Then there's me.

I hate the pill. Hormonal contraception, which covers birth control pills and nearly every other highly effective method on the market, murders my libido. I say that with as much certainty as I can, given the murky, multi-variate thing that is the human sex drive. I've experimented with several pills, hoping that any slight variation in hormonal ingredients would yield a contraceptive that worked without neutering me. Each doused my interest in sex as completely as the other. Although a libido-destroying pill does wonders to lower your pregnancy risk, it's also done a number on my relationships, self-esteem and emotional well-being.

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Dubbed the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, the agenda provided the administration with much-needed P.R. at the very moment it was preparing to defy international will by invading Iraq. But from the start, Bush has been inexplicably stingy and mind-bogglingly slow to act.

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With fighting global poverty leading the agenda for the rest of the world this year, the World Bank job will be a critical one. And Bush's choice of Wolfowitz will likely be controversial. The global development community has to wonder exactly what it says about American plans for the World Bank that Bush has named a leading war planner to head the world's leading development agency. Will countries opposed to the Iraq war, including European nations that have to approve his appointment, ever get over Wolfowitz' key role in planning the invasion? Will Wolfowitz' appointment cement even more the impression that the Bank is but a tool of the U.S. government, and not in fact a multi-lateral agency? Do we imagine George W. Bush even cares about any of that, given his most recent appointment of U.N. hater John Bolton to the post of U.S. ambassador to the U.N.?

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"Vice President Dick Cheney tried to shore up Polish support for the war in Iraq in meetings Wednesday with President Aleksander Kwasniewski ... While some European nations have refrained from committing troops, Poland has been a trustworthy partner in the war in Iraq. But the Polish defense minister, Jerzy Szmajdzinski, has said that he thinks Polish troops should stay in Iraq only until the end of this year."

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GOP Seeks Donations to Get Bush Plans 'Past the Liberal Media'

"(AP) The Republican Party is following up record fund raising for President Bush's re-election effort by asking donors to finance its efforts to get Bush's message 'past the liberal media filter' to the public.

Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman sent a fund-raising e-mail today telling supporters donations are needed to help Bush advance his second-term agenda.

'The president has great goals for our country: a growing economy, strong homeland and national defense, tort and Social Security reform and affordable health care. But we need your help to get the president's message past the liberal media filter and directly to the American people,' wrote Mehlman, Bush's 2004 campaign manager. Mehlman asked donors to give $25 or more."

But wait, isn't that what Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher are for?

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The DoD Web site lists the following Feith accomplishments: defense policy advice in the global war on terror; development of a new U.S. global defense posture; global peace operations; policy guidance to the 21st century defense strategy; Defense Department aspects of the Moscow Treaty on strategic offensive nuclear weapons and the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review; and Defense Department work on the enlargement and reform of NATO.

We remember other things about Feith's tenure at the Pentagon. A few Feith flashbacks:

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Q: Last month in Jordan a gentlemen named Ali Hattar was arrested after delivering a lecture called "Why We Boycott America." He was charged under Section 191 of their penal code for slander of government officials. He stood up for democracy, you might say. And I wonder if here and now you will specifically condemn this abuse of human rights by a key American ally. And if you won't, sir, then what in a practical sense do your fine words mean?

PRESIDENT BUSH: I am unaware of the case. You've asked me to comment on something that I didn't know took place.

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Q Mr. President, do you think it's a proper use of government funds to pay commentators to promote your policies?

PRESIDENT BUSH: No.

Q Are you going to order that 

PRESIDENT BUSH: I expect my Cabinet secretaries to make sure that that practice -- there needs -- doesn't go forward. There needs to be independence. And Mr. Armstrong Williams admitted he made a mistake. And we didn't know about this in the White House. And there needs to be a nice, independent relationship between the White House and the press, the administration and the press. And -- so no, we shouldn't be going forward. Yes, sir?

Q So Mr. Williams made a mistake, but --

PRESIDENT BUSH: Who?

Q Mr. Williams made a mistake. Did the Department of Education make a mistake?

PRESIDENT BUSH: Yes. They did.

Q And what will happen to the people that made this decision?

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"The U.S. Army expects to keep its troop strength in Iraq at the current level of about 120,000 for at least two more years, according to the Army's top operations officer," the Post reports. To maintain the current commitment for that long, the military leadership is "looking for ways to dip even deeper into reserve forces -- even as leaders of the reserves have warned that the Pentagon could be running out of such units."

Later in the story, you get more details on how overtaxed the reserves are -- and how the Pentagon can even think about tapping further into a command that is, by its own chief's admission, rapidly deteriorating. The proposal: By cutting training time and considering extending reservists' total active duty tours.

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About those donors, Public Citizen crunched the numbers and found that, as of last week, corporations and corporate execs pitched in 96 percent of the funds for the inaugural festivities (the nine inaugural balls, and so on). The majority of these industry benefactors are also, not surprisingly, Pioneers, Rangers or "Super Rangers," who have bundled up campaign money for Bush. The industries who've spent the most to wine and dine with the GOP this week: the finance and investment and energy industries.

And just what do the titans of industry expect in return? What they've had from the day George W. Bush stepped into office: access and influence. As Public Citizen points out in its analysis of inaugural contributions, numerous "significant contributors" to the inaugural fund "have already received many legislative and regulatory favors from the Bush administration, and ... stand to get even more in the second term."

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Of course, few would argue against "freedom" and "liberty" for as many people as possible. But many Americans -- a majority -- have registered disapproval of Bush's preferred method of "expanding freedom," at least in Iraq. Ruy Teixeira notes that "By 2:1 (67-32) the public agrees that '[d]emocracy and freedom in Iraq are important, but the war has cost the United States too much in lives and money already to stay much longer.'"

As for the notion that an America led by George W. Bush can show the world "the meaning and promise of liberty," the BBC poll from earlier this week shows just how the rest of the world feels about that: 58 percent of people polled in 21 countries think Bush makes the world more dangerous, and 47 percent see U.S. influence in the world as largely negative.

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Majorities of these otherwise "optimistic" folk also disapprove of pretty much everything Bush is doing and think nothing will change for the better anytime soon. Majorities reject Bush's handling of the economy and Iraq; two-thirds think Bush will leave us with an even larger deficit than he did the first time around; and majorities say they expect no improvement in health care, education, or reducing drug costs for the elderly in the next four years. This is what we're optimistic about? Talk about setting the bar low. For the record, the people polled by the Wall Street Journal and NBC seemed less Pollyannaish: Less than half are hopeful about the next four years, and 58 percent expressed little confidence in the president's policies.

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"Instead of stabilizing the country, national elections Jan. 30 are likely to be followed by more violence and could provoke a civil war between majority Shiite Muslims and minority Sunni Muslims, the CIA and other intelligence agencies predict, according to senior officials who've seen the classified reports."

And it looks like Bush's Iraq policy is bringing at least some people together, but unfortunately they're not the people we should be uniting. It's even more clear, based on new assessments, that terrorists are using post-invasion Iraq much as they used pre-war Afghanistan: As a training ground fertile with new recruits.

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"Bush said in an interview last week with The Washington Post that the 2004 election was a moment of accountability for the decisions he has made in Iraq, but the poll found that 58 percent disapprove of his handling of the situation to 40 percent who approve, and 44 percent said the war was worth fighting."

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