The weekend before Thanksgiving, as the Taliban fled into the Hindu Kush and America's children flocked to "Harry Potter," the nation's opinion-formers discovered that the Bush administration had hijacked the Constitution with the Patriot Act and the military tribunals. Time magazine burst out that "war is hell on your civil liberties." The New York Times suddenly began to run big news stories about John Ashcroft as if he were running an off-the-shelf operation, a latter-day Oliver North.

On Nov. 15, the Washington Post's Richard Cohen discarded his earlier defenses of Ashcroft and declared the U.S. attorney general to be "the scariest man in government." Five days earlier, The New York Times editorial was particularly incensed about suspension of client-attorney privileges in federal jails, with monitoring of all conversations. For the Hearst papers, Helen Thomas reported on Nov. 17 that Attorney General Ashcroft "is riding roughshod over the Bill of Rights.

In this outburst of urgent barks from the watchdogs of the fourth estate, the first yelp came on Nov. 15 from William Safire. In a fine

Clean Sweep in Michigan Deals Major Defeat to American Family Association, Says HRC

Two Major Miami Victories Help Reverse Legacy of Anita Bryant

Houston Voters Barely Reject Health Benefits for Domestic Partners

WASHINGTON - The Human Rights Campaign today applauded state organizations and activists for winning four out of five ballot measures on gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender equality. The encouraging results show that voters are increasingly rejecting discrimination and want to see all citizens treated fairly, says HRC.

"The smashing success of these campaigns signals a trend where voters are increasingly supporting equality and resoundingly defeating discrimination," said HRC National Field Director Seth Kilbourn. "Nowhere was this more apparent than in Michigan, where voters overwhelmingly rejected a divisive anti-gay misinformation campaign by the American Family Association and chose fairness."

Voters went to the polls yesterday to vote on GLBT issues in Houston, Miami Beach, Fla. and the Michigan cities of Huntington Woods,

AUSTIN, Texas -- The fate of Flight 587 is not just a free-standing tragedy, but almost the last thing we needed. Even if the cause remains a mystery, the edginess quotient just shot back up again.

It has seemed to me the media have been engaging in a slightly unseemly amount of navel-gazing concerning our nerves, with perhaps excessive media temperature-taking of anxiety levels, crooning over stress on the home front, etc. Americans on the front lines of this war, including the NYFD, are handling their jobs without swooning, and from my own travels around the country, it seems to me most of the rest of us are managing to comport ourselves with reason and dignity, whatever our anxiety levels.

Unfortunately, the few nincompoops among us now have fresh occasion for hysteria: the always-timely advice THINK comes to mind. The absolute last thing we need is another round of Arab-bashing.

Our most valuable resource against terrorism in the long-run will almost certainly be Arab-Americans. Among them are the bravest of the brave. Look at why many of them are here: They are Iraqis who fought Saddam

Remember the "third degree"? It used to be the standard way many police departments in this country extracted confessions from criminal suspects. The practice was sharply diminished after the 1931 Wickersham Report prepared by the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, which found that the "'third degree' -- the infliction of physical or mental pain to extract confessions or statements -- was 'widespread throughout the country' and was 'thoroughly at home in Chicago.'"

The methods identified in the Report "range from beating to harsher forms of torture. The commoner forms are beating with the fists or some implement, especially the rubber hose, that inflicts pain, but is not likely to leave permanent visible scars ... authorities often threaten bodily injury ... and have gone to the extreme of procuring a confession at the point of a pistol.'" It further found that the practice of police torture in the United States was "shocking in its character and extent, violative of American traditions and institutions, and not to be tolerated."

So the third degree gave way to the jailhouse snitch and other

Agbiotech and corporate special interests in reaction to stubborn global resistance have stepped-up their propaganda and bullying. This aggression is evident in the media, the marketplace, the trade and diplomatic fronts, the legislatures, courts, patent offices, and the streets of the cities where anti-globalization protests have taken place. Recognizing that a critical mass of youth, consumers, farmers, environmentalists, and public interest nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) all over the world are rejecting, not only the biotech and industrial agriculture model, but also the entire "Free Trade" globalization agenda itself, the Gene Giants and their allies know they are losing ground. Reacting to massive demonstrations in Seattle, Washington, Quebec, Sweden, and Genoa--with anti-Frankenfoods concerns often in the forefront-governing elites have clamped down and repressed youthful protestors, and have begun shifting their meetings to inaccessible locations such as the oil sheikdom of Qatar, where the 142 nation members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) are scheduled to hold a ministerial meeting November 9-13.