George Burns ran into Lilian Gish one day. "I thought we were dead," he said.

Dubya says he is humbled by the vote in Iowa. He said it with a smirk, although a smaller one than usual. In four years, we could really get sick of that smirk.

The Supreme Court, in one of the spectacularly idiotic rulings it has been making this month, 5-4, says that redistricting conducted with a discriminatory intent is ok, so long as the minority voters are not put in a worse position.

In Britain a private members' bill to guarantee the right of parents to smack their children failed by a majority of 70.

Evidently Gary Bauer had a fundraiser at the home of the McCaughey septuplets. Have yourself photographed with a sept, only $250. Weird weird weird. I suppose this is the Christian right's idea of the ideal American family, after we get rid of that pesky Roe v. Wade. What next? Alan Keyes holding a fundraiser at a freak show? For $500, get a picture of yourself standing next to the candidate as he bites the head off a live chicken.

Alan Keyes says his favorite movie is Star Trek: Insurrection. Trust him to like one of the odd-numbered movies (in-joke for Trekkies, you know who you are).

Every day brings in new evidence of Americans' inability to reason from the specific to the general (or induction, as we college-types call it). Some idiot legislator from somewhere was on McNeil-Lehrer (I was listening on the car radio, sorry for the lack of specificity) talking about the need to grant Elian Gonzales citizenship so as to remove his case from the jurisdiction of the INS into that of the courts. What do you want to bet she's one of those behind that awful immigration bill that removed to a large extent INS decisions from the oversight of the courts? Suddenly the INS are being portrayed by the right wing as the same jack-booted thugs as the ATF and the FBI. But only in the case of this one brown-skinned type.

Speaking of racists, there goes Austria again. Pay attention to that one it could get nasty.