Dropping A Bomb

British medical journal The Lancet is publishing a report issued by a group of American and Iraqi researchers led by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, in which they claim that more than 100,000 civilians have died in Iraq since in the US invasion. This . story . is being . covered . all over . the . place. Prior to this, most media sources have been using iraqbodycount.net as their reference as to how many civilians have been killed. While iraqbodycount only puts the count at 17,000, Scott Lipscomb, an associate professor at Northwestern who works on that project, says that they only count deaths specifically reported on in the media and that they've "always maintained that the actual count must be much higher." The reaction seems to be split between complete skepticism based on the sheer size of the number, and some level of deference to general credibility of Lancet and Johns Hopkins. I'm sure the spinners are already spinning, and the fallout will probably last about until, oh, next Wednesday, at which point nobody will give a crap.