It is my great honor to announce the winner of the First Annual Robert Fisk Award for Idiotarian of the Year (Fiskie for short). And the winner is ...

The War of the We Against the Me    By P. J. O'Rourke

...    Upbeat is for sissy do-gooder organizations like Brookings, the U.N., and the Democratic Party. Cato is not a do-gooder organization. We're libertarians. We're not here to do good. We're here to do anything we damn well please -- and take the consequences -- because we are real advocates of freedom.

While we may have made scientific advancements of godlike proportions, there is one of God's prerogatives we'll never have the remotest license to, and that is His authority over our souls.

[...]

[The Clonaid group] are neglecting that little detail we refer to as the soul. Cloning advocates such as Clonaid can't possibly believe in the biblical concept that God creates unique human souls in His own image. Even assuming they can precisely duplicate a human being physically, what about his spiritual aspect? Will he/it have a soul?

[...]

When the God of the Bible tells us through the prophet Jeremiah, "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart," I think He's referring to our souls, our essences, not our yet to be fully formed brains. It is a chilling thought that His Jeremiah statement may not apply to beings that He did not form in the womb but that human scientists did.

Most journalists are so stupid, the fact that they are also catty, lazy, vengeful and humorless is often overlooked.

There are two ways of enforcing consumer protections. One is through government intervention. That's the job of agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Labor Department, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Federal Aviation Administration and a host of others and their state and local counterparts.

The second way to enforce consumer rights is the private lawsuit. Bush's war on the trial lawyers can only please those from the consumer-be-damned school of corporate wrongdoing. In President Bush's "compassionate conservatism," just whom does he feel compassion for?

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Have you stocked up on Potassium Iodide anti-radiation pills?

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Wait for Tony Blair to comment on this issue.
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Conservative webloggers get very excited.

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Watch Colin Powell go on all the Sunday talk shows and try to talk down the crisis.

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Sen. Bill Frist Aids Accident Victims

2003 - Incoming Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist stopped minutes after a rollover accident on a Florida highway Wednesday, helping tend to the four survivors until paramedics arrived.

1998 - When a gunman opened fire in the U.S. Capitol, Frist, R-Tenn., rushed to aid the victims. He treated one man who had been shot in the face and performed CPR on another man with a chest wound.

1995 - Frist revived a 60-year-old man who collapsed inside a Senate office building.

• Army Acts to Add Thousands of G.I.'s to Its Gulf Force
  More than 15,000 soldiers will be part of the largest single ground deployment to the Persian Gulf since the war there in 1991.
  
  
• [T]he USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier will stay on deployment instead of returning to its homeport in Everett, Wash., next month as planned.
  
  
• U.S. Sending 25,000 Troops to Persian Gulf
  Those deployed will join 57,000 now in position for a strike on Iraq.
  When the movements are completed, the Pentagon will have positioned about half the 50,000 troops officials had previously indicated they would be moving to the region. They will join an estimated 57,000 troops already in position.
  
  
• Navy Activates Hospital Ship, in Flurry of War Preparations

Nearly two-thirds of respondents in an Associated Press poll said they believe it's prudent to hold off on more tax cuts.    ...   When asked about new tax cuts, a centerpiece of President Bush's domestic agenda, 64 percent said it was better to hold off to make sure the federal budget does not go into a deeper into the red. About three in 10, 28 percent, said they favored additional tax cuts to stimulate the economy, according to the poll conducted for the AP by ICR/International Communications Research of Media, Pa.

"I am convinced that this [North Korean] crisis requires sustained attention from top government officials, including the president. It's important to remember that devising a solution for the North Korean crisis will require sustained diplomatic efforts with China, South Korea and other countries of the region. All this will take time, energy and attention."

Man brings Confederate history home

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Hall is commander of Camp J. Patton Anderson, which is the Olympia chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, an organization open to male descendants of Confederate veterans. Camp Anderson has grown from six to 30 members under Hall's tenure.

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[Hall said] "Most people think that the whole Civil War was about slavery, but that's just not accurate."

... On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. ...

One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war ...

This was George W. Bush's year. Slowly building toward ridding the world of Saddam's threat, shrewdly identifying North Korea, Iran and Iraq as an axis of evil, demanding democracy from the Palestinians, presiding over modest economic growth despite a terrible global outlook, winning an almost unprecedented vote of approval in the November elections, capping it all with a Philadelphia speech that was a watershed in the GOP's struggle with its own internal demons - by any measure, this was a spectacular performance. The high-point? The U.N. speech.