Headlines from The Daily Show reworked and repackaged for an international audience, to run only on CNN International (outside the US) beginning 2002.09.21. I wonder if international audiences will grasp the subtle frustrations of "whaaaAAAAaaaa?"

This is a long review of two books in The New Republic, but what it says about leadership, the conflict between wealth and democracy, and the vacuousness of criticism today is so compelling it's still a must-read. There's way too much quotable in Alan Wolfe's piece, but let me try one:

In its one year in office, the Bush administration has not merely obliterated the memory of Republicans such as Lincoln and Roosevelt. It has also distanced itself from Eisenhower's warning about a military-industrial complex, from Nixon's attempts to steal the left's thunder by adopting programs such as wage and price controls, and even from Reagan's willingness to back off from right-wing nostrums that had little public support. The Bush administration knows that the tradition of Republican stewardship of the nation came to an inglorious end with the watered-down version represented by the current president's father, and it has no plans to resurrect it. Noblesse oblige is dead; ignobility is to be praised, and obligation is to be shunned. We know that Bush is not the hardest-working of modern presidents--and yet he seems to have made all those fund-raising phone calls, and given all those GOP speeches, and appeared at all those county fairs and professional conventions, not out of some deep sense of duty to the nation, but to reward those who so generously rewarded a man so unfit for office as himself. His mediocrity is not a by-product of his mistakes. It is his very intention. He has seen what historical greatness would cost him and his supporters, and he has chosen another path.

Try finding any of this on your AM radio dial.