Don't have all day to primp in front of a mirror? Not to worry. With these simple tricks, you'll look and feel like a million bucks in one sweep of the second hand.

When Life Gives You Lemons...
Use them to get velvety skin. After whipping up a batch of lemonade, take the leftover lemon halves and rub your knees, elbows, heels and other dry spots. The Vitamin C-rich pulp helps skin feel soft and silky.
Time elapsed: 45 seconds

Buy a Bunch
Of flowers, that is. When you surround yourself with beautiful colors and scents, your mood can't help but improve. Plus, oxygenating your surroundings is always good for your skin, and you.
Time elapsed: 30 seconds

Go for the (Faux) Glow
Lounging in the sun is both time-consuming and bad for your skin. Slathering on a shimmery self-tanner, however, is neither. Opt for the tinted kind, and you'll look and feel radiant instantly.
Time elapsed: 60 seconds

Ditch the Heels
Your posture will improve, you'll step more confidently—and that pained, pinched look will disappear from your face.
Time elapsed: 8 seconds

Treat Tired Eyes
Soak caffeinated tea bags and chill them in the freezer for a few minutes, then place them on your eyes to reduce puffiness. Cold cucumber slices achieve the same effect.
Time elapsed: 60 seconds

Replace Your Blade
If it's been months since you changed your razor blade, you may not remember how smooth and silky your skin can feel. Replace the blade every week or two, and say goodbye to nasty nicks and cuts.
Time elapsed: 15 seconds

Although we were carefully checked out in Kiev, we must now endure another shoe removal and bag scan. Somebody help me with this: We require foreign countries to implement the same tedious and wasteful preflight checks we've adopted at home. Yet, after your plane has landed in the United States, suddenly the checks weren't good enough, and everybody is marched through a metal detector all over again.

Apparently, we are worried more about those departing for Pittsburgh, Houston, Indianapolis or Salt Lake City than about those arriving from Morocco, Jordan, Kuwait or Pakistan. In the convoluted circuitry of Homeland Security logic, passengers coming from abroad are not adequately screened but are allowed onto U.S.-bound flights regardless. The only restriction is, they cannot proceed onward without a follow-up shakedown, presumably to make sure those foreign screeners didn't miss any deadly stashes of shaving cream.

[snip]

"Whose bag is this?" yelps a woman in a red TSA vest.

Naturally it's mine, and naturally she has to scan it again, because "there's something in there." That something turns out to be a 2.5-ounce bottle of hand sanitizer. In a rush, I'd packed it separately from my other lethal fluids and forgotten about it.

Five minutes later, after the bag finally completes its second trip down the belt, the woman unzips it, digs down inside and emerges with the sanitizer. She holds it up for inspection, making a tsk-tsk noise. "You can't have this."

"Why not? It's fewer than 3 ounces."

"It's not in a zip-lock bag."

"That's because my zip-lock bag is over here, with these other things inside."

"Well, it has to be in a zip-lock bag."

"But it's right there in your hand! You can see what it is."

"I told you, it has to be in a zip-lock bag."

"You realize I just stepped off a 10-hour flight, and that bottle was with me the whole time?"

No reply, just a stare.

There's a pause now while I attempt to make sure that I'm not dreaming. There are those times in life when you simply can't believe you're having the conversation you appear to be having, and this is one of them.

"So," I say to the woman. "You mean to tell me that if I take that bottle, and put it into this bag with the other tubes and bottles, everything is OK. But if it stays by itself, you have to confiscate it?"

"I told you, it has to be in a zip-lock bag."

And into the zip-lock bag it went, and off I staggered to catch my connecting flight, which by now had departed.

There you have it: Tiny containers of hand sanitizer in zip-lock bags are harmless and approved. Those not in zip-lock bags are dangerous contraband. Meanwhile, the TSA still cannot justify its methods of confiscation: If certain liquids and gels are taken from a passenger, the assumption has to be that those materials are potentially hazardous. If so, why are they tossed unceremoniously into the trash? At every checkpoint you'll see a bin or barrel brimming with illegal containers. They are not quarantined or handed over to the bomb squad; they are thrown away. In effect, the agency readily admits that it knows these things are harmless. But it's going to steal them anyway, and either you like it or you don't fly.

On the October 24 edition of his nationally syndicated radio program, Rush Limbaugh claimed that actor Michael J. Fox -- who has Parkinson's disease and appeared in a recent campaign ad for Missouri Democratic Senate candidate Claire McCaskill -- is part of "a script that they [Democrats] have written for years" in which "Senate Democrats used to parade victims of various diseases or social concerns or poverty up before congressional committees and let them testify and they were infallible." Limbaugh also compared Fox to "the Jersey Girls ... in the period of time when the 9-11 Commission was meeting publicly. Victims -- infallible, whatever they say cannot be challenged."

I have no idea if the Rovians will somehow manage to slash and bite their way to "victory" (i.e. continued GOP control of Congress) next month, but the sheer lunacy of some of their ads -- like this one insisting that an Ohio Democrat wants to zap little pig-tailed school girls with a taser -- has a distinct aura of death about it.

[snip for the weak of stomach]

And then, abruptly, the howling stopped, and I knew what had happened. But I kept on running -- for blocks it seemed like. And then I stopped and threw up into the bushes.

I think I hear that same sound coming from the Rovian machine right now -- a doomed, crazed animal in its final death throes.

At his press conference today, President Bush rallied his remaining base -- those scattered cult members who can always be counted on to agree with whatever he says. To all other Americans, his message is: It's my way, or the die-way.

I'm the decider.

Except for deciding how many troops we have in Iraq, in which case, General Casey is the decider.

Except for deciding what benchmarks the Iraqis have to meet, in which case, Prime Minister al-Maliki is the decider.

Except for deciding what "getting the job done" in Iraq means, in which case, Muqtada al-Sadr and Osama Bin Laden are the deciders.

Except for deciding if it's "stay the course," or "strategy for victory," in which case Karl is the decider.

I'm looking forward to the Baker-Hamilton report. If it agrees with my strategy for victory and getting the job done, I will read it. I call this attitude "flexibility."

There's a big difference between timetables and "timetables." When I talk about them, they're good. When Democrats talk about them, what they're saying is, the terrorists should have a caliphate from Spain to Indonesia.

Some people in Washington say we're not at war. Those people are enabling cold-blooded killers. I do not question these people's patriotism, just their IQ. I will not say who they are.

If I personally did not believe that we will achieve victory in Iraq, then I would not keep your loved ones in Iraq. So the thing I want you to remember as you go to the polls is that whether American kids die in Iraq or come home to America depends totally and completely on what I, George W. Bush, personally believe.

Two retired senior Army generals, who served in Iraq and previously voted Republican, are now openly endorsing a Democratic takeover of Congress. The generals, and an active-duty senior military official, told Salon in separate interviews that they believe a Democratic victory will help reverse course from what they consider to be a disastrous Bush administration policy in Iraq. The two retired generals, Maj. Gen. John Batiste and Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, first openly criticized the handling of the war last spring, when they called for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

"The best thing that can happen right now is for one or both of our houses to go Democratic so we can have some oversight," Batiste, who led the Army's 1st Infantry Division in Iraq in 2004 and 2005, told Salon. Batiste describes himself as a "lifelong Republican." But now, he said, "It is time for a change."

Eaton, who was in charge of training the Iraqi military from 2003 to 2004, agrees that Democratic control of Congress could be the best way to wrest control from the Bush administration and steer the United States away from a gravely flawed strategy in Iraq. "The way out that I see is to hand the House and the Senate to the Democrats and get this thing turned around," Eaton explained, adding that such sentiment is growing among retired and active-duty military leaders. "Most of us see two more years of the same if the Republicans stay in power," he said. He also noted, "You could not have tortured me enough to vote for Mr. Kerry or Mr. Gore, but I'm not at all thrilled with who I did vote for."

An active-duty senior military official who also served in Iraq said that, among a surprising number of his otherwise "very conservative" colleagues, there is hope that Democrats will gain control of Congress. "I will tell you, in the circles I talk to, the only way to enable or enact change is to change the leadership," he said.

[snip]

Batiste said he was tormented by reading daily casualty reports and knowing that the deaths are, in part, the result of a bungled, backward strategy that focuses on lofty but unattainable goals. But while he and others admit they have no particular love for the Democrats, they see the party as perhaps their last, best hope of reaping anything other than more death and destruction in Iraq.

For every additional second we stay in Iraq, we taxpayers will end up paying an additional $6,300.

[snip]

“The total costs of the war, including the budgetary, social and macroeconomic costs, are likely to exceed $2 trillion,” Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel-winning economist at Columbia, writes in an updated new study with Linda Bilmes, a public finance specialist at Harvard. Their report has just appeared in the Milken Institute Review, as an update on a paper presented earlier this year.

Just to put that $2 trillion in perspective, it is four times the additional cost needed to provide health insurance for all uninsured Americans for the next decade. It is 1,600 times Mr. Bush’s financing for his vaunted hydrogen energy project.

[snip]

The bottom line is that not only have we squandered 2,800 American lives and considerable American prestige in Iraq, but we’re also paying $18,000 per household to do so.

Overhead costs have consumed more than half the budget of some reconstruction projects in Iraq, according to a government estimate released yesterday, leaving far less money than expected to provide the oil, water and electricity needed to improve the lives of Iraqis.

The report provided the first official estimate that, in some cases, more money was being spent on housing and feeding employees, completing paperwork and providing security than on actual construction.

Those overhead costs have ranged from under 20 percent to as much as 55 percent of the budgets, according to the report, by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. On similar projects in the United States, those costs generally run to a few percent.

The highest proportion of overhead was incurred in oil-facility contracts won by KBR Inc., the Halliburton subsidiary formerly known as Kellogg Brown & Root, which has frequently been challenged by critics in Congress and elsewhere.

[snip]

One oil contract awarded to a joint venture between Parsons, an American company, and Worley, from Australia, had overhead costs of at least 43 percent, the report found. One contract held by Parsons alone to build hospitals and prisons had overhead of at least 35 percent; in another, it was 17 percent.

The lowest figure was found for certain contracts won by Lucent, at 11 percent, but the report indicates that substantial portions of the overhead in those cases could not be determined.

The report did not explain why KBR’s overhead costs on those contracts — the contracts totaled about $296 million — were more than 10 percent higher than those at the other companies audited. Despite past criticism of KBR, the Army, which administers those contracts, has generally agreed to pay most of the costs claimed by the company.

U.S. Senate candidate James Webb's last name has been cut off on part of the electronic ballot used by voters in Alexandria, Falls Church and Charlottesville because of a computer glitch that also affects other candidates with long names, city officials said yesterday.

Although the problem creates some voter confusion, it will not cause votes to be cast incorrectly, election officials emphasized. The error shows up only on the summary page, where voters are asked to review their selections before hitting the button to cast their votes. Webb's full name appears on the page where voters choose for whom to vote.

Election officials attribute the mistake to an increase in the type size on the ballot. Although the larger type is easier to read, it also unintentionally shortens the longer names on the summary page of the ballot.

Thus, Democratic candidate Webb will appear with his first name and nickname only -- or "James H. 'Jim' " -- on summary pages in Alexandria, Falls Church and Charlottesville, the only jurisdictions in Virginia that use balloting machines manufactured by Hart InterCivic of Austin.

"We're not happy about it," Webb spokeswoman Kristian Denny Todd said last night, adding that the campaign learned about the problem a week ago and has since been in touch with state election officials. "I don't think it can be remedied by Election Day. Obviously, that's a concern."

Every candidate on Alexandria's summary page has been affected in some way by the glitch. Even if candidates' full names appear, as is the case with Webb's Republican opponent, incumbent Sen. George F. Allen, their party affiliations have been cut off.

Jean Jensen, secretary of the Virginia State Board of Elections, who said yesterday she only recently became aware of the problem, pledged to have it fixed by the 2007 statewide elections.

"You better believe it," Jensen said. "If I have to personally get on a plane and bring Hart InterCivic people here myself, it'll be corrected."

Absentee voters casting ballots in advance of the Nov. 7 election first noticed the problem. Election officials have been forced to post signs in voting booths and instruct poll workers to explain why some longer names appear cut-off.

For Bush, who has failed at every task ever put before him, from work, to the military to school, this was going to be his vindication. He so desperately wanted to be a hero and Iraq was going to solve all of his issues. He would defeat an enemy, prove himself worthy and gain the respect from his family he so desperately wanted.

Which is why he chose men his father kept at arms length. Bush never wanted advice, he wanted confirmation of his beliefs. His narrow world view, shaped by the dust dry plains of Midland as much as any movie, this idea thata man didn't need or want questions, he just did.

Which is how he approached the American people, not with facts, but an emotional appeal. He's out there, he's guilty, let's get him first. That was the goal, get them first, show them who is boss, Those who don't get that are weak, even if they are in uniform. We will show the world they better not fuck with us again. Iraq will be first, and the rest will bend to our will. We will show them what a superpower does.

This was never a logical argument, it was never a reasoned one, it was pure emotion, which the anti-war movement never got. Iraq was a challenge to us, our manhood, our power and anyone in the way just didn't care.

It wasn't anything to do with concrete facts. It wasn't just fear, but emasculation which Bush sold and that worked on women like a charm. People wanted to believe that the US could run down Iraq and then all manner of miracle would follow, not because of what people wanted but because people feared the US. It wasn't democracy, but control, to finally make Iraq like Israel, a Westernish country loyal to the US. It wasn't anything about what the Iraqis wanted, although the exiles fed into that delusions, which fell into their own delusions, that Iraq was just waiting for their leadership.

Which is why so many people believed in Bush for so long. That Iraq was to be beaten as psychological payback for 9/11. Osama lived in caves, Saddam in palaces. He was a villian worthy of our attention, not some cave dwelling nutjob. He was an enemy, despite the fact that he had pretty much left us alone.

Bush is a bully and a coward at heart. Iraq was chosen because Iraq would be easy, and then the rest of the Middle East would follow. It was the easy way to solve our problems, not our real problems, but our emotional pain, the unresolved conflict over being attacked. And Bush would resolve his lifelong lack of success.

Bush will not leave Iraq, not because he thinks we can win, or he thinks it's part of the war on terror. But because he cannot face another failure. Which is why Scowcroft and Baker have had no influence on him. They are his father's men, veterans, despite their politics, realists. Bush is not and never has been. When he wasn't hiding from his failure with booze and coke, he hid from it with Jesus. Now he has Henry Kissinger whispering in his ear, telling him what he wants to hear. He doesn't want advice, he wants support and only support. Those who do not support him, are diminished, then banished.

This is a man who has never honestly looked himself in the face and said I have failed. He has always been protected from failure.

Which is why Rumsfeld keeps his job. To admit he was incompetent, and some days he seems positively addled, would reflect poorly on Bush.

When people look to understand Iraq, they look at the facts and see failure, but that isn't what Bush sees. He sees one more chance for personal glory and he will not quit until he is forced to.

Many Republicans have no idea that they have bought into was as psychodrama. It isn't psychodrama to the Tillmans or the Sheehans, but it is for Bush, who seeks redemption as desperately as he drank. And his redemption is in Iraq.

The Bush administration is drafting a timetable for the Iraqi government to address sectarian divisions and assume a larger role in securing the country, senior American officials said.

Details of the blueprint, which is to be presented to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki before the end of the year and would be carried out over the next year and beyond, are still being devised. But the officials said that for the first time Iraq was likely to be asked to agree to a schedule of specific milestones, like disarming sectarian militias, and to a broad set of other political, economic and military benchmarks intended to stabilize the country.

Although the plan would not threaten Mr. Maliki with a withdrawal of American troops, several officials said the Bush administration would consider changes in military strategy and other penalties if Iraq balked at adopting it or failed to meet critical benchmarks within it.