"The necessary conditions are as follows. First, the commission must agree in writing that Dr. Rice's testimony before the commission does not set any precedent for future commission requests, or requests in any other context, for testimony by a national security adviser or any other White House official.

"Second, the commission must agree in writing that it will not request additional public testimony from any White House official, including Dr. Rice."

But White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales said that in order for presidents to receive the most candid advice from their staffs, “it is important that these advisers not be compelled to testify publicly before congressional bodies such as the commission.”

A Brazilian pastor has died during a screening of Mel Gibson's controversial film The Passion of the Christ.

Jose Geraldo Soares, a 43-year-old Presbyterian, had booked a whole cinema to view the film with his congregation.

Halfway through, his wife noticed that he was no longer awake, and a doctor in the audience confirmed that he had suffered a heart attack.

Friends denied that violence scenes of Christ's beating and crucifixion had caused Pastor Soares to expire.

[...]

Pastor Soares is the second person to die at a screening of the film.

Peggy Law Scott, an American woman in her 50s, passed out last month during the crucifixion scene, when watching the film in Wichita, Kansas.

She later died in hospital, after suffering a heart attack.

Before 9/11, Karl Rove and Matthew Dowd were concerned about the GOP's looming demographic doom -- with every passing day the electorate grows less white. Thus, Nixon's southern strategy, which paid off with decades of solid electoral wins, looks set to backfire in the early 21st century. The day of reckoning, moreover, is not far off. If Bush wins the same proportion of the white vote, the black vote, and the Latino vote that he won in 2000, he will lose the 2004 election by a non-trivial margin due to the changing racial demographics.

The official merchandise Web site for President George W. Bush's re-election campaign has sold clothing made in Burma, whose goods were banned by Bush from the U.S. last year to punish its military dictatorship.

The merchandise sold on www.georgewbushstore.com includes a $49.95 fleece pullover, embroidered with the Bush-Cheney '04 logo and bearing a label stating it was made in Burma, now Myanmar. The jacket was sent to Newsday as part of an order that included a shirt made in Mexico and a hat not bearing a country-of-origin label.

The Bush merchandise is handled by Spalding Group, a 20-year-old supplier of campaign products and services in Louisville, Ky., that says it worked for the last five Republican presidential nominees.

Ted Jackson, Spalding's president, said, "We have found only one other in our inventory that was made in Burma. The others were made in the U.S.A." He said the company had about 60 of thefleece pullovers in its warehouse, and that a supplier included the Burma product by mistake.

Bush campaign officials did not return calls seeking comment. The imports are potentially an issue because outsourcing has become a hot political topic in the election.

Bush last July signed into law the Burmese Freedom and Democracy Act, saying "The United States will not waver from its commitment to the cause of democracy and human rights in Burma."

Violators of the import ban are subject to fines and jail, according to the U.S. Treasury Department.

When I ask scientists what's the biggest misunderstanding people have about their work, they often talk about how they know what they know. People tend to think that a scientist's job is to gather every single datum about something in nature--a mountain, a species of jellyfish, a neutron star--and then, simply by looking at all that information, see the absolute truth about it in an instant....

Many bogus attacks on scientific research play on this common misunderstanding of science-as-revelation. If scientists don't know everything they can't conclude anything. Paleoanthropologists have found less than two dozen species of hominids from the past six million years--therefore they can't draw any conclusions about how humans appeared on Earth. Climatologists don't have a perfect temperature record for the planet--therefore they can't say anything about how man-made pollution is warming the atmosphere. In cases like climate change, these bogus attacks spread from science to policy based on science. To hear some people talk, we should only do something about climate change once we have tracked every molecule in the atmosphere since the dawn of civilization and can predict its course for the next thousand years.

Administration sources tell TIME that employees at the Department of Homeland Security have been asked to keep their eyes open for opportunities to pose the President in settings that might highlight the Administration's efforts to make the nation safer. The goal, they are being told, is to provide Bush with one homeland-security photo-op a month.

WASHINGTON, March 14 — Federal investigators are scrutinizing television segments in which the Bush administration paid people to pose as journalists praising the benefits of the new Medicare law, which would be offered to help elderly Americans with the costs of their prescription medicines.

The videos are intended for use in local television news programs. Several include pictures of President Bush receiving a standing ovation from a crowd cheering as he signed the Medicare law on Dec. 8.

The materials were produced by the Department of Health and Human Services, which called them video news releases, but the source is not identified….

Federal law prohibits the use of federal money for "publicity or propaganda purposes" not authorized by Congress. In the past, the General Accounting Office has found that federal agencies violated this restriction when they disseminated editorials and newspaper articles written by the government or its contractors without identifying the source.

Kevin W. Keane, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said there was nothing nefarious about the television materials, which he said had been distributed to stations nationwide. Under federal law, he said, the government is required to inform beneficiaries about changes in Medicare.

"The use of video news releases is a common, routine practice in government and the private sector," Mr. Keane said. "Anyone who has questions about this practice needs to do some research on modern public information tools."

WASHINGTON -- Republican Sen. John McCain allowed a glimmer of hope Wednesday for Democrats fantasizing about a bipartisan dream team to defeat President Bush.

McCain said he would consider the unorthodox step of running for vice president on the Democratic ticket -- in the unlikely event he received such an offer from the presidential candidate.

"John Kerry is a close friend of mine. We have been friends for years," McCain said Wednesday when pressed to squelch speculation about a Kerry-McCain ticket. "Obviously I would entertain it."

House Democratic leaders are honing an election strategy to taint the entire Republican caucus by demonizing Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas).

By running against DeLay, much as they ran against Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) in 1996 and 1998, the Democrats believe they can damage centrist GOP members in potential swing districts that could determine who controls the House.

The strategy, which is based on the belief that DeLay is regarded as an extremist in many GOP-leaning districts, was previewed to lawmakers last week at a leadership luncheon by Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

She galvanized colleagues with a promise that Democrats would not let Republicans claim to be moderates at home while taking marching orders from DeLay in Washington, said several sources at the luncheon.

"Just consider what you're doing now. You don't want to have the freakin' president of the United States mad at you for the rest of your life." And, finally: "It will help you immensely to not do something that won't take you anywhere in a practical manner and that will really screw up your chances down the road...If you step off this cliff, gravity never goes up, it goes down."

Murphy described his reaction to the moment. “[T]hey were going on about the White House and ruining my career, all I could think was, 'I don't have a career.'"

Bill Miller, an Austin-based political consultant for HillCo Partners. "On the NRCC's part, that's what you call ham-handed amateur hour. Do people have bad days? Yeah. Are people stupid? Absolutely. And I think this is more of latter than the former.

"The fact that people get threatened in politics is nothing new. But using Karl Rove's name and saying that he would be an enemy of the president for life if he didn't get out--that's a different situation because of the context. I mean, here's a kid, Murphy, who is an amateur, but he acts like a pro. And the party, they're pros, but they act like amateurs.

• Bush is against campaign finance reform; then he's for it.
  
• Bush is against a Homeland Security Department; then he's for it.
  
• Bush is against a 9/11 commission; then he's for it.
  
• Bush is against an Iraq WMD investigation; then he's for it.
  
• Bush is against nation building; then he's for it.
  
• Bush is against deficits; then he's for them.
  
• Bush is for free trade; then he's for tariffs on steel; then he's against them again.
  
• Bush is against the U.S. taking a role in the Israeli Palestinian conflict; then he pushes for a "road map" and a Palestinian State.
  
• Bush is for states right to decide on gay marriage, then he is for changing the constitution.
  
• Bush first says he'll provide money for first responders (fire, police, emergency), then he doesn't.
  
• Bush first says that 'help is on the way' to the military ... then he cuts benefits

Authorities in Mexico City "are going to hand out free books to people riding the subway.... Apparently Mexico has the highest literacy rate in Latin America (about 90%), but people don't really spend that much time actually reading, so the program makes it easy for people to read in a context where they can't do much else. Hopefully the reading will catch on, maybe even cut down on crime in the subways."

[T]he liberal media elite is either celebrating, or shamefully silent on, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s act of civil disobedience in deciding to have the city issue same sex marriage licenses. Yet last summer this same liberal media elite couldn’t heap enough abuse on Judge Roy Moore’s act of civil disobedience in plopping a Ten Commandments monument in the lobby of the Alabama Supreme Court. You see, it’s all about hypocrisy. Liberal media elites have no moral grounding, so they can disapprove of civil disobedience one week and applaud it the next. That’s how evil they are.

It's not really civil disobedience at all. It's a public official's act based on a legal opinion interpreting state and federal constitutional law. As I say on my site, if gay marriage is "civil disobedience," then so are John Ashcroft's assorted stompings of habeas corpus.

Newsom, she says, "is being treated as a modern-day Rosa Parks. He's a nice guy and a very eloquent public speaker, but he's also not following the law. When Judge Roy Moore wasn't following the law, people were trashing him. He was just ridiculed in the press.... If you have a politically correct view and violate the law, you're a hero."