It's all Bush's fault, but no word on women and minorities

Huge dip in U.S. deaths startles experts:

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.

And there's more pollution, more junk food, more global warming, more tainted water, more dead fish, more SUVs. and more general willfullness on the part of the American citizenry in not listing to their betters who really know what's good for them. Gotta love it.