ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES

So who are the winners from rising inequality? It's not the top 20 percent, or even the top 10 percent. The big gains have gone to a much smaller, much richer group than that.

A new research paper by Ian Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon of Northwestern University, "Where Did the Productivity Growth Go?," gives the details. Between 1972 and 2001 the wage and salary income of Americans at the 90th percentile of the income distribution rose only 34 percent, or about 1 percent per year. So being in the top 10 percent of the income distribution, like being a college graduate, wasn't a ticket to big income gains.

But income at the 99th percentile rose 87 percent; income at the 99.9th percentile rose 181 percent; and income at the 99.99th percentile rose 497 percent. No, that's not a misprint.

Just to give you a sense of who we're talking about: the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates that this year the 99th percentile will correspond to an income of $402,306, and the 99.9th percentile to an income of $1,672,726. The center doesn't give a number for the 99.99th percentile, but it's probably well over $6 million a year.

During the February 27 edition of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes, in response to co-host Alan Colmes's statement that the public may not be getting the whole story regarding the port deal involving a company owned by the government of Dubai, a member state of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Fox News political analyst Dick Morris said that "this is one area where he [Bush] has earned the right to be taken on faith."

Freud confessed that his "thirty years of research into the feminine soul" left him unable to answer one great question: "What does a woman want?" Modern feminists have been arguing for decades over a variation of it: What should a woman want?

This week two sociologists from the University of Virginia are publishing the answer to a more manageable variation. Drawing on one of the most thorough surveys ever done of married couples, they've crunched the numbers and asked: What makes a woman happy with her marriage?

Their answer doesn't quite jibe with current conventional wisdom. Three decades ago, two-thirds of Americans surveyed said it was better for wives to focus on homemaking and husbands to focus on breadwinning, but by the 1990's, only a third embraced the traditional division of labor. The new ideal — in theory, not in practice — became a partnership of equals who split duties inside and outside the home.

This new egalitarian marriage was hailed by academics and relationship gurus as a recipe for a happier union. As wives went off to work and husbands took on new jobs at home, couples would supposedly have more in common and more to talk about. Husbands would do more "emotion work," as sociologists call it, and wives would be more fulfilled.

That was the theory tested by the Virginia sociologists, Bradford Wilcox and Steven Nock, who analyzed a survey of more than 5,000 couples. Sure enough, they found that husbands' "emotion work" was crucial to wives' happiness. Having an affectionate and understanding husband was by far the most important predictor of a woman's satisfaction with her marriage.

But it turns out that an equal division of labor didn't make husbands more affectionate or wives more fulfilled. The wives working outside the home reported less satisfaction with their husbands and their marriages than did the stay-at-home wives. And among those with outside jobs, the happiest wives, regardless of the family's overall income, were the ones whose husbands brought in at least two-thirds of the money.

Mr. Wilcox's research focuses on the influence of religious belief and practice on marriage, cohabitation, parenting, and fatherhood. He has published articles on religion, parenting, and fatherhood in The American Sociological Review, Social Forces, The Journal of Marriage and Family and The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. His first book, Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands, (Chicago, 2004) examines the ways in which the religious beliefs and practices of American Protestant men influence their approach to parenting, household labor, and marriage. Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, Mr. Wilcox is now researching the effect that religion has on relationships among low-income parents in urban America.

Mr. Nock is the author of books and articles about the causes and consequences of change in the American family. He has investigated issues of privacy, unmarried fatherhood, cohabitation, commitment, divorce, and marriage. His most recent book, Marriage in Men's Lives won the William J. Good Book Award from the American Sociological Association for the most outstanding contribution to family scholarship in 1999.

He focuses on the intersection of social science and public policy concerning households and families in America.

Mr. Nock teaches courses on the family at the introductory and advanced undergraduate, and advanced graduate levels. He has team-taught graduate courses on the family in the Department of Psychology. He also offers courses on quantitative methods, statistics, and demographic techniques. He won the 1991-1992 All-University Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award.

His current research is the Marriage Matters project. This ongoing effort examines the legal innovation known as Covenant Marriage in Louisiana, Arizona and Arkansas. In these states, couples wishing to marry must choose betweent the: standard regime of a marriage governed by no-fault divorce laws, and a Covenant Marriage regime, which is governed by fault-based divorce laws. The latter is more difficult to enter and more difficult to dissolve. This ongoing project, funded by the National Science Foundation and other sources, seeks to determine the role of law in marriage by following a large sample of newly married individuals in each type of marriage for five years.

The latest CBS News poll finds President Bush's approval rating has fallen to an all-time low of 34 percent, while pessimism about the Iraq war has risen to a new high.

Americans are also overwhelmingly opposed to the Bush-backed deal giving a Dubai-owned company operational control over six major U.S. ports. Seven in 10 Americans, including 58 percent of Republicans, say they're opposed to the agreement.

The troubling results for the Bush administration come amid reminders about the devastating impact of Hurricane Katrina and negative assessments of how the government and the president have handled it for six months.

In a separate poll, two out of three Americans said they do not think President Bush has responded adequately to the needs of Katrina victims. Only 32 percent approve of the way President Bush is responding to those needs, a drop of 12 points from last September's poll, taken just two weeks after the storm made landfall.

The FDA's inaction on Plan B has been sharply criticized by most major medical societies and many in Congress, and led to a lawsuit by the Center for Reproductive Rights in New York. The federal magistrate judge hearing the case on Friday concluded that the center had established a "strong preliminary showing of 'bad faith or misbehavior' " on the part of FDA officials, and so ordered the case to go forward and ruled that top current and past FDA leaders should be interviewed under oath.

With the application in regulatory limbo, a growing number of states have passed bills that allow pharmacists working in conjunction with doctors to dispense Plan B to women who do not have a prescription -- with Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New Mexico and California acting most recently. The Massachusetts bill was passed last year over Republican Gov. Mitt Romney's veto.

...

While proponents are achieving some success in the more Democratic blue states, their efforts have not been as well received in Republican-leaning red states -- and Barr's lobbyist said the company spends little time pushing legislation in those more conservative states. The director of the Kentucky Right to Life Association said that a Plan B pharmacy access bill introduced this year is not expected to succeed.

"We're confident that our legislature will not approve the bill because we are strongly pro-life here," said Margie Montgomery. "Doctors tell us that Plan B can cause a very early abortion, and we oppose that."

Wendy Wright, president of Concerned Women for America, has testified against Plan B before the FDA and in numerous states because, she said, easier access jeopardizes women's health and welfare. Women need a prescription to buy birth control pills, she said, and it makes no sense for them to buy Plan B, a stronger version of the pill, without one.

SB 609 - This act protects the conscience rights of pharmaceutical professionals. Such pharmaceutical professionals shall not be required to perform, assist, recommend, refer for, or participate in any service involving a particular drug or device that they have a good faith belief is used for abortions. In these instances, the pharmaceutical professional shall be immune from civil or criminal liability and will not have their license suspended or revoked.

Employers cannot refuse to hire, discriminate against, segregate, or terminate a pharmaceutical professional because of their opposition to any service involving a particular drug or device that they have a good faith belief is used for abortions. Colleges and teaching hospitals are also prohibited from discriminating against any person who refuses to participate in any service or training which involves a particular drug that they have a good faith belief is used for abortions. In addition, they are prohibited from requiring a student or teacher to pay fees to fund these activities.

A party injured by any of the acts described in Sections 338.603 to 338.606 can institute a civil action to recover treble damages, court costs, and reasonable attorney's fees.

Colleges and teaching hospitals are also prohibited from discriminating against any person who refuses to participate in any service or training which involves a particular drug that they have a good faith belief is used for abortions.

2006--Forty-three percent (43%) of American adults approve of the way George W. Bush is performing his role as President. That's his lowest Job Approval Rating since January 12.

Confidence in the War on Terror has also fallen sharply. Just 39% of Americans now believe the U.S. and its allies are winning. Thirty-six percent (36%) believe the terrorists are winning. This confirms last weeks poll showing that the Dubai Ports deal has tarnished the President's national security credentials. Just 17% of Americans favor that deal.

The President earns Approval from 48% of White Americans, 5% of Black Americans, and 39% of all other Americans.

The state Division of Elections is once again refusing to give its electronic voting files to the Democrats, arguing that doing so presents security risks to state government and the election system.

Releasing the files could allow someone to use an easily available data-management program, like Microsoft Access, to manipulate the data without the knowledge of the Division of Elections, said director Whitney Brewster.

The state denied the request in a letter dated Feb. 22, more than two months after the Alaska Democratic Party filed a public records request seeking the data file, which contains the final vote tallies for the 2004 general election.

The accuracy of the vote is in question, the Democrats said. Even the division's Web site contains glaring errors, with huge discrepancies between the number of votes cast statewide for each candidate and the number of votes cast district by district, they said.

"The public deserves clear, accurate data about the election," said Democratic spokeswoman Kay Brown. "We wonder why they're so determined not to shed light on this."

The Division of Elections initially said Jan. 19 that the file could not be released because it was proprietary information belonging to Diebold Election Systems, the contractor hired to provide Alaska's electronic voting machines.

Several days later, Diebold consented to the release of the records. But the Division of Elections, after two extensions totaling more than two weeks, denied the request.

Condoms fail you;
Diaphragms slip.
Jellies stain you;
And coils can nip.

Withdrawal's willful;
Flesh is weak.
The pill is sinful;
You might as well breed.

Sponges are sloppy,
The patch is a bore,
Ligation's forever,
The ring's for a w***e.

Norplant is painful-
A shot in the cheek.
There's abstinence
but it's not for the weak.

We are all human,
we all have the need.
If they all get their way,
We might as well breed.

The administration also tells us not to worry about having Arabs control port operations. "I want those who are questioning it," Mr. Bush said, "to step up and explain why all of a sudden a Middle Eastern company is held to a different standard than a Great British company."

He was being evasive, of course. This isn't just a Middle Eastern company; it's a company controlled by the monarchy in Dubai, which is part of the authoritarian United Arab Emirates, one of only three countries that recognized the Taliban as the legitimate ruler of Afghanistan.

But more to the point, after years of systematically suggesting that Arabs who didn't attack us are the same as Arabs who did, the administration can't suddenly turn around and say, "But these are good Arabs."

Dubai Ports World has agreed to postpone its plans to take over management of six U.S. ports after the proposal ignited harsh bipartisan criticism on Capitol Hill.

...

According to the statement, DP World will delay taking over management of the U.S. ports "while it engages in further consultations with the Bush administration and, as appropriate, congressional leadership and relevant port authorities to address concerns over future security arrangements."

The announcement came on the heels of comments from the second in command at the Pentagon, who said Thursday that people who publicly oppose allowing a Middle Eastern company to take over management of some U.S. ports could be threatening national security.

Rupert Murdoch's Fox News Channel threatened to sue the makers of "The Simpsons" over a parody of the channel's right-wing political stance, the creator of the hit US television show has claimed.

In an interview this week with National Public Radio, Matt Groening recalled how the news channel had considered legal action, despite the fact that "The Simpsons" is broadcast on sister network, Fox Entertainment.

According to Groening, Fox took exception took a Simpsons' version of the Fox News rolling news ticker which parodied the channel's anti-Democrat stance, with headlines like "Do Democrats Cause Cancer?"

As introduction to a panel discussion on the February 18 broadcast of Fox News' Cavuto on Business, the network aired clips of Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) accompanied by onscreen text reading, "Attacking capitalism: Have Dems declared war on America?"

A contentious abortion bill passed the South Dakota Senate late this afternoon. The vote was 23 to 12.

Lawmakers spent much of this afternoon debating the bill, which has thrust South Dakota into the national spotlight.

House Bill 1215 would ban most abortions in South Dakota.

It now goes back to the House, which passed an earlier version and must now decide whether to accept changes made by the Senate.

The bill would then go to Gov. Mike Rounds.

Republican Sen. Bill Napoli of Rapid City said, "This bill is as straight
forward [sic] and as honest as it can be. It just says no more abortions unless the life of the mother is threatened."

From what I just heard from Senator Warner on CNN, it's about maintaining access to the ports, as I guessed earlier. (Airfields too.) Ed Henry just said the UAE hosts more of the US Navy in the gulf than any other country. If we diss them and refuse to scratch their backs, they'll get upset and pull back permission to dock our ships in their country. It's nothing personal. It's strictly business.

The Bush administration secretly required a company in the United Arab Emirates to cooperate with future U.S. investigations before approving its takeover of operations at six American ports, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press. It chose not to impose other, routine restrictions.

An attack Wednesday that destroyed the soaring gold dome of one of ShiiteIslam's holiest shrines is being interpreted by most Shiites here as a direct attack on their faith - and has sharply raised sectarian tensions.

It's unclear if any people were killed in the massive explosion in Samarra, about 60 miles north of Baghdad. But the destruction of the shrine may be the most emotionally charged of attacks on Shiite targets thus far in the war, and could set back already hamstrung efforts to form a government of Shiite and Sunni unity.

As citizens deserted the streets of Baghdad in the wake of the attack, many said they feared this could be a seminal moment in Iraq's low-intensity civil war.

"The war could really be on now,'' says Abu Hassan, a Shiite street peddler who declined to give his full name. "This is something greater and more symbolic than attacks on people. This is a strike at who we are."

"What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."

NEOCONSERVATISM has failed the United States and needs to be replaced by a more realistic foreign policy agenda, according to one of its prime architects.

Francis Fukuyama, who wrote the best-selling book The End of History and was a member of the neoconservative project, now says that, both as a political symbol and a body of thought, it has "evolved into something I can no longer support". He says it should be discarded on to history's pile of discredited ideologies.

In an extract from his forthcoming book, America at the Crossroads, Mr Fukuyama declares that the doctrine "is now in shambles" and that its failure has demonstrated "the danger of good intentions carried to extremes".

In its narrowest form, neoconservatism advocates the use of military force, unilaterally if necessary, to replace autocratic regimes with democratic ones.

Mr Fukuyama once supported regime change in Iraq and was a signatory to a 1998 letter sent by the Project for a New American Century to the then president, Bill Clinton, urging the US to step up its efforts to remove Saddam Hussein from power. It was also signed by neoconservative intellectuals, such as Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan, and political figures Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and the current defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.

However, Mr Fukuyama now thinks the war in Iraq is the wrong sort of war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

"The most basic misjudgment was an overestimation of the threat facing the United States from radical Islamism," he argues.

"Although the new and ominous possibility of undeterrable terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction did indeed present itself, advocates of the war wrongly conflated this with the threat presented by Iraq and with the rogue state/proliferation problem more generally."

Two Americans also were named — Benedict's successor at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Archbishop William Levada, and Boston Archbishop Sean O'Malley. Both men have been involved in the response to the clergy sex abuse scandal in the United States.

Suzanne Malveaux, CNN White House reporter, said this about the President's public statements:

He would veto any legislation to hold up this deal and warned that the United States was sending mixed signals by going after a company from the middle east when they said nothing when a British company was in charge. He goes on to say that it is the lawmakers - members of Congress - that have to step up and explain why a middle eastern company is held to a different standard. He also took issue with a reporter's question aboard the plane saying what is the - kind of the politics of all of this - and he says that this is not a political issue.

Volkswagen Golf in cooperation with Volksbank in Croatia placed two blatantly sexist advertisements in Croatian national magazines and newspapers. The ad sells credits loans for Golf automobiles. One ad shows two older women in the background, overlapping their image are two young women, the caption reads; "Trade old for new." Nowhere is there a picture of an automobile. The second advertisements shows a young half naked woman lying in bed, holding and apple, the caption reads; "Father, for who is this?" "For the privileged, son, for the privileged."

I think that the worst thing about this campaign is its reliance on women as a stable of morons. Take its latest, where a man at the wheel of his studmobile tunes out while his word-vomiting girlfriend drones on and on. Finally, after taking commands from some possessed Furbie-lookalike (yes, another unexplainable failure of the campaign), our studmobile driver draws upon his inner manliness to shut the nitwit up. Get it . . . driving a manly Volkswagon gives you the balls to put your woman in her place. Why is it that companies are so sure that the right way to appeal to men is to humiliate women? And why am I so sure that they're right?

The target audience for the GTI is undeniably male: Volkswagen chose to unveil the new campaign on Thursday by holding a news conference at the office of Playboy magazine in New York. Print ads for the GTI are scheduled to run in magazines like Maxim, Spin, ESPN, Wired and Autoweek.

Beyond the leggy German-accented Helga in a skintight dress, the other women in the ads are typically portrayed as nagging girlfriends who interfere with the male drivers and their "fasts."

In one television commercial that is running during the Olympics, a female passenger asks the male driver, presumably her boyfriend, to roll up the windows because her hair is getting tangled by the wind.

He responds by saying, "Sweetie, it's really hard for me to enjoy the sound of the engine with all that yakking."

Another commercial depicts a man refusing to let his girlfriend enter his car because he does not want to "carry the extra weight."

It is a point that is not lost on Alex Bogusky, the chief creative officer for Crispin, who said he considered the car and its driving experience masculine.

"There are obviously women who will buy the GTI," he said Thursday, but the main emphasis of the ads was the car's performance.

The underground cell was tiny, about the size of a grave. According to court papers, "The cell was damp and cold, contained very little light and was infested with rats, which would enter the cell through a small aperture in the ceiling. Cats would urinate on Arar through the aperture, and sanitary facilities were nonexistent."

Mr. Arar's captors beat him savagely with an electrical cable. He was allowed to bathe in cold water once a week. He lost 40 pounds while in captivity.

In a ruling that basically gave the green light to government barbarism, U.S. District Judge David Trager dismissed Mr. Arar's lawsuit last Thursday. Judge Trager wrote in his opinion that "Arar's claim that he faced a likelihood of torture in Syria is supported by U.S. State Department reports on Syria's human rights practices."

But in dismissing the suit, he said that the foreign policy and national security issues raised by the government were "compelling" and that such matters were the purview of the executive branch and Congress, not the courts.

He also said that "the need for secrecy can hardly be doubted."

Under that reasoning, of course, the government could literally get away with murder. With its bad actions cloaked in court-sanctioned secrecy, no one would be the wiser.

But he also lays bare the unpleasant truth about working women. For decades, feminists and Hollywood have perpetuated the myth that a woman can have it all — a successful, high-powered career, with time for a loving husband and children, all the while looking glamorous, sexy, and carefree. The reality, however, is that working women today are more stressed, overworked, and underappreciated than they were prior to the women's liberation movement. Pursuing a career carries trade-offs and costs, which usually come at the expense of family and children. A similar dynamic holds true for women wishing to spend more time at home: The result will be less time and less productivity at the office. This book poignantly illustrates why feminism's war on human nature is destined to fail: Instead of chasing the chimera of perfect wage parity between the sexes, women will continue to harbor the natural desire to be devoted mothers and wives.

Although women are a force to be reckoned with their emancipation has not come without a price—something Lake and Conway fail to discuss. Women have rejected the quintessential essence of their being: Their ability to love and be loved. This has undermined the beauty of marriage and the happiness that comes with raising a child. Women may be more successful and influential than ever, but are they truly happier?

Limbaugh cuts right to the chase and offers countless examples of how the Christian voice is being muted in our educational, judicial, and social systems. Examples range from the current ban of a Ten Commandments monument in the court of Alabama to the elimination of religion in school curriculum, as well as prayer in the classroom to the attempt to strike the words "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance. Limbaugh also does an excellent job at citing more obscure cases where the religious voice is being stifled, such as the discrimination of churches in certain local zoning areas and the prohibition on Christian speakers in certain schools and other forums.

Limbaugh argues that liberal zealots are not being sincere about their true intentions to push religion out of society. The liberal claim that this should be done so as not to offend nonbelievers is hypocritical, since Christians are the ones being discriminated against by having their First Amendment rights infringed upon. Moreover, liberals claim to champion intellectual and social "diversity" but are quick to obliterate any religious or conservative perspective at odds with their agenda. This lack of genuine tolerance is incongruent with the spirit of democracy and freedom that America was founded on.

To see just precisely how rich blogging can make you, it's worth visiting Peter Rojas, the cheerful, skate-punk-like editor of Engadget—and the best-compensated blogger in history. When I meet him one December evening in his bachelor pad on the Lower East Side, he's sitting at an Ikea desk bedecked with three flat-panel screens and looking relatively fresh, considering he's just come off another eleven-hour blogging jag. Like most A-list bloggers, he hit his keyboard before dawn and posted straight through until dinner. "Anyone can start a blog, and anyone can make it grow," he says, sipping a glass of water. "But to keep it there? It's fucking hard work, man. I've never worked so hard in my life. Eighty-hour weeks since I started."

For Rojas, the toil paid off handsomely. Last fall, AOL bought Jason Calacanis's company Weblogs, Inc., which includes Engadget, for $25 million. Rojas himself didn't disclose the precise amount he got from the deal, but he had a good deal of equity in the company and says that, technically, he doesn't need to work anymore. Nonetheless, he's still slogging away at Engadget because he's still obsessed with cool new technology. His idea of a good time is hunting down samizdat pictures of the latest Palm Treo. "I didn't intend to become a millionaire," he says, "but I wound up there anyway."

The Gullible Latecomers: In the end stages of any investment mania, the clueless and the greedy flood in. You know things are really poised for a fall when people who have no management experience and feeble business plans somehow manage to raise cash for ventures. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Pajamas Media. Last November, the collection of right-wing blogs (with a few lefties thrown in for laughs) grandly announced the closing of a $3.5 million round of venture capital financing. Roger Simon, the screenwriter-turned-blogger who is the CEO of the enterprise, promised "to change the way people report and access news and commentary." I don't know. It looks to me like a bunch of blogs with their own logo.

To anyone acquainted with the history of women's sports, the thudding excuses the women ski jumpers are given for their exclusion from the Games are sadly, ridiculously familiar. Gian-Franco Kasper, head of the International Ski Federation, has said, "Ski jumping is just too dangerous for women. Don't forget, [the landing] it's like jumping down from, let's say, about two meters to the ground about a thousand times a year, which seems not to be appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view."

Forget that women ski jumpers have already been competing at high levels for a few years. Or that no one seems to worry about saving boys from the supposed horrors of the sport.

The international federation will take another vote this spring on whether women should jump in the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. And Alissa said, "So far, we've been told every excuse in the book. That it's too 'dangerous' for girls. That there aren't enough of us. That we're not good enough. That it would damage our ovaries and uterus and we won't be able to have children, even though that's not true. It's so outdated, it's kind of funny in a way. And then it's not."

Sexually abusing a teenager is less serious a crime if the girl is not a virgin, Italy's higher court said on Friday in a controversial ruling that immediately drew a barrage of criticism.

The court ruled in favor of a man in his forties, identified only as Marco T., who forced his 14-year old stepdaughter to have oral sex with him after she refused intercourse.

The man, who has been sentenced to three years and four months in jail, lodged an appeal arguing that the fact that his stepdaughter had had sex with men before should have been taken into consideration during his trial as a mitigating factor.

The supreme court agreed, saying that because of her previous sexual experiences, the victim's "personality, from a sexual point of view, is much more developed than what would be normally expected of a girl of her age".

"It is therefore fair to argue that (the damage for the victim) would be lower" if the abused girl was not a virgin, Italian news agencies quoted the court as saying.

This means the man could now be handed a lighter sentence.

But the key thing in a health savings account is you actually put a patient in charge of his or her decisions -- which we think is a vital aspect of making sure the health care system is not only modern, but a health care system in which costs are not running out of control. And part of making sure consumers, if they have a decision to make, can make rational decisions is for there to be transparency in pricing. In other words, how can you make a rational decision unless you fully understand the pricing options or the quality options. When you go buy a car, you know, you're able to shop and compare. And, yet, in health care, that's just not happening in America today.

...

It must be exciting to be on the leading edge of an interesting innovation and to a -- into health care. It's hard to believe that ours is a market society in which people are able to shop based upon price and quality in almost every aspect of our life, with the exception of health care. And it's no wonder that we're dealing with what appears to be ever increasing costs.

You know, it's really interesting, LASIK surgery is a good example of a procedure that was really -- was not a part of a third-party payer, just came to be. People could choose it if they wanted to choose it, could pay for it if they didn't want to -- would pay for it themselves if they chose to use it. And more doctors started offering LASIK surgery, there was more information about LASIK surgery, and the price came down dramatically over time, and the quality was increasing. And now LASIK surgery is eminently affordable for a lot of people, because the market actually functioned. And I think what Robin is saying is that they're trying to introduce those same kind of forces in Cincinnati.

...

In order for it to work, there has to be transparency. How can you expect somebody to make rational decisions in the marketplace if they don't see price and quality? It's going to be a very important -- what we're talking here is a very important reform to really fit into a -- making sure the private medicine aspect of our medical system remains the center of medicine.

There's a debate here in Washington about who best to make decisions. Some up here believe the federal government should be making decisions on behalf of people. I believe that consumers should be encouraged to make decisions on behalf of themselves. And health savings accounts and transparency go hand-in-hand.

The Bush administration helped derail a Senate bid to investigate a warrantless eavesdropping program yesterday after signaling it would reject Congress's request to have former attorney general John D. Ashcroft and other officials testify about the program's legality. The actions underscored a dramatic and possibly permanent drop in momentum for a congressional inquiry, which had seemed likely two months ago.

Senate Democrats said the Republican-led Congress was abdicating its obligations to oversee a controversial program in which the National Security Agency has monitored perhaps thousands of phone calls and e-mails involving U.S. residents and foreign parties without obtaining warrants from a secret court that handles such matters.

"It is more than apparent to me that the White House has applied heavy pressure in recent days, in recent weeks, to prevent the committee from doing its job," Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), vice chairman of the intelligence committee, said after the panel voted along party lines not to consider his motion for an investigation.

Yesterday, a federal judge ordered the Justice Department to turn over its internal documents and legal opinions about the program within 20 days -- or explain its reasons for refusing.

From the February 14 broadcast of The Rush Limbaugh Show:

LIMBAUGH: I don't believe this either. This is -- you know that story -- we had this -- some -- Wal-Mart was not stocking the morning-after pill. And I said, "Oh, this is -- this is big trouble."

It's in Massachusetts. The last place you want to be is between a -- a liberal woman and her morning-after pill. You don't want to be in her path when if -- if -- if she needs her morning after. Just get out of the way and then Wal-Mart didn't stock 'em.

[...]

And, of course, that doesn't matter because you've got bureaucrats in Massachusetts that can tell Wal-Mart what they have to carry. Now, this is a big problem for the libs 'cause here they're trying to put Wal-Mart out of business.

Wal-Mart's one of the biggest enemies that the libs have in this country. And now, all of a sudden, here you had a couple lib babes -- three of them -- that needed a morning-after pill and wanted to go to Wal-Mart.

What I would do if I were Wal-Mart here -- I would stock one bottle. "You going to make me do this? OK. I'll put one bottle and we're charging a thousand bucks a pill." That's what I would do.
(Bolds Echidne's)

Chertoff says he'd do things differently.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff marked his first year on the job Wednesday with a dismal evaluation: His department's failure to respond more quickly to Hurricane Katrina may have cost lives.

Dick Cheney is a constant reminder of those things the White House would most like to forget: the bullying, the intelligence failures, the inability to pacify Iraq, the misuse of classified information and the breathtaking incompetence that seems to be spread throughout the administration.

Mr. Cheney would do his nation and his president a service by packing his bags and heading back to Wyoming. He's become a joke. But not a funny one.

Last night, MSNBC scrubbed a paragraph about alcohol from an online article about Cheney's hunting accident:

Now, they've restored the paragraph, slightly reworked:

In a recorded, on-the-record phone call with NBC News, Armstrong said that beer may have been available at lunch that day. "If someone wants to help themselves to a beer," she said, "they may, but I did not see anyone do that," Armstrong says. She says she was not sure if there were beers in the coolers but wasn't ready to rule it out: "There may be a beer or two in there, but remember not everyone in the party was shooting," she told NBC News.

A company in the United Arab Emirates is poised to take over significant operations at six American ports as part of a corporate sale, leaving a country with ties to the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers with influence over a maritime industry considered vulnerable to terrorism.

The Bush administration considers the UAE an important ally in the fight against terrorism since the suicide hijackings and is not objecting to Dubai Ports World's purchase of London-based Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Co.

The $6.8 billion sale could be approved Monday and would affect commercial port operations in New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia.

DP World said it won approval from a secretive U.S. government panel that considers security risks of foreign companies buying or investing in American industry.

The government may waive up to $7 billion in royalty payments from companies pumping oil and natural gas on federal territory in the next five years, the New York Times reported on Tuesday, citing administration officials and budget documents.

The royalty relief would amount to one of the biggest giveaways of oil and gas in U.S. history, even though the administration assumes oil prices will remain above $50 a barrel throughout that period, the Times report said.

The report cited estimates in the Interior Department's recent budget plan that would allow companies to pump about $65 billion in oil and natural gas without paying royalties.

Prof. Bialystok first noticed bilingual children were proficient in blocking out irrelevant information about 20 years ago. When asked to identify a grammatically correct sentence, for example, both bilinguals and monolinguals are, by age 5, able to choose, "Apples grow on trees," over "Apple trees on grow" as the correct one.

But when it came to asking "Apples grow on noses" versus "Apples nose on grow," only the bilingual children were able to choose the right answer. Although the first sentence is grammatically correct, monolingual children could not get over its silliness. "That's crazy," they'd shout, "You can't say that!"

"We have been able to show on a huge range of cognitive tests that bilinguals are always better at problems with tricky, misleading information," Prof. Bialystok said.

On average, she said, monolingual children take a year longer to learn to block out irrelevant information and focus on a specific task.

You will find these jobs in a handy chart in Haltzman's book, "The Secrets of Happily Married Men," which is a work of marketing genius. Haltzman, a psychiatrist at Brown University, knows that most guys will not buy a self-help book unless it tells them how to make more money or actualize their inner golfer.

So he's aimed this one at women, from the subtitle — "Eight Ways to Win Your Wife's Heart Forever" — to the Herculean lists of husbandly duties. He has been busy inscribing copies for wives who are buying it to give to their husbands on Valentine's Day.

If you get one, do not throw it away. Do not be intimidated by the daily job chart. The genius of this book is that it looks appealing to women shoppers while offering male readers a reassuringly subversive message. It's a book that asks politically incorrect questions about men and women at home — the neglected front in the gender wars.

...

The standard advice for bungling husbands is to go with their wives to a marriage counselor, but Haltzman disagrees. He's a marriage counselor who advises men to beware of marriage counseling. While other therapists urge men to get in touch with their feelings and empathize with their wives', Haltzman figures this is a losing game because their brains aren't wired for it.

They can't express their emotions or empathize as well as women can. Telling a man to solve his marital problems by talking about his emotions for an hour is like telling a woman to solve her problems at the office by joining the guys for a weekend game of paintball.

Even when men can express their emotions, they run a risk. "Women say they want men to be vulnerable, but I say to men, Take your time," Haltzman advises. "Your wife is looking to feel a certain degree of security and trust in you. Until she feels that way about you, it's precarious to talk about your anger or your fears. Either she loses respect for you or she begins to panic — if you're not in control, where does that leave her?"

...

Yes, husbands may usually make more money on the work front, but wives still typically make the important decisions on the home front, like where the children go to school or how to spend the family's money. Wives also (and Haltzman presents supporting data here on the gender gap in libido) tend to make the decision on whether to have sex.

Did that last sentence get your attention, gentlemen? Then enough talk. Start working on that list.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

The CIA's top counter-terrorism official was fired last week because he opposed detaining Al-Qaeda suspects in secret prisons abroad, sending them to other countries for interrogation and using forms of torture such as "water boarding", intelligence sources have claimed.

Robert Grenier, head of the CIA counter-terrorism centre, was relieved of his post after a year in the job. One intelligence official said he was "not quite as aggressive as he might have been" in pursuing Al-Qaeda leaders and networks.

Vincent Cannistraro, a former head of counter-terrorism at the agency, said: "It is not that Grenier wasn't aggressive enough, it is that he wasn't 'with the programme'. He expressed misgivings about the secret prisons in Europe and the rendition of terrorists."

Grenier also opposed "excessive" interrogation, such as strapping suspects to boards and dunking them in water, according to Cannistraro.

A measure seeking a court fight aimed at overturning the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion was approved Wednesday by a South Dakota legislative committee.

The House State Affairs Committee voted 11-2 to approve a bill that would ban nearly all abortions in South Dakota.

HB1215, which next goes to the full House of Representatives, would make it a felony carrying a penalty of up to five years in prison for doctors and others to perform an abortion. However, abortions would be allowed to save the life of a pregnant woman.

Hunt said the bill also recognizes that abortion should be prohibited to protect women and unborn children and to protect a woman's right to a relationship with her unborn child.

The ancients used scapegoating for psychological healing of their communities. The poor victim, known to all to be blameless in whatever ailed the society, was saddled with all the grievances and sins of the past year and then ceremoniously killed or at least beaten and chased out of town. Clearly, scapegoating was not a favorite career plan for any human or animal.

Scapegoating is still with us. It is practiced by the media, the politicians, the so-called cultural critics and the ordinary people we meet in our daily lives. Anybody can become a scapegoat, although the odds are slight for those with some power or status in the society. Most scapegoats are picked from those living on the margins: the poor, the racially or ethnically unassimilated minorities, believers in unfashionable religions, individuals who act out of the traditionally ordained roles allowed them, freethinkers.

Scapegoating by others is easy to distinguish from true attempts to find the culprits of some wrongful deed (although we are likely to be blind to the scapegoat-seeking aspects of our own behavior). The acts are scapegoating when the groups blamed are clearly nowhere near powerful enough to have caused the lamentable phenomenom for which they are accused, when they are inexplicably saddled with all sorts of misdeeds without any attempt to logically connect them to the origins of the problems, and when all aspects of their lives are suddenly demonized. Scapegoating is also revealed when reasonable defenses of the accused are ignored or belittled (where this is not common practice).

It is true that we no longer officially sanction the sacrifice of the scapegoats but the career of a scapegoat is still a painful one. More importantly, scapegoating is wrong. Whatever temporary psychological relief it brings is overshadowed by the new harm the society is inflicting on some of its members. And emphasizing scapegoating leaves the true causes of our problems unattended, and the problems themselves will probably persist.

Examples of scapegoating in human history are not hard to come by. Perhaps the most famous are the medieval witch hunts in Europe and the later American incidents in Salem, Massachusetts. But more recent cases also abound. Consider the public discussion concerning welfare recipients that preceded the 1996 reform of the relevant law. That this discussion reduced to scapegoating is evident from the treatment the politicians and the press accorded the women who were bringing up children on welfare. By all generally accepted standards this group is one of the most economically and culturally powerless: most women in this position are without adequate education and marketable skills, are solely responsible for small children and in many cases lack the psychological resources to advance themselves and their children in life. Their position is clearly problematic and deserves attention and study. I would also argue that it deserves compassion.

What type of attention did this problem in fact receive? Much of it consisted of blame. We all remember the term "welfare queen", the reference to the poor as piglets sucking at the teats of big government, and perhaps also the reference to taxpayers pulling the wagon on which the freeloading poor recline. Some may also recall the arguments that all welfare does is allow the poor to breed another generation of criminals and "welfare queens".

It is not the presence of such arguments that defines this case as scapegoating. After all, it is reasonable to study the extent of misuse in the system as well as its costs to the rest of the society. What is not reasonable, and thereby constitutes grounds for calling the debate scapegoating, is the tone and the vehemence of the arguments, the complete lack of qualifying terms (such as some, a few, most) and statistical evidence (averages, modes, medians), as well as the relative paucity of alternative points of view. Add to these the impression one got from many of the arguments that the welfare system as it stood was largely responsible for high taxes on the hard-working citizens of this country, contrasted with the fact that at that time only one dollar out of each hundred taken in as tax revenue went to welfare payments overall, and the case for scapegoating becomes stronger still. In reality, very little would change if all welfare recipients could somehow miraculously be made to disappear into thin air. The actual value of this whole campaign was in the psychological relief it gave its proponents:"We have identified to problem, assigned blame for it and punished the guilty. Our house is now in order."

But it isn't, of course. Even more generally, the value of scapegoating is only temporary; a release for all the pent-up anger that we as a society seem to have collected over time, a release which is "legitimized" and led to a channel where it does the minimum amount of damage to those in power.

'Thirty years ago this did not exist,' says Remy Mafu, the director of the Rejeer project for street children. 'Now it's a huge problem and difficult to know how to deal with it.'

He estimates there are between 25,000 and 50,000 children on the streets of Kinshasa, a city of seven million. Many - if not most - have been accused of witchcraft and rejected by their families. The roots lie in a distorted development of African culture. Witchcraft does not mean in Africa what it means in Europe. Traditionally in Congo, every community had mediums who communicated with spirits in the other world. These were usually older people, revered and respected. The spirits they communed with or were possessed by were usually neither good nor bad, simply powerful.

'In African culture, when something goes wrong, we ask the spirits to find the human cause,' Mafu explains. 'These days children are accused. They can be persuaded to accept it's their fault. They tell themselves "it is me, I am evil".'

Then there are the new fundamentalist Christian sects, of which there are thousands in Kinshasa. They make money out of identifying 'witches' and increasingly parents bring troublesome children to the pastors. 'It's a business,' says Mafu. 'For a fee of $5 or $10 they investigate the children and confirm they are possessed. For a further fee they take the child and exorcise them, often keeping them without food for days, beating and torturing them to chase out the devil.'

Children who do well in school can also be accused of witchcraft. The common charge is they have been seen flying or eating human flesh. Their confessions of killing and eating relatives are broadcast live on TV channels owned by evangelical churches. What once seemed aberrations from extremist sects now seem to be becoming commonplace.

We have heard for a long time that anger and other psychological and emotional factors drive the extreme elements on the Left, but that is (at least) equally true for the Bush extremists. The only difference happens to be that the Bush extremists control every major governmental institution in the country and the extremists on the Left control nothing other than the crusted agenda for the latest International A.N.S.W.E.R. meeting.

And the core emotions driving the Bush extremists are not hard to see. It is a driving rage and hatred – for liberals, for Muslims, for anyone who opposes George Bush. The rage and desire to destroy is palpable. When John Hinderaker removes those tightly-wound glasses and lets go of the death grip he maintains on the respectable-corporate-lawyer facade, these are the sentiments which are always stirring underneath:


You dumb shit, he didn't get access using a fake name, he used his real name. You lefties' concern for White House security is really touching, but you know what, you stupid asshole, I think the Secret Service has it covered. Go crawl back into your hole, you stupid left-wing shithead. And don't bother us anymore. You have to have an IQ over 50 to correspond with us. You don't qualify, you stupid shit.


The rhetoric of Bush followers is routinely comprised of these sorts of sentiments dressed up in political language – accusations that domestic political opponents are subversives and traitors, that they ought to be imprisoned and hung, that we ought to drop nuclear bombs on countries which have committed the crime of housing large Muslim populations. These are not political sentiments, and they're certainly not conservatives sentiments, but instead, are psychological desires finding a venting ground in a political movement.

It's not an accident that Ann Coulter and her ongoing calls for violence against "liberals" (meaning anyone not in line behind George Bush) are so wildly popular among conservatives. It's not some weird coincidence that the 5,000 people in attendance at the CPAC this last week erupted in "boisterous ovation" when she urged violence against "ragheads,' nor is it an accident that her hateful, violence-inciting screeds -- accusing "liberals" of being not wrong, but "treasonous" -- become best-sellers. Ann Coulter has been advocating violence against liberals and other domestic political opponents for years, and she is a featured speaker at the most prestigious conservative events. Why would that be? It's because she is tapping into the primal, rather deranged rage which lies in the heart of many Bush followers. If that weren't driving the movement, she wouldn't provoke the reactions and support that she does.

The government concluded its "Cyber Storm" wargame Friday, its biggest-ever exercise to test how it would respond to devastating attacks over the Internet from anti-globalization activists, underground hackers and bloggers.

From this morning on the Chris Matthews show:

DAVID BROOKS: Whoever the Democratic candidate, that is the weakness of the Democratic party, they've got the blogs and the netroots who are semi-nuts and they insist on a Stalinist line of discipline.

Dear Mr. Brady,

I'm a liberal blogger though a very polite one. There are certain aspects of your recent article on the WaPo blog incident that I wish to comment on, because I think that it is not only true that different political groups now live in their own little worlds, it is equally true that this "little world" applies to Washington insiders like yourselves.

I'd like to begin by talking about the viciousness of the comments you received. I copied the first five hundred or so, and it is true that most of the ones I copied were very angry. They were not especially obscene or misogynistic. I get much worse on my blog e-mail every day, and almost all of them from our conservative brothers and sisters. For how the conservatives discuss these things, please go and visit Little Green Footballs (you can Google it).

It is indeed true that the level of politeness among blog commenters is lower than in other contexts we usually live in. But I think that you are downplaying the reason for the incivility you so deplore. It is not only the "inadvertent" error that was later corrected, but the fact that the correction is still a partial one. You mention that Abramoff directed donations to Democrats as well as Republicans, but you do NOT mention that the Democrats share was a tiny percentage of the whole and that in the past the tribes used to give a lot more to Democrats. If anything, it would seem that Abramoff directed donations AWAY from Democrats.

If this is not true, why not tell us exactly what the evidence is you have which supports your argument? I get so much data pointing otherwise by just Googling and using my mind.

More about the anger of those who commented. The impression you gave was that of a vast mass of clueless dittoheads which a few clever bloggers could turn into a nasty horde. The reality is much more complicated. (Boy, I wish that someone actually reads this because I'm brilliant here!):

Consider what has happened in the last two decades or so among the political landscape of this country. The Republican party has stepped decisively to the right and embraced the fundamentalist Christians, many of whom have Taliban-type plans for our society. At the same time the media stopped being required to be balanced and we saw the beginning of the radio talk shows. Rush Limbaugh is a good example of the pundits which appeared and soon were treated as prophets by many Americans. Limbaugh and others like him spent hours vituperating on the evil that is a liberal, calling uppity women feminazis and advocating fairly violent measures to fight the Clinton administration.

Then Fox News appeared, with their "fair and balanced" approach. Bill O'Reilly tells us that we liberals are as much enemies of the country as are the terrorists, and the guests on practically all political tv shows today spend at least half of the time liberal-bashing, making comparisons between us and Hitler and between us and Osama bin Laden. We are even destroying Christmas.

And what do the more respectable media organizations do? Not much, from our point of view. There is no real condemnation of the inaccuracy of this new faith-based approach. Then add to this the consistent conservative howling of liberal bias in the media. I have been told that journalists now only fear two things: getting the names, ages and addresses of those interviewed wrong or being blamed for being too liberal.

There is no howling from the other side about how almost all media is owned by conservatives. The consequence is that the guest lists of the Sunday political shows are now something like three-to-one conservative and even the token liberal tends to be a wishy-washy middle-of-the-roader.

We are growing very angry, true, but it is not because of the partisan division in this country. It is because we are being ignored everywhere. We have no major equivalent of Fox News and the so-called liberal media, such as New York Times, publishes at least as many far right conservative columnists as it publishes lefties. We feel silenced and we feel that nobody listens to our concerns anymore. We feel we have no voice, except for the blogs.

Then put the original article of this debacle into the picture and you can see why blog readers would react.

Yours sincerely,

Echidne of the snakes

But evangelical groups, such as the Colorado-based Focus on the Family, saw the guidelines as overly restrictive. They launched a nationwide petition drive, sounded alarms on Christian radio stations, and deluged the White House and Air Force Secretary Michael W. Wynne's office with e-mails calling the guidelines an infringement of the Constitution's guarantees of free speech and free exercise of religion.

Seventy-two members of Congress also signed a letter to President Bush criticizing the guidelines and urging him to issue an executive order guaranteeing the right of military chaplains to pray "in Jesus' name" rather than being forced to offer nonsectarian prayers at public ceremonies.

The revised guidelines are considerably shorter than the original, filling one page instead of four. They place more emphasis on the Constitution's free exercise clause, which is mentioned four times, than on its prohibition on any government establishment of religion, which is mentioned twice.

There are easy, common sense ways to prevent unwanted pregnancies: good birth control and sex education, for example. So why is birth control the next target of the Christian right?

Also, DC's residents are in their classic panic mode because we "might" get "some" snow tomorrow. So, needless to say, middle aged soccer moms are killing each other at the Safeway over the last bottles of raspberry-flavored fizzy water.

Reporters then were ushered out - "I support the free press, let's just get them out of the room," Bush said - so the president could speak privately to his fellow Republicans.

"I want to share some thoughts with you before I answer your questions," said Bush, unaware that microphones were still on and were transmitting his comments back to the White House press room. "First of all, I expect this conversation we're about to have to stay in the room. I know that's impossible in Washington."

That was not to be - and it was telling that the president chose the controversial NSA program as the first topic to raise out of reporters' earshot. Even so, there was no substantive difference between those statements and the series of public speeches he has given recently to defend the program.

The new disclosure that Libby has claimed that the vice president and others in the White House had authorized him to release information to make the case to go to war, and later to defend the administration's use of prewar intelligence, is significant for several reasons. First, it significantly adds to a mounting body of information that Cheney played a central and personal role in directing efforts to counter claims by Wilson and other administration critics that the Bush administration had misused intelligence information to go to war with Iraq.

Second, it raises additional questions about Libby's motives in concealing his role in leaking Plame's name to the press, if he was in fact more broadly authorized by Cheney and others to rebut former Ambassador Wilson's charges. The federal grand jury indictment of Libby alleges that he had lied to the FBI and the federal grand jury by claiming that when he provided information to reporters about Plame's CIA employment, he was only passing along what he understood to be unverified gossip that he had heard from other journalists.

Instead, the indictment charges that Libby had in fact learned of Plame's CIA status from at least four government officials, Cheney among them, and from classified documents. Indeed, much of Libby's earliest and most detailed information regarding Plame's CIA employment came directly from the vice president, according to information in Libby's grand jury indictment. "On or about June 12, 2003," the indictment stated, "Libby was advised by the Vice President of the United States that Wilson's wife worked at the Central Intelligence Agency in the Counterproliferation Division."

Libby testified that Cheney told him about Plame "in an off sort of, curiosity sort of, fashion," according to other information recently unsealed in federal court. Not long after that date, Libby, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, and a third administration official began to tell reporters that Plame had worked at the CIA, and that she had been responsible for sending her husband to Niger.

Welcome home, Master," says the maid as she bows deeply, hands clasped in front of a starched pinafore worn over a short pink dress.

This maid serves not some aristocrat but a string of pop-culture-mad customers at a "Maid Cafe" in Tokyo's Akihabara district, long known as a Mecca for electronics buffs but now also the center of the capital's "nerd culture."

"When they address you as 'Master', the feeling you get is like a high," says Koji Abei, a 20-year-old student having coffee with a friend at the Royal Milk Cafe and Aromacare.

"I've never felt that way before."

Maid cafes dot Akihabara, which has become a second home for Tokyo's "otaku" -- roughly translated as "geeks." They're known for their devotion to comics and computer games and can easily be identified by their standard outfit of track suit, knapsack and spectacles.

In the cafes, girls dressed in frilly frocks inspired by comic-book heroines wait hand and foot on customers, mostly male, who might have once been obsessed with naughty schoolgirls and nurses.

At one cafe, maids get down on their knees to stir the cream and sugar into the customer's coffee.

...

"These cafes offer a chance for men oppressed in their daily life to escape into a fantasy world," said social commentator Tomoko Inukai, adding that the phenomenon hardly helped to promote gender equality in a largely male-dominated society.

...

"The concept of these cafes, where women who are physically and emotionally immature serve male customers, is not surprising given the fetish for young women among Japanese men," Inukai said.

Now, Brownback seeks something far more radical: not faith-based politics but faith in place of politics. In his dream America, the one he believes both the Bible and the Constitution promise, the state will simply wither away. In its place will be a country so suffused with God and the free market that the social fabric of the last hundred years -- schools, Social Security, welfare -- will be privatized or simply done away with. There will be no abortions; sex will be confined to heterosexual marriage. Men will lead families, mothers will tend children, and big business and the church will take care of all.

He is running for president because murder is always on his mind: the abortion of what he considers fetal citizens. He speaks often and admiringly of John Brown, the abolitionist who massacred five pro-slavery settlers just north of the farm where Brownback grew up. Brown wanted to free the slaves; Brownback wants to free fetuses. He loves each and every one of them. "Just . . . sacred," he says. In January, during the confirmation of Samuel Alito for a seat on the Supreme Court, Brownback compared Roe v. Wade to the now disgraced rulings that once upheld segregation.

On Sundays, Brownback rises at dawn so he can catch a Catholic Mass before meeting Mary and the kids at Topeka Bible Church. With the exception of one brown-skinned man, the congregation is entirely white. The stage looks like a rec room in a suburban basement: wall-to-wall carpet, wood paneling, a few haphazard ferns and a couple of electric guitars lying around. This morning, the church welcomes a guest preacher from Promise Keepers, a men's group, by performing a skit about golf and fatherhood. From his preferred seat in the balcony, Brownback chuckles when he's supposed to, sings every song, nods seriously when the preacher warns against "Judaizers" who would "poison" the New Testament.

Brownback was placed in a weekly prayer cell by "the shadow Billy Graham" -- Doug Coe, Vereide's successor as head of the Fellowship. The group was all male and all Republican. It was a "safe relationship," Brownback says. Conversation tended toward the personal. Brownback and the other men revealed the most intimate details of their desires, failings, ambitions. They talked about lust, anger and infidelities, the more shameful the better -- since the goal was to break one's own will. The abolition of self; to become nothing but a vessel so that one could be used by God.

They were striving, ultimately, for what Coe calls "Jesus plus nothing" -- a government led by Christ's will alone. In the future envisioned by Coe, everything -- sex and taxes, war and the price of oil -- will be decided upon not according to democracy or the church or even Scripture. The Bible itself is for the masses; in the Fellowship, Christ reveals a higher set of commands to the anointed few. It's a good old boy's club blessed by God. Brownback even lived with other cell members in a million-dollar, red-brick former convent at 133 C Street that was subsidized and operated by the Fellowship. Monthly rent was $600 per man -- enough of a deal by Hill standards that some said it bordered on an ethical violation, but no charges were ever brought.

He has worldly proof, too. "You look at the social impact of the countries that have engaged in homosexual marriage." He shakes his head in sorrow, thinking of Sweden, which Christian conservatives believe has been made by "social engineering" into an outer ring of hell. "You'll know 'em by their fruits," Brownback says. He pauses, and an awkward silence fills the room. He was citing scripture -- Matthew 7:16 -- but he just called gay Swedes "fruits."

RUSH: We've got a little office pool going on here, folks, and I wanted to share it with you, regarding the funeral. First, when's it going to end? The other things that we're looking at -- who's in the house? You've got Bill Clinton, you've got the Reverend Jackson, and you have Teddy Kennedy, and those are just the known culprits. I'm sure that there are others who fit the mold. They're all in the House. So here's the little office pool that we have going here. Here you might want to have your own version of this in your office or your home today. The end of the funeral, when it's all over, how many women will be picked up? The next question we're asking ourselves, how many babies will be born nine months from today? I mean, you've got Bill Clinton in there; you've got Jesse Jackson and Teddy Kennedy -- and the next question we're asking, "Will a car fail to negotiate a bridge somewhere in Georgia late tonight, and if so, who will have been driving?"

The President intends to nominate Patricia P. Brister, of Louisiana, to be the Representative of the United States of America on the Commission on the Status of Women of the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations with the Rank of Ambassador.

When Pat Brister, state chairwoman of the Louisiana Republican Party, wanted to do her part to seal the 2000 election for George W. Bush, she didn't need Tom DeLay to provide an e-ticket to Florida. Instead, she just strolled out into her political backyard. Last month, Brister assembled a mid-sized Republican mob outside the Baton Rouge office of Louisiana's senior senator, Democrat John Breaux, and hand-delivered a letter urging Breaux to "call for Vice President Gore to accept the certification of the Florida Secretary of State" ensuring that Bush had won the election.

If you read enough numbers, you never know what you'll find. Take President Bush and private Social Security accounts.

Last year, even though Bush talked endlessly about the supposed joys of private accounts, he never proposed a specific plan to Congress and never put privatization costs in the budget. But this year, with no fanfare whatsoever, Bush stuck a big Social Security privatization plan in the federal budget proposal, which he sent to Congress on Monday.

His plan would let people set up private accounts starting in 2010 and would divert more than $700 billion of Social Security tax revenues to pay for them over the first seven years.

If this comes as a surprise to you, have no fear. You're not alone. Bush didn't pitch private Social Security accounts in his State of the Union message last week.

First, he drew a mocking standing ovation from Democrats by saying that "Congress did not act last year on my proposal to save Social Security," even though, as I said, he'd never submitted specific legislation.

Then he seemed to be kicking the Social Security problem a few years down the road in typical Washington fashion when he asked Congress "to join me in creating a commission to examine the full impact of baby boom retirements on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid," adding that the commission would be bipartisan "and offer bipartisan solutions."

But anyone who thought that Bush would wait for bipartisanship to deal with Social Security was wrong. Instead, he stuck his own privatization proposals into his proposed budget.

I enjoy blogs like Bitch, Ph.D., Echidne of the Snakes, Pinko Feminist Hellcat, One Good Thing, Angry Black Bitch, and The Happy Feminist, but I dread the inevitable day it is discovered that a seemingly feminist pseudonymous blogger is actually an anti-feminist man, who has been lying profusely and manipulatively about his background, a la James Frey or Asa "Forrest" Carter, or JT Leroy. I don't think this is a very likely outcome with respect to Dr. Bitch, Echidne, Sheezlebub, Flea, Shark-Fu, or Happy, but their pseudonymity also precludes them from evolving into the visible, "public intellectual" feminist leaders that they certainly seem to otherwise have the drive and talent to become. Sometimes I wonder how much energy and sleep they lose worrying about having their true identities revealed, or how much trying to avoid identifiable disclosures causes them to self-censor, or even lie about their lives.

The largest study ever to ask whether a low-fat diet keeps women from getting cancer or heart disease has found that the diet had no effect.

The $415 million federal study involved nearly 49,000 women aged 50 to 79 who were followed for eight years. In the end, those assigned to a low-fat diet had the same rates of breast cancer, colon cancer heart attack and stroke as those who ate whatever they pleased, researchers are reporting today.

"These are three totally negative studies," said Dr. David Freedman, a statistician at the University of California at Berkeley, who is not connected with the study but has written books on clinical trial design and analysis. And, he said, the results should be taken seriously for what they are — a rigorous attempt that failed to confirm a popular hypothesis that a low-fat diet can prevent three major diseases in women.

And the studies were so large and so expensive that they are "the Rolls Royce of studies," said Dr. Michael Thun, who directs epidemiological research for the American Cancer Society. As such, he said, they are likely to be the final word.

Dr. Rossouw, however, said he was still intrigued by the breast cancer data, even though it was not statistically significant. The women on low-fat diets had a 9 percent lower rate of breast cancer — the incidence was 42 per 1,000 per year in women in the low-fat diet group, as compared with 45 per 1,000 per year in women consuming their regular diet. That might mean that fat in the diet might have a small effect, Dr. Rossouw said, perhaps in some subgroups of women or over a longer period of time. He added that the study investigators would continue to follow the women to see if the effect became more pronounced.

ROBERTSON: Studies that I have read indicate that having babies is a sign of a faith in the future. You know, unless you believe in the future, you're not going to take the trouble of raising a child, educating a child, doing something. If there is no future, why do it? Well, unless you believe in God, there's really no future. And when you go back to the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, the whole idea of this desperate nightmare we are in -- you know, that we are in this prison, and it has no hope, no exit. That kind of philosophy has permeated the intellectual thinking of Europe, and hopefully it doesn't come here. But nevertheless, ladies and gentlemen, Europe is right now in the midst of racial suicide because of the declining birth rate. And they just can't get it together. Why? There's no hope.

Since the prescription program made its debut Jan. 1, some of the estimated 2 million mentally ill Americans covered because they receive both Medicare and Medicaid have gone without the drugs that keep their delusions, paranoia, anxieties or stress in check. Mental health service providers and advocacy organizations nationwide say they worry that scores are at high risk of relapse. Numerous people have been hospitalized.

"The continuation of medications is absolutely critical to keep them in community living," said Steven S. Sharfstein, chief executive of the Shepherd-Pratt Health System in Baltimore and president of the American Psychiatric Association. Last week, the association joined other mental health groups in a lengthy talk with Medicare officials about the myriad problems.

...

The mentally ill are nearly a third of the "dual eligibles" who qualify for both Medicare and Medicaid because of income and disability or age. Mark B. McClellan, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told a Senate committee hearing Thursday that a prime focus is resolving the "remaining transition issues" for this extremely vulnerable population.

That will not happen quickly. Like other Medicare-Medicaid recipients, the mentally ill were to have been signed up automatically for Part D at the start of the year, with responsibility for their prescriptions shifted seamlessly to private drug plans. Clinicians expected a bumpy beginning even in the best of circumstances. The new coverage often forces beneficiaries to switch from their usual pharmacies to different locations and strange faces, changes that Pam Cudahy of St. Luke's House in Bethesda said can have a huge effect on someone with few coping resources.

"Is the environment familiar? Is the person [behind the counter] familiar? When I show my prescription card, will the same thing happen as happened before?" Such questions represent daunting challenges, explained Cudahy, whose agency provides crisis care and psychiatric rehabilitation to about 1,000 teenagers and adults. "You don't want something to happen they're not expecting."

But repeatedly, she and others say, people have fallen through the program's cracks and discovered they have no insurance -- and have either run out of pills or rationed their medicine because they feared they would be left without.

Or they have been assigned to plans that will pay for some but not all of their psychiatric prescriptions -- an untenable and potentially dangerous situation given the complicated multiplicity of drugs people often take, with some pills to treat symptoms and others to counteract side effects. Unlike many medicines, psychiatric drugs are not easily substituted.

The National Embryo Donation Center announced today that it is a partner in a $309,000 embryo adoption awareness grant, funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

The Baptist Health System Foundation in Knoxville, TN, which serves as the primary recipient of the HHS grant, will work with the National Embryo Donation Center and the Christian Medical & Dental Association to educate the public about embryo adoption.

The genetic parents determine their own level of involvement in the adoption process and whether or not to remain anonymous. After completing the embryo adoption agreement and a home study, the embryos are transferred to the adoptive mother, allowing her to experience pregnancy and the birth of their adopted child. However, in the case of embryo adoption, the adoptive parents are recognized as the birth parents of the child.

The press decided early on the issue of warrantless electronic surveilance is a loser for Democrats, and having created the CW, aren't anxious to see it proved wrong.

Amnesty International is calling on the Iranian authorities to take immediate steps to end the use of the death penalty for child offenders. Two new cases have been reported in which child offenders – persons under 18 at the time of the crime – have been sentenced to death by Iranian courts, in breach of Iran's obligations under international human rights law.

On 3 January, 18-year-old Nazanin was sentenced to death for murder by a criminal court, after she reportedly admitted stabbing to death one of three men who attempted to rape her and her 16-year-old niece in a park in Karaj in March 2005. She was seventeen at the time. Her sentence is subject to review by the Court of Appeal, and if upheld, to confirmation by the Supreme Court.

According to reports in the Iranian newspaper, E'temaad, Nazanin told the court that three men had approached her and her niece, forced them to the ground and tried to rape them. Seeking to defend her niece and herself, Nazanin stabbed one man in the hand with a knife that she possessed and then, when the men continued to pursue them, stabbed another of the men in the chest. She reportedly told the court "I wanted to defend myself and my niece. I did not want to kill that boy. At the heat of the moment I did not know what to do because no one came to our help", but was nevertheless sentenced to death.

The House yesterday narrowly approved a contentious budget-cutting package that would save nearly $40 billion over five years by imposing substantial changes on programs including Medicaid, welfare, child support and student lending.

With its presidential signature all but assured, the bill represents the first effort in nearly a decade to try to slow the growth of entitlement programs, one that will be felt by millions of Americans. Women on welfare are likely to face longer hours of work, education or community service to qualify for their checks. Recipients of Medicaid can expect to face higher co-payments and deductibles, especially on expensive prescription drugs and emergency room visits for non-emergency care. More affluent seniors will find it far more difficult to qualify for Medicaid-covered nursing care.

The impact of the bill on the deficit is likely to be negligible, slicing less than one-half of 1 percent from the estimated $14.3 trillion in federal spending over the next five years. As the House debated the budget-cutting measure, the Senate moved to begin final negotiations with the House on a package of tax cuts and extension of expiring tax cuts that could cost up to $60 billion over five years, more than negating the savings from the budget bill.

BUSH: Before history is written down in books, it is written in courage.

Like Americans before us, we will show that courage and we will finish well.