So, do the rumors of a possible Cheney indictment and resignation explain his little house-hunting trip to Maryland last month?

You know -- a guy from the West thinks he might need to stay in the East to clear up some legal problems, but he also thinks he might be on the verge of having to give up his employer-paid housing?

MORE GUNS, LESS CRIME?

The Toronto Globe & Mail reports what appears to be grim news about Winnipeg:

According to a report by Statistics Canada, the city is now the country's murder capital -- it has the highest per capita murder rate of Canada's nine largest urban areas.

Shootings and other violent crimes have become so commonplace in Winnipeg, especially in the impoverished northern and central parts of the city, that some streets are empty at dusk.

Many people from middle-class suburbs avoid entire neighbourhoods, even during the daytime.

Know how many murders there have been in Winnipeg so far this year?

22.

Know what Winnipeg's population is?

Approximately 600,000 people.

Here are the murder stats for Canada's nine largest metropolitan areas, according to the Globe & Mail:

Homicides by census metropolitan area per 100,000 population.

Winnipeg 4.89
Edmonton 3.39
Vancouver 2.58
Calgary 1.91
Toronto 1.80
Montreal 1.73
Ottawa-Gatineau 1.14
Hamilton 1.30
Quebec 0.84

The worst metro area in Canada -- the murder capital, the place decent people fear to go -- has a lower murder rate than the U.S. as a whole. Our murder rate is 5.5. per 100,000 population.

4.89? That's nothing. Several metropolitan areas in America (at least as of 2002) had murder rates over 10 per 100,000: Los Angeles-Long Beach; Detroit; Baltimore; Little Rock-North Little Rock; Baton Rouge; Gary, Indiana; Mobile, Alabama; Richmond-Petersburg, Virginia; and Stockton-Lodi, California. The rate in Memphis? Over 15. In, er, New Orleans? 24.4.

Also over 10 per 100,000: Jackson, Mississippi; Savannah, Georgia; Shreveport-Bossier City, Louisiana; and Fayetteville, North Carolina. Oh, and: Hattiesburg, Mississippi; Alexandria, Louisiana; and (over 15) Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and Victoria, Texas.

Smirkers on the right will note that quite a few of the listed cities are in Louisiana. Smirkers on the left will note that quite a few are in other, unambiguously red states in the South. Smirkers in Canada will note that, by comparison, even Winnipeg looks awfully safe.

Cheney might resign and be replaced by Condi? Interesting, and Condi would be the obvious choice -- but my favorite response to the rumor so far is from this wag at Free Republic:

Harriet Miers for VP !

The way Bush is operating these days, I wouldn't put that past him.

I don't know which is more unintentionally amusing -- Truth for Youth's Hairy Polarity and the Sinister Sorcery Satire, a Chick Publications-style comic intended to remind young people and their parents that the Harry Potter books are a primrose path to hell (which you may have already learned about via World O'Crap), or the Halloween page at Pat Robertson's CBN.com, a jam-packed collection of writings from which we learn that interest in the supernatural can mutate into an addiction and is inextricably linked to suicide and drug abuse, even though, as it turns out, poltergeists are real. Don't worry, though, it's not all gloom and doom -- if you're looking for an alternative to trick-or-treating, CBN recommends this "Fun Family Prayer Adventure":

Pass around a bag or bowl of M & M's the next time your family is gathered for prayer. Let each person take a handful, but don't let anyone eat the candies yet. Explain that the color of the candies will indicate the direction of the families' prayers. Lead your family in prayer using this guide and stopping for prayer after explaining each color.

Say:

* For every green M & M you chose, pray for your spouse (present or future) or some other significant person in your life. This is a great way to get kids thinking about what qualities they want to find in a future mate. Encourage them to pray for this person’s safety, spiritual and physical growth, and so on).

* For every red M & M you chose, pray for a member of your family by name (a parent, son, daughter, brother, sister, grandchild, niece, nephew, cousin, aunt, uncle, and so on).

* For every orange M & M you chose, pray for a teacher in your life (a co-worker, a professor, a pastor, a Bible study leader, a child’s school teacher, a mentor, or another teacher)....

Woo-hoo! That sounds like way more fun than TP-ing a neighbor's trees!

Special bonus column by Chuck Colson -- with a scary goth-looking photo of Chuck!



(Hey, isn't that an outtake from the Nine Inch Nails "Closer" video?)

ANOTHER BRAVE CONSERVATIVE YOUTH SPEAKS TRUTH TO POWER

Last spring, a Larkin student wrote an essay lamenting the celebration of Mexican holidays in American schools, the Herald reported.

--WorldNetDaily, reporting on ethnic tensions at a high school in suburban Chicago

...last spring ... a Larkin student wrote an essay lamenting the celebration of Mexican holidays in American schools.

-- article cited by WorldNetDaily, from the Daily Herald, Arlington Heights, Illinois

"If it was up to me, they would be expelled, beaten, wrapped in their flag, set on fire and tossed over the border," one portion of the student essay reads.

--from another story on the same incident

Wow, that's some lament.

****

UPDATE, 10/19: The last link doesn't seem to be working. Here's a cached version from Google.

A Gallup approval rating of 39%? I thought Bush would never get below 40% in a Gallup poll; I was wrong. That's crow I'll happily eat.

Haley Barbour wants you to think that, after Katrina, affected areas of Mississippi were pretty much crime-free. I imagine he doesn't count this:

... Mr. Velazquez, 45, is one of 32 immigrants housed in three mobile homes who are being paid $8 an hour to tear Sheetrock for 10 hours a day. The men are among hundreds of illegal immigrants who entered the United States hoping to find work in the aftermath of the hurricane.

They are promised good pay, three meals a day and a place to stay, and some contractors make good on this. But the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance, an advocacy group, says many do not.

"These workers are superexploited by contractors in horrible living conditions," said Bill Chandler, the president of the alliance. "People are working without any kind of inoculation - tetanus or anti-hepatitis - they don't have goggles, they don't have gloves, they don't have any safety protection at all."...

Arnoldo Antonio Lopez, 36, another worker in the group, said he paid $70 a month to live in trailer No. 10. He said he would have put up with the poor conditions, but the contractor who hired him did not pay him. "He promised me $7 an hour wages and good food," Mr. Lopez said....

"They hadn't eaten for three days when we got to them," said Vicki Cintra, the Gulf Coast outreach organizer for the alliance. "They had no blankets, nothing. They were sleeping on the floor. They had no money to buy food."...

It could be happening in Louisiana, too. In any case, illegal immigrants are also getting a lot of the jobs there:

Two weeks ago, Geremias Lopez was picking grapes near Bakersfield, but when he saw an advertisement on Univision, the nation's largest Spanish-language television network, for work on the Gulf Coast, he and a friend called the 1-800 number flashing on the screen and were soon aboard a Greyhound bus headed east.

Lopez and the 80-some other Mexican and Honduran immigrants in his crew are now earning $100 a day covering torn and mangled roofs with blue tarps until the roofs can be re-shingled and restored to some semblance of what they looked like before Hurricane Katrina struck six weeks ago....

The Louisiana Department of Labor says it has received requests from contractors to certify 500 illegal migrants. Agency officials estimate that the actual number of illegal migrants already working for contractors is far higher, because many employers are not bothering with the paperwork.

This is adding to the unhappiness of local contractors trying to re-establish their own businesses and hire local workers, after being evacuated or otherwise losing their ability to operate for weeks.

"The local people can't participate in their own recovery," said Jack Donahue, whose Mandeville, La.-based firm Donahue Favret Contractors Inc. specializes in such construction tasks as sheetrock and flooring removal and mold remediation.

Part of the problem, Donahue said, is that local construction workers scattered during the evacuation and are just beginning to come back. Many are returning to destroyed or severely damaged homes and have discovered that the hotels in the region are full of out-of-state workers, including migrants.

"There's no room for local people in the hotels," Donahue said....

Credit for this goes to that great conservative hero, George W. Bush:

Recognizing the demand for migrant labor, and to help speed reconstruction in the areas devastated by Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security temporarily suspended rules mandating employers to prove that workers they hire are citizens or have a legal right to work in the United States.

In addition, President Bush suspended application in the Katrina-affected region of the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act, under which employers must pay prevailing wage rates on federally financed construction projects -- in order, Bush said, to "permit the employment of thousands of additional individuals."

Most people aren't paying attention to this story -- and I wonder what Bush voters, in particular, would think if they knew any of this.

CONSERVATIVE CRACK-UP CONTINUES

Last week I told you that the Reverend Donald Wildmon's American Family Association is P.O.'d at NASCAR because driver Robby Gordon said "shit" on a NASCAR broadcast and wasn't subjected to a draconian punishment. Now I see that there's some red-state grumbling about remarks made by Brian France, the new CEO of NASCAR, on 60 Minutes last week:

NASCAR CEO Brian France doesn't like fans flying Confederate flags at races as he tries to make stock-car racing more appealing to minorities and women.

"It's not a flag that I look at with anything favorable. That's for sure," he said in an interview with CBS' 60 Minutes...

...he doesn’t believe the racial stereotypes associated with the Confederate flag will affect NASCAR.

“I think it’s a fading image,” France said.

A fan in Alabama is not pleased:

...Southerners who have always been the meat and potatoes for NASCAR have made this sport what it is today. Southerners who love the Confederate flag, their history, heritage and culture should boycott NASCAR and keep their money at home for one whole racing season. Then Brian France will know which group of race fans butters his bread.

And a fan writing to NASCAR.com's "Last Lap" column is a bit disgruntled:

I understand that he is trying to grow his corporation by appealing to everyone but he is forgetting how NASCAR made it to the level it currently enjoys: Rednecks. Plain and simple. I am one of them. I grew up on NASCAR, beer, cigarettes and confederate flags.

Now we have to appeal to everyone on the planet. Don't say s*** or you're outta here. Don't want the kiddies to hear it. Well let me tell ya, the folks that watch NASCAR could care less about the odd four-letter word and appreciate a good scuffle in the infield. Soon it will be plain old vanilla television.

And I like this comment at Free Republic:

Don't really like that the Confederate Battle Flag on every truck and moron's hands at the track. Not really the meaning of that flag....

Yeah, that's the real problem -- flying the Stars and Bars at a NASCAR race is disrespectful to the flag.

CAMBODIA

This story from Saturday's New York Times should get a bit more attention:

A series of clashes in the last year between American and Syrian troops, including a prolonged firefight this summer that killed several Syrians, has raised the prospect that cross-border military operations may become a dangerous new front in the Iraq war, according to current and former military and government officials....

One of Mr. Bush's most senior aides, who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject, said that so far American military forces in Iraq had moved right up to the border to cut off the entry of insurgents, but he insisted that they had refrained from going over it.

But other officials, who say they got their information in the field or by talking to Special Operations commanders, say that as American efforts to cut off the flow of fighters have intensified, the operations have spilled over the border - sometimes by accident, sometimes by design....

The troops can't secure one country, so now they're being spread even thinner. Oh yeah, that'll work.

And do I even need to tell you -- given that this is the Bush administration -- that many people who know what they're talking about think this is a huge mistake?

...Some current and former United States military and intelligence officials who said they believed that Americans were already secretly penetrating Syrian territory question what they see as the Bush administration's excessive focus on the threat posed by foreign Arab fighters going through Syria. They say the vast majority of insurgents battling American forces are Iraqis, not foreign jihadis.

According to a new study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, intelligence analysis and the pattern of detentions in Iraq show that the number of foreign fighters represents "well below 10 percent, and may well be closer to 4 percent to 6 percent" of the total makeup of the insurgency.

One former United States official with access to recent intelligence on the insurgency added that American intelligence reports had concluded that 95 percent of the insurgents were Iraqi.

This former intelligence official said that in conversations with several midcareer American military officers who had recently served in Iraq, they had privately complained to him that senior commanders in Iraq seemed fixated on the issue of foreign fighters, despite the evidence that they represented a small portion of the insurgency.

"They think that the senior commanders are obsessed with the foreign fighters because that's an easier issue to deal with," the former intelligence official said. "It's easier to blame foreign fighters instead of developing new counterinsurgency strategies."....

Worse and worse...

Could the mistrust Bush has engendered around the world actually make a bird flu pandemic more likely? Sounds crazy, but read this, from Lebanon's Daily Star:

The citizens of South Lebanon appear to be ignoring the threat of bird flu, which has reached Romania and Turkey, with the hunting season continuing despite severe government warnings....

The Daily Star visited bird sanctuaries in South Lebanon, where work continues as normal, regardless of the warnings of the environment and health ministries.

An owner of one of the sanctuaries, 45-year-old Mohammad Masri, said he did not believe in the existence of bird flu, adding: "This is an American creation aimed at distracting the people from their economic and political problems."...

Carrying a butchered chicken, Umm Walid, a resident of Sidon, said: "Chicken is the cheapest food; why do they want to prevent us from buying it?"

She added: "I assure you this is not bird flu, this is an American flu, a flu of personal interests and ambitions." ...

Yikes. Thanks for elevating our standing in the eyes of the world, George.

Well, I said on Friday that there would be a contested GOP primary in New York for the 2006 Senate race, but now Jeannie Pirro has the thing effectively locked up because rival Ed Cox dropped out. Seems like something Karl Rove would have engineered with a horse's head in Cox's bed, but apparently Governor Pataki and the state GOP pressured Cox to withdraw.

GO FOR WHAT YOU KNOW

Human rights activists in Iraq claim there are no polling stations in parts of the predominantly Sunni province of Anbar, in western Iraq, for a referendum today on the country's new constitution....

Much of the population is expected to vote against the US-backed constitution.

"There are no voting centres in cities like Haditha, Hit, Rawa, Qaim, Ana, Baghdadi and the villages around them," said Mahmoud Salman al-Ani, a human rights activist in Ramadi, listing locations across the western province.

"There aren't actually any voting centres or even voting sheets in these cities ... Nobody knows how and where to vote if they decide to," he said of the predominantly Sunni Arab region....

--Reuters yesterday

... as the House Judiciary Democratic Committee investigation found in Ohio, "There was a wide discrepancy between the availability of voting machines in more minority, Democratic and urban areas as compared to more Republican, suburban and exurban areas." Right after the election the Washington Post reported that, "local political activists seeking a recount analyzed how Franklin County officials distributed voting machines. They found that 27 of the 30 wards with the most machines per registered voter showed majorities for Bush. At the other end of the spectrum, six of the seven wards with the fewest machines delivered large margins for Kerry."

--Tova Andrea Wang, "Waiting for Democracy," Century Foundation comment on the 2004 election, 6/24/2005

(Reuters link via Juan Cole.)

Complicated day. Tomorrow, too, possibly, or at least part of it. I'll get back to you as soon as I can.

I keep trying to figure out whether yesterday's Daily News story about the New York subway terror alert makes it more or less likely that the alert was a Bush deception (as I know all of you believe it was).

The city's rich and well-connected were tipped off to last week's subway terror threat days before average New Yorkers, the Daily News has learned.

At least two E-mails revealing the purported plot were sent to a select crowd of business and arts executives early last week by New Yorkers who claimed to have close connections to Homeland Security and other federal officials, authorities said.

The NYPD confirmed that it learned of the E-mails on Oct. 3 - three days before Mayor Bloomberg, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly and the FBI went public with the threat....

The early warning infuriated several police officials, who noted that Homeland Security officials had challenged the credibility of the threat after the city and FBI warned the public.

"We're briefing the mayor, ratcheting up security, talking about when to go public - and Homeland Security is downplaying the whole thing while their people are telling friends to stay out of the subways," a police source said. "It's pretty bad." ...

Here's what I think: If the Bushies wanted to spread fear, is this how they'd do it? Not through a big, brassy D.C. press conference, but through viral marketing to a select demographic?

If this was a Bush ruse to spread fear via "new media," it didn't work -- word didn't spread very far; the public didn't find out until New York City made the announcement a couple of days later.

One person who didn't spread the word was the unnamed blogger at GOP and the City. He posted a partial text of one of the e-mails, but only when the alert was being made public by the city (note the date at the very top of the post), adding this comment:

Now, put on your tin hats...I got this email forwarded to me on Tuesday (10/4/05) from a coworker. I sent it on to Snopes and some other NYC Bloggers as a potential hoax. Look who's not laughing now.

So a Republican blogger got one of the e-mails two days before the story went public -- and didn't post it.

You know what else makes me doubt White House skulduggery? The fact that Bloomberg and his police commissioner were the focus of all the attention. In a White House operation, wouldn't the point have been to persuade the public that Flight Suit Bush and His Band of Mighty Warriors are all that stands between America and the unthinkable? Why yield the headlines to a not-very-Republican Republican, a guy who just recently made a point of telling NYC voters that he opposed John Roberts? Hell, I don't think Bush would have yielded the stage to a mayor who agreed with him on everything. Bush and obvious Bush surrogates would have made the message clear: "We will keep you safe. We are your daddies."

Also, why New York? If Bush wanted to scare people, why convey the sense that the "real" America wasn't under threat?

I'm sticking with my theory: This really was based on an intelligence report, one that turned out to be unreliable. And the feds couldn't make up their minds what the hell to think when they passed it on to the city.

(Also note this New York Times story, which says that Homeland Security personnel didn't believe the intel because it was too specific. I mention that only because, like the NYPD officials quoted in the story, I don't get it at all. These Homeland Security people are not to be confused with the Homeland Security people who obviously did believe the intel and e-mailed their friends accordingly. Feel safe now?)

A final thought: I wonder if the administration has changed strategies and doesn't want to scare the public anymore -- apart from the subway alert, there's been a lot less of this kind of thing in the second Bush term. Maybe Ashcroft and Ridge liked grandstanding more than Gonzales and Chertoff do. Or maybe the White House is trying to send the message that We're Winning the War on Terror, Dammit, and scaring people undermines the new party line.

AFGHANISTAN: THE NEW IRAQ? (II)

Afghan rebels are now travelling to Iraq to learn from insurgents there and returning home equipped with deadlier weapons and new techniques to use against US troops, analysts and reports say....

"Whether it's some old Taliban or some new insurgency, some of the things we're seeing happen have the fingerprints of things that are going on in Iraq," [Milton Bearden, a former CIA agent who was based in Pakistan during the Afghan rebellion against Soviet occupation,] told AFP....

The US magazine Newsweek in late September said its reporter had met two Taliban regional leaders, Mohammed Daud and Hamza Sangari, who told of spending several weeks in Iraq being trained by insurgents there.

"I'm explaining to my fighters every day the lessons I learned and my experience in Iraq," Daud told the weekly. "I want to copy in Afghanistan the tactics and spirit of the glorious Iraqi resistance"....

--AFP

"I want to copy in Afghanistan the tactics and spirit of the glorious Iraqi resistance." Tactics like this, perhaps?

A blast destroyed eight fuel tankers Friday outside the U.S.-led coalition's main base in southern Afghanistan. Two drivers were injured in the explosion, which sent thick black clouds billowing over Kandahar Airfield.

... Afghan army commander Gen. Mohammed Sarwar said the explosion was believed to have been caused by a bomb hidden in one of the tankers....

There has been a string of attacks on tankers contracted by the coalition to haul fuel to its bases from neighboring Pakistan....


(Via Democratic Underground.)

You may know that some experts think the Zawahiri-Zarqawi letter is a fake. Well, add Professor Juan Cole to the list of doubters. He literally can't get past the salutation without skepticism.

Oops -- Karl Rove's designated Hillary-slayer has suffered a few stumbles:

Two Republican leaders in upstate New York on Thursday disputed the claim by Jeanine F. Pirro's campaign that they had endorsed her candidacy for the United States Senate, dealing another embarrassing setback to a campaign struggling to build momentum as she seeks to unseat Hillary Rodham Clinton.

On her campaign Web site, Ms. Pirro has been mentioning endorsements she said she had received from Republican leaders in the politically important upstate region, including Gordon Brown, the chairman of the Wyoming County Republican Party, and Tom Hayden, the chairman of the Allegany County Republican Party.

But in separate interviews on Thursday, Mr. Brown and Mr. Hayden took issue with that claim, saying that neither they nor the county parties they lead had endorsed Ms. Pirro, who is in a primary battle for her party's nomination.

Mr. Hayden said he had not even met Ms. Pirro....

"The statement is inaccurate," [Mr. Brown] said of the campaign's claim about his endorsement....

This is part of a larger problem:

...Mrs. Pirro entered the race saying that she had the support of 46 Republican Party county chairmen around the state. "So my support in the Republican Party runs deep and wide," she said, according an August article in The New York Observer. But only 17 of these chairmen have officially endorsed her candidacy, according to her campaign....

Also, since she announced her candidacy, her disapproval rating has skyrocketed:

As more voters have gotten to know potential Senate candidate Jeanine Pirro, more have decided they don't like her, according to a new poll.

...Voters polled favored Clinton over Pirro, 59 percent to 31 percent....

Maybe more troubling for Pirro than being so far behind Clinton is that 25 percent of the respondents had an unfavorable opinion of her in this poll, compared to 12 percent who felt that way in July....

You know, Rove used to be able to clear the GOP field and run a winner, but now he's got contested Senate primaries in Florida (the candidate he dreads, Katherine Harris, won't go away) and New York (Pirro is screwing up and Nixon son-in-law Ed Cox wants the nomination, too). Clearly, he was losing his touch even before the Plamegate noose started tightening.

THREE DOWN...

This is brilliant.

I'm late to this, but I just love the fact that Jerome Corsi, of all people, now thinks there might have been something fishy about how George W. Bush got into the Texas Air National Guard.

Yeah, that Jerome Corsi -- the guy who wrote the Swift Boat book and helped get Bush reelected.

He and Joseph Farah have been publishing stories at WorldNetDaily about Harriet Miers's tenure as head of the Texas Lottery Commission. (To put it mildly, they're no fans of Miers.) They assert that former Texas lieutenant governor Ben Barnes engaged in shady business practices as a lobbyist for the company that ran the state's lottery, GTECH, and that Miers looked the other way -- which is interesting if true, because Barnes says he was the guy who pulled strings to get George W. Bush into the Texas Air National Guard during Vietnam, and perhaps the administration of a governor with higher political ambitions didn't want to give Barnes a reason to want to go public with such recollections.

Farah writes:

Corsi ... wonders out loud whether Barnes may have been telling the truth about his involvement in securing Bush a spot in the National Guard.

"The Barnes melodrama got drowned out by the forged document saga, but to this day, nobody has disproved Barnes played the role he said he did," writes Corsi....

Barnes had been hired first by GTECH because of his relationship with former Gov. Ann Richards. When Richards was replaced by George W. Bush in 1995, he boasted to the company that he knew the Bush family well. He explained that Bush family friend Sidney Adger approached him in 1968 to ask Barnes to use his influence to make sure George W. Bush was admitted to the Texas Air National Guard....

"GTECH further dodged a bullet when the Texas Lottery Commission, including Harriet Miers, decided to end the competitive bidding and re-award the contract to GTECH, deciding not to pursue the lower-price competitive bids that were on the table," Corsi reports. "In the period of 1995-1997, the George Bush controversy over the National Guard had not yet surfaced to be vetted. Was there a cover-up going on? That's a reasonable question given what we've uncovered so far." ...

I hate these people:

In the case of employer-paid health insurance, the main proposal [President Bush's tax advisory commission] discussed would limit tax-free premium payments....

The main proponent of the health insurance proposal, Timothy J. Muris, ... said limitless tax-free health insurance premiums encouraged workers to demand and companies to offer overly generous insurance and resulted in increased health costs.

Here's the reality:

Mitch Mayne, 38, is a marketing executive in San Francisco who considers himself basically healthy.

Mr. Mayne went to his doctor three times between March and June for the same thing: recurring bronchitis.

Yet the explanation of benefits statements he received from his insurer after each office visit differed drastically in the amount he owed, varying from $10.66 to $90, with no explanation of the services provided.

"What did I do on June 27 that was different than what I did on April 6 that was different than what I did on March 4?" Mr. Mayne asked.

When he calls for an explanation of the E.O.B.'s [explanations of benefits], he said, the most tangible result he sees is a new card in the mail with no indication of the amount he owes as a co-payment printed on the card.

"I'm paying through the nose for this premium, and when I go to the doctor it's a roll of the dice as to whether or not they'll pay it," said Mr. Mayne. "It seems like it depends on the mood of whoever happens to be doing the claim that day, or on the phases of the moon."

Mr. Mayne recently grew so fed up that he decided to try to beat the bronchitis on his own. "I can't deal with all this paperwork," he recalled saying. "It's just too much of a hassle." That turned out to be a mistake. Mr. Mayne became so sick that he finally relented and saw his doctor.

What if something truly catastrophic should happen to the state of his health?

"Oh wow, I hadn't even thought of that," Mr. Mayne said. "That's actually a pretty scary proposition. If I can't manage my health care as a healthy individual, the prospect of trying to manage it and be really sick at the same time - I don't know that I could do it."

I'm grateful to The New York Times for running that second article today, but the Times has had a big hand in spreading the myth retailed by Timothy Muris in the first article -- that our health care woes are all the fault of cosseted middle-class employees who avail themselves of the medical system at the drop of a hat. As if we really enjoy the paperwork, the maddening insurance company phone trees; as if we're not facing ever increasing premiums and co-payments.

Back in the '90s, the Times -- fat with ads from drug companies -- strongly suggested that managed care was a magic bullet for our health care woes, and scolded us just the way Muris is scolding us now. Yeah, managed care -- that was really an efficient solution to our problems, wasn't it?