But it is not just intolerance that is the hallmark of today's conservatives. They have become little more than the sum of their fears and their hatreds. What they fear most is the modern world and its pace of change. For them, the natural order of things is a country run by white, Protestant males.
Today they are confronted with a black man in the White House, a woman as House majority leader, no Protestants on the Supreme Court, gays asserting their rights, and a Muslim immigrant winning the Miss USA crown. It is all too much to bear.




The pathologist who carried out the post-mortem on weapons inspector Dr David Kelly is under investigation after 'mixing up' two servicemens' remains.
The US supreme court has refused to delay the military trial of Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen held at Guantanamo Bay. Lawyers for Khadr had sought to have the trial, scheduled for next week, put on hold while they challenged the constitutionality of the military tribunals at the US army base in Cuba.
As BP moves to seal the Deepwater Horizon well permanently, more than 31,000 cleanup workers continue to rely on incomplete and at times misleading information about toxic exposure to the spilled oil in the Gulf of Mexico.
A piece of ice four times the size of Manhattan island has broken away from an ice shelf in Greenland, according to scientists in the U.S. The 260 square-kilometer (100 square miles) ice island separated from the Petermann Glacier in northern Greenland early on Thursday, researchers based at the University of Delaware said.





























