It is the quagmire-clock moving closer to midnight that worries me the most regarding our strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But I guess George Bush has done things his way for eight years. Here's as remarkable a lead as you're ever likely to encounter at the closing of a U.S. presidency: "Nearing the bitter end of eight ruinous years in office, President Bush still won't acknowledge a single substantive thing he did wrong.

There is ecstasy in the streets of America and around the world. A new vibrant, thoughtful leader has emerged during a time of paralyzing confusion and despair.

While Americans ponder the dilemma of the disparities in health care delivery assured by a system which rations care based on the ability to pay for or otherwise acquire health care insurance, a study from the World Health Organization ("Primary health care: Now more than ever ") reminds us that vast disparities between health care outcomes are hardly a U.S.

With the carnage on Wall Street continuing at a jaw-dropping pace and retirees and folks like me, who aspire one day to be a retiree, wondering how devastated stock portfolios might ever recover, a fella could be forgiven this week for investing a few moments in some serious self-pity.

Perhaps file this under "Be careful what you wish for."Folks who get driven to red-faced fury by the presence among us—in slaughterhouses, restaurants, in lawn care, and domestic servitude—of migrants without legal papers may be able to find the silver-lining among all the economic bad news trooping across cable news tickers.

Chicken Little rules on Wall Street and Washington this week, but while Bernanke, Paulson, Bush et alia,  try a "sky is falling" bumrush to an unregulated bailout of the world's richest financial institutions, cooler heads are asking what eggzackly would help calm these troubled market waters.

Are we witnessing the end of neoliberalism in America or the birth of neo-neoliberalism (in which slavish devotees of deregulation will argue that what's most wrong with U.S. capital markets is not that we have too gutted regulatory structures but in fact that we have not completely obliterated them)?

Below is the complete text of the Margin notes column I penned in the days following September 11, 2001. This article, "Choking on ashes," ran in the November 2001 issue of U.S. Catholic: Choking on ashesCan justice, not retribution, be served in response to America’s worst terrorist attack?

The war on terror took a little noticed, but dangerous step over the line--literally--today when U.S. and Afghan forces launched a commando raid across the border in Pakistan. This could be the beginning of a treacherous escalation in the conflict.