Cheney: Oh, we have a plan B all right. Here it is: You marry yourself and then you take yourself on a honeymoon to Vegas and you get yourself flippin' pregnant with twins.

Powell: Ok, look, I-- I'm calling my car. I've got to get back to the building before all the passwords change.

Some people do feel this way, and they do not wish to be handed the line that “language is always evolving,” or some other slice of liberal pie. They don’t even want to know what the distinction between a restrictive and a non-restrictive clause might be. They are like people who lose control when they hear a cell phone ring in a public place: they just need to vent. Truss is their Jeremiah. They don’t care where her commas are, because her heart is in the right place.

Pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies are working on a variety of myostatin inhibitors. Initially, the possibility of producing meatier food animals piqued commercial interest. Nature has already provided examples of the effects of myostatin blockade in the Belgian Blue and Piedmontese cattle breeds, both of which have an inherited genetic mutation that produces a truncated, ineffective version of myostatin. These cattle are often called double-muscled, and their exaggerated musculature is all the more impressive because an absence of myostatin also interferes with fat deposition, giving the animals a lean, sculpted appearance.

Some parents are trying to avoid both abortion and disease by opting for in-vitro fertilization, even if they do not need it to conceive. A new procedure can test embryos in the petri dish for chromosomal abnormalities or a genetic condition known to run in a family.

For the White House, the most devastating segment of "Fahrenheit 9/11" may be the video of a befuddled-looking President Bush staying put for nearly seven minutes at a Florida elementary school on the morning of Sept. 11, continuing to read a copy of "My Pet Goat" to schoolchildren even after an aide has told him that a second plane has struck the twin towers. Mr. Bush's slow, hesitant reaction to the disastrous news has never been a secret. But seeing the actual footage, with the minutes ticking by, may prove more damaging to the White House than all the statistics in the world.

The Journal of Reproductive Medicine has withdrawn from its Web site a September 2001 study that demonstrated the benefits of prayer on fertility treatments, following recent concerns raised by the research community about the validity of the results. One of the three authors of the paper [Daniel Wirth] is a lawyer and psychic researcher who last month pleaded guilty in a Pennsylvania court to a number of charges, including using phony identities and defrauding the cable company Adelphia Communications of more than $1 million.

... Harold G. Koenig at the Duke University Medical Center, who studies the relationship between spirituality and health, cautioned that whether the report contains falsifications still remains unknown. "It could be a completely legitimate study," he noted. He also told The Scientist that Flamm [a UCI physician critical of the report] is a "known skeptic."

Ronald Reagan does hold a special place in the annals of tax policy, and not just as the patron saint of tax cuts. To his credit, he was more pragmatic and responsible than that; he followed his huge 1981 tax cut with two large tax increases. In fact, no peacetime president has raised taxes so much on so many people. This is not a criticism: the tale of those increases tells you a lot about what was right with President Reagan's leadership, and what's wrong with the leadership of George W. Bush.

Le 27 avril, l'US Patent and Trademark Office (Uspto) a en effet accordé au géant Microsoft, sous le numéro 6 727 830, un brevet protégeant le clic et toutes ses déclinaisons possibles, dès lors que celles-ci concernent un programme développé pour un ordinateur de poche aux "capacités limitées", c'est-à-dire un appareil du type assistant personnel numérique (PDA).

Does Mr. Bush understand that the end result of his policies will be to make most Americans worse off, while enriching the already affluent? Who knows? But the ideologues and political operatives behind his agenda know exactly what they're doing.