Speaking about his Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, Bush remarked that "we've created these offices whose sole function is to, one, recognize the power of faith, and two, recognize there are fantastic programs all throughout the country on a variety of subjects, all based upon faith, all changing lives, all making American life better, and therefore, folks would be enlisted in making sure the American dream extends throughout our society." He continued, "We ought not to discriminate against faith-based programs."

Putting aside the semantic problem of how the office can have so many "sole" functions, since when did recognizing "the power of faith" become any function of a federal office? And when did separation of church and state become a matter of religious discrimination?

That's why "there doesn't appear to have been" a contingency plan, according to Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. "It's scary but true. An underlying assumption of this whole campaign against Iraq and the larger campaign to remake the whole Middle East was that all we had to do is knock off Saddam Hussein and everything else would fall down obediently at our feet. The Iraqis themselves would welcome being liberated, the Syrians and Iranians would be cowed and start doing what we want, Israel would be able to impose a peace on the Palestinians because they'd be intimidated, and all will be for the best in this best of all possible worlds."

"When Hurricane Andrew struck the Florida coast in 1992, it destroyed an airbase, destroyed towns, and Florida went into anarchy," says professor Andrus of the University of Southern California. "People were hiding in their houses with guns to protect themselves from roving bands of thieves and rapists. It was a horrible place. Now if you take Iraq, that's been under this very tight dictatorship for decades, and all of a sudden the U.S. comes in and sweeps aside this very tightly controlled political and civil structure, you have a huge vacuum and the people aren't prepared to deal with it, so it deteriorates very quickly."

• "If Donald Rumsfeld was here. I'd ask him for his resignation," Spc. Clinton Deitz of the 3rd Infantry Division told ABC News on Wednesday.
  
• "Americans cannot enforce order in the society and because order cannot be enforced, reconstruction cannot take place, and because there's no order and no reconstruction, there cannot be an American withdrawal. This is a quagmire and a situation that is deteriorating, and it's about time that somebody started saying this." -ex-Marine Lou Cantori, an expert in military policies in the Middle East at the University of Maryland who has taught at West Point, the U.S. Air Force Academy and the U.S. Marine Corps Univers
  
• The hawkish Weekly Standard reports in a cover story this week that "the soldier story now is that the 3rd Infantry is 'black' -- meaning critically short -- on Prozac supplies."

QUESTION: Regardless of whether or not there was pressure from the White House for that line, I'm wondering where does the buck stop in this White House? Does it stop at the CIA, or does it stop in the Oval Office?

Scott McClellan: Again, this issue has been discussed. You're talking about some of the comments that -- some that are --

QUESTION: I'm not talking about anybody else's comments. I'm asking the question, is responsibility for what was in the President's own State of the Union ultimately with the President, or with somebody else?

Scott McClellan: This has been discussed.

QUESTION: So you won't say that the President is responsible for his own State of the Union speech?

Scott McClellan: It's been addressed.

QUESTION: Well, that's an excellent question. That is an excellent question. (Laughter.) Isn't the President responsible for the words that come out of his own mouth?

Scott McClellan: We've already acknowledged, Terry, that it should not have been included in there. I think that the American people appreciate that recognition.

QUESTION: You acknowledge that, but you blame somebody else for it. Is the President responsible for the things that he said in the State of the Union?

Scott McClellan: Well, the intelligence -- you're talking about intelligence that -- sometimes you later learn more information about intelligence that you didn't have previously. But when we're clearing a speech like that, it goes through the various agencies to look at that information and --

QUESTION: And so when there's intelligence in a speech, the President is not responsible for that?

Scott McClellan: We appreciate Director Tenet saying that he should have said, take it out.

Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson said Thursday he was not talking about any particular Supreme Court justices when he asked his television audience to pray that three liberal justices retire.

"I don't care which three, I mean as long as the three conservatives stay on," Robertson said at a news conference at Regent University, which he leads as president and chancellor. "There's six liberals, so it's up to the Lord. "I'm not telling God what to do," he added. "I'm just saying, 'Lord, help us.'"

Under a system deployed on the White House Web site for the first time last week, those who want to send a message to President Bush must now navigate as many as nine Web pages and fill out a detailed form that starts by asking whether the message sender supports White House policy or differs with it.

BORK: Impeachment is the only option, and impeachment is not going to work. You couldn’t get a justice impeached--not for misbehaving as a judge, at least, although maybe you could if you caught him in some other activity, but not for the way he behaves as a judge. There is currently no way to block the Court except, I suppose, through the confirmation process. But that’s long run, and you can’t count on the confirmation process really digging out what people will be like once they’re on the Court. [emphasis mine] And furthermore our political parties have now split on this issue, and the Democrats clearly want activist judges. So barring a series of strong electoral victories and some luck, I don’t think there’s any way to stop the Court from its adventures.

According to legal lore, after Sandra Day O'Connor graduated from Stanford Law School, a law firm at which she interviewed was only willing to offer her a job as legal secretary. The wrong-headedness of this decision was decisively demonstrated a few weeks ago, as Justice O'Connor — along with a number of her colleagues, both male and female — determined that the Constitution does not ban racial discrimination, even though it does, and does ban discrimination against homosexuals, even though it does not. Anyone intelligent enough to be a legal secretary would not have made mistakes like that. Clearly O'Connor has an innate inability to comprehend legal texts, should never have been offered a position of any sort at a law firm, and is fit only to be a Supreme Court justice.

Resistance develops when patients take their HIV drugs irregularly, allowing the virus to survive and adapt. Resistant viruses are thought to be less infectious, but they can be passed on to some extent. "It could have been predicted," says [Joep] Lange [director of the International Antiviral Therapy Evaluation Centre in Amsterdam, Holland].

By now, nearly everyone in South Africa knows how HIV is transmitted, and how to avoid it. The enduring mystery is why so many people do not.

Some of the most perceptive research about the decline of HIV rates in Uganda has been carried out by Rand Stoneburner and Daniel Low-Beer of Cambridge University, who have long experience with the AIDS epidemic in the US and in Africa. They believe that what contributed most to the decline in HIV infection rates in Uganda was the ordinary, but frank, conversations people had with family, friends, and neighbors—not about sex—but about the frightening, calamitous effects of AIDS itself. Stoneburner and Low-Beer believe these conversations did more than anything else to persuade Ugandans to avoid risky sexual behavior, which in turn led to declines in HIV transmission. The researchers found that people in other countries were far less likely to have such conversations.

Both in Zimbabwe and South Africa people told Stoneburner and Low-Beer that they had heard about the epidemic from posters, radio, newspapers, and clinics, as well as occasional mass rallies and village meetings; but they seldom spoke about it with the people they knew. They were also far less likely to admit knowing someone with AIDS, or to be willing to care for an AIDS patient. It may be no coincidence that HIV rates in these countries are now higher than they ever were in Uganda, and they are falling far more slowly, if at all.

[H]ere's a plan for the Bravo cable channel to conjure its own summer sociological phenomenon. Let's match the stylish cast of the network's new "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" against the Justice Supreme who draws dark power by evoking the scare of a national homosexual conspiracy.

....

Imagine the wand waving over Scalia, clad in his usual dull suit, a la Hart, Schaffner & Marx. He'd be transported to Barneys for a nifty purple Ralph Lauren suit. How about a pink Ermenegildo Zegna shirt? Prada shoes? That stuffy oak-and-alabaster court décor also just must go. To do so, the Fab 5 might need the aid of Scalia pal and their secret ally: Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, he of gold-braided, Gilbert & Sullivan-like robes, just to preside over presidential impeachments.

Resisting this scenario? Courting sexuality angst? Or maybe cartoonish notions just don't capture? Ah, there may be the real power of the Fab 5. Contrary to what dissenters Scalia, Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas pronounced from the bench last month, gays and lesbians have become part of America's warp and woof. Camp has gone mainstream and most of America has moved so far that even the "Queer Eye" stereotypes evoke what they should — a summer giggle.

The nation's debate on school vouchers is shifting away from their impact on student achievement, one researcher says, largely because there's no evidence they make a difference.

Instead, K-12 school vouchers are now touted as tools to promote opportunities for low-income and minority families.

"It used to be about achievement and now it's about equity," said Clive Belfield, associate director of research for the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Columbia University.

"Voucher students do not appear to do better, on average," Belfield said, adding that the students left behind in traditional public schools "do not appear to do any worse."

You lambaste "media elites," but aren't you a member?
When I say "elite," I mean a state of mind. I don't think George Bush is an elite. He came from a prestigious family, and he's wealthy, but when I say "elite," I mean a state of mind that believes that America's traditional values are kind of passe. They want us to get away from that red, white, and blue, mom-and-pop, traditional family thing. There are all sorts of different lifestyles, and they all work, the elites tell us, and we need to be progressive that way.

Is "elite" just a convenient way to stigmatize your opponents?
Not necessarily. There are conservative elitists. But the elite mindset is much more of a left-wing mindset, because Republicans tend to be champions of traditional America.

CNN wrongly defined intelligent design theory as the belief that “an intelligent being created life on Earth.” Actually, intelligent design is the hypothesis that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.

Saddam Hussein probably believes his war plan is working. Knowing he could not withstand American and British military might, Saddam theorized that the United States and Britain would cut and run if in the post-war aftermath the casualties became unacceptable and Americans' notoriously short attention span kicked in. From his bunker, Saddam must be getting summaries of Western media reports and opinion polls from his remaining sycophants and concluding his triumphant return to power may be near.

Rather than focus on the future of Iraq, administration critics - who include Democratic presidential candidates desperate to bring down Bush's still high approval ratings as much as their ideological colleagues in the big media - concentrate on who said and did what about evidence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.

If you cannot hear us on this issue, sir, there is no future at all for our society and nation. There is no other value worth trading for. Freedom itself has begun to have little meaning.

"We're going to tell the truth that there's no way that Mohammed is going to save you. There's no way you can practice homosexuality and claim Christianity. If you do that, you're going to split hell wide open and we don't want that for you."