TODAY'S TOP FIVE: Dreading the Inevitable.

The Human Cost Tony Blair can rest assured: His place in history has been secured.

Paid Republican Operative Fails in Bid to Disrupt U.S. Election Or, Ralph Nader's effort to circumvent the democratic process by using the U.S. Supreme Court to get him on the ballot in Oregon has failed. He's also off the ballot in Ohio, but on the ballot in New Mexico. And, we presume, that level of political Hell reserved for turncoats.

Now, Watch Him Drink Water and Make the Dummy Talk at the Same Time Iraqi Prime Minister Hamid Karzai, er, sorry, Ngo Den Diem, er, my mistake - Iyad Allawi gave some rousing remarks last week about how stable and prospering his benighted country is. The trouble is, as the Washington Post found out, those remarks were an almost verbatim copy of a speech that Bush recently gave on the same subject. But I'm sure that Allawi, you know, totally agreed with those sentiments.

We Are Winning the War in Iraq, if by "Winning," You Mean "Not Winning" Oh, and what about the rosy talk of Iraq from Bush/Allawi last week? This week, Colin Powell announced that "We are fighting an intense insurgency. Yes, it's getting worse, and the reason it's getting worse is that they are determined to disrupt the election," while Rumsfeld said it may be more realistic to envision having that election in three-quarters or four-fifths of Iraq, rather than the whole country. Sen. Kerry, I hope I'll be hearing these comments in tomorrow's debate.

The Lawbreaker-in-Chief Another Bush violation of federal law, to add to the dozens of previous examples: "The Bush administration violated the law by allowing private insurers to limit choices of some patients in a small trial program of managed health care under Medicare, congressional investigators said." That "small trial program" includes more than 100,000 people in 19 states denied medical treatment because of the administration's reckless embrace of free market ideology.

-Consider Arms