So it's not sheer protectionism that drives the Democrats and Big Labor, as the deal's supporters claim. It's "horrific violence," especially against unions. John Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO, claims, "In Colombia, joining a union or advocating for workers' rights can be a de facto death sentence."

BS.

Last year's overall murder rate was down 40 percent since 2002, while deaths among Colombia's union members plummeted even farther - a drop of 86 percent in a decade. Further, the murder rate for union members is about an eighth that of the population at large. Sadly, it's the pact that has effectively been killed. Read more here.

Petty Officer 2nd Class Michael Monsoor (right) during a fight in the Mulaab, Ramadi

In fact, he was protecting me as well as his teammates. SEALs don't wear identification -- even on dress uniforms -- and I would never have learned his name if, six months later, he hadn't sacrificed all to save those same teammates.

Last week I looked on as President Bush, tears glistening on his face, presented the parents of Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class (Sea, Air, and Land) Michael Monsoor our nation's highest award -- the Medal of Honor. "Mr. and Mrs. Monsoor: America owes you a debt that can never be repaid," he said. "This nation will always cherish the memory of your son."

Read the rest (including photos and video of SEALs in action), by the only reporter to write about the ceremony who was in combat with Monsoor.

I first wrote about being in combat with Monsoor's unit in Ramadi, Iraq in April of 2006 in my Weekly Standard "New Band of Brothers" article, though he wasn't mentioned by name. He was killed just as I was returning to Ramadi later in the year, and one of the photos I took of him during that first fight graced the cover of the issue containing my subsequent article. I plan to attend and to write about the Medal of Honor Ceremony.

"In November, a study by CBS News found a high rate of suicides among veterans," wrote blogger Steve M. "In response, Michael Fumento of the New York Post promptly rose to shoot the messenger" he wrote, linking to my article. It went on that, "Fumento cited a lot of statistics that, he claimed, proved CBS's "nefariousness." But two months later, we now have some new statistics: "Suicides among active-duty soldiers in 2007 reached their highest level since the Army began keeping such records in 1980, according to a draft internal study obtained by The Washington Post."

Never mind that I'm not "of" the Post; I just occasionally contribute. Instead, let's count. "Veteran" comprises seven letters, whereas "active-duty soldiers" comprises 18 letters plus a hyphen. It thus appears Steve M. not only cannot read, he cannot do the simplest math. Since that would also preclude writing, it appears he has prevailed upon mommy to do his typing.

Finally, he knows nothing of logic. Even were we comparing apples to apples or oranges to oranges, an Army study showing an increase would not necessarily support a CBS study showing an increase. If the CBS said flu deaths doubled last year and the CDC said they went up 10 percent, would the CDC have established the CBS figures and methodology as correct?

Don't ask No More Mister Nice Blog - or at least not in writing!

Naturally, the media cheered until hoarse, featuring Lancet's numbers on 25 news shows and in 188 articles within a single week. Likewise for the leftist blogosphere like Daily Kos and Tim Lambert at Deltoid - who began a vendetta against me over it.

But now, as I discuss in my current Weekly Standard article, "The Casualties of War," complete with a plethora of hyperlinks, a new study co-conducted by the World Health Organization (hardly an Iraq war booster) and appearing in America's most prestigious medical journal, directly compares itself with Lancet 2006. It also uses as comparison numbers kept by the antiwar group IraqBodyCount. The comparisons show the real carnage is whatever was left of the Lancet's reputation and that of its editor, who screeches about "Anglo-American imperialism" at anti-war rallies.

Perhaps most importantly, for the latest comparable reporting period, the new study found Lancet's numbers to be SEVEN TIMES its own.

The WHO's Iraq Family Health Study (IFHS) "found an estimated 151,000 excess violent deaths from the U.S-led invasion in March 2003 through June 2006, when compared to violent deaths in the prewar period," I note. "This is roughly one-fourth the war-related deaths found by Lancet in 2006."

Specifically, for the last comparable year, "the IFHS daily figure was 2.3 times higher than that of IraqBodyCount, (while) the Lancet 2006 daily figure was a stunning 7.3 times higher than that of the IFHS and 17 times higher than that of IraqBodyCount."

Nonetheless, the research leader for both the Lancet studies insists the IFHS findings are consistent with Lancet 2006! He's said the same of the only "study" to find a higher number than The Lancet, a British poll last year concluding over 1.2 million Iraqis had been "murdered." Die-never defenders like Lambert likewise assert that all three studies are consistent. In short, no study can possibly find so few or so many deaths that somehow it doesn't somehow support The Lancet.

Yet one hardly need to look at outside studies to find Lancet 2006 is B.S. Consider just this.

Lancet 2006 attributed an amazing 166 deaths on average per day to car bombings alone from June 2005-June 2006. These bombings are fastidiously reported in the U.S. media and Wikipedia keeps a list of the major ones. Yet the highest single-day car bomb total Wikipedia records (114) is 42 short of Lancet's alleged average. Lancet's daily car bomb victim average is also 111 more than Iraq Body Count figure for war-related deaths from all causes. How could IraqBodyCount miss all those bodies?

Are the MSM now admitting to having been duped - assuming "dupe" is the proper word?

Get real. "WHO Says Iraq Civilian Death Toll Higher Than Cited" screamed the title of The New York Times article.

ERRATUM: In the original blog, I wrote that the number of Iraqi dead Lancet 2006 attributed to car bomb victims per day was "111 times higher" than Iraqbodycount. That would be extreme, even for The Lancet. Or maybe not. As it happens, it's "111 more," not 111 times more.

Therefore a California Department of Public Health study in the current Archives of General Psychiatry hasn't either. It shows absolutely no decrease in the rate of increased autism diagnoses, notwithstanding that thimerosal was discontinued in childhood vaccines in 2001. (I include a graph that makes the point abundantly clear.) Yet not only did the nut cases claim the California data would eventually prove their case, they even claimed it already had.

For the rest of us there are two valuable lessons. First, the lack of a thimerosal connection to the developmental disorder has once again been reaffirmed. And second, those fanatics really and truly are fanatical - as a British Medical Journal book reviewer put it, an "angry and paranoid universe."

I've already gotten a barge-load of nasty e-mail from this paranoid universe. See what's made them so incredibly angry.

Hi Michael,

A little belatedly, I ran across your excellent article on the "hoax that is ADHD." :-)

I can't thank you enough for the excellent dissection. Five years ago, when I discovered that my scientist husband has ADHD and we both went through hell trying to coax decent care out of our very broken mental health care system - and some truly ignorant psychiatrists - I swore that others would benefit from my hard-won experience.

So, I've been volunteering almost full time - essentially a Peace Corps at Home stint - helping other people to understand this ridiculously common condition, especially in adults. At this point, after finishing a book so I can try easing out of doing so much volunteer work, I'm pretty much exhausted. But I've made my dent.

[Two paragraphs omitted.]

The idea that nutballs like Fred Baughman and overreaching egotists like Lawrence Diller (who has absolutely no clue about what happens when these children who are not treated grow up and leave the structure of "helicopter" parents) are the most prominent influences on the internet is appalling. So I really appreciate it when thinkers and writers like you put their focus on this subject.

Thank you,

I responded:

You're welcome. I started taking ADHD drugs a few months ago and it''s been wonderful. I've long known I have the problem, but I found lots of ways to cope. But it got to a point where I was simply blanking out and missing freeway ramps and stuff. That's not just frustrating; it's dangerous. And it's so nice not to be constantly mislaying things. Meanwhile my creativity hasn't been touched in the least bit. In other words, no, I am not a zombie thank you very much.

All the best,
Mike

I'm no Huckabee fan, but my first reaction was that Huckabee meant "regrets" or "sympathy" when he said "apologies." In many languages the same term is used for both of these words. For example, in German you can apologize or sympathize with an expression that translates to: "It's to my regret." In French, a way of saying "I regret it" as in "I regret we don't sell that type of photo film" translates literally to "I excuse myself."

Indeed, the Huckabee campaign later tried to explain he "intended to extend his deepest sympathies to the people of Pakistan when he used the word 'apologies.'" So he seems to realize that he made a faux pas even if he's not entirely sure why.

In fact, as I write in the New York Post, vets are only overrepresented because of sheer demographics. Shelter denizens are overwhelmingly male and males comprise 93 percent of all vets. As to housing, it bears noting that despite the efforts of myriad "advocacy" groups to present vets as losers, they have more education, higher rates of employment, and higher salaries than comparable non-vets. The data on why people are in shelters confirms what anybody (including me) who lives near a shelter already knows. These people aren't just like you and me but without a home; their rates of alcohol and drug abuse and mental illness are astronomical.

Claims such as these, and all the journalists who simply repeat them, do the homeless - vets or otherwise - a tremendous disservice in taking attention away from the real causes of their problems. Yeah, it's wicked. What's new?

Said Keteyian in his New York Post letter about my article, not my "statement." "Our investigative unit collected official suicide data for veterans from all branches of the military from 45 states" and had it independently analyzed by a University of Georgia biostatistics expert. Very basic data were online and I said so and my website links to it.

But "45 states sent us numbers" is not a proper explanation of methodology. It's also not changed by their having an outside bio-statistician look at their final numbers, insofar as he had no way of knowing what went into making those numbers - something CBS completely glossed over for obvious reasons.

Further, the methodology from each state would vary. What did CBS do to make this a proper meta-analysis?

Insofar as they used amateurs, even if they tried to be honest they couldn't be. And rarely does anybody ever accuse CBS of trying to be honest. Epidemiology is horribly complex. I've said it many times: After 20 years of writing about epidemiology, I can poke a hole in a bad epi study in five minutes. I can also detect that a ship is sinking in five minutes. But never would I deign to either design or build a ship. CBS took that step and was undeterred by the reality that nobody else out there came who has studied this issue got results indicating any increased suicide risk for veterans anywhere.

CBS's final word: "After the reports aired, Congressional [sic] hearings were requested," wrote Keteyian. Yes, because only Congress still believes anything aired on CBS. But gee, what if those hearings had been called by a Wisconsin Senator named Joe McCarthy . . .

Now, as I discuss in my new article in The American Spectator Online, "An Epidemic of Falsehoods," the UNAIDS program has admitted its HIV estimate from last year was over six million too high, dropping it from 39.5 million to 33.2 million. The agency also now admits the number of new HIV infections per year peaked way back around 1998.

Trust me; the "corrected" figure is still a gross exaggeration. And as I make clear, the inflated figures were no mere mistake in methodology, as the official and unofficial alarmist groups would have us think. It was a concession that our trusted officials (Trusted by the mainstream media, anyway) could no longer maintain such a massive fiction against the onslaught of reality. It's a sordid tale, but an interesting one. And it's far from over.

Now, when will they admit they've grossly exaggerated the risk of pandemic avian flu?

This year the goons were CBS News and a homeless activist group. I'll deal with homeless group in a later piece; but in the New York Post I take on CBS's claim that a study they conducted all by their lonesomes (Big red flag there.) shows an "epidemic" of veterans ending their poor miserable lives. (And if you don't believe that, CBS has some documents on President Bush's National Guard service they'd like to sell you. )

The CBS suicide claim goes against lots of detailed published reports regarding both active duty service personnel and veterans. For example, the suicide rate among Vietnam vets and Gulf War vets is no higher than among comparable civilians. Why would there be such a high suicide rate among vets in general then, most of whom served during peacetime? And while naturally CBS wants to blame its "findings" on PTSD, I also discuss studies showing that vets with PTSD are less likely to kill themselves. All CBS's "study" showed us was a crass way of raising ratings.

Meanwhile it's working mightily and spending the bank on three diseases that have yet to kill a single American and probably never will: Ebola virus, SARS, and avian flu. Federally-funded Ebola and SARS vaccines are in human trials and the government is already stockpiling FDA-approved avian flu vaccine. Yet government-funded MRSA vaccine research is still in mice.

One spending comparison: Congress has specifically earmarked $5.8 billion for avian flu, the threat of which continually recedes. Yet, although the CDC lists in addition to MRSA 8 important diseases connected to antibiotic resistance, the total annual budget for these is merely $221 million.

I conclude: "We need a government that pays more attention to medical statistics than to headlines. The one we have now is killing us."

That's the History Channel's plug for its show, "The Band of Bloggers," which first airs Fri. Nov. 9 at 8pm. I'm told it will contain 56 seconds of my footage from Ramadi, including a near rooftop sniping of a soldier in 1/506, 101st Airborne Division and the subsequent ambush we endured. It may also include some of my firefight footage with Seal Team 3, including both Mike Monsoor and Marc Allen Lee, both later killed in action.

Subsequent air times are here.

If my 56 seconds aren't there, don't sue me.