David Scheffer is a Northwestern University law professor who was the ambassador at large for war-crimes issues during the Clinton administration. He testified that after the experience of war-crimes tribunals after World War II and international tribunals prosecuting many atrocities over the past 15 years, "one would be forgiven to assume that surely in the United States the law is now well established to enable U.S. courts — criminal and military — to investigate and prosecute the full range of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. . . .

"That, however, is not the case."

Even in a growing economy, only about a third of Americans can be considered upwardly mobile -- meaning they will end up with more inflation-adjusted income and a higher relative economic standing than did their parents. The rest are maintaining their standing or falling behind; about one-third slip down the income scale over the course of a generation.

When specific groups are considered, the news is even more unsettling. Men in their 30s have experienced a sustained slide in their inflation-adjusted incomes, which fell by 12 percent between 1974 and 2004.

And most shocking of all: About 45 percent of middle-income African American children end up falling to the bottom of the income scale over a generation, compared with 16 percent of white children -- meaning that even solidly middle-class African American families lead fragile economic lives.

According to the Pew studies, America has less upward economic mobility than Denmark, Canada or Finland. "In America, more than other countries," says project director John Morton, "the circumstances of your birth have more to say about where you end up than how we tend to think of ourselves."

If you've been listening to Mike Huckabee or John Edwards on the Presidential trail, you may have heard that the U.S. is becoming a nation of rising inequality and shrinking opportunity. We'd refer those campaigns to a new study of income mobility by the Treasury Department that exposes those claims as so much populist hokum.

. . .

The Treasury study examined a huge sample of 96,700 income tax returns from 1996 and 2005 for Americans over the age of 25. The study tracks what happened to these tax filers over this 10-year period. One of the notable, and reassuring, findings is that nearly 58% of filers who were in the poorest income group in 1996 had moved into a higher income category by 2005. Nearly 25% jumped into the middle or upper-middle income groups, and 5.3% made it all the way to the highest quintile.

Of those in the second lowest income quintile, nearly 50% moved into the middle quintile or higher, and only 17% moved down. This is a stunning show of upward mobility, meaning that more than half of all lower-income Americans in 1996 had moved up the income scale in only 10 years.

The United States Bridge Federation has an excellent opportunity to show the world what America stands for by punishing these women. Some people have the wrong idea about what the Bill of Rights really means. In America you have freedom of expression as long as a private organization doesn't own your expression. Peaceful protests are fine as long as they don't embarrass organizations that depend on corporate sponsorship and take place on American soil behind police barricades where they can be videotaped for future use in any trials that might arise.

1. Georgia is in severe drought
2. Governor Perdue decides to pray for rain on Tuesday
3. Forecast called for rain Tuesday
4. Prayer service goes ahead as planned
5. Skies completely clear up immediately following prayer service
6. No rain

Across much of Pakistan on Monday, the government was firmly in command -- squelching protests, blacking out television stations and picking up dozens more political prisoners to add to the thousands already in jail.

But in vast stretches of the country's rugged and wild northwest -- heartland of the Islamic extremist insurgency -- President Pervez Musharraf's army did not have any more control than it did when the military-led government imposed emergency rule nine days ago. In some areas, it had less.

. . .

When the army has tried to conduct operations in the tribal areas, it has paid a heavy price. In August, for example, Taliban fighters commandeered an entire army convoy, taking 250 soldiers hostage without firing a single shot.

The Taliban held the troops for more than two months. They were released the day after Musharraf imposed emergency rule, when the government acceded to Taliban demands and freed nearly 30 of the group's fighters, including several who had been involved in planning suicide bombings.

Advisers to Musharraf have conceded that the main reason he suspended the constitution, fired most of the Supreme Court and declared an emergency was that the court was about to rule him ineligible for another term as president.

“Two weeks ago, when they had their mini-budget, with billions and billions of tax cuts, they couldn't have imagined that the Canadian public would thank them by seeing their numbers drop,” he said.

If the two former candidates do file suit, it would mark another legal chapter for Conservative party lawyers who have seldom lacked for work in the last two years.

It's an unlikely twist for a party whose 2006 election platform promised to "ensure that party nomination and leadership races are conducted in a fair, transparent and democratic manner" and "prevent party leaders from appointing candidates without the democratic consent of local electoral district associations."

A bitter court battle over the nomination process in Calgary West, the riding of Conservative MP Rob Anders, ground on for months and eventually compelled Anders to repeat the nomination process last spring.

Just last month, the party replaced the riding executive in a Nova Scotia riding after the existing members pledged their continuing support for Independent MP Bill Casey, who was expelled from the Conservative caucus for voting against a budget measure.

When scientists first decoded the human genome in 2000, they were quick to portray it as proof of humankind’s remarkable similarity. The DNA of any two people, they emphasized, is at least 99 percent identical.

But new research is exploring the remaining fraction to explain differences between people of different continental origins.

. . .

At the same time, genetic information is slipping out of the laboratory and into everyday life, carrying with it the inescapable message that people of different races have different DNA. Ancestry tests tell customers what percentage of their genes are from Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas. The heart-disease drug BiDil is marketed exclusively to African-Americans, who seem genetically predisposed to respond to it. Jews are offered prenatal tests for genetic disorders rarely found in other ethnic groups.

Such developments are providing some of the first tangible benefits of the genetic revolution. Yet some social critics fear they may also be giving long-discredited racial prejudices a new potency. The notion that race is more than skin deep, they fear, could undermine principles of equal treatment and opportunity that have relied on the presumption that we are all fundamentally equal.

A 2006 report from the Nixon Center, a Washington, D.C., policy institute, quoted a senior FBI official as saying that Canada is the most worrisome terrorist point of entry and that al Qaida training manuals advise terrorists to enter the United States from Canada.

The report concluded that "despite widespread alarms raised over terrorist infiltration from Mexico, we found no terrorist presence in Mexico and a number of Canadian-based terrorists who have entered the United States."

A new explanation for the demise of the Neanderthals, the stockily built human species that occupied Europe until the arrival of modern humans 45,000 years ago, has been proposed by two anthropologists at the University of Arizona.

Unlike modern humans, who had developed a versatile division of labor between men and women, the entire Neanderthal population seems to have been engaged in a single main occupation, the hunting of large game, the scientists, Steven L. Kuhn and Mary C. Stiner, say in an article posted online yesterday in Current Anthropology.

Because modern humans exploited the environment more efficiently, by having men hunt large game and women gather small game and plant foods, their populations would have outgrown those of the Neanderthals.

. . .

At sites occupied by modern humans from 45,000 to 10,000 years ago, a period known as the Upper Paleolithic, there is good evidence of different occupations, from small animal and bird remains, as well as the bone awls and needles used to make clothes. It seems reasonable to assume that these activities were divided between men and women, as is the case with modern foraging peoples.

But Neanderthal sites include no bone needles, no small animal remains and no grinding stones for preparing plant foods. So what did Neanderthal women do all day?

Their skeletons are so robustly built that it seems improbable that they just sat at home looking after the children, the anthropologists write. More likely, they did the same as the men, with the whole population engaged in bringing down large game.

Dr. Stiner said that in her view there was not time for them to change their culture. “Although there may have been differences in neurological wiring,” she said, “I think another very important key is the legacy of cultural institutions about social roles.” Is there a genetic basis to the division of labor that emerged in the modern human lineage? “It’s equally compelling to argue that most or all of this has a cultural basis,” Dr. Stiner said. “That’s where it’s very difficult for people like us and Richard Klein to resolve the basis of our disagreement.”

Musharraf vs Chavez

One wants to ignore his nation’s constitution, the other is a U.S. ally

Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf’s crackdown on dissidents in his country looks a lot like Venezuela President Hugo Chavez’s crackdown on dissidents in his country. Both men seek to exceed their nation’s term limits on presidents.

The difference is one is a dictator, the other is a lion tamer . . .

trying to keep the second-largest Muslim nation in the world from exploding.

Musharraf’s call to hold elections in January as planned was greeted with skepticism, but since it is the nation’s only real hope for survival, I was not surprised.

His crackdown 9 days ago was not a spontaneous act. Rather it was a reaction to attempts on both his life and that of Benazir Bhutto, the once and likely future prime minister.

These were acts of terrorism from the hotbed of terrorism along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border provinces. Martial law under such circumstances as would be the house “arrest” of Bhutto, as a caution against her assassination.

He told a skeptical world press on Sunday that he did so “to save the democratic process.”

I hav emy doubts.

Certainly he at least has an excuse, unlike Chavez who has shuttered the opposition media and pushed through a series of constitutional amendments aimed at giving him unprecedented power for life in one of South America’s oldest democracies.

Does anyone really think that if the Taliban sympathizers with the elections in January that is a step forward for democracy.

US military officials are putting huge pressure on interrogators who question Iraqi insurgents to find incriminating evidence pointing to Iran, it was claimed last night.

. . .

Brose, 30, who extracts information from detainees in Iraq, said: 'They push a lot for us to establish a link with Iran. They have pre-categories for us to go through, and by the sheer volume of categories there's clearly a lot more for Iran than there is for other stuff. Of all the recent requests I've had, I'd say 60 to 70 per cent are about Iran.

'It feels a lot like, if you get something and Iran's not involved, it's a let down.' He added: 'I've had people say to me, "They're really pushing the Iran thing. It's like, shit, you know." '

He denied ever being asked to fabricate evidence, adding: 'We're not asked to manufacture information, we're asked to find it. But if a detainee wants to tell me what I want to hear so he can get out of jail... you know what I'm saying.'

The amount of losses that financial institutions have already recognized - $20 billion – is just the very tip of the iceberg of much larger losses that will end up in the hundreds of billions of dollars. At stake – in subprime alone – is about a trillion of sub-prime related RMBS and hundreds of billions of mortgage related CDOs. But calling this crisis a sub-prime meltdown is ludicrous as by now the contagion has seriously spread to near prime and prime mortgages. And it is spreading to subprime and near prime credit cards and auto loans where deliquencies are rising and will sharply rise further in the year ahead. And it is spreading to every corner of the securitized financial system that is either frozen or on the way to freeze: CDOs issuance is near dead; the LBO market – and the related leveraged loans market – is piling deals that have been postponed, restructured or cancelled; the liquidity squeeze in the interbank market – especially at the one month to three months maturities - is continuing; the losses that banks and investment banks will experience in the next few quarters will erode their Tier 1 capital ratio; the ABCP and related SIV sectors are near dead and unraveling; and since the Super-conduit will flop the only options are those of bringing those SIV assets on balance sheet (with significant capital and liquidity effects) or sell them at a large loss; similar problems and crunches are emerging in the CLO, CMO and CMBS markets; junk bonds spreads are widening and corporate default rates will soon start to rise. Every corner of the securitization world is now under severe stress, including so called highly rated and “safe” (AAA and AA) securities.

Let's have a look at Citigroup. Their equity base is $128 billion. Therefore, their Level 3 assets to equity ratio: 105%  

How about Goldman Sachs?  Level 3 assets are $72 billion, equity base is $39 billion. Their Level 3 assets to equity ratio is 185%. 

Morgan Stanley:  $88 billion in Level 3, equity base is $35 billion. Ratio: 251% (WOW!) 

Bear Stearns:  $20 billion in Level 3, equity base is $13 billion. Ratio: 154%  

Lehman Brothers:  $35 billion in Level 3, $22 billion in equity. Ratio: 159% 

Merrill Lynch: $16 billion in Level 3, $42 billion in equity. Ratio: 38% 

Firstly, we will see hostile takeovers. This means that one blog will ‘buy’ another blog.

However, we’re the ones who grew up with blogging. When we start our careers, we’re already blogging for years and have already created a (humble but still) name for ourselves. What’s more, we’re more technologically savvy than our older colleagues, we’ve got more energy, and we’ve got our productive years ahead of us, rather than behind us.

[T]he whole point of my piece is that I AM complaining that we do NOT waterboard enough. Yes, we need to waterboard more. At the moment, waterbaording [sic] appears to have been banned by both the CIA and the Pentagon. As I say pretty directly in my piece, Bush should reinstate waterboarding publicly and proudly, and I called him deluded for thinking he would gain anything by going along with the Left and ditching waterboarding. . . .

I hope this clears up any confusion you might have had.

Ms Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party (PPP) says thousands of its supporters have been detained in the past two days.

Despite the ban, PPP activists have been trying to reach the venue of the planned rally through alleyways, throwing stones and clashing with police.

The authorities banned the event, saying attackers were trying to target it.

. . .

Meanwhile in the city of Peshawar, police say a suicide bomber targeted the residence of the minister for political affairs, Amir Muquam.

They say two security personnel were killed, along with the attacker, but the minister is safe.

Somali insurgents have dragged the bodies of two dead Ethiopian soldiers through the streets of Mogadishu after a day of heavy battles.

Residents say hundreds of people trailed after them, pelting the corpses with stones, chanting "God is Great".

. . .

"They came here in their hundreds just after dawn and met stiff resistance from the insurgents, using rocket-propelled grenades and machine-guns," resident Seynab Sheikh told our reporter.

The clashes subsided only after the Ethiopians withdrew.

In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.

He told the Associated Press there was a "strong threat" of another suicide bomb attack against Ms Bhutto, who survived an assassination attempt in Karachi on 18 October that killed more than 140 people.

In the procedure, water is used on restrained prisoners to make them feel like they are drowning.

Waterboarding is not a simulation. Unless you have been strapped down to the board, have endured the agonizing feeling of the water overpowering your gag reflex, and then feel your throat open and allow pint after pint of water to involuntarily fill your lungs, you will not know the meaning of the word.

Waterboarding is a controlled drowning that, in the American model, occurs under the watch of a doctor, a psychologist, an interrogator and a trained strap-in/strap-out team. It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water. There is no way to simulate that. The victim is drowning. How much the victim is to drown depends on the desired result (in the form of answers to questions shouted into the victim’s face) and the obstinacy of the subject. A team doctor watches the quantity of water that is ingested and for the physiological signs which show when the drowning effect goes from painful psychological experience, to horrific suffocating punishment to the final death spiral.

Waterboarding is slow motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of black out and expiration –usually the person goes into hysterics on the board. For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch and if it goes wrong, it can lead straight to terminal hypoxia. When done right it is controlled death. Its lack of physical scarring allows the victim to recover and be threaten with its use again and again.[emp mine]

Waterboarding was used during the Spanish Inquisition and by Cambodia's brutal Khmer Rouge regime and the World War II Japanese military,

Ethiopia and Eritrea, stubbornly hostile neighbors for years, are possibly weeks away from a renewed border war that could engulf the volatile Horn of Africa region, according to a report released Monday by a foreign policy research group.

. . .

Eritrea, a tiny country with one of the largest armies in Africa, has about 12,000 troops near the disputed border, as well as 4,000 positioned inside a demilitarized zone that was established by a peace agreement that ended a 1998-2000 border war, according to U.S. government estimates cited in the report.

On its side of the border, Ethiopia, a U.S.-backed military powerhouse, maintains an estimated 100,000 troops who have been carrying out large-scale training exercises in recent months.

Ethiopia also has been building up its air force and jamming Eritrean radar, according to a U.S. government source, who speculated that Ethiopia may strike by air in the Eritrean capital, Asmara, hoping to topple the government there.

An RCMP officer was shot and killed in the Baffin Island hamlet of Kimmirut Monday night and a suspect was arrested hours later.

Const. Douglas Scott, 20, who was originally from the Brockville, Ont., area, was responding alone to a complaint of an impaired driver shortly before 11 p.m. ET, Chief Supt. Marty Cheliak, the RCMP's commanding officer in Nunavut, told a news conference Tuesday.

The dollar's decline to record lows may turn into a ``more violent correction'' that requires the U.S., the European Union and Japan to intervene in foreign- exchange markets, said analysts at Morgan Stanley.

Taliban insurgents have captured a third district in western Afghanistan, local officials said on Monday, defying Western assertions the rebels are unable to mount large military offensives.

The hardline Islamist Taliban relaunched their insurgency two years ago to topple the pro-Western Afghan government and eject the 50,000 foreign troops, expanding their operations further from the mainly Pashtun south where they are strongest.

Western forces say the Taliban's greater reliance this year on suicide and roadside bombs is a result of heavy battlefield casualties they and Afghan troops have inflicted on the rebels and the insurgents' inability to hold ground.

But in the last week, the Taliban have captured three districts in the western province of Farah, bordering Iran, forcing lightly armed Afghan police to flee and defying Afghan and foreign forces to retake the lost ground.

The world's richest model has reportedly reacted in her own way to the sliding value of the US dollar - by refusing to be paid in the currency.

. . .

According to Brazil's weekly magazine Veja, when Ms Bündchen signed a deal to represent Pantene hair products, she demanded that the brand owner, Procter & Gamble (P&G), paid her in euros.

We live in a strange world in which inflation and deflation are galloping rampantly about the globe, both at an increasing pace. Economists aren’t used to such a world, and their instinct is to choose one or the other as the true operating phenomenon, and in that case the default choice is almost always inflation because deflation is so rare.

. . .

So Brahma can accomplish some good, though obviously too much inflation at too rapid a pace can be dangerous. Investors around the world are now chasing after “things” – oil, wheat, gold, copper – anything with tangible value that has some scarcity. One of the reasons tangible things are so valued is that Shiva is out destroying the intangible things like paper assets.

Take the interesting case of Merrill Lynch. In June it was sitting high on the world, the king of the mortgage securitization business. Four months later, Merrill Lynch has been forced to write down about $8 billion of assets, destroying 20% of its net worth and the equivalent of the past four quarters of its profits. Stan O’Neal has lost the chairmanship of Merrill Lynch, and analysts are openly discussing another $10 billion more of write-offs. Some are whispering about the possible collapse of the firm and forced merger with someone stronger.

What hath Shiva wrought? Deflation, certainly, and not just in the mortgage business. Banks, hedge funds, brokers, so-called Special Investment Vehicles (off-balance sheet repositories for bank assets) – they’ve all woken up to an unprecedented and unexpected drop in the value of anything they own that cannot be readily sold. Due to the prevalence of the mark to market process – so useful in the past 15 or so years in allowing the financial industry to declare profits and bonuses when paper instruments were going up in value - financial firms are now struggling to determine how truly deflated their assets are going to be.

Everyone says the banks have not “come clean” about their problems. The truth is, banks don’t really know how bad their problems are. The picture changes from day to day. In August most financial markets had seized up and no one was making prices to each other. Things improved for a while but just this past week the same problems came back with a vengeance. Wednesday last week when the Fed lowered interest rates 25 basis points, it could not actually achieve this goal without injecting $41 billion into the banking system to force rates down. This was the second greatest liquidity injection by the Fed in the last ten years, the largest being right after the 9/11 attacks.

For Fed policy aficionados, the sight of the Fed pushing money into the interbank market to achieve an interest rate cut is extraordinary. It tells us that Fed Funds – the purest and safest form of cash – are another one of those “things” that are now scarce and valued in a world that is highly skeptical of debt instruments. It also tells us that the market-setting level of overnight rates in the U.S. is higher than the Fed wishes it to be.

All too often, it seems, the dictators in the Middle East use the West’s fear of Islamists as an excuse to stay in power and crack down on all of their opponents. Since they can’t shut down the mosques as easily as they can other opposition focus points, the result is that the Islamists wind up being the only organized opposition force standing. That apparently hasn’t happened in Pakistan yet, but prop up Musharraf long enough while he crushes his secular opposition and you can be sure it will.

One of the curious aspects of General Musharraf's speech last night (by the way, it is General, not President, as he first annulled the constitution and then invoked one of its provisions to declare an Emergency, acting not as president but as Chief of Army Staff), at least to this observer, was the general's thoroughly un-self-conscious invocation of two major threats to the security and integrity of Pakistan: terrorism and "judicial activism." It did not seem to occur to the general that, to some observers, even flawed or over-reaching attempts by duly constituted bodies to uphold the law might not be equivalent to mass murder. Judging by the General's actions, judicial activism is a much more sinister and immediate threat than terrorism, as all of his actions since yesterday have targeted the former rather than the latter. Indeed Musharraf's agents managed to pirate the codes to prevent Geo TV from uploading its programs to satellite, while Maulana Fazlullah's FM station in Swat continues to broadcast calls for jihad without impediment.[Emphasis mine]

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has dismissed calls by opposition parties for a public inquiry into reports about cash payments made to former prime minister Brian Mulroney, saying allowing the government to launch probes against former political adversaries was "extremely dangerous."

"Do they really want to say that I, as prime minister, should have a free hand to launch inquiries against my predecessors?" Harper asked reporters Friday in Halifax following a speech to the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples.

. . .

Harper also issued a thinly-veiled warning to the Liberals, saying he could use the opportunity to investigate former prime minister Jean Chrétien's involvement in the controversial sale of a golf course in his Quebec riding — even though the justice system has already dealt with the matter.

In 2000, former ethics counsellor Howard Wilson ruled Chrétien did not violate existing conflict-of-interest rules.

Or, Harper said, he could also launch an inquiry to look into Paul Martin's involvement with Canada Steamship Lines, a company Martin held in trust and later handed to his sons while he was prime minister.

Sorry, Scott. Not even the possibility of world peace can make me give up my bacon. Mmmmmm, bacon.

Nice try! But I'm willing to risk nuclear annihilation of it means I can't have a beer after work.

A worldwide shortage of hops — a key beer-making ingredient — could have a big effect on the taste of specialty brews and force smaller microbreweries to hike the price of their products.

. . .

"It's bordering on disastrous actually. If you don't have hops then you don't have beer," said Titus.

According to the Air Force report, some Air Force personnel mounted the warheads on the missiles (which are obsolete and slated for destruction), and another ground crew, allegedly not aware that the missiles were armed with nukes, moved them out and mounted them on a launch pylon on the B-52's wing for a flight to Barksdale and eventual dismantling. Only on the ground at Barksdale did ground crew personnel spot the nukes according to the report. (Six other missiles with dummy warheads were mounted on a pylon on the other wing of the plane.)

The problem with this explanation for the first reported case of nukes being removed from a weapons bunker without authorization in 50 years of nuclear weapons, is that those warheads, and all nuclear warheads in the US stockpile, are supposedly protected against unauthorized transport or removal from bunkers by electronic antitheft systems--automated alarms similar to those used by department stores to prevent theft, and even anti-motion sensors that go off if a weapon is touched or approached without authorization.

. . .

And yet we're asked to believe that some low-ranking ground crew personnel at Minot AFB simply walked out of a nuclear weapons bunker with six nuclear armed Advanced Cruise Missiles, not knowing what they were carrying, and labored for eight hours to mount those missiles and their launch pylon on the wing of a B-52 strategic bomber without ever noticing that they were armed with nuclear weapons. We're asked to believe that none of those electronic alarms and motion sensors built into the system went off during that whole process.

When I mentioned the automated alarm and motion sensors to Lt. Col. Jennifer Cassidy, a public affairs person at the Department of the Air Force, and asked her how the movement of the six nukes could have occurred without those alarms being disabled, she said, "It's an intriguing question, and it makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck."

About 300 Taliban militants believed to be holed up in a district north of Kandahar City were under siege on Wednesday, surrounded by Canadian troops fighting alongside Afghan and coalition forces, NATO officials said.

In three days of intense firefights in the Arghandab district, coalition and Afghan national forces have so far killed 50 Taliban fighters and wounded 50 more, authorities said.

Insurgents have failed to seize control of a coveted corridor into Kandahar city, leaving only "ineffective" pockets of resistance as they left the scene of a major battle with coalition forces, a Canadian military officer said Thursday.

. . .

"They are trying to leave pockets of resistance but they are being very ineffective and we are pushing them out of the Arghandab district," Landry told reporters at Kandahar Airfield.

About 300 Taliban militants were involved in the fighting over Arghandab, about 25 kilometres north of Kandahar. At least 50 of them were killed and an equal number were injured after three days of fierce firefights with Canadian, U.S. and Afghan forces.

Another candidate, Brent Barr, in Guelph, has also been disallowed from running, Plett said.

Barr, like Warner, is shocked and angry – furious at being told he wasn't campaigning enough and, more importantly, that he was failing to enter information from his canvassing into the central party information registry.

"The Conservative party that I'm from doesn't remove a duly nominated candidate. It's supposed to be based on grassroots principles," Barr said.

Taking a cue from one-time Republican blogger John Cole, President George W. Bush told a group of reporters that he, in fact, was a Democrat and has been for the past seven years.

"I think this goes to show you how twist the Democratic Party has become, in many ways," said Bush. "And we've really seen it all from them. Out-of-control spending, mostly. And hate. Lots of hate."

. . .

"I didn't even tell the DNC about it," said Bush. "But I was, and remain a Democrat. Do you notice that Osama bin Laden is still on the loose? That al-Qaida is stronger than ever? That we can't even score a decisive win in Iraq? That's because a Democrat is in office."

Bush, who was joined by fellow Democrats Dianne Feinstein and Joe Lieberman, said that the Democrats record has been ghastly the past seven years, and that change was needed.

Oil prices have continued their unremitting climb, passing the $96 a barrel mark after figures showed a surprise fall in US crude reserves.

. . .

At the current rate of increase, prices are set to top $100 a barrel during the next week.

Adjusted for inflation, prices are still below the $101 high reached in November 1980.

The Canadian dollar surged to a modern-day high against the U.S. dollar late Wednesday after the Federal Reserve cut interest rates again and oil prices surged to another all-time high.

In after-hours trading, the loonie went as high as $1.0617 US, eclipsing the previous 50-year high of $1.0614 US set on August 21, 1957.

That's the highest the Canadian dollar has climbed since it was allowed to float in 1950.

According to a history of the dollar posted on the Bank of Canada website, the U.S. dollar plunged in 1864 as the Confederate Army approached Washington during the U.S. Civil War and the Union government temporarily shut down gold trading.

On July 11, 1864, the Canadian dollar was worth $2.78 US.