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ATLANTA -- In what appears to be an amazing success for American medicine, preliminary government figures released Wednesday showed that the annual number of deaths in the U.S. dropped by nearly 50,000 in 2004 -- the biggest decline in nearly 70 years. The 2 percent decrease, reported by the National Center for Health Statistics, came as a shock to many, because the U.S. is aging, growing in population and getting fatter. In fact, some experts said they suspect the numbers may not hold up when a final report is released later this year. Nevertheless, center officials said the statistics, based...

Hawaii residents paid more state taxes in 2004 than residents of any other state in the country... Hawaii residents paid an average of $3,050 per person in 2004, while Texans paid the least — an average of $1,368. Every state but one collected more taxes per person in 2004 than it did a decade earlier... State taxpayer burdens increased by an average of 41 percent from 1994 to 2004. Only Alaska saw the amount it collects per person decline. Even when the numbers are adjusted for inflation, the individual tax burdens increased in 43 states. Rising education and Medicaid costs...

Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid accounted for more than $1 trillion in the 2004 budget year, according to the Consolidated Federal Funds Report being released today by the Census Bureau. Overall federal spending was $2.2 trillion, an increase of 5 percent from 2003.

YEAR-MURDERS in the United States2002-16,204 Murders2003-16,528 Murders2004-16,137 MurdersTotal-48,802 MurdersLink: 2002 Statistics Link: 2003 Statistics Link: 2004 Statistics

WASHINGTON, Aug. 2 /U.S. Newswire/ -- The American Center for Voting Rights Legislative Fund ("ACVR Legislative Fund") today released the most comprehensive and authoritative review of the facts surrounding allegations of vote fraud, intimidation and suppression made during the 2004 presidential election. The ACVR Legislative Fund report, "Vote Fraud, Intimidation & Suppression In The 2004 Presidential Election," finds that while Democrats routinely accuse Republicans of voter intimidation and suppression, neither party has a clean record on the issue. The report finds that paid Democrat operatives were far more involved in voter intimidation and suppression activities than were their Republican counterparts...

A quirk in how the U.S. government defined terrorism meant that when Chechen rebels blew up two airliners almost simultaneously over Russia last year, only one was counted in an annual tally of terrorist attacks. On board one plane were 46 Russians. But the other had 43 Russians and an Israeli citizen - a foreign national that allowed the explosion to meet the U.S. criteria for international terrorism. A new database assembled by the National Counterterrorism Center that was to go online early Wednesday has broadened the definition of terrorism to include both bombings. In the process, the center has...

The presidential election of 2004 is widely regarded as one of the most important in the past 100 years. But its importance does not derive from clear ideological differences between the candidates and the parties. For example, the two candidates generally agree about longer term goals in Iraq, however much they disagree about appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court or the rollback of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. The election is important, rather, because the candidacies of President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry have been framed by two different theoretical understandings of the nature of American society....

Annual Report on the United States Government When Republicans took control of Congress in 1994, the federal government was spending $200 billion per year more than it took in, and was borrowing more than $100 billion per year from the Social Security Trust Fund. Republicans ushered in an era of fiscal restraint, and balanced the federal budget for the first time since 1969. This enabled us to change the nation's deficits to surpluses, so that we borrowed less and lowered interest rates. Lower interest rates, in turn, produced greater investment and, greater investment produced more jobs and higher take home...

WASHINGTON - Growing at a rate of about 900 inmates each week between mid-2003 and mid-2004, the nation's prisons and jails held 2.1 million people, or one in every 138 U.S. residents, the government reported Sunday. By last June 30, there were 48,000 more inmates, or 2.3 percent, more than the year before, according to the latest figures from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The total inmate population has hovered around 2 million for the past few years, reaching 2.1 million on June 30, 2002, and just below that mark a year later. While the crime rate has fallen over...

It's that time again! The Darwin Awards this year are classic. These awards are given each year to bestow upon (the remains of) that individual, who through single-minded self-sacrifice, has done the most to remove undesirable elements from the human gene pool. 5th RUNNER-UP Goes to a San Anselmo, California man who died when he hit a lift tower at the Mammoth Mountain ski area while riding down the slope on a foam pad. 22-year old David Hubal was pronounced dead at Central Mammoth Hospital. The accident occurred about 3 a.m., the Mono County Sheriff's department said. Hubal and his...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The economy closed out 2004 with decent momentum and appears to have picked up some speed since then, raising hopes of a better climate for jobs. With the economy chugging ahead -- but not too rapidly -- Wall Street staged a jubilant rally. The broadest barometer of economic health, the gross domestic product, advanced at an annual rate of 3.8 percent over the final three months of last year, the Commerce Department reported Wednesday. The rate, the same as the one estimated a month ago, improved upon the initial reading of 3.1 percent pace for the fourth...

"There may well be even more terrible things to come in Iraq than what we have seen already, but there will also be far better things than were there before. And there will come a time, when all those who slandered the efforts — the Germans, the French, the American radical Left, the vicious Michael "Minutemen" Moore, the pampered and coddled Hollywood elite, the Arab League, and the U.N. will assume that Iraq is a "good thing" like Afghanistan, and that democracy there really was preferable — after they had so bravely weighed in with their requisite "ifs" and "buts"...

[...]A budget deficit in no way reduces the portion of the national pie that goes to Americans. As long as other countries and their citizens have no net ownership of the U.S., 100% of our country’s output belongs to our citizens under any budget scenario, even one involving a huge deficit. As a rich "family" awash in goods, Americans will argue through their legislators as to how government should redistribute the national output – that is who pays taxes and who receives governmental benefits. If "entitlement" promises from an earlier day have to be reexamined, "family members" will angrily debate...

Investor Warren Buffett took the blame in his annual report for a fall in his Berkshire Hathaway Inc.'s 2004 earnings. "My hope was to make to make several multi-billion dollar acquisitions that would add new and significant streams of earnings to the many we already have," Mr. Buffett, head of the Omaha, Neb., insurance and investment vehicle wrote in his 26-page annual report. "But I struck out." The source of Mr. Buffett's guilty complex comes from the company's change in book value -- assets minus liabilities -- a measure he likes to use to gauge Berkshire's performance. Last year, the...

At the end of December, Michael Medved gave his lists of best and worst films for 2004. Best: 10. Finding Neverland 9. Saints and Soldiers 8. The Aviator 7. In Good Company 6. Spiderman 2 5. Danny Deckchair 4. America's Heart and Soul 3. Friday Night Lights 2. Passion of Christ 1. The Incredibles Worst: 10. Torque 9. Scooby-Doo 2 8. Chasing Liberty 6. Welcome to Mooseport 5. Life Aquatic 4. Catwoman 3. Alexander 2. Havana Nights 1. Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (Note: I missed number 7 on his list...)

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Addressing a national gathering of about 100 diocesan social action leaders, a religion researcher said Feb. 19 that the divisive polarization long felt in the U.S. Catholic community reached a new peak in the 2004 election season. A "more ominous" element of the election-year divisions, said William A. Dinges, a professor of religious studies at The Catholic University of America and a member of the university's Life Cycle Institute, was the "vitriolic and escalating" rhetoric and "uncivil behavior, characterized by confrontation, harassment and attempts at intimidation." He said much of this was fueled by a relatively small...

US Customs and Border Protection officers seized over 100 tons of narcotics and apprehended more than 69,000 immigration violators at Southern California ports of entry during federal fiscal year 2004 that ended September 30. The 14,000-member National Association of Chiefs of Police reviewed the achievements of the CBP and reported them to its membership, which includes police chiefs, commanding officers and directors of security throughout the nation. CBP was formed in March 2003 under the Department of Homeland Security, unifying the operations of Customs, Immigration and Agricultural inspectors and the Border Patrol working at and between the ports of entry....

Last year was the fourth warmest since systematic temperature measurements began around the world in the 19th century, NASA scientists said yesterday. Particularly high temperatures were measured over Alaska, the Caspian Sea region of Europe and the Antarctic Peninsula, while the United States was unusually cool. But the global average continued a 30-year rise that is "due primarily to increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere," said Dr. James E. Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in Manhattan. The main source of such gases is smokestack and tailpipe emissions from burning coal and oil. The highest global average...

I've analyzed the spending by both parties in the Senate race. With the exception of Pennsylvania, the Democrats spent 50% more on the Senate races. Democratic candidates were financially non-competitive in only 6 races, whereas the Republicans were financially non-competitive in twelve. Republicans were 17-4 in states where they were financially competitive. Republicans won four states where they were significantly outfunded by their opposition; Democrats won none. None of this data includes independent expenditures and "issues advertising" which was virtually exclusively Democratic. Money raised but not spent is not included [These results exclude the Pennsyvlania race, because the FEC data...

This may be a repost but an important one.Alexandria, VA) – Even though President Bush took the oath of office last week, taxpayers still have one piece of unfinished business from the election: some federal lawmakers – including many seeking higher office – received thousands of dollars in salary overpayments for being away from their jobs during 2003 and 2004. According to a study released today by the 350,000-member National Taxpayers Union (NTU), an obscure federal statute still on the books requires Congressional absentees to forfeit their pay unless they or a family member are ill; but leaders have failed...