HELEN PUTS HER DUKES UP Helen Thomas is the oldest White House correspondant in the business, and here she digs into Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary about Iraq.

LOUDER THAN WORDS Arianna Huffington is very rich, very liberal and not very often part of my daily (or weekly or even monthly) routine. I usually hear about her when she's donated a gajillion dollars to a political candidate. But I have to say her new website for The Detroit Project caught my eye: amusing, thought-provoking commercials now airing around the country; information about how she believes SUVs are bad; and tips on reducing America's dependence on foreign oil (without pillaging Alaska).

DATE BY DYING, OR DEATH BY DATING Kate Sullivan offers up the bad date sketch as penned by diaryist Red Clay, whose friends left him and a young lady at a table (they went to find a phone and never came back). She was purty, she pontificated, she was a Vaygun, he says -- "She didn't eat no meat, nor wear it, nor cheese, nor alcohol. I was wondering what she would eat, the list was so long, she didn't have much past manna left. Talk about militant. I've seen Baptist preachers didn't push so hard, nor expect so much. I'm thinking, maybe I need to go find that phone myself, she'd probably be prettier out of earshot. She's starting to make my head ache, and my eyes water." It's good 'un.

WHEN KATE DOES GOOD Ah, Kate... well, I'll let her tell it. "So the thing about eating less is true -- it does make you weigh less. I also found out, if you think less, you get stupid. If the air smells like jasmine in the evening, and it's warm, and it begins to plop warm wet raindrops on your arm, then you get magical. You get all ELO inside. You get a strange magic." Right on.

COUNTING THE HOURS Finally, an honest appraisal of "The Hours." Thank you, Desson Howe -- "The movie, based on Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, is deeply moving, but not merely for three stories of agony, bravery and inspiration. With its deft intercutting of place and time, the film creates a powerful sense of mysticism and fate. As with such wildly disparate films as D.W. Griffith's "Intolerance" and Paul Thomas Anderson's "Magnolia," we are invited to watch these stories from a godlike perch and appreciate the synchronicity. This is about more than individual lives. It's about collective experience."

PRAYING FOR CHENEY Josh Marshall takes a look at how Vice President Dick Cheney might just be single-handedly knifing the White House in the back with his Old School approach to being too smart for his own britches. God knows, the Democrats should be thankful that there are people in the Bush administration who only know how to be self-righteous, arrogant and secretive -- if only the Dems knew how to take advantage of it without being self-righteous, arrogant and secretive.

EDITORIAL HEROES Slate gives a well-deserved shout out to Colbert King, one of the better editorial writers in the business. "I salute King not because he's the most artful writer in the business or even the brainiest, but because he possesses the most relentless voice I've encountered in a daily newspaper since alcohol dimmed Mike Royko's and death extinguished it. He's a winning example of what editors (and writers) could do with the op-ed form if they drew on their passion now and again. King takes names. He names names. And he calls people names... [King] writes half of his columns about national/international issues and half about local Washington stuff, a subject he knows well, having grown up in the city. His national/international stuff is good, but his local stuff is fabulous." I agree emphatically. King's always been on my radar, because as I opined in May, King is not afraid to speak the truth -- in that case about the tragic reality that 50 percent of all reported crimes in DC in 2001 involved violence against women.

VIDEO KILLED OHM SHANTI I started doing yoga because I figured the best way to eliminate the Egyptian bacteria in my gullet involved some odd amalgam of relaxation, yogurt and miracles (mostly of the modern medical marvel sort). Apparently, I was spot-on. Three years later, yoga meets my compulsive need to relax and be at one with an obsessive universe... well, to relax, anyway. The Oxygen Network has discovered that the best way to kill something pure and innocent is to make it LOUD, PAINFUL and MEAN. And Steve Ross is the perfect yogi to dish it out.

TELEVISION WITHOUT PITY The site of the same name has a motto: Spare the Snark, Spoil the Networks. What is provides is an easy way to watch TV without having to watch TV -- or, succinct reviews of all of your favorite shows in an easy-to-read, catty format.

LOSING THE KOREAN GAMBIT Dennis Ross, former director of policy planning for the Department of State under the last President Bush, explains why the current administration's mixed messages and wrongheaded articulations vis-a-vis North Korea are reducing our ability to achieve a peaceful outcome -- the threat of force, and the use of China and Russia as significant partners are critical tools.

COURTING THE MILITARY The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals narowed the scope of their decision about the military detention of Yaser Hamdi, but the decision -- in effect, granting the military free reign to detain an American with little or no evidence, or opportunity to be heard -- is wrong. The facts of the Hamdi case are that few facts are known, and the court has said that no facts need to be known. The Post editorial board posits: "...legal doctrine, at least where American citizens are concerned, cannot be so deferential that judges have no ability to correct for even the most glaring errors. Under the 4th Circuit's ruling, no judge will ever hear Mr. Hamdi's response to the government's claims -- even if that response were that he had somehow been tragically misidentified." Look for this one to head to the Supreme Court.

WRESTLE THE WORLD AWAY FROM DISASTER Today must be Bono day. Chicago Sun-Times religion reporter Cathleen Falsani spend some time shadowing the Irish rock activist this winter, and puts him way into perspective with this first piece,, even as she allows him to voice his concern for the state of the world. " 'The '80s were responsible for a lot of terrible shit,' he says, as they gasp again. 'Shoulder pads and the mullet. But also, Live Aid... The crisis in Africa now is so much worse than it was then, but there's less energy in the air to deal with it. Have we become numb to the pictures on TV?' he asks the rapt teens. 'The reason we turn the channel when we see these things is that we think we can't do anything about it. It is exciting to be part of wrestling the world away from this disaster.'

HOW BONO DIDN'T MESS UP Flak Magazine serves up a short glimpse of Irish rocker Bono, asking how is it that after 20 years he has managed to become either utterly genuine or completely disengenius -- depending on whether you think he's an ass or a hero. Bob Cook reflects that, "...it's not just that he does the Jesus Christ Pose onstage (and off) — it's that he's completely sincere when he does it. Bono has no major scandal to speak of; he seems in no danger of flaming out. He raises his children, he raises the world's conciousness about the crushing effects of debt on the world's poorest nations. His band, U2, can put out a new album 20 years after its debut, and unlike any other band, can still have a hit and get away with actually playing the songs on it on tour, rather than just leaning on nostalgia. Bono is not only Not One of Us, he is Better Than Us, and we hate him for it." Or love him for it.

ARE DEMOCRATS READY TO RUMBLE? If you review the first week of the 108th Congress in the context of the White House, it's hard to not conclude that partisanship is the name of the game. In the past week, the Bush administration has resubmitted the nominations of two controversial judges, and tossed out an economic policy deliberately primed for cries of class warfare and Reaganomics. The Post editorial team frames it this way: "The president came to town promising to change the tone of debate and to reach across party lines. Now he seems to have settled on a different course. Some of his advisers apparently have concluded that polarizing political fights with Democrats benefit the administration; that ugly combat, even in a losing and not terribly worthy cause, such as the renomination of Judge Pickering, only shores up support among the Republicans' socially conservative Southern base. Tactically they may be right. But as a method of governing, all-out war from Day One leaves much to be desired."

SLOWDOWN I'll be doing mysterious things for the next several days and likely won't be updating the site until Friday. Browse the archives for fun and stimulation.

THE FIRST INSIDER David Frum, former speechwriter for the Bush White House, has spoken. Frum's new book, which is not actually chockful of zingers about those zany Bushites, does have a telling description of the President. Frum writes that Bush "has many faults. He is impatient and quick to anger; sometimes glib, even dogmatic; often uncurious and as a result ill informed; more conventional in his thinking than a leader probably should be." Who'd've thunk it?

AN APPLE A DAY Apple just announced a slew of new software upgrades and enhancements, but I'm just as close to giddy as I can get about the new Safari web browser. [Erm, okay. Except that it isn't fully compatible with the web log tools I use. Maybe it's time for Movable Type...]

GODSPEED, YOU... Those clever Canucks in Godspeed You! Black Emperor have just released a new CD, "Yanqui U.X.O." And Ross White at salon.com tells you why you should listen to it.

SULIVAN ON DIDION Andrew Sullivan tends to irk me to no end, but somewhere in his retort to Joan Didion's essay (linked yesterday, see below) I found a juncture between where she stood, where he stands and where I want to be. Didion is right when she observes the national landscape post-September 11 and chaffs at how the dialogue has become hostile, and yet Sullivan is spot-on when he kicks off by asking, basically, "That's all good and well, Joan, but what's the recipe for solving this mess?" Sullivan, who posts on salon.com and maintains his own weblog, spends too much time poking Didion for looking back -- ironic, considering how frequently he reminds his readers that North Korea and Iraq are leftover problems from the Clinton administration (prior to 1996, no administration ever left a problem to be solved by an incoming President -- that's my read on it).

SLIM GOOD BODY The Washington Post now has a snazzy new Flash diagram of the human body (well, two human bodies). Point, click and learn about the latest in body- and health-related news for specific parts of that walking and talking bundle of nerves and corpuscles we call you.

TUNED IN TO THE GRAMMY'S Eight get five. That's the news in the world of music today -- Bruce Springsteen, Eminem, Norah Jones, Lavigne, Ashanti, Sheryl Crow, Nelly and Raphael Saadiq all received five Grammy nominations for 2002. Personal preferences aside, what an interesting mixture, especially when you look at other nominees this year -- the Dixie Chicks, India.arie, Elvis Costello and Johnny Cash.

POSTCARDS FROM THE HYMNAL Even if the premiere totally sucks, the website for Bob Massey's "The Nitrate Hymnal" is flashy, impressive and fun. The multimedia rock opera makes its debut at the George Washington National Masonic Temple in D.C. later this month. God, isn't it nice to see cool people grow and stretch?

FARFECUTE The new Volkswagen convertible commercial is a gem. Take a look-see. Thanks to Miss Hatter for pointing it out.

NOT THE QUIET ONE When magician-cum-superstar Penn (the first half of Penn and Teller) flew to LA, he was searched. Unfortunately for the security person, Penn took umbrage at having his crotch touched and filed an assault complaint. His retelling of the event is amusing, but the PR response from the airport sort of makes me want to get frisked.

IRAN'S POLITICAL TEST Next month, more than 200,000 candidates will compete for about 107,000 town, village and city council seats throughout Iran. Given the tension that has ebbed and flowed in recent months within the central government, these elections are expected to be a real test of popular support for moderate President Mohammad Khatami, especially since the candidates will not be vetted by the clerical regime (unlike in national elections).

HOT TIME IN THE SNOW Iranian hardliners have gone balistic over plans to invite 12,000 males and female students to Chaharmahal-Bakhtiari province for a winter festival. The AFP reports that "religious conservatives in the province have already issued a statement slamming the plan, arguing the idyllic and isolated winter setting would only lead the students astray while they engage in a variety of winter sports. 'They are going to bring girls and boys and not control them,' IRNA quoted local Friday prayer leader Hojatoleslam Amini as saying, and describing the plan as a 'source of corruption and debauchery.' "

BRINKMANSHIP: THE BOARD GAME If you can't laugh at nuclear brinkmanship, what can you laugh at?

CUCKOO IN KOREA Okay, so you're not sure where you stand on North Korea, because, I mean, can't we all just get along and everything, you know? Er. Visit the official website of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, meet the leaders, click on "welcome" and listen to the soul-wrenching sounds of the hit Korean song, "Raise your weapons to wave our Supreme Commander."

TIME TO CHOOSE: MORALISM OR PRAGMATISM David Ignatius does a better job advancing the argument I made last week in regards to the tension on the Korean peninsula -- "It's time to choose," he writes. "On Korea, Bush can't be a moralist and a pragmatist at the same time." Ignatius explains how the administration led on Korea with a moralist tone until this past fall, when reality stepped in and the same tension that exists between Defense Department hawks and State Department pragmatists on Iraq erupted in Asia. It's constantly been the challenge of this administration, and it's the problem with Bush's leadership. Bush operates with a pretty solid moral worldview, and his rhetoric is what the administration has -- time and again -- used to set the tone and advance arguments. And twice now, that moral rhetoric has collided with the grey realities of a nuanced world politic with dramatic results (in Iraq and North Korea), while minor collisions have taken place in countless other places (NATO, Mexico, Germany, Israel, the UN). A moral presidency staffed with pragmatic politicians is a recipe for continued disasters.

JOAN DIDION PACKS A PUNCH For some odd reason -- a psychological scar inflicted on me in a seminar class at university -- Joan Didion used to grate me like pith. I've gradually recovered, enough even to point toward her recent New York Review of Books appearance that discusses many of those intangible remainders from September 11, 2001. Two, in particular, stood out for me. One is just how we have used language to distort, to defend and to intimidate in this country since the attacks. It's easy to point at people like Bush and Rumsfeld, certainly, since the conservative political wing of the Land has done so much steamrolling of late. But even in liberal quarters it exists. Second, and more frightening, is how this utterly teachable moment in our history just flickered off -- how we stopped asking questions, how our curiosity faded, our interest in honest conversation deteriorated. Didion captures it well. If only she could etch out a path to follow out of this wilderness.

EXHAUST YOURSELVES ON POLITICS ABC News' The Note returns from vacation with an exhaustive and exhausting look at the political state of the nation, covering the incoming Congress, the slew of presidential contenders and the personality of the Bush administration. Knock yourselves out with this one, kids...

THE PERILS OF IMPERIALISM Michael Ignatieff goes a long mile with this NYTimes Magazine piece on the growing tension between America the Republic and America the Imperial Power [registration required]. It's long, but worth reading. Ignatieff writes, "As the United States faces this moment of truth, John Quincy Adams's warning of 1821 remains stark and pertinent: if America were tempted to ''become the dictatress of the world, she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.'' What empires lavish abroad, they cannot spend on good republican government at home: on hospitals or roads or schools. A distended military budget only aggravates America's continuing failure to keep its egalitarian promise to itself. And these are not the only costs of empire. Detaining two American citizens without charge or access to counsel in military brigs, maintaining illegal combatants on a foreign island in a legal limbo, keeping lawful aliens under permanent surveillance while deporting others after secret hearings: these are not the actions of a republic that lives by the rule of law but of an imperial power reluctant to trust its own liberties." What sort of nation do we want to be -- for ourselves and for the world? It's a question we haven't asked in half a century. Maybe more of us should start.

SCARED YET? AlterNet offers up the Top 10 Conspiracy Theories of 2002 (with runners-up) and they aren't for the faint of heart. Even the most skeptical of skeptics might be a little jittery after reading this trail of tears that, basically, implies that we're all doomed like rats in a maze. But what a maze it is!

MAASS ON FRIEDMAN ON OIL Follow the thread. Peter Maass summarizes Tom Friedman's views that invading Iraq actually is about oil, and that that's not necessarily a bad thing. He also links to a Foreign Policy In Focus report on the subject. The bottom line, as I see it, is that the potential war against Iraq is about many things, and that it's ignorant or disingenius (or both) to try to lay it out as a clear-cut, single issue event.

HART ACHEGary Hart for President? Why the hell not? I always liked Hart, even during the puritanical days of the 1980s when a single man cavorting on a private yacht with a lady friend was apparently political suicide. Times have changed. Now you can take advantage of a young intern and still run the country. Which makes a Hart candidacy more viable today, and might explain why he's testing the waters.

THE SECRET WAR William Arkin ends his dot.mil column at The Post today with a look at how the military is returning to a closed-door, members-only approach to planning and dialogue, under the guise of there being a war on at the moment. Arkin is rightly dismissive of this, and lays out some of the demoralizing changes he's witnessed in the past year. He concludes, "I supposed Rumsfeld can be proud of the impact of his reign of terror over the American military. Mr. 21st Century warfare would do better, nevertheless, if he spent some time pondering that the strength and vitality of our country comes from openness, and dissent, and debate, and not from some permanent wartime gloss that shields the government from the citizenry."

GUNS AND BUTTER Sure, breath a sigh of relief that your tax rates might just have declined by $100 a year (unless you're making several hundred thousands of dollars a year). But when we get a few more years down the pike and our national infrastructure has gone to hell, remember who's responsible. The Bush administration has done several things on the budget front, and they're all beginning to come into alignment. Defense spending has soared, significant tax cuts have been enacted, and for the second year running domestic programs have been frozen. In the meantime, the economy continues to run on fumes. Every administration has priorities -- some are inherited, others self-initiated. In the case of the Bush team, it's a little of both and like many administrations they hope to capitalize on the short-term PR and dodge the longer-term pain. If you're statistically average -- married, a few kids, earning about $40,000 a year or less -- you'll be feeling the pain long before President Bush.

BUDGET QUESTIONS As Bush unveils his latest economic proposal tomorrow, and Democrats rush to breach the gap, folks like you and me should be asking two questions: Will any of the proposals give the economy the near-term boost it needs? What will the long-term, downstream effect of the proposals be? The answers, roughly, are "Not likely" and "Not good." Or in the words of former director of the Congressional Budget Office Alice Rivlin, "Making the tax cuts permanent doesn't do much to help the economy in the short run and leaves policymakers a hell of a hole to climb out of in 2012," she said.

MILITARY PURSESTRINGS Defense analyst Michael O'Hanlon tells us two things today: 1) Defense spending will almost double during the Bush administration and 2) it doesn't need to. O'Hanlon has a pretty good grasp on defense spending issues, and he parses the estimated $500 billion budget (by 2009) to discover that about $100 billion is potentially wasted. The two areas where most of the waste is occuring? Acquisition of new equipment and maintenance. The first is the result of a military that is living off of the equipment largess of the 80s, and truly requires new equipment -- unfortunately, O'Hanlon contends, the Defense Department is not making the best choices in this important area. The second is the result of outsourcing and privatization, where we've spent money to hire contractors to do a lot of work but haven't wisely utilized the people resources freed up by outsourcing.