Guardian Unlimited:Scared of spiders? Take this pillScience/ Medicine/ Psychotherapy
I look upon this report with much skepticism. As a lifelong sufferer of a true phobia (birds, of all the stupid things), a sometime claustrophobe, and a person decidedly uneasy when near the edges of high places, (not to mention dozens of competing and conflicting neurotic tensions), I've tried just about everything in the therapy arsenal to try to get a grip. Now they are telling me I just have to take a pill? We'll see.

Mirror.co.uk - Death of the Lightbulb Science/ Energy/ Invention
Soon the horribly inefficient lightbulb will be a thing of the past. Imagine lighting a room with 4 watts of power, using a bulb that will last 60 years, and costs about $3.

The Bush II Success Story: A Global Tragedy in the Making Politics/ Ruling Class/ 2004 Election

1. Successfully catered to heavily bankrolled special interests and giant multinational corporations while totally ignoring the needs of working Americans, retirees, and the environment.

2. Successfully squandered the entire stock of worldwide empathy and goodwill that accrued to America following 9/11 by invading Iraq under false pretenses and without the approval of the United Nations.

3. Successfully told all other nations 'you are either with us or against us,' thus reducing the art of American diplomacy to the language and tactics of schoolyard bullies.

4. Successfully avoided his military responsibilities by deserting from the U. S. Air Force, and then used his father's connections to avoid prosecution.

5. Successfully attended over 40 political fundraisers in 2003, but did not attend any of the funerals for the hundreds of U.S. soldiers who lost their lives.

6. Successfully rammed a prescription drug program through Congress that promises to destroy Medicare by providing windfall profits to drug companies, HMOs, and insurance companies, and hardly any benefits for seniors.

7. Successfully presided over more executions than any other governor in America's history.

8. Successfully rammed the USA Patriot Act through an unwary Congress, thus dealing the greatest blow to civil rights ever experienced in America.

9. Successfully expanded the role of the military to spy on Americans, a mission unprecedented in American history.

10. Successfully ignored the statement of General Tommy Franks, the man appointed by Bush II to plan and execute the disastrous American invasion of Iraq, that any future terrorist attacks on the U.S. would lead to the suspension of the U.S. Constitution and military rule in America.

11. Successfully used counterterrorism law to chill free speech and the right to peaceably assemble by directing the FBI to investigate individuals and groups protesting his pre-emptive military doctrine and elective wars.

12. Successfully smears all those who disagree with his new American militarism as unpatriotic.

13. Successfully ordered American reserve units into action in Iraq without upgrading their equipment to the level of protection afforded regular Army units.

14. Successfully parades as a deeply religious Christian, yet he daily ignores Jesus as he pursues war instead of peace.

15.Successfully looted the U.S. Treasury of nearly $3 trillion to provide payoffs to the 1% of Americans who are already wealthy, effectively saddling 99% of us, and future generations, with new debt of $125,000 to $250,000 per person.

16. Successfully labeled his looting of the U.S. Treasury as tax cuts for for everyone. Actually, the zero to $200 in tax relief that low and middle-income groups did receive was more than offset by increases in local property and state taxes, tuition hikes, and increased energy costs, all made necessary to offset Bush II budget cuts and military adventurism. Meanwhile, the average millionaire (Bush II campaign contributors) received payoffs averaging over $90,000.

17. Successfully transfigured the huge federal budget surplus created by Democrats into an endless sea of Republican red ink (deficits).

18. Successfully cut federal funding for the delivery of vital state and local services to disadvantaged and needy people, deviously labeling the cuts as necessary to reduce the Republican-created deficit.

19. Successfully ignored intelligence reports warning that a 9/11-type attack was imminent, and refuses to cooperate with legally constituted commissions that are investigating what really happened on and before 9/11.

20. Successfully avoided responding to the inquiries of the families of the 9/11 victims, calling their unanswered questions unimportant and unnecessary. By and large the mass media, with only rare exceptions, ignores the unanswered questions.

21. Successfully leaked the name of an undercover CIA agent (a felony) to the press, and has refused to cooperate in the continuing criminal investigation of White House personnel to find the leaker.

22. Successfully expanded weapons spending (including vast new funding for the research and development of new nuclear weapons) beyond anything needed for real national security for the sole purpose on enriching family and friends.

23. Successfully ignored the needs of 45 million Americans, mostly women and children, who cannot afford health insurance.

24. Successfully staged a chauffeured landing on an aircraft carrier to announce victory in Iraq, thus falsely portraying himself as a hero when in fact no such victory had obtained.

25. Successfully promised to find bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but failed to deliver on the promises.

26. Successfully protected approximately 20 members of the bin Laden family by secretly spiriting them out of the U.S. the day after 9/11.

27. Successfully stalled an investigation into whether or not NORAD received orders to stand down on or before 9/11.

28. Successfully drafted a Roadmap for Peace in the Middle East, but has instead pursued a policy of war, war, and more war.

29. Successfully told hundreds of lies to the American people.

30. Successfully aided and abetted the consolidation of the mass media so that a few billionaires now control what is euphemistically called America's free press.

31. Successfully created heightened global instability and insecurity by withdrawing America from important longstanding treaty obligations.

32. Successfully encouraged anti-democratic campaign fund-raising and special interest lobbying practices that are really nothing but outright bribery.

33. Successfully waged a continuing war on women by aggressively trying to restrict a woman's right to choose.

34. Successfully waged war on the environment by dismantling sections of landmark environmental legislation including the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts.

35. Successfully waged a continuing war on working Americans by promoting the export of their jobs overseas and hindering the rights of workers to form unions and receive overtime pay.

36. Successfully waged a continuing war on the elderly and on future generations of Americans with efforts to cripple Medicare and Social Security, and failed to do anything protect employee pension plans from unscrupulous employers.

37. Successfully waged a continuing war against the bedrock American principles that separate church from state by attempting to transform our public schools into houses of worship and funding faith-based organizations with taxpayer dollars.

38. Successfully curtailed the development of cures for major diseases by overly restricting stem cell research.

39. Successfully violated two international laws (The Hague Regulations of 1907 and the Geneva Convention of 1949 and the US Army code of war) by ignoring the Iraqi Constitution which forbids the privatization of key state assets and bars foreigners from owning Iraqi firms.

40. Successfully aided and abetted the expansion of the anti-democratic powers of giant multinational corporations, and failed to prosecute gross corporate criminality.

41. Successfully destroyed America's credibility in the United Nations and throughout the world by opting to pursue elective wars, thereby creating conditions favorable for the intensification of terrorism, and removing America from the world's family of nations.

42. Successfully introduced an inept economic program that failed to create a single American job, lowered wage rates, and lost 3 million American jobs.

43. Successfully implemented schemes (phony tax cuts and excessive weapons spending) that served as means to transfer large chunks of our national wealth from working people to the 1% who are already wealthy.

44. Successfully transformed America into the target of choice for ridicule from abroad.

45. Successfully created a Department of Homeland Security to protect Americans from terrorist attacks, but did not provide the funds necessary to do the job.

46. Successfully invaded Iraq without any exit strategy, a catastrophic planning blunder that is now costing hundreds of American lives, thousands of American casualties, thousands of Iraqi lives, and hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars.

47. Successfully created near total chaos in Afghanistan by installing a puppet regime whose authority is limited to Kabul (the capitol city), allowing the rest of the country to fall into violent anarchy and become the world's # 1 supplier of heroin and safe haven of choice for terrorists.

48. Successfully handed global terrorism victories by failing to destroy al Qaeda and the Taliban, and by curtailing the civil rights of every American. Al Qaeda is regrouping and stronger than ever. The Taliban are regrouping in Afghanistan and positioning themselves to topple the American installed government.

49. Successfully cut funds for veterans' health care and raised eligibility requirements.

50. Successfully reduced hazardous duty compensation for veterans.

51. Successfully created an energy plan that entirely fails to address America's strategic need to become energy independent, while providing substantial tax relief to the full array of Republican-run energy companies. Fortunately, the plan failed to win Congressional approval.

52. Successfully aided and abetted the recall of Governor Gray Davis for the purpose of delivering California in 2004 presidential election.

53. Successfully elevated the sophistication of political rhetoric by calling environmentalists 'green, green, lima beans.'

54. Successfully portrays himself as a Texas rancher when even his wife refers to him as a 'windshield cowboy.'

55. Successfully promotes himself as a self-made rugged individualist when, in fact, his entire education and career was built on the use of his father's name to gain entry into Harvard and Yale and to attract large sums of investment capital.

56. Successfully promised to leave no child behind (educationally speaking), and then delivered nothing but an unfunded mandate that thwarts all efforts to level America's educational playing field.

57. Successfully destroyed the infrastructure of Iraq and then committed hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to rebuilding it; meanwhile, the rebuilding of America's crumbling infrastructure is all but ignored.

58. Successfully created numerous opportunities for Republican-run companies to profit from his disastrous pre-emptive war policy (the invasion of Iraq was based on pre-emption even though Bush knew Iraq posed no threat to the U.S. or its neighbors). An example of Republican war profiteering is Halliburton (Cheney's old company), which charges the U.S. Army in Iraq nearly $2.00 a gallon for gas that they could purchase from Iraqis for five to ten cents a gallon.

58. Successfully but unnecessarily put our troops in harms way in Iraq.

60. Successfully announced a series of false terrorist threats that unnecessarily spread fear and loathing throughout America for the sole purpose of promoting Bush's elective wars and fooling the Americans into thinking their government was hard at work protecting them.

61. Successfully transformed the executive branch of government into an operation more secretive than the CIA and far more threatening than organized crime or any terrorist organization ever could be.

www.theamericanchallenge.com,

Chicago Tribune | Rare look at Dean the man Politics/ 2004 Election
A more intimate look at Dean, a candidate who refuses to use the personal for the political.

Critics in Vermont Rally Around Dean (washingtonpost.com) Politics/ 2004 Election
Many of Dean's staunchist political opponents in Vermont none the less will support him for the Presidency.

GOP pulled no punches in struggle for Medicare bill Politics/ Ruling Class
Even the normally loyal Robert Novak is taken aback by the viciousness of the methods used by the leadership to pass the medicare fraud.

Warblogging.com: Republicans and Republic Politics/ Ruling Class
More on the tactics used by BushCo to win approval of the disgraceful medicare payoff to the pharmo-industry.

spiked: Does al-Qaeda exist? Politics/ War on Terror
Article discusses how the West has cast al-Qaida as a mythical multinational all encompassing centralized organization. In fact it is not even a formal alliance of groups. It is a range of groups united more by commonality of ideology rather than control. And not recognizing this fact makes fighting it so much more difficult

Star-Telegram:Molly Ivins--A Couple of Real Turkeys Politics/ Ruling Class
Molly uses her normal tact to discuss the Medicare bill and the big energy company welfare act.

NYTimes: Scholars of Twang Track All the 'Y'Alls' in Texas Popular Culture/ Regional Speech
Nice article on the regional flavor of Texas dialect.

Moscow Times: Global Eye -- Naked Gun Politics/ Ruling Class/ Civil Liberties
The view from Moscow on the latest Ashcroftian maneuvers against our freedom. Particularly useful to read in light of Putty-Put's recent actions against the oligarchs of Russia.

The Century of the 'Son of a Bitch' Politics/ Ruling Class
Erik Alterman on that prize war criminal, Robert McNamara.

The Spectator: How to scare a US marine Science/ Medicine/ Military
American troops in Liberia refused to take malaria pills, because they feared the side effects more than bullets. How rumor, myth and official indifference led to over half the Marines in Liberia contracting serious cases of malaria.

BBC: Fossil fools: Return to Piltdown Science/ /Frauds & Hoaxes/ Anthropology
Fifty years after being proclaimed a forgery, the Piltdown Man still raises a controversy. Who actually perpetrated the fraud?

Science News: Protein Portal: Enzyme acts as door for the SARS Science/ Emerging Diseases
A protein implicated in hypertension may be the point of attack used by the SARS virus.

Independent: Billionaire Soros stakes fortune on 'matter of life and death' - defeating George Bush Politics/ Iraq/ Ruling Class
George Soros continues to put his money where his mouth is. The world's most leftest billionaire strikes again.

Queens Chronicle: Queens County Democrats Give Nod to Dean for President Politics/ 2004 Election
Howard Dean receives endorsement of the powerful NYC Queens Boro party leaders.

NYTimes: Name That War Politics/ Iraq/ Ruling Class
Nicholas Kristof suggests that part of our problem in Iraq is the lack of a catchy title for the war. His readers respond.

John Holt: Blue Light: Battle for the Sweetgrass Hills Politics/ Environment/ Native Rights
Another bit of the spiritual heart of Native America is targeted for destruction. The reason, why thar's gold in them there hills!

National Post:Killer flu plans call for 'fever hospitals' Science/ Emerging Diseases
Hard on the SARS outbreak, Canada plans for a difficult flu season.