Cornucopia of Cons

• "Ghost Gas." Gas expands when temperatures are over 60 degrees. Gas stations are allowed to sell a "gallon" of gas in summer that delivers far less energy than a gallon in winter. Canada regulates against the problem. Dick Cheney's America doesn't. Let's see if the Democratic Congress has the guts to legislate against outright theft.

• When the Israeli government wanted to make sure they could keep occupying formerly non-Israeli territories, despite any subsequent change in government or international pressure, they created "facts on the ground": permanent settlements. Here are the facts on the ground in Iraq.

• Bet your bottom dollar I'll be studying these just-released Nixon documents. Fun new revelations: a Justice Department official wanted to recruit John Kerry as a Republican candidate; the White House tried to launder a story that Democratic vice-presidential candidate Sargent Shriver's ancestors were slave owners; and what about those "left-wing mob connections" in the McGovern campaign?

• Conservatives love to dote upon their supposed "intellectual" patrimony. Ignorant of their actual history, they never have a word to say about the perfect overlap between conservative institutions and the most odious corporate public relations abominations. The latest: the conservative Independent Women's Forum gave their "Women of Valor" award to a woman whose life's work is to pink-wash the depredation of companies whose chemicals very likely cause breast cancer.

• Does anyone doubt that had not conservatives been controlling our public agenda, municipal wifi connections would flow like water, and that the city of Moscow alone wouldn't have nearly as much fiber optic density as the entire United States? "We will bury you," said Khruschev; it took the rise of the E. coli conservatism to fulfill his prophesy.

• Conservatives outsource the most sensitive government function imaginable: intelligence.

• If our enemy in Iraq is al Qaeda, and Iran is our enemy in Iraq's most crucial ally, how is it that al Qaeda is threatening war against Iran?

• You've heard it here before: an ignored epidemic of right-wing terrorism. Now, outside Fort Worth, a "radical Christian activist group" is caught celebrating the Fourth of July by attempting to blow up a an Evangelical church under construction. "[T]hey believe there should be one denomination and one church, not multiple denominations," according to a police spokesman.

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future