ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES

Speers: So you need those Australian troops there?

Bush: Well we need... we need all our coalition partners, and I would hope that... And I understand, look, everybody's got their own internal politics, my only point is that, um, whether it be Afghanistan or Iraq, we've got more work to do. We the free world has got more work to do, and I believe those of us who live in liberty have a responsibility to promote forms of government that deal with what causes 19 kids to get on airplanes to kill 3,000 students.

Police are searching for the mother of a small fetus found by utility workers at a sewage pump station Monday in Morgantown, W.Va.

The fetus will be sent to the state medical examiner's office in Charleston for an autopsy to determine race, sex and age.

Morgantown police said a worker whose job it is to check screens at the pump station found the fetus during his daily routine Monday morning.

The fetus was so small that police don't yet know if a crime was committed or if the mother had a miscarriage.

...

It's likely the fetus was flushed down a toilet, Green said.

Authorities were trying to locate the mother of the unborn child to learn what happened.

Cesare also seized (1502) Piombino, Elba, Camerino, and the duchy of Urbino, and he crowned his achievements by artfully luring his chief enemies to the castle of Senigallia, where he had some of them strangled. By killing his enemies, packing the college of cardinals, pushing his conquests as fast as possible, and buying the loyalty of the Roman gentry, he had hoped to make his position independent of the papacy, or at least to insure that the election of any future pope would be to his liking.

Cesare was struck in 1503 by the same poison (or illness) that suddenly killed his father. Cesare recovered; however, his political power had suffered a fatal blow. Pius III, after a short reign, was succeeded by Julius II, an implacable enemy of Cesare Borgia. Louis XII then turned against him. Julius demanded the immediate return of what territory remained to Cesare and had him temporarily arrested. Returning to Naples, Cesare was soon arrested by the Spanish governor there as the result of collusion between Julius II and the Spanish rulers, Ferdinand and Isabella. Sent to prison in Spain, he escaped and finally found refuge (1506) at the court of the king of Navarre. He died fighting for him at Viana.

True story that I wrote in three minutes because that's exactly how much time I felt like dwelling on it: this one time about nine years ago I got locked out of my house and went home with some vaguely smarmy hair-product using type from my ex-boyfriend's frat. I had slept with maybe two or three guys prior to that -- it was the summer between sophomore and junior year of college -- so when he, after about a half hour of fooling around, put on a condom I was like, "Whooooah, what are you doing?" But I'd had two forties and I kept drifting in and out of consciousness -- my tolerance, obviously, wasn't what it is today -- and I woke up to find him sticking it in. I'd said 'no' a bunch of times and when I came to I just froze, stopped, turned over and slept. In the morning I chewed him out (by informing him I wasn't putting him on "my list" -- oh no she didn't!) and after that he kissed my ass so liberally I thought he might have learned from it.

But then in Israel I saw this other girl who used to hook up with him and she assured me he remains a douchebag, only now one that practices medicine in New York. Anyway, I sure hope he saves some lives, and I remember that sexual experience a little more vividly than most of the consensual sexual experiences I've undergone in a similar state of intoxication, but neither sentiment makes it RAPE, does it? It's something, "date rape" I guess, but it's not rape unless I say it was, right?

One problem that the "netroots," whatever that is, has is that there's tendency by Democrats to see it as just another player in the interest group checklist politics game. So, sometimes "this will piss off the blogs" is a consideration, and a similar one to "this might piss of NARAL" or "this might piss off the Sierra Club." We're a noisy somewhat influential group to be placated somehow.

Now that's not how I see things as I think blogs should be seen more as an opportunity to influence media coverage and narratives, as well as helping to stitch together a broader-based political movement.

But it isn't very surprising the Democrats don't really understand how blogs work within the media, as they've long failed to understand how the media works generally. So it's difficult to communicate and explain the "good" the blogs can do when a lot of them just see us as a noisy sometimes-pain-in-the-ass. This isn't true of everyone in DC, of course, but one has to remember that of congressional staffers are often shockingly young and really can't be expected, no matter what their talents, to have a grip on all this stuff in a sophisticated way.

Premenopausal women who are very physically active --especially those who put in the most work around the house -- may be cutting their risk of developing cancer of the uterine lining.

Among 253,023 women followed for more than six years, those who had not yet reached menopause at the study's outset and were the most physically active were 34 percent less likely to develop endometrial cancer than their more sedentary peers. Three to four hours of household or recreational activity each day produced the greatest benefit.

"This amount and type of activity is achievable by many in the at-risk population," Dr. Christine Friedenreich of the Alberta Cancer Board in Calgary, Canada and her colleagues write in the International Journal of Cancer.

Let's see. If I can leave the office at 5 today, I'll be home by 6 and I can do housework until 10! Oh, goody! I can't wait to get started. Do you think the boss might even let me leave early? I don't want those 250,000 European women in the study to beat me at this game. Ladies, start your vacuum cleaners!

There's just one problem. I hate housework. In fact, my entire philosophy of who should do housework can be summed up in one sentence: "There's a reason God invented teenage boys."

Just last night, I was lying on the couch reading when, in the midst of the leisurely act of turning the page, I noticed out of the corner of my eye a tumbleweed of dog hair roll gently by. "Somebody vacuum that up!" I yelled to my boys, and went back to reading.

Feel guilty? Who, me? Not a chance. I'm just trying to protect them from prostate cancer.

Guys with bulldog-like faces have been chick magnets throughout human evolutionary history.

A recent study of the skulls of human ancestors and modern humans finds that women, and thereby evolution, selected for males with relatively short upper faces.

The region between the brow and the upper-lip is scrunched proportionately to the overall size of their heads.

Among the men who fit the bill: Will Smith and Brad Pitt.

This facial development was also accompanied by a shrinking of guys' canine teeth, so men appeared less threatening to competitors, yet attractive to mates.

"Although we expected to find sex differences, we were surprised at how robust they were, given the simplicity of our test," said Anya Hurlbert of Newcastle University, UK. In the test, young adult men and women were asked to select, as rapidly as possible, their preferred color from each of a series of paired, colored rectangles.

The universal favorite color for all people appears to be blue, they found. "On top of that, females have a preference for the red end of the red-green axis, and this shifts their color preference slightly away from blue towards red, which tends to make pinks and lilacs the most preferred colors in comparison with others," she said.

Overall, the differences between men and women were clear enough that the seasoned researchers can now usually predict the sex of a participant based on their favorite-color profile.

To begin to address whether sex differences in color preference depend more on biology or culture, the researchers tested a small group of Chinese people amongst the other 171 British Caucasian study participants. The results among the Chinese were similar, Hurlbert said, strengthening the idea that the sex differences might be biological. The explanation might go back to humans' hunter-gatherer days, when women—the primary gatherers--would have benefited from an ability to key in on ripe, red fruits.

"Evolution may have driven females to prefer reddish colors--reddish fruits, healthy, reddish faces," Hurlbert said. "Culture may exploit and compound this natural female preference."

About the universal preference for blue, "I can only speculate," said Hurlbert. "I would favor evolutionary arguments again here. Going back to our 'savannah' days, we would have a natural preference for a clear blue sky, because it signaled good weather. Clear blue also signals a good water source."

Bob Murray, the outspoken owner of the Crandall Canyon Mine, did not appear at a news conference today to discuss the deaths of three rescue workers and the injuries of six others.

...

He has also been combative, sparring with seismologists over earthquakes and mine collapses, denouncing global warming, promoting the benefits of coal energy, blasting union "lackeys" and even calling out news reporters he said wrote or broadcast inaccurate statements. Since Thursday night's fatal cave-in, Murray has reportedly not left the Crandall Canyon Mine.

It's not exactly news or anything, just further confirmation of the obvious: the eventual fate of Iraq (outside the Kurdish north) is the establishment of a Shia theocracy closely aligned with Iran. As far as I can tell, no one has even a colorable argument that things are moving in any other direction, and equally, no colorable argument that there's anything we can do to stop it.

While plenty of male lawmakers have small children, the pressures and responsibilities don't seem to weigh on them the way they do on women.

"Men have this fixture called a wife that's going to take care of the children," said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for the American Woman and Politics at Rutgers University's Eagleton Institute of Politics. "We hear very often from women who are running or elected that they wish they had a wife, someone to deal with the children, have fresh food in the house, pick up the dry cleaning."

Men running for office get kudos from voters for raising young children, but women are often penalized for it, said Celinda Lake, the Democratic pollster who has tracked voter attitudes on the topic for the past 20 years.

"For male candidates, people think having young children is a total plus -- people think, 'Oh, this is great, he's going to be concerned about family issues, he'll be more future-oriented,' " she said. "A male with young kids, everyone likes it -- men, women, seniors." For women, it's a different story.

A man who blogs about his attraction to young girls but says he doesn't touch them was arrested Monday near a university child care facility with a camera, police said.

Last Saturday evening, I found myself at the counter of a truck stop diner in Caroline County, Va. I was sitting next to a weathered trucker whose accent betrayed an East Texas upbringing and a lifetime devoted to tobacco products. We quickly established that we were both celebrating birthdays. He was 68.

He'd been trucking for 46 years, away from home for nine months a year for most of them. He'd run through five marriages and now traveled with a little dog.

...

I don't know what came first, the mystique of trucking or the country music songs that defined the mystique, but this trucker had been captured by the ethos early on and had never let it go. He wore the right boots and clothes. He had a flat, never-surprised way of talking. He didn't smile or try to ingratiate.

He has one of those hard jobs, like mining and steel-working, that comes with its own masculine mythology and way of being in the world. Jobs performed in front of a keyboard don't supply a code of dignity, which explains the spiritual anxiety that plagues the service economy.

...

People in other classes may define the social structure by educational attainment, income levels and job prestige, but these men are more likely to understand the social hierarchy on the basis of who can look out for themselves, who has the courage to be a fireman, a soldier or a cop, who has the discipline to put bread on the table every night despite difficulties

Today, morale is high. The soldiers and marines told us they feel that they now have a superb commander in Gen. David Petraeus; they are confident in his strategy, they see real results, and they feel now they have the numbers needed to make a real difference.

Two nights ago, I sat down in one of the base mess halls with several Georgia soldiers stationed in Iraq. Over dinner, these soldiers discussed the pride that they have in the job they are doing in Iraq. Their positive morale was a welcome change from the negativity that I hear every day in Washington. While they made it clear that they missed their families, they stressed that now was not the time to pull them out of Iraq.

Where once the war in Iraq was defined in conversations with these men by untenable ideas -- bringing democracy or defeating al-Qaeda -- these days the war in Iraq is defined by different ways of expressing the idea of being weary. It is a theme that is endlessly reiterated as you travel around Iraq. 'The army is worn out. We are just keeping people in theatre who are exhausted,' says a soldier working for the US army public affairs office who is supposed to be telling me how well things have been going since the 'surge' in Baghdad began.

They are not supposed to talk like this. We are driving and another of the public affairs team adds bitterly: 'We should just be allowed to tell the media what is happening here. Let them know that people are worn out. So that their families know back home. But it's like we've become no more than numbers now.'

The first soldier starts in again. 'My husband was injured here. He hit an improvised explosive device. He already had a spinal injury. The blast shook out the plates. He's home now and has serious issues adapting. But I'm not allowed to go back home to see him. If I wanted to see him I'd have to take leave time (two weeks). And the army counts it.'

A week later, in the northern city of Mosul, an officer talks privately. 'We're plodding through this,' he says after another patrol and another ambush in the city centre. 'I don't know how much more plodding we've got left in us.'

When the soldiers talk like this there is resignation. There is a corrosive anger, too, that bubbles out, like the words pouring unbidden from a chaplain's assistant who has come to bless a patrol. 'Why don't you tell the truth? Why don't you journalists write that this army is exhausted?'

A lot of people like to say, scaremonger about China, right? A lot of politicians and I know you talk about that issue all the time. I think people should be careful what they wish for on China -- you know, if China were to revalue its currency, or China is to start making, say, toys that don't have lead in them, or food that isn't poisonous, their costs of production are going to go up. And that means prices at Walmart, here in the United States, are going to go up too. So, I would say China is our greatest friend right now.They're keeping prices low, and they're keeping prices for mortgages low too.

BURNETT: -- and all those creative types of mortgages. And you could say that's a good thing, but, you know, Chris, I guess just to throw it out there and, you know, be provocative, but also ask a fair question -- you know, maybe not everybody is able to own a home. We like to think of owning a home as a right in this country.

MATTHEWS: Yeah.

BURNETT: It might not be.

MATTHEWS: Could you get a little closer to the camera?

BURNETT: My -- what is it? Is it zooming in strangely?

MATTHEWS: Come on in closer. No, come in -- come in further -- come in closer. Really close.

BURNETT: What are you -- what are you doing?

MATTHEWS: Just kidding! You look great! Anyway, thanks. Erin, it's great to -- look at that look. You're great.

The Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary offers coursework in Greek and Hebrew, in archaeology, in the philosophy of religion and – starting this fall – in how to cook and sew.

Southwestern Baptist, one of the nation's largest Southern Baptist seminaries, is introducing a new academic program in homemaking as part of an effort to establish what its president calls biblical family and gender roles.

It will offer a bachelor of arts in humanities degree with a 23-hour concentration in homemaking. The program is only open to women.

Seminary President Paige Patterson, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, which has its executive committee headquarters in Nashville, said wives of seminary students asked for the homemaking courses. The program was approved by seminary trustees in the fall.

"We are moving against the tide in order to establish family and gender roles as described in God's word for the home and the family," Patterson said at the denomination's annual meeting in June. "If we do not do something to salvage the future of the home, both our denomination and our nation will be destroyed."

Patterson took a leading role in the 1980s in a successful campaign to oust moderates from leadership posts in the Southern Baptist convention. While he was president of the convention from 1998 to 2000, Southern Baptists issued a statement that women should not be pastors and that wives should "graciously submit" to their husbands.

Immediately following President Bush's press conference today, MSNBC's Chris Matthews spent three unbroken minutes fawning over the president's "powerful rendition" of his "philosophy" without uttering a single critical word. "I thought in listening to the president, I was listening to one of the great neoconservative minds," gushed Matthews.

But, you know, I do see a lot of really good second-tier candidates here, but I don't see a big, beefy alternative to Hillary Clinton -- a big guy. You know what I mean? An all -- an every-way big guy. I don't see one out there. I see a lot of slight, skinny, second- and third-rate candidates.

Women who get cosmetic breast implants are nearly three times as likely to commit suicide as other women, U.S. researchers reported on Wednesday.

The study, published in the Annals of Plastic Surgery, reinforces several others that have shown women who have breast enlargements have higher suicide risks.

Loren Lipworth of the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Tennessee and colleagues followed up on 3,527 Swedish women who had cosmetic breast implant surgery between 1965 and 1993. They looked at death certificates to analyze causes of death among women with breast implants.

Only 24 of the women had committed suicide after an average of 19 years, but this worked out to triple the risk compared to the average population, they reported. Doctors who perform cosmetic breast surgery may want to monitor patients closely or screen them for suicide risk, Lipworth said.

But based on their clinical experience, Lainhart and also Skuse see autism as a heterogeneous disorder. Its profile may change and expand as more is understood about girls, whose autism, they worry, often goes undiagnosed. That is partly, Skuse posits, because girls' general aptitude for communication and their social competence helps some Asperger's girls "pass" — they pick up on their difference and carefully mask it by mimicking other girls' speech and manner and dress. In a sense, their femaleness allows some girls to seem less autistic. It is as if they start off with a social advantage — Skuse sees this as a 20-point bonus on a scale of 100 — that helps counter the disorder. This idea isn't necessarily at odds with the findings that show girls to be more seriously affected by autism, Skuse says, because the girls who succeed in masking their deficit wouldn't be included in studies. And so they are missing from the picture. "There is no doubt in my mind that the way we have defined autism currently biases our assessments strongly in the direction of identifying a male stereotype," he says. The C.D.C. agrees and says that as a result the estimate for the number of girls with autism and normal intelligence may be low.

She says she was attacked in another airman's barracks room on the night of May 12-13, 2006. The charges against her allege that she performed an indecent act on one of the men she accused while the other two watched, the defense says.

In her letter, the woman said she reported the attack and was given a medical examination. The three men were charged with rape, but the charges were dropped after she refused to testify, she said.

"The pressure of the judicial process was too much for me, and I felt like no one was looking out for my interests," the woman wrote.

The men received nonjudicial punishments and have been granted immunity for their testimony in the woman's trial, according to documents the defense provided.

She conducted three tests in which men and women recruited randomly watched videos of a job interview and were asked to rate the applicant's status and assign them a salary.

...you have to post regularly about the topics that news junkies are interested in and you have to find a way to write your issues into those. It is difficult to get people to care about pro-choice, my personal signature issue. I found a way to write it into the Alito story, the Joe Lieberman story, the NARAL story, in a way that the blogosphere got interested in because I took the time to figure out how things worked and how you could catch the wave. I also took a lot of time building relationships with other bloggers, reading what they had to say, linking back to them, going out of my way to meet them in person when I could (no matter how big or little the blog) and being in conversation with other bloggers rather than sitting there carping about how they never linked to me.

In 2006, National Review columnist Ramesh Ponnuru appeared on Fox News and claimed that the "journalistic elite was a functional ally of the party of death."

This week, Ponnuru officially joins the "party of death" himself, signing on with the "journalistic elites" at the Washington Post.

At the Post, he will lead a new Discussion Group on "the future of conservatism" entitled Right Matters. One of the issues Ponnuru will focus on is "the state's role in enforcing morality."

It's Sunday, day 4 of Yearly Kos, the major conference for progressive bloggers, and Gina Cooper, the confab's organizer-in-chief, surveys the ballroom of the massive McCormick Place Convention Center. A few hundred remaining conventioneers are having brunch, dining on eggs, bagels and sausage.

Seven of the eight Democratic presidential candidates have paid their respects this weekend, and some 200 members of the credentialed press have filed their stories. A mere curiosity just two years ago, the progressive blogosphere has gone mainstream. But Cooper sees a problem.
"It's mostly white. More male than female," says the former high school math and science teacher turned activist. "It's not very diverse."

There goes the open secret of the netroots, or those who make up the community of the Internet grass-roots movement.

For all the talk about the increasing influence of this growing group -- "We are a community . . . a movement . . . an institution," Cooper said in a speech Saturday night -- what gets scant attention is its demography. While the Huffington Post and Fire Dog Lake, both founded by women, are two of the most widely read blogs, the rock stars are mostly men, and many women bloggers complain of sexism and harassment in the blogosphere.

Walking around McCormick Place during the weekend, it became clear that only a handful of the 1,500 conventioneers -- bloggers, policy experts, party activists -- are African American, Latino or Asian. Of about 100 scheduled panels and workshops, less than a half-dozen dealt directly with women or minority issues.

Polls showing President Bush's approval ratings in the 20s and 30s and a New York Times survey last month reporting that people across the country are eager for an end to the current administration suggest that this nation has a problem it's going to have to live with for the next 17 months -- a failed presidency that won't reestablish its credibility with a national majority.

The political argument against Bush's continuing tenure is not frivolous. There are good reasons to see him as a failed president whose remaining time in office will be unproductive at best and destructive to the country's well-being at worst. But given the constitutional rules by which the presidency operates, there is no serious prospect of removing him from office.

THE PRESIDENT: Good morning. I just finished a Cabinet meeting. One of the things we discussed was the terrible situation there in Minneapolis. We talked about the fact that the bridge collapsed, and that we in the federal government must respond and respond robustly to help the people there not only recover, but to make sure that lifeline of activity, that bridge, gets rebuilt as quickly as possible.

To that end, Secretary Peters is in Minneapolis, as well as Federal Highway Administrator Capka. I spoke to Governor Pawlenty and Mayor Rybak this morning. I told them that the Secretary would be there. I told them we would help with rescue efforts, but I also told them how much we are in prayer for those who suffered. And I thank my fellow citizens for holding up those who are suffering right now in prayer.

We also talked about -- in the Cabinet meeting talked about the status of important pieces of legislation before the Congress. We spent a fair amount of time talking about the fact that how disappointed we are that Congress hasn't sent any spending bills to my desk. By the end of this week, members are going to be leaving for their month-long August recess. And by the time they will return, there will be less than a month before the end of the fiscal year on September the 30th, and yet they haven't passed one of the 12 spending bills that they're required to pass. If Congress doesn't pass the spending bills by the end of the fiscal year, Cabinet Secretaries report that their departments may be unable to move forward with urgent priorities for our country.

This doesn't have to be this way. The Democrats won last year's election fair and square, and now they control the calendar for bringing up bills in Congress. They need to pass each of these spending bills individually, on time, and in a fiscally responsible way.