I was in South Carolina to haul a 1968 22-foot Airstream back to California behind my Ford 350 one-ton truck. Interstate 40 would have been a logical route west, but out of respect for the late Patton, the bulldog martyr to cop violence, I headed north from Knoxville, Tenn., into Kentucky. Rolling out of Lexington, Ky., toward St. Louis at dusk, I could see graceful horses nibbling at the snow-covered pastures as the sunset turned the western sky red.

All the way across the Great Plains I listened to radio reports of the cold about to roll down out of Canada. There's nothing between you and the North Pole out there on the prairie. "Not even a tree to hide behind," as one 19th-century pioneer homemaker plaintively wrote home to her European mother as she and her family cowered in their sod cabin amidst the terrible blizzards of 1886 and 1887 that finished off the cattle boom and sent Teddy Roosevelt scuttling east from his ranch on the Little Missouri.

The snow and ice finally caught up with me 100 miles east of Denver, where I sat in the lobby of a Comfort Inn listening to a Cherokee

Thirty-seven U.S. states have animal cruelty laws that result in felony convictions. My own state of Ohio does not. What does that tell us about the mentality of humans in the Buckeye State? Well, if the riots I heard about at OSU are any indication – all over a bunch of large men wrestling, grabbing and grinding each other over a football – then the future is bleak.

There are two identical bills in the Ohio legislature right now that would increase the penalties for animal cruelty, House Bill 480 and Senate Bill 221. S.B. 221 passed on December 10, 2002 and is awaiting the signature of Governor Bob “Serial Killer” Taft. I hope a man with so much human blood on his hands will find some compassion for innocent animals. It seems a passive-sounding group “The Ohio Association of Animal Owners” is putting up quite a fight against animal protection legislation in Ohio -- battling the “animal rights terrorists ,” as it were. Contact your state reps and senators and ask them to support the two bills.

“Only in the most direct sense is the Bush administration’s Iraq policy directed against Saddam Hussein. In contrast to all the loud talk about terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, and human rights violations, very little is being said about oil. The administration has been tight-lipped about its plans for a post-Saddam Iraq, and has repeatedly disavowed any interest in the country’s oil resources. But press reports indicate that U.S. officials are considering a prolonged occupation of Iraq after a war to topple Saddam Hussein. It is likely that a U.S.-controlled Iraq will be the linchpin of a new order in the world oil industry. A war against Iraq may well herald a major realignment of the Middle East power balance.“

Following the infamous September 11 terrorist attacks, there’s been an active international debate surrounding the Bush administration’s secret oil negotiations with the Taliban earlier in the summer of 2001. U.S. oil giant Unocal proposed a massive natural gas pipeline project extracting oil and gas from former Soviet Central Asian republics through then-Taliban ruled Afghanistan to its final destination in Pakistan.

The recently revised and expanded English edition of Forbidden Truth: U.S.-Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy And The Failed Hunt For Bin Laden details the Bush administration’s threats against the Taliban a month prior to the 9/11 events. French intelligence experts Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquié suggest that Bush administration threats stating that “Either you accept our carpet of gold or we’ll carpet you with bombs,” led to the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

So let’s join Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Logistics and Technol- ogy Edward C. “Pete” Aldridge at a recent Pentagon press briefing, where he’s addressing concerns about the Pentagon’s bold new plan to have Admiral John Poindexter personally review exactly what you bought in Safeway last week and all the dirty movies you ordered up in Motel 6 last time you were on the road.

Poindexter, you’ll recall, is the bespectacled seadog who, as one of Reagan’s National Security chieftains, instrumented another bold effort in synergy, later known as Iran/Contra, which involved shuffling money and guns along the axis of evil from Iran to the Nicaraguan contras in defiance of U.S. laws at the time. Poindexter got nailed for lying to Congress but was later pardoned.