Let's talk about replacing GWBush in 2004.

Within days of the July 2002 fire, Secret Service and other federal agents were at Patrick's house here. His mother, Denise Collier, said they told her that the young men had "blown up the president's boat" in what might have been "a terrorist act." One federal firearms agent told her, Ms. Collier recalled, that the incident had raised "national security concerns."

Patrick then found himself in a highly unusual predicament. Instead of being tried in local juvenile court, he was turned over to the United States attorney's office in Portland, tried in Federal District Court and found guilty. He was given the maximum sentence allowed: 30 months incarceration, followed by 27 months of probation. He was then sent to a maximum security juvenile facility in Pennsylvania on the order of the federal Bureau of Prisons.

LAPD: 'Pre-emptive' arrests made to get terror info
Federal source says investigation 'trying to beat a ticking clock'

Tuesday, December 23, 2003 Posted: 4:42 PM EST (2142 GMT)

Police search a car as part of stepped-up screening at Los Angeles International Airport.


LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- In response to the national terrorism alert, Los Angeles police have made "a number of pre-emptive arrests," a high-ranking LAPD source said Tuesday.

Those arrests were made in the past 48 hours and included people who came to authorities' attention after the September 11, 2001, al Qaeda terror attacks in the United States.

The source stressed that none has been charged with any terrorism-related offense but were rounded up on unrelated charges -- in one case, credit card fraud -- in an effort to get information about possible threats. None of those picked up was identified.

A federal law enforcement source told CNN a number of grand jury subpoenas have been issued in the Los Angeles area in the past few days as part of a "massive investigative effort" -- with a real sense, the source said, of "trying to beat a ticking clock."

In the heart of the Bluegrass, a Bible Belt preacher is rallying people to political action around what he calls "basic religious values." Think you can describe his politics? Think again. This man of the cloth wants "regime change" in Washington.

The Rev. Albert Pennybacker, a Lexington, Ky.-based pastor, is head of the Clergy Leadership Network, a new, cross-denominational group of liberal and moderate religious leaders seeking to counter the influence of the religious right and to mobilize voters to change leadership in Washington. Pennybacker, affiliated with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and a pastor of 35 years, is tired of the conventional wisdom that equates religiosity with conservatism. Nationwide, he says, the religious right often squeezes out the left in public debate.

If there is anything that might be accurately termed "anti-American" in France today, it's pretty much confined to far-left critics who view the excesses of the Bush Administration as inherent in the American system and not as the radical anomaly they are. By the same token, the pro-interventionists who, like Bush himself, level indiscriminate charges of anti-Americanism at those who oppose those excesses make the similar mistake of presuming the current Administration to be representative of American values. The greater sensitivity to anti-Americanism in France today may, paradoxically, be due in part to the Bush Administration, whose radicalism has made it more important than ever to distinguish the nation from its policies. This was one of the fundamental points made in another much-discussed book of the past year, Après l'empire (translated into English as After the Empire), by Emmanuel Todd, a demographer and sociologist whose 1976 book, The Final Fall, correctly predicted the breakup of the Soviet sphere. Todd writes:


Thinking reasonably about America in no way means trying to get rid of it, diminish it, or undertake any other fantasy-filled violence toward it. What the world needs is not that America disappear but that it return to its true self--democratic, liberal, and productive.

It is equally important to distinguish prejudice from sincere dissent. Many of the millions who filled Europe's streets last winter wear Levi's and Nikes, watch American movies, read American authors and probably eat more hamburgers than they would like to admit. They oppose not America but the politics of force, coercion and unregulated capitalism promoted by a small handful of people at the summit of world power. Their massive turnout was as much a message to their own conservative leaders--especially in Italy and Spain--as it was a challenge to the United States.