Dick Armey asked why to give a reason for opposing the tobacco bill: "No, I can't." Why not? "Because I don't want to." The #2 leader of the House of Representatives, ladies and gentleman!

Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions (R-KKK), the rejected appeals court judge and now on the Judiciary Committee, has been know to ask nominees "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the ACLU?"

Best phrase for Starr et al: "The scandal-industrial complex."

Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee accuses environmentalists of worshipping the earth and not god.

China is trying to clone pandas, which as we all know don't breed well in captivity, and China has pretty much destroyed their natural habitat, and they only go into heat once a year anyway. Still, even I know that when the gene pool is as shallow as it is for this species, cloning is just gonna make it shallower.

I trust everyone followed the state elections in Saxony-Anhalt this weekend. The rabidly racist German People's Union (DVU), which didn't even exist a couple of years ago, won 13%, entirely at the expense of the Christian Democrats. The good news is that with Kohl's support evidently having collapsed in the ex-East Germany, he should be voted out of office nationally in a few months time, and the nation's bed-testers will have an easier job of it. The bad news is that democracy has entirely failed to take root in East Germany, which only ever voted for the ChristDems to get loot and jobs, which never materialized. A full one-fourth of first-time voters went for the DVU. That's a lot of skin heads.

According to Molly Ivins, Canada's national motto is "Let's not get excited." For once, Ivins is quite wide of the mark. Canada's motto is actually "Let's not get excited, eh?"