I feel like a prisoner in my own land, and the Israelis do everything they can to reinforce that feeling. After the bombings last week, I started to think logistics like all my colleagues. How would I get home? I decided to take Thursday off from work and head home before any Israeli action might take place. I left Nablus early in the morning. It took me 45 minutes to get to the checkpoint. At the checkpoint I waited two hours before I finally broke through. I thought I was home free, but there was a surprise -- well, not really a surprise -- ahead. After the bombings, the Israelis, as they often do, had thrown up four more checkpoints along the road. It took me two more hours to get home.

...

Here is what you have to understand: Palestinians want a democratic, professional, institutionalized government. They probably want a leader who is not Arafat, and who is not influenced by Arafat. But such a leader must take us someplace and give us something new. For Palestinians want their freedom before everything else. A leader independent of Arafat who simply gives away the store to the Israelis is unacceptable.

Arafat will not go away until public opinion shifts away from him. But there now seems to be only one way that can happen. The end of the era of Arafat will come with the end of the occupation. That's what Arafat stands for; if the occupation goes away, so does he. There will be no more need for him -- even he would agree. If the U.S. government were to force the Israelis to leave and give us our own state, I think all parties would be very pleasantly surprised by the outcome of the first Palestinian election. But instead, the United States ignores the whole situation. And the Israelis madly go after Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas, not seeing the insult to the Palestinian people.

So, as a Palestinian citizen, I find myself in an impossible situation. I have to cheer for rulers I'm not convinced of only because the alternative -- the continued occupation -- is completely unacceptable.

Meanwhile, I worry about my family, about my daughters, 6 and 8. They have a really limited concept of geography, and I'd like it to expand. For the past three years, the farthest they've ever been from home is Ramallah, which is seven kilometers away. Even there we only go once every two months or so, because crossing the checkpoints is such a hassle. The girls used to have a rough time with this. They would cry and beg, "Why don't you ever take us anywhere?" But now they accept it, just as they accept that I can't be home during the week. And I have to tell you, I hate their acceptance. I want them to be aware of a bigger world. I don't want them to have to live this way.

I believe the Israelis are convinced that there must be a Palestinian state. They know that we have earned and deserve our freedom. But they are trying to design it according to their own needs, and making it an unviable state. Now, it seems to me, Palestinians and Israelis are simply killing each other over the details.

I want to say to the Israelis: Give us our state in the lands occupied in 1967, a state free of Israeli settlements, a viable state where we can move from one city to another without the need for a thousand permits and visas. Do this, and you will have your security. I promise. I know my people. We don't consider killing ourselves a hobby. But killing themselves is what people often do when they find themselves wrapped in hopelessness.

As the second anniversary of the September 11 attacks rolls around, a report card on the Bush administration’s &ldqu;;war on terrorism” is long overdue. And much like the child who is anticipating a failing grade, the administration would like to intercept the bad news before it reaches home. But unsettling harbingers have been trickling into the homefront and a summary of them is in order.

Today, President Bush, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Congressional leaders will participate in a ceremony at the National Archives. The building had been closed for renovations since 2001; the ceremony re-opens the building to the public. There will be music. There will be family activities. Most importantly, there will be a new display for our beloved documents: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. In effect, there will be all the distractions necessary to prevent people from thinking too deeply about how their rights, as outlined in that Constitution, are under attack by Bush and his minions. I find it ironic that Bush will preside over a ceremony about a document that he disdains. The rights he purports to celebrate, the rights that US citizens most take for granted, are the rights President Bush would like to weaken or eliminate.

If you will recall just three short years ago, this country was a going operation. Eight years of peace, prosperity and the busy, busy Republican scandal machine trying to convince us it was all an illusion.

Since then, we've started two wars, still don't have Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein and have spent millions on people who make us take off our shoes at the airport, and we are still as vulnerable to terrorist attack as ever. The Republican response on that is their favorite ploy, "Blame Bill Clinton," but the record shows that the Clinton administration was a lot more active in going after Al Qaeda than the Bush administration before Sept. 11.

Perhaps you have noticed, the only terrorists we have actually rounded up have all been caught through police operations, often with the cooperation of the Pakistanis, the French, the Spanish, even the Saudis, sometimes. Bombing two countries doesn't seem to have done anything to Al Qaeda except reinforce and reinvigorate it. A connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda at last! They moved in after we got rid of Saddam Hussein.

Meanwhile, the economy is in the toilet; even the optimists who think it will recover are predicting a "jobless recovery." Won't that be nice -- we can certainly look forward to whatever that is. And when we get our "jobless recovery," the government's in the hole for $500 trillion this year and most of the upscale Bush tax cuts haven't even kicked in yet. As we march bravely toward oceans of red ink (leaving behind no problem for future presidents or future generations), we also face a looming crisis in Social Security.

Let me be the first to say -- we shoulda listened to Al Gore. Al Gore was right, oh Lord, he was right. We shoulda put that money into a lockbox for Social Security. We are in a world of trouble now. As Paul Krugman pointed out in a Sunday New York Times magazine article, getting ourselves into a such a dire financial mess that we have to kill off or at least dramatically reduce Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is not just a slight miscalculation on the part of our leaders. They want to undo both the Great Society programs of Lyndon Johnson and the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt.

But I think there is something even worse being taken, being stolen, by this administration. As Jim Hightower observes in his excellent new book, "Thieves in High Places: They've Stolen Our Country and It's Time to Take It Back," what they're really stealing is the very idea of this country, the idea that there's a common good, that we're all in this together, that we all do better when we all do better.

In this country, we have the most extraordinary luck -- we are the heirs to the greatest political legacy any people have ever received. Our government is not THEM, our government is US (with room for improvement, to be sure). All this right-wing propaganda about how the government is The Enemy, the government needs to be strangled, needs to be starved, needs to be hocked off, as though schools and hospitals were horrible things -- it's all nuts.

Dick Cheney is not a public relations man for the Bush administration, not a spinmeister nor a political operative. He's the vice president of the United States, and when he speaks in public, which he rarely does, he owes the American public the truth.

In his appearance on "Meet the Press" Sunday, Cheney fell woefully short of truth. On the subject of Iraq, the same can be said for President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz. But Cheney is the latest example of administration mendacity, and therefore a good place to start in holding the administration accountable.

Is there some deadline approaching, after which Bush administration officials have to engage in honest debate? It seems as if there has been a rash of misleading, deceptive, and disingenuous remarks coming from on high in recent days. The gang at "Capital Games" has been working overtime to keep up with the truth-bending of the president, the vice president, the defense secretary, and the deputy defense secretary.

[H]here is a painfully constructed list—arranged in quasi-chronological order--that demonstrates the severity and range of Bush’s serial lying but that only skims the surface.

10. "I have been very candid about my past."
9. "I’m a uniter not a divider."
8. "My plan unlocks the door to the middle class of millions of hard-working Americans."
7. "This allows us to explore the promise and potential of stem cell research."
6. "We must uncover every detail and learn every lesson of September the 11th."
5. "[We are] taking every possible step to protect our country from danger."
4. "I first got to know Ken [Lay in 1994]."
3. "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." And, "[Saddam Hussein is] a threat because he is dealing with al Qaeda."
2. "We found the weapons of mass destruction."
1. "It’s time to restore honor and dignity to the White House."