It’s a mystery to us, too, echoed spokesmen for the White House, the Department of Health and Human Services, and physician-turned-senator-turned-drug-company-shill Bill Frist, who had originally penned the Lilly-friendly provision for a different bill.

The haphazard lawmaking also proved baffling for pharmaceutical industry lobbyists, and for White House budget director Mitch Daniels, a former Lilly executive, who made a very public show of disavowing any knowledge of the amendment’s mystifying genesis. Gosh, maybe the little provision just flew down from heaven. Or was immaculately conceived. Or maybe Osama bin Laden snuck over and planted the little public policy bomb himself.

The outrageous rider stuck onto the end of the Homeland Security bill provides security for Lilly from suits filed by the families of autistic children who believe that their kids’ condition is linked to Thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative made by Lilly that used to be a common ingredient in childhood vaccines.

But in a town where knowledge is power, and where there is no shortage of people willing to take credit for even the most minute accomplishment, there has been a sudden outbreak of people playing dumb. Official Washington is observing a code of omerta that makes the Sopranos look like the loose-lipped gals on “The View.” In other words: Nobody’s seen nothin’.

Here are the clues we have to work with: Over the Veterans Day weekend, GOP negotiators from the House and Senate hunkered down to finalize the details of the elephantine security bill. At some point — no one is willing to say when — someone — no one is willing to say who — inserted the Lilly provision — though no one is willing to say why.

It’s vital that we solve the mystery, even if you believe that the custom-made legislation is justified. We need to find out because this kind of behind-closed-doors monkey business is an affront to our democracy — the very democracy this bill was theoretically designed to protect. Perhaps it should have been called “the Homeland and Lilly Protection Act.”

“The ability,” Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, told me, “of a special interest group to secretly insert provisions into law for its own narrow benefit and to the detriment of the public interest raises fundamental questions about the integrity of our government.”

Kucinich has vowed to lead a challenge to congressional rules that permit our representatives to do the bidding of their deep-pocket donors away from the prying eyes of the public. At the most crucial part of the bill-drafting process — when the language of the law is being finalized — Washington’s corporate alchemists work their black magic to turn legislative gold into self-preserving lead.

“It’s a defect in the system,” explains Kucinich. “When a bill goes into a conference committee, it gets yanked out of the sunlight and into the shadows. The conference process is a closed one, so you can go into a conference committee and basically add anything or take out anything you want and no one really knows. It transforms the legislature into a secret cabal.”

So this fight is about a lot more than pushing for the repeal of the Lilly provision, something Sens. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., and John McCain, R-Ariz., have promised to do when the 108th Congress convenes in January. It’s about putting an end to the gaming of the system that is turning the legislative process into a prize-a-minute carnival for big contributors. “Inserting such favors for special interests in a bill is a directive that can only come from some very high places,” Stabenow told me.

Intriguingly, Stabenow, McCain and Kucinich may have found an unlikely ally in their battle — one with a very personal stake in the issue. It turns out that Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., the chairman of the Government Reform and Oversight Committee, has a grandson who first began showing symptoms of autism within days of receiving vaccinations containing Thimerosal. “He became radically different,” says Burton, “banging his head against the wall, running around flapping his arms. Twenty years ago we had one in 10,000 children that they thought was autistic. Now, it’s more than one out of 250.”

This is clearly not a left-right issue. Any politician who has waxed lyrical about “accountability” and “transparency” — that includes you, Mr. President — owes it to the public to demand that Congress get to the bottom of just whose directive it was to insert into the Homeland Security bill a provision that has absolutely nothing to do with homeland security. And to find out whether the $1.6 million that Lilly contributed in the last election cycle — 79 percent of which went to Republicans — had anything to do with the inclusion of this designer provision. And, come to think of it, whether these donations had anything to do with the Bush administration asking a federal claims court to block public access to documents unearthed in over a thousand Thimerosal-related lawsuits.

For anyone remotely familiar with the ways of Washington — and Sherlock Holmes — the answer should be “elementary.”

We’re used to having pounds of fatty pork stirred into almost every recipe Congress dishes up. But the abuse of a bill about homeland security is especially distasteful. Washington’s greedy corporate masters may finally have overreached. Their continued influence constitutes a clear and present danger to our security and if the president is serious about protecting the homeland, he should speak up.

The president’s “new direction in Iraq” speech rehashed the same tired material he’s been using on Iraq for years. Indeed, it was a veritable Greatest Hits collection. He even invoked the terrorist formerly known as Osama Been Forgotten two times. Even more shockingly — though not unexpectedly — he played the “conflate 9/11 and Iraq” card again and again and again and again and again. Five mentions in all for the terrorist attack that had absolutely nothing to do with the war in Iraq — supposedly the topic of the speech. Here’s a sample: “The only way our enemies can succeed is if we forget the lesson of Sept. 11.”

And now on to the secretary of defense.

It’s time to cancel the Rummy show. Remember when it was fun to watch Don Rumsfeld come out and do his preening Master of the Universe act? Actually, I never thought it was that much fun — and I was always surprised by how much the self- loathing press loved Rummy’s cocky, cutesy little put-downs and the jabberwocky nonsense answers he’d use to duck a question without uttering a single word of substance.

But he intimidated them, humiliated them, and so they subserviently accepted their role in the Kabuki theater performances his appearances became. But with two to three soldiers and dozens of Iraqis dying each and every day, his smug verbal pirouettes are no longer so endearing. As time goes on, it’s become clear that he sees his role less as making sure our soldiers vanquish the enemy than making sure he vanquishes the press and the straw men he puts so much rhetorical energy into creating.

There he was at the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, spinning and spinning. But no one’s laughing anymore. “Timing in war is never predictable,” he said. “There are no guarantees,” he said. That wasn’t what Rumsfeld was saying back at the beginning, when he said he “doubted” it would last as long as six months.

Rumsfeld then propped up this latest made-of-straw beauty: “Success in this effort cannot be defined by domestic tranquility.” Who on earth is saying “domestic tranquility” is the goal? How about: “An end to dozens of deaths a day, with the carnage continuing as far as the eye can see.”

It’s now beyond dispute that the enemy Rumsfeld is most suited to fight is the latest straw enemy he has created in his mind. It’s then that he’s at his most effective — like a 9-year-old at the arcade, delighting in mowing down imaginary foes with his BB gun. Then he wants a little prize for his efforts. Tragically, we’ve got a real enemy to fight, and Rumsfeld is clueless about how to do it. One person who has clearly had his fill of Rummy is Ted Kennedy, who pointedly asked: “Isn’t it time for you to resign?” After a pregnant pause, Rumsfeld answered: “I’ve offered my resignation to the president twice.”

He should keep trying. Bush has already gotten a four-year pickup, but it’s time to pull the plug on the Rummy dog and pony show. Or, better yet, move his all-too-real reality show from the Pentagon to Fox — where the body count will be significantly lower. And they can use a laugh track to sweeten the deadly silence his tired routine now provokes.

But unlike a traditional court, the Blog Circuit Court of Appeals lacks an enforcement arm. The only way its decisions can be enforced is by constant reiteration of the decisions.

Which brings me back to this weekend. If you were to get your news only from television, you’d think the top issue facing our country right now was an 18-year-old girl named Natalee Holloway who went missing in Aruba. Every time one of these stories comes up — like, say, the Michael Jackson trial — when it’s finally over I think, what a relief, now we can get back to real news. But we never do. When one of these big-league nonstories ends, they just call up a new one from the minors … and off they go with another round of breathless reporting. Anything to not have to actually report actual news.

Here are the number of news segments that mention these stories (from a search of the main news networks’ transcripts from May 1 to June 20):

— ABC News: Downing Street memo: 0 segments; Natalee Holloway: 42 segments; Michael Jackson: 121 segments.

— CBS News: Downing Street memo: 0 segments; Natalee Holloway: 70 segments; Michael Jackson: 235 segments.

— NBC News: Downing Street memo: 6 segments; Natalee Holloway: 62 segments; Michael Jackson: 109 segments.

— CNN: Downing Street memo: 30 segments; Natalee Holloway: 294 segments; Michael Jackson: 633 segments.

— Fox News: Downing Street memo: 10 segments; Natalee Holloway: 148 segments; Michael Jackson: 286 segments.

— MSNBC: Downing Street memo: 10 segments; Natalee Holloway: 30 segments; Michael Jackson: 106 segments.

When defending these choices, news execs inevitably fall back on the old “we’re just giving the people what they want.” But are they? Fox News averages around two and a quarter million viewers in prime time; CNN hovers just under a million; MSNBC pulls in a quarter million. We have 280 million people in the country. That means that tens of millions of people actually don’t want what they’re being given — and that there are huge slices of audience a real news operation could go after.

The mainstream media regularly confuses interesting with important. What’s more, it doesn’t even do the former very well, and it largely ignores the latter.

One wonders what happens to all those enterprising young broadcast journalists being pumped out by J-schools across the country. I speak to them occasionally, and they all seem to be truly dedicated to reporting the news. So what happens to them between grad school and the moment they do their 50th windswept, beachfront update on Natalee Holloway? Surely no one actually aspires to spend his or her life describing the pre-verdict scene outside the Santa Maria, Calif., courthouse or filling up airtime with a feature on the party scene in Aruba. This can’t be what they wanted to do with their lives, can it?

In any case, here’s my suggestion: Go cold turkey. Just say no. Every time you see or hear the word “Aruba” or “Holloway” on the screen in the next few weeks, turn off the TV, or change the channel. I’ve been trying it, and it’s not easy. (I’ve found the Cartoon Network is a pretty safe — if nerve-rattling — escape valve.)

This is not to minimize the tragic elements of Holloway’s disappearance. Her disappearance is tragic — but it’s not news in the way the Downing Street memo is news, or multiple deaths in Iraq are news. The deaths of 19-year-old Lance Cpl. Adam Crumpler, 26-year-old Lance Cpl. Erik Heldt and 36-year-old Capt. John Maloney were confirmed by the Pentagon in the past few days, but you won’t hear their names repeated on Fox or CNN.

But be warned: Even if you try really hard to go cold turkey, the Scandalous Non-News Story of the Day still has a way of seeping into your consciousness. It’s some kind of tabloid osmosis. Despite my best efforts, and an incredibly quick remote-control technique, I still find myself starting to offer an opinion on one of them at a dinner party before pulling up short. “Wait a second,” my brain starts to shout, “I don’t even care about this story — why do I know so much about it!?”

Still, it’s worth a try. And until the blog high court gets a better enforcement mechanism, we, as viewers, will just have to practice jury nullification.

Bush was able to keep Iraq at bay long enough to get reelected, but the debacle threatens to derail his second term. Just look at the latest polls. According to Washington Post/ABC News, for the first time a majority of Americans feel that the war has not made the U.S. safer. Fifty-eight percent disapprove of Bush’s handling of it. Fifty-eight percent say the war was not worth fighting. And 73 percent consider the number of casualties unacceptable.

But poll numbers are not the only figures the White House should be worrying about. Dick Cheney’s “last throes” delusion is being rebutted by the figures coming out of Iraq every day. May was the fifth deadliest month of the war for U.S. troops. And in just the first two weeks of June, 41 Americans have been killed and 75 wounded.

This is clearly not a war that is waning or winnable. Yet the Bush administration continues to refuse even to consider the idea of developing an exit strategy. And don’t tell me it’s when Iraqi troops are ready to take over the fight; at the rate they’re going, Ahmed Chalabi’s great-grandchildren will be leading the first all-Iraqi push against the insurgents.

Like LBJ with Vietnam, Bush appears to be losing touch both with reality and with the sentiments of a growing majority of Americans. But, unlike Johnson, he seems strangely unaffected by the disconnect. Perhaps because he’s so convinced that God put him there. That he saved him from drinking and drugs so he could spread democracy in Iraq. But a combination of hubris and incompetence — always a dangerous cocktail — could well be his undoing. Unlike Truman and Johnson, he doesn’t have any more elections to lose — but his party does. If only the Democrats would find their voice on the subject as 2006 approaches.

With memos pouring out of the U.K. showing there was no planning for what to do after Baghdad fell and that “intelligence and facts were being fixed,” and with the number of dead American soldiers now over 1,700, what is the Democratic leadership waiting for before they finally stand up to the White House? Where are Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Howard Dean on a moral issue of this magnitude, on which the majority of Americans oppose the administration?

This is definitely not your father’s antiwar movement.

Unlike Vietnam, opposition to the war in Iraq is not being driven by the “make love, not war” crowd. A growing number of voices are being raised — and asking whether the ongoing disaster in Iraq is draining precious resources from the war on terror (remember that?) and efforts to secure the homeland. So this is not war vs. peace; it’s war vs. security.

While Democrats are crisscrossing the country, holding conclaves in search of what the party should stand for, Russ Feingold introduced a resolution in the Senate on Tuesday calling on the president to create a timetable for withdrawing American troops from Iraq. Thank God at least one prominent Dem has the good sense to know what the party should stand for — and, just as important, the cojones to act on that knowledge.

As for the House, the leadership against the war in Iraq is now in the hands of Mr. “Freedom Fries” himself, Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C. After being a staunch supporter of the war — “There is no question,” he said in November 2002, “that Saddam Hussein is a threat to the security of not only our nation, but of every nation across the globe” — Jones now believes we went to war “with no justification.” He even voted for the Woolsey Amendment, which calls on President Bush to develop an exit strategy as soon as possible. So he voted yes while 79 Democrats — including Nancy Pelosi — voted no.

On last week’s “Meet the Press,” Sen. Joe Biden said that a military draft “is going to become a subject if in fact there is a 40 percent shortfall in recruitment. It’s just a reality.” But the best thing for the health of our Army would be to institute a draft for an opposition party. Right now, it seems, there aren’t enough willing to serve voluntarily.

To see a master in action, let’s go to the transcript:

Early in the interview, Russert asks Mehlman whether “the president has hit a wall with his domestic agenda? What’s the problem?”

The RNC chair dances around the question so deftly his moves should be taught at Arthur Murray: “Tim, I don’t think there’s a problem,” he responds, and then promptly changes the subject to Ronald Reagan before closing with an RNC commercial.

“Before we provided prescription drugs for Medicare, we were told it wasn’t going to happen. Before the president was able to move forward with No Child Left Behind, we were told it was stalled. We just passed class-action reform for the first time in six years and that, too, was predicted not to happen.”

If Russert were doing his job, he would have countered with some well-aired problems with these three accomplishments: The Medicare prescription drug plan was promised to cost under $400 billion over 10 years but now stands at $724 billion (and, in a stunning giveaway to the drug industry, the government gets no bulk-purchasing discount); the No Child Left Behind Act has been such a massively underfunded disaster that 12 states are considering legislation to get out of it; and the class-action “reform” will just make it harder for injured people to get a fair day in court.

But E-ZPass Russert mentions none of the above. Instead, he waves Mehlman through and moves on to stem cell research, about which Mehlman says: “This is the first administration ever that has funded with federal dollars embryonic stem cell research.”

Does Russert bother to point out that this is not much of claim, since this is the first administration ever to have had the chance to fund embryonic stem cell research? Of course not. Mehlman is in the GOP Express Lane. No need to slow down for little things like facts. Move right along.

Russert actually allows Mehlman to get away with saying, “So you have an administration that is unprecedented in our commitment to more scientific research,” without offering a spit take, a rim shot, or a “Please, Ken, not even I can let you slide on that one!”

Russert then switches to his pet interrogatory method: asking his guest for a reaction to a pointed quote from someone else — in this case, former Republican Sen. John Danforth:

“By a series of recent initiatives, Republicans have transformed our party into the political arm of conservative Christians. As a senator, I worried every day about the size of the federal deficit. I did not spend a single minute worrying about the effect of gays on the institution of marriage. Today it seems to be the other way around.”

Mehlman bypasses the criticism altogether, leaving Danforth in his rearview mirror with a condescending, “I think he’s a good man. I would respectfully disagree with that.” And Russert lets him get away without even attempting to answer a serious charge from a senior member of his own party.

And on and on Mehlman rolls, on issue after issue after issue:

On the deficit, he follows the administration’s standard “In an Emergency, Break Glass” procedure and seeks refuge in 9/11: “Well, Tim, I would say that what we’ve suffered, unfortunately, was an attack on this country.”

When asked why, even after the president’s 100-day tour, 56 percent of Americans continue to oppose his Social Security plan, Mehlman says he “would respectfully disagree with those numbers,” then counters them with a bit of complete nonsense: “That same NBC News poll showed that a plurality of Americans believe that Congress is moving too slowly on the question of dealing with Social Security.”

Now, even if a plurality of Americans saying something actually meant anything, I read that poll three times from beginning to end — yes, I did have a fun Sunday — and it says nothing of the sort.

When asked about the latest Pentagon report that, in fact, several copies of the Quran were mishandled, Mehlman responds by calling this “unacceptable,” but tries to minimize the unacceptability by putting it in “context”: “We also need to remember it in the context, in the context of an America that is liberating Muslims.”

Well, it’s all fine and dandy if we want to look at it that way, but the question is not how we look at it, it’s how Muslims look at it. And, unlike Russert, they’re not buying Mehlman’s “context.”

When asked about the Downing Street memo, which shows that Bush was determined to go to war almost a year before the invasion, and that the intelligence was accordingly “fixed,” Mehlman falls back on an out-and-out fabrication: “Tim, that report has been discredited by everyone else who’s looked at it since then.”

Russert does manage a follow-up on this whopper: “I don’t believe that the authenticity of this report has been discredited.”

But Mehlman just flashes his E-ZPass again: “I believe that the findings of the report, the fact that the intelligence was somehow fixed, have been totally discredited by everyone who’s looked at it.”

And so he gets through. And, returning to form, Bulldog Russert just gives up.

They eventually make it to Pat Tillman, and the fact that Tillman’s family was deeply offended by the Pentagon’s lies regarding the circumstances of their son’s death and its attempt to make Tillman a poster child to sell the war.

Mehlman’s response is that he “respectfully disagrees” with Tillman’s mother.

In fact, Mehlman says he “respectfully disagrees” a total of seven times over the course of the interview. Sometimes he respectfully disagrees with people, sometimes with a report, sometimes with numbers. Mostly, he “respectfully disagrees” with the truth.

But there’s something about the way Mehlman says it that makes him come off like a prissy doorman. You know that when he says, “I respectfully disagree,” he really means “Fuck off.”

“Ken Mehlman,” Russert intones in closing, “we hope you’ll come back.”

And given the obliging treatment Mehlman got, you know he will.

This war is a quagmire, and if the Democrats don’t know it, the American people do — 57 percent don’t believe the Iraq war was worth it.

On Tuesday (May 24) the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), a British think tank, released its “2004/2005 Strategic Survey.” The report, a well-respected annual assessment of the security situation worldwide, cites a number of positive developments in the Middle East.

But it’s important to remember that those developments are hardly the product of Bush’s policies. After all, Bush wasn’t responsible for the death of Yasser Arafat, nor did he order the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the anti-Syrian former prime minister of Lebanon, which touched off the pro-democracy demonstrations there.

What is most stunning about the report is the bleak picture it paints of the situation in Iraq. Some lowlights:

“From al Qaeda’s point of view, Bush’s Iraq policies have arguably produced a confluence of propitious circumstances … [The U.S. is] hated by much of the Islamic world and regarded warily even by its allies … The upsurge in violence in April and May indicates that neither the U.S. military nor the nascent Iraq security forces have managed to increase their capacity to control the country … Such illegal practices [detainee abuses] made the achievement of any broad international coalition in Iraq even more difficult than it already was, and strengthened the cause of the insurgents.”

No mention of Newsweek anywhere, by the way.

The report was published on Tuesday — another day of murder and mayhem in Iraq. As the BBC reported, “more than 100 Iraqis [were] killed or injured in a wave of bombings since Monday morning.” Fifty-eight Americans and more than 500 Iraqis have been killed since April 28, when the new Iraqi government was installed.

Yes, it’s great that the Democrats staved off the nuclear option. But the reason the nuclear option was even a possibility was that the Democrats have ceded the foreign-policy battlefront to a majority party that doesn’t represent the majority on the crucial foreign-policy issue of Iraq. When will Democrats realize that they will remain a minority party so long as they only dare to take on Bush and the Republicans on domestic issues?

They certainly cannot count on the media to put Iraq on the front burner. As Mark Halperin, political director of ABC News, admitted earlier this month, Iraq “simply isn’t going to break through to American news organizations.” Indeed, it’s worse than that — as was illustrated on “Meet the Press” last Sunday, when Howard Dean raised the specter of Iraq, and Tim Russert quickly took him back to his hot-headed rhetoric and style:

DEAN: Because of the president’s actions, I would argue that we are in greater danger now because of what’s going on in Iraq than we were before. Now there are terrorists in Iraq. They have migrated there since our troops were there.

RUSSERT: Let me stay on your rhetoric…

Nice pivot, Tim. Yes, by all means, let’s stay on Dean’s rhetoric rather than on the insignificant fact that our country is less safe as a result of our invasion of Iraq.

Now that Social Security is not going private and the Senate is not going nuclear, it’s time for Democrats and the media to get their priorities in order.