AMERICA: Twenty years ago in Soviet Moscow, a small protest took place in the Old Arbat in support of imprisoned Jewish refusenik Natan Sharansky. There were only about six people and a few foreign journalists there, including CNN's Peter Arnett.
We were rushed by a dozen KGB thugs who roughed up the protesters and cut Arnett's sound cable. But times were changing. Shortly afterwards, in February 1986, Mikhail Gorbachev freed Sharansky from a labour camp and he was allowed to emigrate to Israel.
There he created a right-wing party which merged with Likud, and he is now minister for Jerusalem and diaspora affairs. In November Sharansky was in Philadelphia promoting his book, The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror, when he got a message from the White House asking him to come by.
Next day President George Bush spent an hour telling Sharansky in the Oval Office how he loved the theme of the book - that it is in the national interest of free societies to spread democracy.
"I felt like his book just confirmed what I believe," said Bush later.
Now a must-read for White House officials, the book confirms the president's utopian views on ending tyranny and inspires his oratory. Sharansky writes that "just as the institution of slavery has been all but wiped off the face of the earth, so too can government tyranny become a thing of the past".
Mr Bush said at his inauguration: "We do not accept the existence of permanent tyranny because we do not accept the possibility of permanent slavery", and in both this and his State of the Union speech he promoted "the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world".
Sharansky's idea of refusing to accept stability in international affairs and making Israeli engagement with Palestinians dependent on democracy, long dismissed in his adopted country, is now the official line in the White House.
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Another survivor of Soviet repression has sharply different views from Sharansky on what America should be doing. Billionaire George Soros, who escaped from communist Hungary and now lives in the US, said last week that America didn't understand the first principle of an open society, "namely that we may be wrong", and was therefore not qualified to propagate democracy all over the world.
Soros worked hard to defeat George Bush, pumping $26 million into the presidential election campaign. He blamed Kerry for Bush's win, saying in Davos last week that the Massachusetts senator had not offered a "credible and coherent alternative".
He also stated that if Kerry had admitted to his anti-war activities after Vietnam, rather than playing up his own heroism, the outcome might have been different.
Kerry, meanwhile, is trying hard to convince people he hasn't gone away. "If you take half the people at an Ohio State football game on Saturday afternoon and they were to have voted the other way, you and I would be having a discussion about my State of the Union speech," he said in his first post-defeat television interview last Sunday, referring to the 120,000-vote margin by which he lost in Ohio.
The defeated Democrat admitted some mistakes, like being slow to respond to attacks on his Vietnam war record, but blamed the release of an Osama bin Laden videotape just before the election for his defeat.
"We were rising in the polls up until the last day when the tape appeared; we flat-lined the day the tape appeared and went down on Monday," he told NBC's Tim Russert.
Asked if he would run for President again, Mr Kerry said: "I'm going to keep all my options open."
If he does he might want to find religion. A University of Akron poll this week showed that Catholics favoured Bush over Kerry - the Catholic candidate - by 53 per cent to 47 per cent, mainly on the abortion issue. His rival for 2008 has already got the message.
New York Senator Hillary Clinton has been emphasising God, religion and prayer in her recent speeches, as well as the need to be more tolerant of people who are opposed to abortion and gay marriage because of their beliefs.
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The religious right and the mobilisation of church-goers helped re-elect the President, and Mr Bush's State of the Union message was heavy with religious imagery. In it, he also renewed his vow to support a constitutional ban on gay marriage. This was inserted after furious complaints from religious conservatives over his hint in an interview the previous week that the gay marriage ban might not be attainable.
One of those to protest the loudest was James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who made the headlines recently protesting about a cartoon character called SpongeBob SquarePants. Apparently SpongeBob and 100 other cartoon figures like Big Bird, Barney, the Muppets and Winnie the Pooh, feature in a video promoting tolerance.
Dobson identified a "sinister" agenda in the fact that SpongeBob and friends promoted respect for people whose "abilities, beliefs, culture, race, sexual identity or other characteristics are different than my own".
The themes of "tolerance" and "diversity" were like buzzwords for homosexual activity, he complained.
Dobson's protest was met with widespread derision but Mr Bush's new Education Secretary, Margaret Spellings, also took on cartoon characters last week in a culture wars battle with serious implications. She voiced strong objections to an episode in a children's series Postcards From Buster on Public Broadcasting System.
It featured a cartoon bunny called Buster who meets different people across America, and in this episode visited Vermont to make maple syrup and briefly met children from two families headed by lesbian couples. Producers in PBS outlets across the country protested that the episode was innocuous, did not promote lesbianism and was simply about kids milking cows and playing in hay.
PBS president Pat Mitchell initially agreed, but she changed her mind after some influential Republicans weighed in and PBS axed the episode. Spellings also demanded that PBS refund the Education Department grant of $125,000 for the episode.
Funding concerns at the publicly-financed station are it seems making it capitulate in the face of conservative criticism. Republicans have been unhappy with the station since the early 1970s, when its coverage of the Watergate hearings helped turn the tide against Nixon.
In the 1990s House Speaker Newt Gingrich declared war on Big Bird of Sesame Street and tried to have all funding withdrawn. PBS has recently ingratiated itself with its critics, removing "liberal" Bill Moyers and funding programmes featuring conservatives Tucker Carlson and Paul Gigot, but the pressure is being turned up.
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The Washington Post published a photograph in its January 21st edition of a man in evening dress waving his wallet at anti-Bush protesters and thanking the president for his tax cuts. It identified him as Rich R. Danu of Detroit. Turns out he was an anti-Bush demonstrator, one of a satirical group "Billionaires for Bush" who dress up as the super rich at demonstrations. Other members have names like Robin Eublind and Ivana Moore-Enmoore.