Despite more bad news on the jobless recovery front -- 129,000 fewer new jobs in February than forecast -- the White House spinmeisters are acting like everything is coming up roses and daffodils.

It seems to me that in terms of evolutionary impact on culture it is much more likely that Christianity, along with other monotheistic religions, is simply a generalization of the parent-child relationship we are all genetically programmed to recognize and identify with. With that in mind, it seems strange that anyone would seek to intentionally hobble the ethical growth of a culture by forcing what is arguably a literally childish and undeveloped ethos on society.

The 4,037 same-sex couples who obtained marriage licenses in San Francisco hail from 46 states and eight other countries, are highly educated, range in age from 18 to 83 but generally are middle-aged, and represent hundreds of occupations.

Coming over the transom, with no hint of the sender, was a document she had been seeking for months: an estimate by Medicare's chief actuary showing the cost of prescription drug benefits for the elderly. Dated June 11, 2003, the document put the cost at $551.5 billion over 10 years.
But interviews with federal officials, including Mr. Foster and Mr. Scully, make clear that the actuary's numbers were circulating within the administration, and possibly on Capitol Hill, throughout the second half of last year, as Congress voted on the prescription drug bill, first in June and again in November.
mred - they suppressed that $550b figure for at least 8 months...

In a 21-page memorandum filled with scorn and with lessons in the ways of Washington, Justice Scalia wrote that if people assumed a duck hunting trip would be enough to swing his vote, ``the nation is in deeper trouble than I had imagined.''

David Bookbinder, the Washington legal director of the Sierra Club, said in a telephone interview today that ``it would have been terrific'' if Justice Scalia had explained in January how little contact he had had with Mr. Cheney during their outing.

``The implications of this argument are staggering,'' Justice Scalia wrote. ``I must recuse because a significant portion of the press, which is deemed to be the American public, demands it.''