Does president Bush really believe what he’s saying about the effort from congressional Democrats and some leading Senate Republicans to provide health coverage for millions of uninsured children? He’s portraying it as the first step on a slippery slope toward ‘government-run healthcare,’ as if senior senators in both parties were conspiring with Michael Moore to import Cuban doctors to inoculate and indoctrinate American children. In fact, Congress is moving responsibly to remove a blot on the nation: the 8 million children without health insurance. It is doing so by expanding the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP, a state-federal partnership that the Republican Congress and President Clinton created in 1997 to cover kids in working-poor families. Final votes on the House and Senate floors could come this week. Bush, seemingly determined to provoke every possible confrontation with congressional Democrats, has pledged to veto the bills. And with the GOP congressional leadership, he is fighting the proposals with a swarm of misleading and hypocritical arguments. Bush complains that expanding the program costs too much. But cost was no object when Bush and congressional Republicans sought to court seniors by creating the Medicare prescription drug benefit in 2003. […]
WASHINGTON — A new investigation on Iraq shows that the troubled reconstruction efforts there face deeper problems if the Iraqi government doesn’t accept control for some of the projects that the US is completing. The US government continues to share the blame and must better scrutinize the billions of dollars it is spending to erect power stations, build water-treatment plants, and other facilities, according to a report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) released Monday. The report paints a picture of an Iraqi government that is still not accepting responsibility for the billions of dollars of projects the US is completing and attempting to hand over to the Iraqis. Since last year, the Iraqi governmenthas yet to accept one project, the report said. ‘The failure of the asset-transfer program raises concerns about the continuing operation and maintenance of US-constructed projects,’ the report said. ‘In some cases, the United States has continued to pay for maintaining completed projects that have not been accepted by the [government of Iraq].’ The Iraqi government took control of more than 400 facilities completed by the US between April and June of 2006, but it has not taken over […]
In a recent experiment, psychologists at Yale altered people’s judgments of a stranger by handing them a cup of coffee. The study participants, college students, had no idea that their social instincts were being deliberately manipulated. On the way to the laboratory, they had bumped into a laboratory assistant, who was holding textbooks, a clipboard, papers and a cup of hot or iced coffee - and asked for a hand with the cup. That was all it took: The students who held a cup of iced coffee rated a hypothetical person they later read about as being much colder, less social and more selfish than did their fellow students, who had momentarily held a cup of hot java. Findings like this one, as improbable as they seem, have poured forth in psychological research over the last few years. New studies have found that people tidy up more thoroughly when there’s a faint tang of cleaning liquid in the air; they become more competitive if there’s a briefcase in sight, or more cooperative if they glimpse words like ‘dependable’ and ‘support’ - all without being aware of the change, or what prompted it. Psychologists say that ‘priming’ […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
