I blamed it on my bleary eyes. After all, it was Friday 8:00am at the tail end of another long week. Was the New York Times's story actually reporting that, "Mr Bush's campaign says it is raising so much money just to remain competitive with what it says is a well-financed liberal political machine."

Whoa! This is the same President who's going to bust all fundraising records--raising over $200 million, even with an uncontested primary race? It's certainly true that unions, wealthy liberals, and others are pouring what resources they have into election 2004. They've correctly anticipated Bush's enormous financial advantage will require an expensive response and that the stakes are extraordinarily high. And Bush's own fundraising is a fraction of the money that will be spent on his behalf--his party will raise far more money than the Democrats and corporate-friendly investment in Bush, Inc. will make its voice heard loudly as well.

Bush as financial underdog? The only question is whether the press corps covering the presidential race will challenge this remarkable spin.

America is better for Tony Kushner. A self-described "God-believing Jew and a historical materialist socialist humanist agnostic," Kushner--a member of The Nation's editorial board--is a playful partisan, whose sense of humor and a generous, joyful and truthful voice fills his work, including his Pulitzer prize-winning epic play, Angels in America, which premieres this Sunday on HBO.

And The Nation is better for Kushner's contributions over the years, including his award-winning 1994 essay A Socialism of the Skin, his rabble-rousing commencement address to Vassar's 2002 class, A Word to Graduates: Organize! and a scene from his forthcoming play about Laura Bush reading Dostoevsky to dead Iraqi children. (Click here to read past Nation articles from Kushner.)

What has always moved me about Kushner is his sense of humanity and humility. "I am a person of the left," he said in a recent New York Times profile. "But I am uncertain about a great many things; what to do next; where change is coming from; what is the meaning of being left in a world like this?"

George W. Bush's Thanksgving Day campaign stop in Baghdad said everything that needed to be said about the success of the US occupation of Iraq. The president, who likes to refer to the invasion of Iraq as a mission of liberation, traveled in secret, arrived unannounced and with plane lights dimmed, remained closeted at the heavily guarded Baghdad International Airport for 150 minutes and then hightailed it out of the country before the Iraqi people knew their liberator was among them.

It was hardly a triumphal visit. Yet, the Bush political team could count on the cheerleading squads that have taken over the so-called "news departments" of the nation's television networks to hail the tarmac tap in Baghdad as "dramatic," "courageous" and "historic." "What the president did today was show he was willing to put himself in harm's way, like the troops," chirped CNN commentator Douglas Brinkley, whose enthusiasm was echoed on every Thanksgiving night news report. ABC's World New Tonight devoted the better part of 15 minutes to breathless reporting on the trek, closing off with an apparently serious recreation of the President's not-exactly-harrowing transit from his ranch in Crawford to the airport in Waco, Texas.

For realistic reporting on the President's tour of a completely secure airport hangar in Baghdad, Americans were again forced to turn to foreign news sources. Beyond the borders of the United States, practioners of a craft called journalism treated the trip with the respect it was due. While US commentators babbled on about how the President had erased the embarrassing image of himself bundled into a flightsuit for that "Mission Accomplished" photo op in May, international reporters sought out honest assessments, such as that of Mahmoud Othman, a member Iraq's governing council. "(Bush's) visit cannot be considered as a visit to Iraq," Othman told Britain's Guardian newspaper. "It was really a visit to an American military base in the country to boost the morale of the troops." Another member of the governing council told the Guardian that the "excessive secrecy" surrounding the presidential trip could end up strengthening the image not of the US but of the insurgents opposing the US occupation. "They will be able to boast that they forced the most powerful man in the world to come in through the back door," the governing council member explained.