MoveOn officials fume that CBS has since bowed to White House pressure and violated the network's own stated policies by agreeing to air the commercial. If CBS is indeed out of line, why is MoveOn going to the Justice Department and not the FCC? Eli Pariser, campaign director for MoveOn Voters Fund, tells Salon: "The critical distinction is that we believe this to be more than a regulatory matter. This may be a violation of federal law."

CBS officials did not return calls seeking comment.

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On Friday, they drove almost three hours in the early morning from Auburn to San Francisco, found a public bathroom, put on their wedding dresses for a second time, and became the 66th couple to make history that morning at the city's elegant City Hall. One day after newly elected San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom defied California law by ordering the county clerk to accept marriage license applications from gay and lesbian couples, Toby and Jean are among the first legally married same-sex couples in the nation.

For now, anyway.

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One recent Sunday, newlyweds Jean and Toby Adams walked to the altar and held hands. The women had been married two weeks before, but not many in the congregation knew that yet. This was Jean's first time in Toby's church, and because she had grown up in a similar congregation in small-town California she was cold with sweat on her way to the altar. The 10 or 12 steps to the front of the church seemed long to her, but when they arrived and turned to face the congregation, Toby was clear voiced and calm. "I would like to give thanks for our marriage," said Toby, and stopped. There was a pause as the senior warden hurried over to them, turned to the congregation, and took Jean's free hand. "Let us give thanks for how open our church is," he said. Only one couple left the church as a result.

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If Fox's intention was to break a large, undercooked ostrich egg on its corporate face while pouring streams of golden ducats into Franken's pockets, it carried out its plan to perfection. As everyone who pays attention to such matters knows by now, a judge laughed its trademark-infringement lawsuit (Fox claimed it trademarked the phrase "fair and balanced") out of court -- even adding insult to injury by warning the right-wing media behemoth that its ownership of the phrase it claimed to have spent $61 million developing was extremely dubious. And sales of Franken's book soared sky-high on the publicity, hitting #1 on Amazon's list Thursday.

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"From the eyewitness accounts, it appears that Dana was fired on without warning," wrote the Committee to Protect Journalists in an open letter to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. "He was filming in an area where no hostilities were taking place, raising questions about whether U.S. troops acted recklessly in targeting him."

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Although President Bush has promised to come to Liberia's aid once the conditions of a regional peace agreement are met, the United Nations has called upon the United States to send in a small peacekeeping force now. In the meantime, 4,500 U.S. troops are waiting for orders off the Liberian coast.

"What more do you need to see?" one protester screamed into a CNN camera on Monday. So far the American answer remains "More than this."

If the United States regularly and consistently intervened around the globe anytime innocents were being slaughtered, the Marines would already be in Liberia. But there are deadlier wars in Africa clamoring for humanitarian intervention. And despite the idealistic rhetoric offered to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq, both the Bush administration and foreign policy circles are at best divided on whether the United States should ever commit its troops for humanitarian reasons alone. With American forces already stretched thin by Iraq and Afghanistan, some experts question the wisdom of sending additional troops to a nation that presents no immediate security risk.

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Liberia was founded by former United States slaves, and 150 years later, the U.S. is the obvious choice for peacemaker. But while several thousand U.S. troops are moving into position for that role, President George W. Bush has yet to decide if they will be sent in. In the meantime, Liberians continue to die and world pressure builds on Bush to intervene.

On Tuesday night, Salon spoke to Samuel Boniface Nah, a Liberian stationed in Monrovia with the humanitarian aid agency Mercy Corps. He had taken refuge in a house near the agency's offices; hidden in a basement where candles provided the only light, Nah spoke to Salon by cellphone. Here is his description of the past few days:

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So when the broadly popular Vietnam War broke out in earnest in 1964, the force of the statements made against it by radical student groups came as a shock -- and to many people, suggested a shocking amount of hubris. At the end of 1965, one in three Americans thought students against the war had no right to demonstrate. At Kent State University in Ohio the same year, demonstrators were met by a crowd with rocks, not cheers. And although the anti-Vietnam War movement looms large in the way we imagine the 1960s now, "it wasn't, in that imprecise and evasive cliché, an expression of the times," according to Gitlin. "The times were profoundly polarized."

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In that context, Bulamuzi's story is not remarkable, either. News reports and interviews with those who live in the Congo or have recently left suggest that he is but one person adrift on a sea of madness. In the eastern part of Congo there is a town run by children, an uncontrollable army playing soldiers with Kalashnikovs. In the city of Bunia, men machete men, and underground there are diamonds and bones. At night the women hide in the forest because it is safer than in their homes, but they desperately hush their infants lest the noise bring looters who rape and sometimes kill.

"I am convinced now ... that the lives of Congolese people no longer mean anything to anybody," Bulamuzi told an Amnesty International representative at the start of the Iraqi war.

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The Bush campaign is spinning his invulnerability myth. In fact he fears it will be a close race. The "liberation" of Iraq is turning into an occupation. As of June 6, 79 Americans had been killed in Iraq and Saudi Arabia since the statue of Saddam was pulled down in Baghdad -- almost as many Americans have died in peacetime as in war. On the homefront, there is no escape from budget crisis, unemployment, environmental rollbacks and fights over stacking the judiciary. If Bush wins the same percentage of votes in 2004 as he did in 2000, he would lose by 3 million votes, largely due to the increase in Latino voters.

Presidential elections are decided on character, theme, national security and the economy. Democrats will have to tie Bush on character, improve on theme, defend on national security and emphasize the economy. But Democrats can't expect the economy to eclipse the national security issue. Nor can they be credible sounding equally warlike with Bush. And they can't expect a national election to be determined by a narrow economic issue like prescription drugs for the elderly.

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Is Bush beatable? Sure. The pollsters who are saying national security is all that matters are wrong. By the time the election rolls around, the issue of jobs, whether or not you're able to pay your mortgage and send your kids to college, whether you have health coverage -- they're gonna be paramount. But you don't have any Democrat who has nerve enough to take Bush on and take him on consistently. Every Sunday talk show should have a Democrat forcibly taking Bush to task on all the lies -- the weapons of mass destruction, tax cuts -- whatever the lies are. They have to take him on in a dramatic fashion -- the way Bill Clinton would have. I mean, in 1992 we were in a time of great pleasure surrounding the defeat of Saddam the first time, by the first President Bush. But Mr. Clinton was able to defeat him.

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Can George W. Bush be beaten in 2004? Every one of the dozen experts Salon asked that question answered a resounding "Yes, but ..." There's consensus that the economy will matter more than Republicans want to believe, that Bush is vulnerable as long as Iraq remains unstable, that the growing controversy over the missing WMDs might finally hurt him with voters, that Americans would rather have Social Security and public education stabilized than a tax cut for the wealthy -- but the Democrats haven't found the message or messenger yet to make a persuasive case.

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In fact, it is in the red where the really impressive numbers reside. The day before the East Room signing ceremony, in a move unembellished by ceremony, Bush signed a bill that allows the federal government to borrow up to $7.4 trillion -- a $984 billion increase in the federal debt limit -- to cover the tab for the tax cuts. This year's deficit, after surpluses during the last four years of the Clinton administration, already is expected to exceed a whopping $300 billion.

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No blizzards, rats or owls, either.

That's because these words -- along with over 500 others -- have been banned under the mandatory bias guidelines that must be followed by publishers of children's textbooks and tests.

According to these guidelines, heroines are sexist, blizzards demonstrate regional prejudice, rats are too scary and owls are culturally insensitive because they're associated with death in some cultures.

Pressure groups from the far left and right have hijacked children's education, claims educational historian Diane Ravitch, and replaced it with adult politics. What's worse, she says, most parents have no idea this is happening. In her damning new book, "The Language Police," Ravitch, who was an assistant secretary in the Department of Education under former President Bush and served on a board overseeing the development of national tests in the Clinton administration, outlines the byzantine approval process publishers must go through in order not to offend any pressure group, no matter how small. She says that the results of these guidelines are bloodless history textbooks that border on inaccuracy and bowdlerized literature devoid of controversial language or topics.

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In a 40-minute speech to a packed hall sponsored by the Commonwealth Club of California, Kerry offered a stinging indictment of Bush domestic policies on the environment, homeland security, eroding civil liberties and the declining economy. But he saved his comments on the war for a question-and-answer session afterward, and even in those tempered remarks, his position on Iraq was less than clear-cut.

The ongoing failure of the Bush administration to win allies in the U.N. Security Council "displays some of the weakest diplomacy we've ever seen in the history of the continental U.S.," Kerry said after the speech.

Although he voted last fall to authorize the president to use military force against Iraq and said Thursday that he did not regret his vote, Kerry did not say whether he still believes force should be used -- or if so, when. "The United States should never go to war because it wants to go to war," he said, echoing statements made in January. "We should go to war because we have to go to war. And that is not clear at this time."

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Wooed by such a wealthy suitor, Guinea may not be able to afford ideology.

Such are the naked politics of checkbook diplomacy, currently on gaudy display as the Bush administration tries to pull from among the 15 members of the U.N. Security Council the nine votes required to authorize an invasion. In the tug-of-war over the six undecided countries that will determine the final outcome, the U.S. is brandishing its wallet as a weapon. Guinea, Mexico, Chile, Angola, Cameroon and Pakistan all face the same dilemma this week: Ignore mounting opposition to war at home, or face the wrath of Washington?

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Although he bristles at being labeled conservative, his idiosyncratic politics fall several yards to the right of the black nationalism he embraced in his youth in California. Raised in L.A., he taught theater at nearby Pomona College at the zenith of student activism before rejecting black separatism as narrow and nihilistic and trading it in for the more inclusive New York jazz scene of the mid-1970s. Democracy is a jazz band, he once wrote, the fusion and interplay of individual identity and community. Along with Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, he's introduced maverick -- and always controversial -- ways of thinking about race, culture and politics to an American audience that likes its ideas about such topics simple.

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Ivins and the president also share a populist touch. Her four books all spent time on the New York Times bestseller list, and her well-read column clearly is not written for her Op-Ed colleagues but for the rest of us. In a conversation with Salon, Ivins says Texans are as concerned about war with Iraq as anyone else, and she frets that the president who called Africa a country has not been able to convince the world that he knows what he's doing in the Middle East.

All indications are that we're heading into a war with Iraq whether the American public wants one or not. What do you make of the current situation?

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The Democrats listened, almost reverently.

Back in those days, Cuomo was a moral center of gravity in the Democratic Party. The son of Italian immigrants, he was the first Italian-American governor of New York. He was the longest-serving Democratic governor in the state's modern history. He was a clear front-runner for the party's presidential nomination in 1988, but after a period of highly public indecision, he bowed out.

He had captured the party's imagination as a thoughtful and passionate speaker, an eloquent intellectual, and someone very sure of himself. In a telephone interview with Salon last week, those traits were still very much in evidence in the 70-year-old former governor. So, too, were his values.

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So when the INS told him it had grown close to closing time that day and he would have to come back on Dec. 19, he didn't mind. He minded a little more when the computer connection to D.C. went down on that second visit too and he was again told to make the hour-and-a-half drive to return. For a routine process, this was taking a long time, he thought, but he willingly complied. And although on his third visit the computer did not crash, everything else in his world did.

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