I’m not supposed to be here. This vast training base near the Gaza border where thousands of reservists are preparing for battle is off-limits to the press. Still, everyone in Israel knows someone, and my travelling companion knows a senior army commander who’s willing to break the rules. “Just say you’re my friends,” says the commander, who picks us up in his car near the gate.
Columbus, Ohio
This is shaping up to be the Democrats' year. According to current polls, the party stands to make significant gains in the House, the Senate, and statehouses across the country this November. And it's not hard to see why: the botched Katrina response, high gas prices, scandals in Congress and in the states, and, most of all, the quagmire in Iraq. Discontent with the Bush administration's conduct of the war is affecting even the gubernatorial races. At a recent meeting in a posh Cincinnati suburb, a group of Republicans supporting Democratic candidate Ted Strickland voiced to him their unhappiness with the war. "They expressed great concern about the war and its cost," Strickland tells me--"not just in terms of dollars, but lives and national prestige."
If these facts surprise you, it's because you haven't been given a straight story about the Clinton health bill. Take two examples: on November 4, Leon Panetta, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, testified to senators that the bill does not "set prices" and "draw up rules for allocating care"; a month later Hillary Rodham Clinton assured a Boston audience that the government will not limit what you can pay your doctor. The text of the bill proves these statements are untrue.
