whether Cisneros had lied to the FBI -- not about whether he had given money to his ex-mistress (an affair that was both over and public knowledge well before Cisneros ever went to Washington) -- but about how much he had paid her.

So the moral here is: Don't ever lie to the FBI about how much you have paid an ex-mistress, even if it's common knowledge that you have done so. The Cisneros special prosecutor costs the taxpayers over $2 million

AUSTIN -- The president has taken to saying peculiar things again. "There are no shades of gray in our war on terrorism," he announced the other day. Excuse me, but if you've ever seen anything grayer than some of our warlord allies in the Northern Alliance, please write at once.

I especially like the reports that the warlords are now calling in American air strikes on one another. "A City, Free of Taliban, Returns to the Thieves," reports The New York Times. "Jalalabad, a city in the hands of thugs and crooks." I'd say that's grayish.

"Not over my dead body will they raise your taxes," announced the president. Well, we know what he meant. According to bipartisan budget experts, we're back in deficit for at least the next several years. That didn't take them long, did it? Nobody is proposing raising taxes, but some fiscally prudent voices have been raised on behalf of postponing some of the generous tax cuts the Republicans gave to the rich in April. You may think Americans are smart enough to tell the difference between raising taxes and postponing tax cuts, but apparently Republicans don't. You can already see

First the tumult of war, now the fruits of peace. From Afghanistan comes bracing news about the new era of tolerance, now that the Taliban have, at least for the time being, slunk off the stage of history. Shortly before the turn of the year, Justice Minister Karimi declared Afghanistan's new government will still impose Sharia Islamic law on its people, but with less harshness.

The details were fleshed out by Judge Ahamat Ullha Zarif, who has told the French news agency Agence France Presse that public executions and amputations will continue, but there will be changes: "For example, the Taliban used to hang the victim's body in public for four days. We will only hang the body for a short time, say 15 minutes."

Kabul's sports stadium, financed by the International Monetary Fund, was where the Taliban used to carry out public executions and amputations every Friday. No longer. "The stadium is for sports. We will find a new place for public executions," he said.

Judge Zarif makes it clear that the ultimate penalty will remain