The president also repeated his objection to sitting down with leaders of countries such as Iran and Cuba, nations accused of abusing human rights and stifling democracy.

The move has been an issue between Democratic presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

"It is extremely counterproductive, sends chilling messages to our allies. ... It would be a mistake," Bush said. "Having your picture taken with someone like Raul (Castro) lends the status of our country to him." Castro, brother of Fidel, is the new president of Cuba.

Bush said he intends to meet with China's president during a trip to Beijing to see the summer Olympic Games, which begin in August.

The Bush administration has accused China, a major U.S. trade partner, of human rights abuses. Bush didn't elaborate on what issues he might bring up.

Kimmel and his writers, rested from being on strike, show their rejuvenated creativity by hauling out 25-year-old flaming fag stereotypes. They know a couple of certifiably straight stars pretending to be big queens will have them rolling in the aisles. So, they open with Kimmel and Affleck in an open-air bar populated by a shirtless West Hollywood harem. They stand at a bar with a blender and glass of what looks like a strawberry daiquiri, and on the bar sits a large bowl of fruit. Get it? Fruit. Get it? They're FRUITS. Get it?

Next up, let's see Jimmy to do a video where he's f**king a famous negro, running around with chitlins, watermelons and a spear, while tap dancing and singing "Shortnin' Bread." Let the hilarity begin! 

But today, cosmetic companies and retailers increasingly aim their sophisticated products and service packages squarely at 6- to 9-year-olds, who are being transformed into savvy beauty consumers before they're out of elementary school.

Radio talk show host Bill Cunningham's mocking and harsh criticism of Democrat Barack Obama upstaged Republican presidential candidate John McCain's rally today in Cincinnati.
Sen. McCain apologized for the remarks by the WLW radio talk show host.

Cunningham said later that he stood by his comments. He told his listeners: '"I've had it with McCain. I'm going to throw my support to Hillary Rodham Clinton."

Cunningham said McCain "ought to attack Democrats and quit attacking conservatives like me."

"I, for one, regret that John McCain is the nominee of the conservative party," he said.

McCain said Monday that to win the White House he must convince a war-weary country that U.S. policy in Iraq is succeeding. If he can't, "then I lose. I lose," the Republican said.
He quickly backed off that remark.

"Let me not put it that stark," McCain told reporters on his campaign bus. "Let me just put it this way: Americans will judge my candidacy first and foremost on how they believe I can lead the country both from our economy and for national security. Obviously, Iraq will play a role in their judgment of my ability to handle national security."

"If I may, I'd like to retract 'I'll lose.' But I don't think there's any doubt that how they judge Iraq will have a direct relation to their judgment of me, my support of the surge," McCain added. "Clearly, I am tied to it to a large degree."

iTunes Customers Top 50 Million

CUPERTINO, California--February 26, 2008--Apple® today announced that iTunes® (www.itunes.com) is now the number two music retailer in the US, behind only Wal-Mart, based on the latest data from the NPD Group*. Apple also announced that there are now over 50 million iTunes Store customers. iTunes has sold over four billion songs, with an incredible 20 million songs sold on Christmas Day 2007 alone, and offers the world's largest music catalog of over six million songs from all of the major and thousands of independent labels.

There are something like 1,400 seed banks around the world, guarding samples of crop plants ranging from alfalfa to yams. But, as I wrote last year, this agricultural archive is eroding under forces including war, storms, scant money or bad management, particularly in the world's poorest or most turbulent places. A Fort Knox has been needed, many experts said. Now they have it.

"There is a due diligence that has to be done, particularly coming from a totalitarian dictatorship where execution of prisoners and a general lack of value for human life are paramount," said Smith, who has championed human rights issues in China for many years.

Smith said he will be issuing a formal request to the House Foreign Affairs Committee for a congressional hearing. "There needs to be a moratorium immediately. There is something very very wrong here."

Adding to the complexity, Texas holds a primary and a caucus on the same day, with the evening caucus open only to those who have already cast primary ballots, either in early voting (which began Tuesday) or at the polls on March 4. Mr. Obama has prevailed in most caucuses up to now.

Mrs. Clinton said she could not begin to explain how the Texas system worked. "I had no idea how bizarre it is," she said aboard her plane flying from Wisconsin to Ohio. "We have grown men crying over it." (bold my emphasis)

Warren Buffett says he's addicted to Bridge.  To emphasize just how much, he told CBS News, "You know, if I'm playing bridge and a naked woman walks by, I don't ever see her."

This latest challenge isn't about losing weight, saving money or eating more vegetables.

Church members, most of whom are in their 20s and 30s, will get a journal to track their sexual encounters - or lack thereof - and jot down their feelings. Ranters can vent on the church's blog, which is set to go up after the challenge starts, at www.30daysexchallenge.com. (ed.- safe for work, but the

It's about having sex. Lots of it. As in every day, if you're married. Or not at all, if you're single.

"When you talk about sex, everybody expects the church to say God hates sex," Wirth said. "That's just not true. I really believe that God wants us to have great sex."

"Self-determination is a right recognised by the United Nations, and it is the people who are masters of their nation's future," the Taiwanese foreign ministry said in a statement.

From peepeeface.com: Political Urinal Cakes

I found this site when I was googling for political T-shirts.  Yes, that means that I didn't intentionally go to a website named "peepeeface.com".

To save you the trouble of going to peepeeface.com at work or having to explain to your spouse or kids, these urinal cakes are $7.95/piece and a Mike Huckabee one is available too.  There isn't a Ron Paul one.  Hmmm.  Conspiracy?  I think so!

However, the focus of the "20/20" report, airing at 9 tonight on KMBC-TV, is on discoveries that Ross made during a recent visit to China. In an interview Thursday, Ross said that university officials in Dalian told him that, contrary to Premier's assertions, they were not the sole supplier of cadavers to "Bodies: The Exhibition." That show is Premier's highest-profile anatomical exhibition and has just begun a seven-month run at the Cincinnati Museum Center.

"We found in fact they don't come from the university but from a company on the outskirts of town in a series of ramshackle warehouses on a dirt road," Ross said. "It's run by somebody who's a professor at the university, but it's not the business of the university. The question is, where does he get the bodies?"

Ross said he visited the compound briefly, before officials ejected him and his crew, and interviewed a former employee who said that at least a third of the cadavers he processed were bodies of executed prisoners. That's an allegation human rights groups have made about anatomical traveling shows and one that Premier has repeatedly denied. In 2006, Arnie Geller, the CEO of Premier, told The New York Times, "We traced the whole process. None of these would be executed prisoners."

Ross said that's what a Premier official told him, too. But he said the ex-employee is certain of the corpses' provenance, "because he was involved in going around China picking them up.

In an interview to be aired Friday on the ABC News program "20/20," Dr. Gunther von Hagens also says an underground black market is providing bodies to Chinese companies that export them to the U.S. and Europe, despite a 2006 Chinese law prohibiting the export of human bodies for commercial purposes.

A spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry said it was investigating the allegations.

Von Hagens says he had to cremate several bodies he received in China after detecting injuries that led him to suspect they had been executed prisoners.

"There is now no way for me any more to work with specimens in China," said von Hagens, who says his company in China now only deals with animal specimens.

Plasticized bodies -- every vein, muscle, organ and bone of what was once a real person, carefully preserved in ways that were not possible before -- have become blockbuster attractions across the country. Millions of people have paid to see the bodies that are put on display in a full range of poses, such as running with a football or dancing.

But with the growing popularity have come troubling questions about the bodies. Whose bodies are they? Where do they come from? And is it educational and scientific, as some people say, or are these cadavers just being used for entertainment?

A three-month "20/20" investigation into the business of bodies tracked the ghoulish process to its origins -- from a body processing factory on the German-Polish border, to Internet sites that offer the plasticized bodies for sale, to a rundown warehouse in northern China where "20/20's" undercover cameras saw what has, until now, been kept well hidden.

Friday, Feb. 15 at 10 p.m.: Brian Ross Investigates: Millions pay to real human bodies on display in exhibits. Whose bodies are they and where do they come from?

If a new report is to be believed, an entire generation of children has grown up drinking a toxic chemical from their earliest months: bisphenol A. A consortium of North American environmental and health groups released a paper Thursday showing that many major-brand baby bottles leach bisphenol A, and is now calling for a moratorium on the use of the compound -- used to make polycarbonate plastic -- in food and beverage containers.

What they mean is that like Pavlov's dog, trained to salivate at the sound of a bell, animals are similarly trained to anticipate lots of calories when they taste something sweet -- in nature, sweet foods are usually loaded with calories. When an animal eats a saccharin-flavored food with no calories, however -- disrupting the sweetness and calorie link -- the animal tends to eat more and gain more weight, the new study shows.

"I know the pundits, and I know what they say: The math doesn't work out," Huckabee said Saturday morning at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. "Well, I didn't major in math, I majored in miracles. And I still believe in those, too."

Theodore Sorensen, the great JFK speechwriter who backs Obama, says words can move an electorate and Clinton seems not to realize "the important quality in a presidency of being able to move, arouse, inspire, galvanize. Neither Congress nor the allies would pay any attention to you otherwise. Words still matter. You bet they do."

"Four more years," the audience chanted after Sen. Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, introduced him, and again during his speech. It was a striking contrast to the reception Mr. McCain received from the same audience the day before, when he was jeered and booed by some.

Since the late 1980s, the percentage of Americans taking part in such activities has declined at slightly more than 1 percent a year. The total effect, Pergams says, is that participation is down 18 percent to 25 percent from peak levels.

Melinda says they will follow Warren Buffett's philosophy: "A very rich person should leave his kids enough to do anything, but not enough to do nothing."

There are many people who would like to donate their bodies to medical science after their deaths. One means of doing so is to work with the anatomical institutes of universities. However, such establishments are unable to pass on specimens to other academic institutions in need of such bodies, as costs would be incurred for which they do not want to issue invoices if body donors have not agreed to a sale. In addition, "services" like these are technically not within the declared province of a university in most countries. This situation is particularly awkward, as anatomical institutes frequently have to turn down prospective body donors because they already have more than enough bodies for their own instruction.

Where do the specimens come from?
A: All of the specimens in this Exhibition were obtained thorough the Dalian Medical University plastination laboratories in the People's Republic of China. China has a large and highly competent group of anatomists and dissectors, who are essential to properly preparing these specimens for exhibition and educational purposes.

Will we know who the body specimens are? How did they die?
A: The identity and the cause of death of the anatomical specimens are never revealed to the public. Law requires that only the initial authorized recipient -- Dalian Medical University -- have this information, and it may not be disclosed to any third party. Premier Exhibitions obtained the bodies from Dalian Medical University, which has established itself as a leader in the process of plastination. Dalian is an internationally recognized medical university that is governed by the World Health Organization.