Anyway, short answer: “NO.” I live on Staten Island, NY. The only frickin’ place in the city where Repubs have any stones….

And I regularly throw rocks at the little guido I refer to as my “Congressional robot,” while my Wife asks, “”You know this guy… and you rip him right to his face?”
ME: He’s a big boy; he can take it.”
HER: “What if he gets pissed?”
ME: “He walkies into my world and I got better guns.”

US Deaths (in the continental 48 states):
2,450,149.2159 deaths per year in 9,631,420 sq km
0.254 per sq km per year

Iraqi Deaths:
166,250 deaths per year in 437,072 sq km (665,000 over 4 years)
0.380 per sq km per year

That’s a 67 percent increase in geographic density over the United States, a first world country at peace within our borders. I don’t even see a funeral procession very often, and we handle the dead bodies just fine. In a country experiencing open war, this isn’t surprising, and it doesn’t mean that they would be “tripping over” the bodies.

Let’s all breath through our bellybuttons,
deep and earnestly,
and say, “Ohhmmm… WTF?”
And grab a single malt and a flagon of beer.

Next Lancet could shift focus to Lebanon. A good follow-up survey could include asking “Green Helmet Man” how many ambulances were necessary to transport all those cadavers around the war ravaged countryside so they could be photographed over and over again at different locations. You know, just to perk up the totals and compensate for any unintentional oversights.

Now, I got a squash I grew in my yard that’s kinda more orange than green sitting here; does that make it a citrus fruit?

///////////
slashies rule the world!

“2) No statistician is going to call another’s work “bulletproof” without going over *everything*.”

Which goes back to my original question which has drawn me further into this circle jerk of a comment thread than I ever expected: Who were the “peers” that did the review;accepted it as solidly constructed, and signed off on the report’s release. Supposedly, those folks DID go over *everything*. Just ’cause Lancet claimed it happened don’t mean it’s true. Let’s hear who signed off on this thing.

Or maybe Lancet’s reviewers are akin to Jason Leopold’s “sources” in his reportage of Karl Rove’s signed and sealed “Plamegate” indictment.

“And attention in the blogsphere has never driven a story that the mainstream media ignored, right?”

Dude, I just checked Memeorandum. The only mention was this piece from Jane Galt. She, too, thinks the numbers are bunk.

The blogs have already written this off and gone looking for better material than this farcical bit of partisan fluff.

So no, those cluster bombs don’t come close to a mitigating factor.