Election--1st thoughts

Most of the surprise Dem wins so far seem attributable to black voters. Does that mean they're voting this year?

The Bushes are the new Kennedy’s. Come to think of it, the founding dynast in both cases was a Nazi sympathizer. Other than that, not much comparison.

Senator Pothole out, Senator Putz Head in.

D.C. voted on medical marijuana today. Congress voted last month that the initiative ballots could not be counted.

In Britain, two soldiers let out after serving 6 years of a life sentence for killing an unarmed Irish civilian are readmitted into the Scots Guards.

Fob James, the stupidest governor in the US, is out.

Jesse "The Body" Ventura?

The commercials just get more and more amusing. I haven't seen the one for whoever the Republican candidate for atty general is, accusing Lockyer of smoking dope, but I have seen the one where March Fong Eu demands that Barbara Boxer stop picking on her son. As the New York Times recently reported, there are a surprising number of ads this year featuring the wives of candidates, to prove that they are happily married (like Hillary wouldn't make such ads even today, if Billy Bob were running again). What does it prove when you have your mother do the ad? Especially when mom is from another party and didn't speak to you for many years after you became a Republican?

Speaking of presidential sex scandals, DNA tests strongly suggest that Jefferson did fuck Sally Hemings, which means that every Jefferson biographer has to eat their words and admit that every black person in America was right. Next up: proof that OJ was innocent and that the CIA created AIDS.

Oddest political spectacle of the season: LA county supervisors falling all over themselves to endorse the late Sheriff Block for reelection. The highest paid elected official in America, Block admittedly is much more competent now than he was last week when he was actually breathing. The supes want Block elected so that they can appoint a successor, rather than leave it up to the electors. So anyone who votes for Block, knowing this, is tacitly admitting that they consider themselves too stupid to vote for sheriff, concurring with the supes. But given that Daryl Gates was only the second stupidest law enforcement official in LA county, this is hard to disagree with.

On the Calif. animal trap initiative, Kevin recently asked whether fur trumps feathers. One person strongly supporting the initiative: Tippi Hedren. Really.

Seen "consumer advocate" David Horowitz's tv ads against Prop 9? Well first, I don't know how much of a consumer advocate Horowitz really is. I seem to remember his claim to fame being to test the claim of a frosting commercial that it was so smooth that it could be spread with a paper knife. Anyway, it seems that Horowitz was paid over $100,000 for his appearance.

I'd be more upset by the details of how Starr has been spending that $40 million ($20,000 for polling to establish a way to market the prosecution of former Ark. governor Jim Guy Tucker, $400 an hour for his ethics consultant--surely money well spent--and $127 for the lunch Linda Tripp and Monica had) if it didn't come out the same day I got my hospital bill ($31,706.40).

The Welsh Secretary and presumed first First Minister of Wales after devolution, Ron Davies, who I've always felt was something of a shit, resigns from the British Cabinet for having put himself in a position where he was robbed. At least, that's the official story, and they're sticking with it. What this actually is is the first sex scandal of the Blair government, and about time too. Davies picked up some guy (a black guy, yet) in Clapham Common, which for some reason even I know is where you go in London to pick up gay rough trade. In this case a little too rough, and the police are still looking for his car, mobile phone, etc.

The Israeli-Palestinian deal is already dead, since Netanyahu refuses to ask the cabinet to confirm it. This must piss off Arafat, who's been busily arresting all the opponents of the deal.

In Congo-Kinshasa, an entire rugby team (shit, I think it was rugby) is hit by lightning and killed. Fortunately, they were not the home team.

A 16-year old Brit, obsessed with hygiene, dies from excessive use of deodorants. He can't have done much for the ozone layer either.

The British High Court rules that Pinochet had sovereign immunity, and was thus free to kill whoever he wanted. The case will go to appeal in the House of Lords, whose members are also Senators-for-life. The last time sovereign immunity was raised in a British court was in the case of Mary Queen of Scots, where things turned out just a little bit differently.
Ah, the good old days!

For those needing voting advice.

Propositions:

1A: $9 billion in bonds for school construction. And $6 billion in interest, for absolutely nothing. I hate deficit financing. No.

1: Another Prop. 13 exemption, for houses destroyed by marauding aliens from the Crab Nebula, or some such thing. Yes, why the fuck not.

2: Tries to keep the governor and legislature stealing transportation funds. Yes.

3: The political parties are ordering us to reverse the open primaries for the purposes of presidential primaries. As annoying as I found the primaries, this is just arrogant and insulting. If the 2 parties want to set the rules for primaries, they can bloody well pay for printing the ballots and manning the polling booths. Given the deterioration of party loyalty, anyone should be able to vote for anyone. No.

4: Saves furry animals from nasty traps. Yes.

5: Indian casinos. I haven't seen an argument against that isn't an attack on Indian tribal sovereignty in general. Interestingly, no one is arguing that gambling is bad. There are problems. The revenue sharing with the tribes that don't have casinos is laughably small. Tribes with populations of 70 already have gambling. I suspect some tinkering will be required in years to come. And the idea that fleecing the suckers is promoting Indian "self-reliance" is pretty amusing. Still, yes.

6: Bans horsemeat for human (or at least Canadian) consumption. But leaves the dogfood industry alone. So what is the point supposed to be? No.

7: Tax credits for air pollution control. Except that it rewards doing a lot of things that are required by law, and would mostly aid the big polluting industries. No.

8: Pete Wilson's state takeover of the schools, including unelected councils, teacher testing, and mandatory suspension for drugs, and a Schools Czar. No.

9: Reverses electricity deregulation, which somehow left us with the highest rates in the country, by far. The most difficult part is that it invalidates the bonds that are being sold to pay for that great rate reduction (I personally am paying more for those bonds than I got in rate reductions--how's everyone else doing?). The scare argument is that the state would get stuck paying for them, but that would be unconstitutional. Let's stick PG & E with the costs of its own stupid business decisions, especially Diablo Canyon. Yes.

10: A tobacco tax to pay for completely unrelated early childhood programs. I may yet change my mind on this before election day (again), but my inclination is to vote against. The programs are rather nebulous and the perhaps worthy attempts to run them from the county rather than state level seems likely to create a lot of waste and bureaucracy. The reason I may vote yes ultimately is that I'd really hate to vote the way the tobacco companies want me to. The ads against 10 have been even more dishonest than the Prop. 5 ads. The proposition exempts itself from Prop 98 so that 40% (I think it was 40%) of the new revenues won't immediately be sucked out for purposes other than those for which the tax was created; so what? Kevin noticed the line about it reducing the Prop 99 anti-smoking fund, but the way it will do this is by depressing cigarette sales, so it's hard to object to that unless we think people should smoke in order to fund propaganda telling them not to. So that was vote no, or maybe yes.

11: Sales tax revenue-sharing, as for example in Palos Verdes where the city of RPV has almost no shops of its own and so gets some of the sales tax revenue from Rolling Hills Estates, which does. This would make such deals easier, but it would do so by by-passing the voters in favor of city and county governments, and worse, require an undemocratic 2/3 vote. No (and there was no argument against in the book).

State offices:

I just saw a Lungren ad saying that Gray Davis is too mean-spirited to be governor of California. After the last 16 years, not to mention Ronald "Let the bloodbath begin" Reagan, it's hard to imagine anyone too mean-spirited for that high office. For me, it comes down to the death penalty, the issue that has prevented me voting for a Democrat for any high California office for all the time I've been voting. I'm not willing to vote for Davis in the hopes that his support for it has been from political expediency rather than conviction and that there would therefore be fewer deaths under his regime. If I were German in 1932 I wouldn't vote for the candidate who promised to gas only 5 million Jews, and I sure as hell don't want a governor willing to execute people to save his own career. We've seen that sort of thing up close, and we all know where it leads to: sex with interns.

So I'm probably going with the Green for governor, and Peace and Freedom for most of the lesser positions, and Delaine Eastin for Public Instruction. I also can't make myself vote for Boxer.

State Supreme Court is a little more tricky. We shouldn't be voting on this at all, so in the past I've sometimes voted yes for all of them. But most of these clowns are horrible right wing Duke and Wilson appointees, so I think yes on Mosk and abstain on the rest.

And that's it for another crappy election year. I've watched some of the debates for other states, which C-SPAN's been running pretty much non-stop, but couldn't work up much enthusiasm, even for the governor's race in, where was it?, Minnesota? where the famous professional wrestler is running.

Big Deal

Clinton succeeds in getting Israel and Palestine to agree to do some of the things they promised they would do during the last "peace process". To put it into perspective, tomorrow is the 350th anniversary of the Treaty of Westphalia, ending the 30 Years' War. In those talks, 176 delegations represented 194 countries. They slept two to a bed, had lice, and still managed to end a major religious conflict with more grace than these clowns did. One point in common: long memories. The current pope refuses to attend the commemorations of a Peace that ended Church domination of Europe. Not that they'll ever acknowledge that. Currently, the Vatican and San Marino are allowed to mint a small quantity of Italian liras, and the Vatican thinks it can mint euros with a picture of the pope on them (and this after the British tabs kicked up a fuss about the queen's face not being allowed on the euro).

The Israelis actually threatened not to sign unless the US released Jonathan Pollard. This I suppose correctly acknowledges that the peace process means more to Clinton and the November elections than it does to Netanyahu, who never feels obligated to live up to Israeli promises he doesn't like.

The NY Times coverage of the Pinochet extradition has been unusually abysmal. A favorite, from today's paper: ""It's a legal matter among the Governments of the U.K., Spain and Chile," said a State Department official who insisted on anonymity. "The United States is not involved."" Oh yeah, you could see how such tough talk requires confidentiality. And you wouldn't know that the US is actively involved in pressuring both Spain and Britain.

Something to look for in American papers, that the British papers have been covering: the US's determined pressure on Britain not to extradite Pinochet to Spain. Interesting to see the Clinton Administration covering up for the Nixon administration's assistance to Pinochet.

Which links up rather interestingly with the current Middle East process. The Israeli press but, again, not the American, has for some time been reporting on the comings and goings in that country of top CIA officials. The CIA's role is as advisers to the Palestinian Authority in espionage, infiltration and interrogation (which explains all those recent torture deaths in Palestianian prisons), basically the same role as it had in the 1970s in Chile.

But how 'bout that Spanish judge who's going after Pinochet, being fought by his own conservative government the whole way?

William Safire refutes the argument that the US cannot afford an impeachment at this time of world crisis, saying that a superpower should be able to walk and chew up a president at the same time.

Recipe

London Times:

Error of the week

Birds tagged in America by the Washington Biological Survey used to wear metal tags that bore the inscription "Wash.Biol.Surv". But, according to New Scientist, the survey team recently received a letter from a camper in Arkansas. "Dear sirs, while camping last week I shot one of your birds. I think it was a crow. I followed the cooking instructions on the leg tag and I want to tell you it was horrible."

The inscription has now been changed to Fish And Wildlife Service.

Found on return a supplemental ballot pamphlet, answering the question, how can California have an election without a bond initiative. It can't. Prop 1A, a school construction bond measure, is disguised as the more trendy cause of class size reduction. However, since not one penny is to be spent on hiring teachers, I have to assume that it foresees spending 9 billion dollars to move the walls of classrooms closer together.

China has banned Chinese translations of the Starr Report as pornographic.

An ad in the TV Guide said that Sunday's football game would have more physical contact than the Starr Report.

Clinton originated, and then denied originating, a plan to get 34 Democratic Senators to declare in advance that they would not vote to convict Clinton in any impeachment process. OK, this would make clear what I said a week ago, that any impeachment with no chance of conviction was nothing more than an exercise in personal humiliation, but christ, how hamfisted can you get! The Senators would have to take an oath to try the case impartially. Republicans are rightly screaming jury tampering, but then again they're also calling jury tampering Clinton's attempts to fund-raise on behalf of candidates for Senate in close races as in NY.

In advance of NATO airstrikes, Russia has sold Serbia new, harder to hit, mobile surface to air missiles. This is not the act of an ally.

I heard much of the debate today, before heading into the C-Span-less halls of Alta Bates, and I have to wonder: what the fuck are these people thinking? A vote for impeachment is a vote for what, exactly? I doubt even Newt Gingrich's wet dreams are so unrealistic as to think that Clinton will actually be removed from office. Even if the Republicans do spectacularly well in November, they would need 1) at least 6 Democrats, which they probably won't get, 2) at least all of the Republicans, which believe it or not, they will not get. And underneath all the hoopla, they all must know that. So, since Clinton will never resign as long as he has one true-believer left (James Carville) to whisper in his ear, "Ken Starr would laugh his ass off if you did that", then impeachment can only be about humiliation. And will be seen as such.

Quick Starr Report quiz: Monica gave Bill her idea on how to improve education. The news reports all found that just darling, but tended to leave out what her idea was. Anyone know? Answer at the bottom of this e-mail.

So when Starr told the Appeals Court that it should force the White House lawyers to testify, saying that although Clinton did have a right to confidential advice from them in event of impeachment, we were a long way off from that, and it was so contingent an event that the court could safely ignore it. Three days later he secretly filed a motion before another bunch of judges asking permission to make an impeachment referral to Congress. He and Clinton should open a law firm together.

But let's say Clinton was removed or resigned. Who would Gore appoint as veep? Come to think of it, who will he appoint in 2000, and why have I heard no speculation about it? And would he be able to get his nominee confirmed by Congress?



Answer: Monica's idea was to pay the teachers more money.

This is my rifle, this is my gun

Last week the Pentagon was complaining about deteriorating readiness. Now we know what they meant. It seems their budget request includes $50 million for Viagra.

There is an article by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker just out, about the US bombing of the Sudan, which I haven't seen but which is probably quite interesting.

Italians are getting microchip homing devices implanted in case of kidnap.

Monica: a question

In all these transcripts, I'm curious as to whether Monica ever expressed an opinion as to whether Paula Jones's accusations were true.

Monica: "I'm like not a normal person."

I'm like totally disappointed that we didn't get actual tapes, since it's beginning to drive me crazy that I don't know what she sounds like, but there is one comment that suggests that she sounds like Marilyn Monroe. Happy birthday, Mr. President.

A question I asked facetiously a few months ago has surprisingly not been answered: what does Clinton call his penis? I still maintain that he is just the sort of person to have a name for it.

Elected in the German elections: the first MP to sport a mohawk (purple and green), a nose ring, and she is rumored to be pierced somewhere else as well. Welcome to the successor to the Communist Party.

Iraq's new list of urgent medical supplies it needs: liposuction machines, silicone breast implants, acme cream....

The Taliban, having escaped having their asses kicked by the Iranians, for now, are going after a bigger target, setting up training camps for Muslim separatists from Xinjiang province, China.

Sat, 3 Oct 1998

The NY Times web site is down, like it always is when I'm trying to send stories, so I'll just paraphrase:

1) a minister in Florida trying to make an analogy about sin being like Russian roulette shot himself with a blank in front of his congregation. Of course a blank shot from a .357 can, and did, kill you.

2) In a NY charter school, a 15-year old going up on stage at an assembly to receive an award as student of the month, dropped his gun on the way up. He is now suspended.

NY Times headline: "Older People Enjoy Sex, Survey Says".

In the 1950s Israel had agents go undercover as Arabs, some of whom took Muslim wives and had children. And then the program was wrapped up in 1959 and most of them left their Muslim wives and children.

Jiang Jemin, in a speech whose purpose was to show the continuing relevance of the Communist Party, praised if for having defeated the recent flooding (how, he didn't precisely say), comparing this victory to the one over the demonstrators at Tiananmen Square.

Faced with an odd reluctance to go into the military, the Russian army has been resorting to press gangs. Didn't Yeltsin promise to have the draft eliminated by just about now?

Such a thing as too much participatory democracy

From the CA. voter's pamphlet: "If horsemeat is outlawed, only outlaws will eat horsemeat"

Today's quiz: the largest parliamentary constituency in the world is located where? Answer at the very end.

The NY Democratic party is running D'Amato's ads. They're running the ads depicting NY City as a shark-like parasite stealing tax money from good farming ads, which D'Amato is running upstate, in NY City, and the ads he's showing in the city, showing support for him by mayors Benito Guiliani and Koch, upstate.

I got a fortune cookie with a misspelling today. I'm not sure what it means: "You are very expressive and positive in word, act and felling."

Everyone seems to be taking as meaningful the meaningless statements by the Iranian government that it is not now a threat to Salman Rushdie's life. The US and British government see it as in their current economic interests to declare victory and move on, ignoring the fact that the fatwa still stands and that Iranian foundation hasn't revoked the price on his head ($2.5 million--what does it mean that the reward has always been in even numbers in American money?).


Answer: Western Australia, over one million square miles. It is represented by a racist.

More thoughts on Cigargate

The Malaysian prime minister has deposed his deputy PM and had him arrested for sodomy. I wonder where he got the idea.

Tom Carson of the Village Voice wonders about the "cant that [Clinton's resignation] would be traumatic for the country--even though European leaders tarnished by scandal quit or get the boot pretty regularly, at no cost to democracy and a considerable gain in dispatch. Only the US treats its status quo, however, dismal, the way Doris Day treated her virginity."

Monica the dupe

The new Iranian president at the UN says that he wants cultural contacts with the US. And yet he seems pissed off at the forthcoming Radio Free Iran. His idea of an olive branch is to say how much he admires the Puritans.

I'm sorry, but if someone you're threatening with prosecution (Monica again) asks to see a lawyer, that's it, all questioning ceases. And the Starr inquisitors definitely have no right to suggest that any deal is conditional on her not talking with her lawyers.

It now seems that the prosecutors tried to get her to wear a wire on Vernon Jordan, and rather more interestingly that it was Linda Tripp who suggested that Monica contact Jordan to get her a job. This is interesting because the only tenuous connection between Whitewater and Monica was the alleged pattern whereby Jordan would get jobs as pay-offs for silence. Now it seems that this connection was actually created by Starr, acting through Tripp. Entrapment, in other words. Tripp also tried to get Monica to say that she wanted a job before she would sign a perjurous affidavit, surely a trap to get Clinton to bribe a witness into lying. Very underhanded, although there are plenty of prosecutors who will defend it as ordinary practice.

On a completely unrelated subject (wink wink), did you see where those Chicago cops found the real murderer (they say) after browbeating a couple of kids of, what was it, 6, 7 years old, into confessing in the absence of their parents or lawyers, and then realizing that little kids are unlikely to have also raped the victim? The cop that succeeding in getting the innocent to confess evidently has a reputation of getting children to confess, which is why he was brought in. Makes you wonder.

According to the NY Times, US intelligence inside Sudan was so terrible that it is now admitted that they couldn't have known, only "surmised" that the pharmaceutical plant made chemweapons on the side. Sudan supports or at least harbors terrorists, for sure, but there was a sort of institutional demonization of the country inside the US government because of previous warnings that Sudan planned to take the US, including assassinating Anthony Lake. These warnings were false, coming from agents who were taking CIA money and making up their reports (see Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana, John Le Carré, The Tailor of Panama).

Monica wanted a job in a PR company (she's certainly done great things for the reputations of every man she's ever been associated with) or George Magazine. Somewhere, John John is heaving a sigh of relief.

So the tapes were more boring than advertised. Which leads to the question, who did the advertising? Did Clinton's people leak the stories about him storming out and so forth, to make the actual tapes look anti-climactic? Even without that, and rather to my surprise, I came out much more sympathetic to the Big Creep than I expected. All the legalisms come across as justified, in context (well, most of them: the thing about not being alone with Monica is still a lie). The Jones case was about sexual harassment; only some aspects of his sex life were relevant to that case (if any), and he didn't tell them about the aspects that didn't, which were no one's business. This is why there was such a specific definition of sexual relations in that trial. If he actually made that case to the public, I think most of his PR problems would go away. No one could have missed the "sexual McCarthyism" of the questions, since the questions, rather than the answers, were what justified all those warnings about explicit content.

Most of the bits that the Judiciary Committee spent so much time arguing about redacting, were actually already in the Starr Report.

The rest of the world is laughing at us, but the rest of the world includes Egypt, where a court just ordered a female nuclear scientist and professor to bear children by her husband.

Happy 5759! No Y2K problem here.

Just saw the documentary on Angola Prison in Louisiana. I haven't seen so many people professing that god has forgiven them and hence everyone else should too since, oh, the last Clinton speech.

Henry Hyde was lying, according to the woman he had the affair with. Where Hyde says that he did the honorable thing and broke off the affair immediately after he was, well, caught, she says it was 2 1/2 years later. She also says he was also sleeping with other women and, less believably, that he told her he was not married. It seems she's not especially thrilled by their relationship of five to eight years depending on whose story you believe being passed off as a fling, a "youthful indiscretion" (a phrase that would have gotten Clinton's balls handed to him). D'you think all politicians are like this? I remember one of the early reactions to the Lewinsky thing, I think by Tom Carson of the Village Voice, was to wonder why Americans professed to find it axiomatic that power was more important than sex.

The Clinton Cabinet, the Post says, is indeed like America, in that its white male members are significantly wealthier than its minorities and women.

Bumper sticker seen on Highway 24: If you tailgate me I'll flick boogers at your windshield.

OK, in a few hours more we'll have a better idea of whether Clinton will resign, but it certainly can't be before this year's elections. Why? And I'm shocked at myself for not having thought of this before, and even more shocked that neither the NY Times nor the Washington Post seem to have either. The reason is that it has to be after January if Gore is to be able to run in 2004.

Remember that Israeli settler who last Thursday shot up a bunch of Palestinian high school students, killing one and severely wounding another? They let him out of jail for the holidays.

New Statesman competition

From a NS competition in which biblical stories were to be retold as by a modern author. In most of these, to know the choice is not to need to read more. For ex., Noah as by Hemingway: "When the call came, the old man knew what he had to do..." etc. The loaves and fishes as by Irvine Welsh (the author of Trainspotting): "Faithless wankers! spat Jesus--Shut it and wait." David & Goliath as by Frederick Forsyth (Day of the Jackal): "The momentum of the quicksilver carried it forward through the front of the pebble, shattering it into 2,143 tiny slivers, sharper than glass; 2,081 failed to penetrate the skull, but any 27 of the remaining 62 shards would have been enough." My favorite, in the style of Arthur Conan Doyle:

In the third week of November a dense fog settled over the eastern suburb of Eden where my father Adam resided with his housekeeper Eve.
"Nothing of interest in the paper, Cain? The Eden criminal is a dull fellow. Since the death of the serpent, that Napoleon of crime, no problem has arisen worthy of my talents. But what do I see in this field? A corpse. There is a spirituality about the face which arable farming does not generate. I judge that he was a shepherd. Since you and I are now the only males in existence I deduce that it is my son, Abel. The death-blow was a heavy one that could only have been delivered by a man, and I know that it was not I. We may congratulate ourselves, Cain, on the resolution of a curious, and in some respects unique, case. From the first we were puzzled by the remarkable lack of possible suspects. When you have eliminated the impossible, what remains, however improbable, must be the truth. You, Cain, are the murderer."
"Wonderful!" I ejaculated.
"Commonplace," said Adam.

Not unlike Clinton's semen-stain-in-the-shape-of-the-Madonna

NAPLES, Sept. 19-A flask of saint's blood appeared to liquefy today in the hands of Naples' cardinal, sparking immediate, impassioned debate among Italians over whether it was a sign of divine favor for the cardinal in a loan-sharking case.

Copyright 1998 The Associated Press

I see the Palestinians have opened their casino. Well, give them a reservation and they will act like Indians. Seems only fair.

The Republicans are insane. Who do they think they are, talking about ordering the FBI to investigate who leaked the Henry Hyde affair. 1) We do not investigate the free press. 2) The husband of the woman Hyde was fucking "leaked" the story, which is surely his to leak, end of story, full stop.

Margaret Cammermeyer, the lesbian kicked out of the Army National Guard who sued and won and was played by Glenn Close in the tv movie, has won the Dem. nomination for Congress in Washington state.

If anyone cares, which they don't, Congo-Kinshasa looks set to spiral into the African civil war to end all African civil wars, with half the continent's countries sending troops to one side or other, Angola because Unita is operating out of Congo and the Sudan in order to pay Uganda back for helping rebels in southern Sudan.

Monica had a pretty high security clearance. Of course she had that wonderful ability to keep secrets.

And the US claim some time back that Iraqi missiles had nerve gas on them turns out to be unconfirmable by any other country (France & Switzerland) that has tried to find the evidence.

As for the presidents and sex, oh sure you could name more (and subtract some of the unfounded gossip here, I'm afraid). But how many of them talked endlessly about the importance of the family. Remember that film made for the 92 Demo convention on Clinton's life that mentioned his alcoholic step-father but not his Rhodes scholarship? Of course in the last election those Republicans all supported someone whose most memorable line on family values was "I want out".

Monica thoughts

The Guardian notes that one of those phone calls Clinton may have been a little too, uh, distracted to give proper attention to, was with Alfonso Fanjul, the zillionaire sugar baron, a connection that was much more dangerous to the republic that anything Brillo Head was getting up to. Thank to import restrictions, Americans pay twice as much for sugar as we should, but what was particularly worrying Fanjul that day was that there was a suggestion that the sugar industry actually pay for some of the cleanup for its vast destruction of the Florida Everglades. Of course Fanjul was a major Clinton fundraiser, so that idea went nowhere.

Will Durst suggests that the real source of outrage in the media is that the Starr report was so detailed as to ruin their chances of selling a tell-all book, as it's all ready all been told. The disconnection in views between the pundit-industrial complex and the great unwashed has been described by David Corn in the Nation as an "umbrage gap". Learn that term and use it in all future conversations about this, because there is a real danger not only that we'll be setting the bar too high for politicians in the future, as most NY Times columnists have been suggesting as the worst long-time result of an impeachment/resignation, but that in a few months or a years when the last witches have been burned and the smoke is dissipating, and the monumental silliness of all this sinks in, it will be remembered, as Robert Harris of the London Sunday Times has put it, as a coup d'etat. Sorry about the length of that sentence.

Trust Clinton to form a committee of ministers to assist him in keeping it in his pants in the future.

I have a PC question: is it ok for a member of the masculine persuasion such as myself to call Monica a "ho", or is that acceptable only for women on Politically Incorrect, like nigger and queer?

Today's NY Times has an advertising section for the newspaper industry (y'know, like when Bahrain takes out 10 pages to try to stir up investment), featuring the following timely pull-quote: "A Texas expert in newspaper education believes that newspapers can be useful reading for a child beginning in third or fourth grade, although some teachers start as early as kindergarten."

A quick reminder of some of the news no one is paying attention to: Serbia has now cleansed 1/4 of Kosovo's population, and Montenegro just closed the border. There are elections in Bavaria and Bosnia that might repay some attention. There are coups pending in Pakistan and Lesotho. Israel killed two Hamas leaders and has decided to keep their bodies as bargaining chips.

Several Americans are seeking political asylum in the UK because in the US they are forced to pay for their own medical care. Eventually they'll be turned down, but the backlog there is as long as it is here so in the meantime they get free treatment on the NHS (these are mostly AIDS patients), accomodation and, oh yes, free legal aid to put forward their asylum claim. I wonder if I can apply for political asylum in Canada before my next operation, eh?

Starr's father was a fundamentalist minister who once delivered a sermon on the perils of women dressed in Bermuda shorts.

Well, I've read it. All of it, including the footnotes, which are funnier than the actual report. For example, "Ms. Lewinsky testified that she had multiple orgasms." I don't think anybody can read the report without asking themself one question: who would have blow jobs without ejaculating? I think we need another special prosecutor to get to the bottom of this important question. Monica does come across as quite the emotional blackmailer. More than emotional, I guess, since she wanted a cushy job as well. And Clinton with the cigar (Gallup polls show that 63% of Americans who have accessed the report simply did a word search for "cigar".) does not seem any more perverted than Starr in dredging out every last sordid detail, including the names of the Congressmen the Big Schmuck talked to on the phone while Monica did what Monica does best. The extensive coverage of their conversations seems intended to further either Monica or Kenneth the Menace's agenda of showing that it was a relationship, rather than just a sex thing. I can't believe Starr subpoenaed her psychologist.

It doesn't come to much, does it? Is there really nothing to say about Whitewater after $30 million? Starr's self-righteousness comes through when he counts Clinton's putting forth of perfectly credible (some of them) legal claims of privilege as further charges against him, and the refusal to testify voluntarily. Also, "The combination of the President's silence and his deception of his aides had the effect of presenting a false view of events to the grand jury." Reaching just a tad.

This is where having a different wife would have come in handy. Trying to protect your wife from your indiscretions would be a reasonably acceptable excuse if Hillary was more of a delicate flower than she is.

One interesting detail of the independent counsel law, as I understand it, is that all those aides and whatnots can have their legal bills picked up by the government, but only if Starr doesn't indict them. Not convict them, just indict them. Now that's too much power.

To sum up, the tortoise seems to have won this race. Starr was able to choose his forum and instead of the courts where most of the report would have been ruled inadmissable and he couldn't have made his accusations in this bombastic form, he chose to go to... the Internet, where it seems right at home. And somehow we're gone past censure to impeachment, which took on the air of inevitability for no really good reason. Even Paula Jones is somehow supposed to be vindicated.

Chernomyrdin, taking his rejection well, compares the decision with the Munich pact.

The INS is currently detaining 16,000 immigrants, 11,000 in ordinary jails and prisons over which it has no control. Welcome to the US.

Helen Chenoweth (R-NRA), friend of the militias and enemy of fuzzy animals everywhere, who says that Clinton makes Nixon look like a saint (Saint Richard!), has been outed as an adulteress, after running ads linking her opponent with Clinton and saying that "personal conduct and integrity does matter", which is not only hypocritical but bad grammar as well. She defends herself by saying that she was single at the time, although he wasn't. Actually she was single by the end of the affair, but only because she got divorced after she began screwing around.

Dan Burton was evidently known back in Indiana for screwing everything that moved.

Next?


Bad Hollywood remake idea of the week: The Prisoner, starring Mel Gibson.

Independent Counsel Kenneth the Menace Starr?

In the shitstorm of hypocrisy that will follow the release of the report, remember: "We are the sum of the things we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be." (Kurt Vonnegut)

Back to school, and many districts now require see-through backpacks, exposing students to the ridicule of their peers for carrying last year's gun.

Kaliningrad (or is it Kalingrad?) declared a state of emergency today. Moscow told it that it couldn't do that, but one aspect of the breakdown of the Russian government is that the 89 regions are taking unilateral illegal steps like regulating prices. Meanwhile, Yeltsin, the invisible president, hasn't resubmitted Chernomyrdin's name, and Lebed says that if anyone wants him to save the day, he'd be happy to do so.

---

New York Magazine Competition. Oxymorons:

Fast Food
Franco-American Spaghetti
Smart ass
Lassie
Common courtesy
Parental guidance
Rapid City, South Dakota
Sly Stallone
Internet access
Coach class

[NOTE: More New York Magazine competitions here.]

First line of a NY Times story: "Today might be one of those rare heady days for Russia's post-Soviet Communists, if only someone could say what a post-Soviet Communist is."

I started a thought a couple of days ago, got distracted and failed to finish it. I mentioned that Gerhard Schroder was courting the Germany gay vote. I meant to contrast it with the problem the CDU is having with replacing Kohl: the #2 man is a guy in a wheelchair. So since the Nazis, gays have been rehabilitated but not crips.

The WP runs an AP story reporting that California congressman Randy Cunningham has apologized for saying last Saturday during an appearance at a medical center that a rectal procedure he underwent during his recent treatment for prostate problems was "just not natural, unless maybe you're Barney Frank."

The next German chancellor Gerhard Schroder has been courting the homosexual vote.

There is one open homosexual in the Reichstag, a Green. What color do you get when you mix pink & green?

Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza have increased by 12.4% over the last 18 months.

As I understand it, there should soon be a new country. The newly elected government of Malta intend to invite the Knights of Malta back in. Now the Knights are currently a state with UN observer status in the same way as the PLO was, but without an actual country. But when they return, they get back their old Fortress, thus combining government with actual territory, making them an official country sort of like the Vatican, but smaller.

The Tory party's attempts to save hereditary peers may have been damaged by Lord Joseph Philip Sebastian Yorke being caught selling cocaine in the House of Lords during the debate on the terrorism bill.

Said bill includes a provision which makes it illegal to plan crimes committed abroad, a move resisted for over 150 years by more liberal-minded MPs (the Emperor Napoleon III was pissed off that the bomb in an attempted assassination on him was made in England). The provision includes an exemption for MI6, so evidently there really is a license to kill.

McNeill-Lehrer, of all things, had an exposé no one else seems to have picked up, on those Iraqis the US first used against Hussein, and then tried to deport from the US using secret "evidence" they could not see. You will remember they hired a former CIA director as their lawyer, but even he couldn't see the evidence. Then 95% of it was declassified, and guess what, there really wasn't any evidence. The FBI mistook someone's tribe for a last name, used unsupported hearsay, and one agent told the judge that according to his long experience, Arabs just plain lie.

So Dan Burton has an illegitimate kid from an affair. That means two women have had sex with him.

Even if you take Chernomyrdin's economic plan seriously, it amounts to a massive tax forgiveness. First they will massively inflate the economy by printing money, and then later they'll crack down on taxes. Who wouldn't want to pay their back taxes with worthless rubles? The Washington Post today has a good story on the disappearance in the crash of South Korea's middle class, but it's the Russian middle class that has really been screwed. The poor barter, the rich had their money outside the country....

Hurricane Earl. Finally a storm with an appropriately white trash name.

Clinton in Moscow: "a country that rebuffed Napoleon and Hitler can surely adjust to the realities of the global marketplace." Russia fought Napoleon and Hitler by withdrawing deep into its territory, poisoning the wells, destroying crops and so on. So Yeltsin's already made a pretty good start.

Dachau PR + giraffes in platform shoe

Palestine holds its first executions. Another state joins the elite death penalty fraternity, with Jamaica set to.

I haven't seen today's tv coverage of the Potemkin Summit yet, but when I do I'll be looking to check out my theory that Yeltsin had a stroke at some point. With no government in Russia, what can they have to talk about? If next month Clinton takes up vodka and Yeltsin takes up interns, I guess we'll know.

The United Kingdom was invaded today by the Kingdom of Arucania and Patagonia. I've read two articles in two papers about this (the Guardian evidently didn't find it newsworthy) and I still don't quite understand, except that some Frenchman was elected king in 1860 or so by some Indians who owned the Falklands, and today some Patagonians on a yacht raised the flag on the Minkies Reef and claimed the southernmost outhouse in the UK.

5,600 of Ecuador's 9,500 prisoners have served more than one year without a trial (which is now unconstitutional). Their protest has progressed from hunger strikes to sewing their lips together.

MGM is selling a walk-on in Pierce Brosnan's next movies for $10,000. Of course there is no guarantee against winding up on the cutting-room floor. No one mentioned it in the article, but the price might go up (or down) if it is realized that this is a remake of The Thomas Crown Affair, a 1968 or so film with Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway known as being the first American film to feature open-mouthed kissing.

It has been announced that the prime minister of Norway is too depressed by the onset of the long northern winter to do his job. This is not the first time that this has happened in Norway.

Yesterday's testing by North Korea of a new missile, which overflew Japan, should perhaps be getting more attention than it has. The missile is actually intended to be aimed at Japan or more specifically at the US bases in Japan, so that in the event of another war, the US can be forced out quickly by North Korea inflicting damages in the form of a fast 20,000 casualties.

An interesting story in the London Times, for which some historical background is required. Fortunately, you have me to explain it. The British Labour Party has its origins in the Labour Representation Committee, formed something like 125 years ago. For the first few decades, the Labour party had no policies separate from those of the Liberal Party but existed simply to elect members of the working class to Parliament, who would bring their own experiences to bear on parliamentary debates, in the same way that Emily's List tries to get women elected today, in theory irrespective of their party affiliations. Eventually the Labour party developed its own platform. And now, the Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union has formed a fund to elect working-class members of Parliament, because in 125 years we have come full circle and the Parliamentary Labour Party now contains only 13% former manual workers.

As I predicted right off the bat, the Sudanese factory was probably not what the US said it was. Oops. Incidentally, soil samples from where? The land around it is evidently all paved.

And in the camp in Afghanistan, we killed mostly, well, those of in the big UC campuses should have expected this--foreign exchange students from Asia (in this case Pakistan). We've managed to push Pakistan further into Islamism, with the prime minister announcing a total shift to sharia law with mandatory five-times-daily prayer. Oh, and they have one of our intact cruise missiles now and are taking it apart. Fortunately, this one already missed its target by 400 miles, so they may not be learning anything all that useful. That's the thing about Afghanistan: chickens always come back to roost there. That was my first thought when I heard that foreign-financed terrorists were operating out of Afghanistan: boy, must the Russians be laughing up their asses at us over this one. The lost cruise missile (or maybe two) is like those stingers we gave to the Mujahadin and then spent years trying to buy back at inflated prices after the Russians left. And Iran is massing its army over the Afghan border because the Taliban seems to have taken a bunch of Iranian officials--yes, including embassy officials--hostage.

New game for reporters: figure out which Russian businessman seems to be giving Chernomyrdin and Yeltsin their marching orders this week and write an article calling them the new Rasputin. Hours of fun.

Not helping Russia any is that its chief foreign banker, Germany, is having an election in which another fat leader who way outstayed his welcome is going to be booted out.

Speaking of terrorist targets, Radio Free Iran begins operating in a couple of days. There would have been a Radio Free Iraq too but the US decided to operate it out of Prague without actually bothering to ask the Czechs whether they'd like this future ground zero in the middle of their capitol. Next to a nursery school. So it's been postponed a bit.

Britain is thinking about changing its law to prevent anonymous sperm donation.

OK, since the Church of England allowed the ordination of women, a lot of clergy have defected to Rome, but there's one whose wife is one of the new priests. And you thought Clinton's home life was a little frosty.

Speaking of which: cigars?

From the Sunday Times (London): "Eleven garden gnomes have been found hanged from a bridge in northeastern France in what appeared to be a mass suicide. Police at Briey found a suicide note in which the gnomes said they wanted to "quit this world" and join a "sect of the temple of submissive dwarves". The gnomes' origin remains a mystery: local gardeners report nothing suspicious.

If the lottery is a tax on innumeracy, what do we call Clinton's terrorism policy (I'd call it an anti-terrorism policy, but the US did drop missiles on Khartoum)? Some terrorists mount an operation probably costing a few thousand dollars to destroy embassies worth millions. So we respond by destroying a primitive training camp (barracks, tents and an obstacle course) worth thousands of dollars, at most, by dropping 50 or 60 missiles worth $1 million each on it. Surely a win-win situation, even at the loss of Terrorist University (watch out for the frat initiations, but the keggers are awesome, dude!). And this is the "war of the future," huh?

Let me be the first to say that chemical weapons are a bad thing, but I have yet to be convinced that the plant in Khartoum produced anything more than human and veterinary medicine. For a start, a fair number of westerners have been inside it and haven't seen anything untoward. And I'm getting increasingly curious as to the terminology being used--"precursors" to nerve gas? Does that not mean that we know damned well the plant was incapable of producing actual nerve gas and are so claiming only that it could have produced components of nerve gas, like any pharmaceutical, chemical, or paint factory in the entire world? Something like the airstrips in Grenada that could have landed Soviet Migs--or Canadian tourists? No, I suspect this was just added on as a justification after intensive focus group studies, just like Bush didn't start talking about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction until other rationales failed to produce high enough poll ratings. And because Clinton needed two targets to match the two embassies.

In the same way, I suspect this bin Laden character has been promoted, and probably promoted way out of his league, to Darth-Vader-of-the-year to put a human face on the Enemy.

The language I dislike most is the language of legality. I've heard several times, I think from both William Cohen and Madeline Albright (incidentally, one hates to give in to anti-semitism, but having those two fronting this policy doesn't really help a whole lot in the Middle East), that this was a legal action. What is meant by this? It is true that the 1996 Terrorism Act does allow the president to do literally anything against he wants against anybody he deems to be terrorists, which is pretty much the same as having no law at all, but it doesn't matter since these actions took place outside the boundaries of the US. So Sudanese and Afghan law should apply, unless we claim that the cruise missiles have diplomatic immunity, and I'm willing to bet there is nothing in the laws of either nation that says that other countries can bomb them, although perhaps the lawyers on this list will correct me. Recycled paper isn't even legal in Afghanistan, so I doubt missiles are. That leaves only United Nations law, which allows for self-defense. Which is what we're claiming, although normally revenge doesn't quite count. So we're claiming to have foreknowledge that bin Laden was planning lots more terrorism. Probably picked it up off his web site or something, since if we had such great intelligence sources, I suspect they'd have mentioned something about the embassy bombings in advance.

I suspect Helen of Troy was much more attractive than Monica, but did she give blow jobs?

Just heard the Boxer/Fong debate. Fong is playing the poor victimized Chinese card, which is a little bizarre to a Berkeley student. One-fourth of the debate was on Clinton's penis. Key phrase never to be used again: zero tolerance.

Clinton's response to calls for evidence about the Sudan plant: trust me. Yeltsin's response to the ruble crisis and the run on the banks: I'm in complete charge.

Yeltsin, by the way, has disappeared.

Thu, 20 Aug 1998

Just read an e-mail, which I won't forward since it's too long-winded to be worth it, but someone having problems with a Microsoft product called up their support line, which charges money, and a lot of it, and doesn't necessarily refund it if they fail to fix the problem, and then called the Psychic Friends Network. A comparison showed that the latter was faster, cheaper, more courteous although, admittedly, the psychics didn't solve the computer problem either.

According to a newspaper story, Chelsea is the glue holding the family together right now. I can just picture it. "Chelsea, can you ask your mother to pass the ketchup?" "Tell your father to get one of his bimbos to pass the damned ketchup!"

Newt Gingrich has been awfully moderate this week. Do you suppose it was that lying-to-Congress thing and that fine he had to pay a while back? Is he still in hock to Bob Dole, I wonder? Now, here's a question. One way in which Gingrich lied was in promising not to orchestrate a spin campaign, which he then did. Now, with which other Congresscritters was he closeted that weekend, and are any of them calling Clinton a liar this week?

I know the first question a reporter asked the defense secretary today was whether he'd seen the movie Wag the Dog, but I didn't hear what the answer was. Now was the bombing because a vacation at Martha's Vineyard turned out to be an inappropriate follow-up to a national almost-confession, sort of like OJ on the golf course? Or was it to put a break in that line-up of Senators and such calling for his resignation, which I don't believe anyone has done since the bombs fell?

A chemical plant in the center of a capitol city. No, nothing dangerous in that choice of target, no sirree billie-bob.

Terrorism is just a license for anything we want to do, isn't it? Yesterday, the Irish prime minister announced a bunch of new measures which he described as draconian, for use against the Real IRA and such. That must be the only time I've heard someone supporting actions use the term draconian, as if it was a positive term. Britain, too, is talking about going back to the good old days of internment, conviction on the word of a single cop, supergrasses, further cutbacks on the right to silence, etc., that brought us the Guildford 6, the Bradford 4, etc etc etc.

Starr is still going to try to match up the semen stain. Is there anything probative in that after Clinton has confessed fucking her? Monica, by the way, is seriously put out because she thinks they had a genuine relationship which he is reducing to mere sex. Poor girl.

None of the people Clinton made lie for him have seen fit to resign. Who was the last person to resign on a matter of principle in this country, anyway? William Jennings Bryan?

Meanwhile, the Russian economy has collapsed and Yeltsin is showing more signs of dementia, and Congo-Kinshasa is about to erupt again, but wait, let's hear some more about that tie!

Some British tourists who were unsatisfied with their accommodations in Malta sued the company. The judge decided this needed to be looked into very carefully indeed, has just returned from Malta, and says their expectations were too high.

Words not used by Clinton in yesterday's speech-let: affair, sex, lie, sorry, apology, aardvark, semen-stained dress.

Quayle, the master of irony, said on Nightline last night that Clinton should resign.

Matt Drudge says that Clinton was wearing the tie Monica gave him yesterday.

Clinton testifies. Whee. So where is the made-for-tv movies, already? And who should play Monica? I think we all fondly remember Sherilyn Fenn's ability on Twin Peaks to tie a knot in a cherry stem with her tongue, but I understand that Shannen Doherty has already gained 30 pounds in preparation for the role, a la Robert De Niro.

Speaking of crappy movies, the review in the NY Times of The Avengers, which was released without reviewers being allowed to see it in advance, was headlined "Shh, They're Trying Not to Be Noticed." I understand the movie could still make a profit if they just take out ads emphasizing the key's sole asset, which is that neither Uma Thurman in the catsuit nor Sean Connery under his kilt, are wearing any underwear.

The Union Bank of Switzerland, which conveniently lost its records of money deposited by Jews before and during World War II, spent years trying to collect the rather piddling sums it lent to British and other Allied soldiers who escaped from POW camps and arrived without money or food and unable to get their British pay.

OK, it was the Oakland City Council that deputized the cannabis buyer's club to make its activities legal, not Berkeley. What does that tell you?

The 9th Circuit rules that people on Medicare have constitutional due process rights not to have claims turned down without a reason giving and a hearing by those HMOs the Feds are trying to force everyone on Medicare into. The decision is sensible and obvious enough, which means it will be reversed by the Supreme Court, which hates sensible and obvious almost as much as it hates the 9th Circuit. The interesting part is the Clinton Administration's position, which is that the decisions of the HMOs aren't subject to court review because they are not the actions of government. This is where privatization leads us, to a world where the Constitution no longer applies to actions taken by people working for the government because those people are alleged to be private. I know there are privatized federal prisons whose managements claim not to be bound by federal rules on things like excessive force and not killing prisoners and stuff.

I'll say it again: just when I think I have no expectations of Clinton left to be disappointed, he manages to disappoint me. Who would have thought they actually didn't want to find any evidence of Iraqi "illegal" arms programs because it would mean, I don't know, all that paperwork, I guess.

Finally, according to the LA Times, Sharon Stone, Michelle Pfeiffer, Ellen deGeneres, Madonna, Andie MacDowall, and I forget who all else, are turning 40 sometime this year. Feel old, feel very very old.

Some days ago, the Animal Liberation Front in Britain (come to think of it, I have one of their t-shirts somewhere) released 3,000 minks from a mink farm. The British papers have been full ever since of stories about how minks are really the most vicious animals on the face of the earth, and attack anything that moves. The locals are not happy.


Till dress us do part

Athens: A bride-to-be suffered a nervous breakdown the night before her wedding on the Greek island of Crete when she took friends to the couple's new home to see the wedding dress - only to find the groom wearing it and in a passionate embrace with his best man. The wedding was called off, an Athens news agency reported. (Reuters)

The Nevis referendum on independence from St. Kitts failed to win the necessary 2/3.

Hillary Clinton says that it's just anti-Arkansas prejudice fueling the attacks on husband Bill (if your idea of a good time is oral sex from the chubby much younger intern, you just might be a redneck) Clinton.

Sony accidentally invented and sold the #1 item on the wish list of teenage boys everywhere, the x-ray specs. Their camcorder's night vision filter (for filming sleeping babies and philandering husbands) can pretty much see through clothing in the right light.

Somebody from the Carter Center was showing a bunch of Chinese visitors how democracy worked by taking them along while he voted in the Georgia primaries. Where he was promptly refused a ballot in his own party, as they kept insisting he was a Republican. The Chinese, according to the Washington Post, were baffled. When it was finally straightened out, the guy voted in the Democratic primaries, in which there was only one candidate for governor. The Post doesn't say, but one presumes the Chinese were less baffled by that.

The Post has an article on welfare reform which says that a major cause of the shrinking rolls is not people being kicked off, but hurdles being put in the way of people ever getting on to begin with. Sometimes they get one-time payments, which may be all they need. Some are made to go after 40 job opportunities first, which may work. Oregon gives people one-way tickets to California, which works for Oregon. But mostly this has a sense of being number-mongering, that civil servants are now being made to go after lower welfare caseloads based strictly on numbers, in the same way that the lowering crime rate is partly based on police departments, under pressure to get those numbers, downgrading crimes, and of course Robert MacNamara's famous body-counts. A civil servant with a quota of people to screw over makes the spine shiver even more than "I'm from the government, I'm here to help." No one knows how many just give up when they realize there will just be more stupid hurdles endlessly. One civil servant saw nothing wrong with forcing people to rely on relatives, which should ensure that the really poor drag down the not-quite-so-poor.

Speaking of unfortunate relatives, Mark Thatcher, idiot son of Margaret, who made his money in illegal arms deals in the 1980s and security services in the US in the 1990s, has a new career: loan-sharking to the underpaid police and civil servants of South Africa, where he now lives.

Finally, for Bay Area residents: Channel 20's new owners are ditching the dogs. Boooo!

Magic shoes

China hails sole survivor

Beijing: A Chinese soldier thrown high into the air when he stepped on a landmine near China's border with Vietnam survived unscathed thanks to the experimental boots he was wearing, the People's Daily said. A Chinese military university is testing the special protective footwear for mine clearers in the southwestern province of Yunnan, the site of thousands of mines left over from China's 1979 border war with Vietnam. (Reuters)

This story just baffles me. What sort of shoes are these? I'm picturing giant springs.

Fri, 7 Aug 1998

There's a story in tomorrow's London Times about a World War I soldier who got caught in a French town behind German lines and spent four years hiding in a cupboard.

Israel has banned the practice of posthumous circumcision.

A joint US/Russian military exercise that was supposed to involve a Marine landing at Vladivostok is halted, scared off by a bunch of old communists with red flags. Where is Tom Hanks when you need him?

Chanel no. 1

Daily Telegraph:
A ZIMBABWEAN man has been jailed for a month for bottling his urine and selling it as perfume.

Evidently dead people who haven't already been circumcised can't get into Jewish cemeteries (perhaps this is only in Israel), unless, of course, someone circumcises the corpse.

Among the Chinese of Indonesia, the latest big fashion accessory is the chastity belt, in preparation for the next round of rape 'n' riot. There must be a good reason why this is a bad idea, or surely someone would have done it before?

The Vietnamese police official from the famous 1968 photo in which he executed a VC prisoner dies peacefully in Virginia, where he ran a pizza parlor, leading ineluctably to the question: what the fuck was he doing in this country all these years? This is why the US opposes a war crimes tribunal.

China has 30 times as many deaths per automobile as the US, 70,000 traffic deaths in 1997.

China reverses its ban on Amway. Not that these two stories are in any way related.

From an LA Times story: "Emmy Award-winning effects supervisor Ron Thornton said his best work last year was creating a computer-animated, 9-foot tall, three-legged alien for UPN network's "Star Trek: Voyager." But another assignment kept him tied up for a couple of days digitally removing armpit stains from an actor who had been perspiring heavily."

Iran hangs a Bahai for converting a Muslim.

A Federal judge strikes down NJ's law against pornography at the state prison for chronic sex offenders.

Stupid medical idea of the week: a company in Britain is charging 300 pounds for home paternity testing. Just send off a sample of the DNA from your alleged offspring and find out if you're really the father.

Today, our news is all military. Everyone should read the series (a bit long for me to mail out) in the Washington Post on the role of US special forces in training all sorts of scummy armies abroad. It's much more extensive than I had realized, including every single Latin American country. Under the guise of training them in fighting drug traffic, we are giving them the same old counter-insurgency training, including countries that were supposed to be under US sanction.

On Salon today, Christopher Hitchens, famous for trashing Mother Theresa, goes after the Dalai Lama, who is evidently a shit. And supports India's nuclear policy, by the way.

British tv says that in January 1995 Russia's hi-tech early warning system (a couple of guys with binoculars would be my guess) figured that they were under nuclear missile attack by the US (actually a Norwegian weather research rocket) and Yeltsin initiated all but the last step in launching a retaliation.

I'll leave you on that thought while I'm on vacation. I'm going to a wedding in Redondo Beach, which I think means that there'll be a Best Dude. Should be like totally bitchin'.

Dollywood is getting a new roller coaster, in the shape of....

A member of the Russian Duma has been demanding an investigation of reports that Yeltsin was replaced by a double two years ago. OK, nobody believed me when I said that two years ago I saw someone in the hospital who looked exactly like Yeltsin, but boy am I vindicated now.

Speaking of the former super-power, the next launch of a crew to the Mir (motto: don't laugh, it's paid for) has been delayed 10 days because the space agency failed to pay its electricity bills.

From a Village Voice review of "Armageddon": "Like being yelled at by idiots for 144 minutes"

It won't stand a week, but a panel of the 10th circuit court forbids prosecutors giving leniency to witnesses in exchange for testimony under the federal bribery laws. I approve wholeheartedly, at least until defense attorneys have the same ability to hand get-out-jail-free cards to potential witnesses.

Nice to see just how long outrage at India and Pakistan lasted. Right up until the Iowa wheat harvest came in.

Mon, 6 Jul 1998

There is a story on the BBC, playing even as I write, about sexual harassment in the Canadian military. Someone is heard to suggest that the cases should be handled by the police. Oh yeah, sexual harassment investigated by the "Mounties".

Clinton's lawyer Robert Bennett is also representing the Zapruder family, which wants the government to pay it $70 million for those 26 seconds of film. Bennett compares the film to the original manuscript of the Declaration of Independence. Right.

The London Times also has a story tomorrow about this subject, which focuses on the accusation that Pete Wilson and Dan Lungren have let the incredible violence at Corcoran, detailed in the LA Times article below, go on and on and obstructed the investigation, which has been basically run by the prison guards' union, which happens to be a big campaign supporter of both of them, and has ensured that the only guard punished was the whistle blower. The Times, being naive in matters American, thinks that this will be a problem for Lungren's campaign. Knowing Lungren, I'll bet we're gonna see ads with him taking credit for prisoners being raped and strangled. And I'll bet somewhere in the Republican party platform there's something about bringing back Gladiator Nights at Corcoran and putting it on pay per view and using the funds brought in to reduce the car tax. How much would you pay to see a fight to the death between Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan?

The USDA approves a new vegetable for federally-funded school lunches: salsa. But not ketchup.

The word on the street (well, the unpaved dirt road) in Nigeria is that Abacha actually died from an overdose of Viagra.

I just celebrated the 4th by watching "1984". At least we didn't wind up being ruled by Big Brother but by Bob's Big Boy.

Clinton keeps talking about China entering the 21st century. Of course, by the Chinese calendar, that would be 698 B.C.

Yesterday, Kenneth Starr argued in Federal appeals court about whether lawyer-client privilege was more important than getting at the truth. Some of the truth which his people have been trying to get out, include these questions to Sidney Blumenthal before the grand jury: did you and Hillary Clinton ever discuss whether Bill had a sex addiction? does Bill believe that oral sex is sex? does his religion include sexual intercourse?

The Post Office is to give some of its workers the day off in honor of Nixon's funeral, 4 years late. These were the people who already had the day off that day, and so didn't get the day off that the people who didn't have the day off got off. Head...hurts.

Speaking of Nixon, I saw a Nixon scholar on C-SPAN saying that the technology now exists to recover the missing 18 1/2 minutes, but a) it would cost about $10,000, b) the archives won't let anyone do that sort of thing to the originals.

Kentucky is to stop letting people below the age of 16 get married.

The Northern Irish Assembly has been elected. Of 108 members, 14 will be women and 8 will be terrorists. 3 will be survivors of terrorist attacks. Buckle your seatbelts.

Just when you thought Texas would execute anyone at all, they spare the life of a guy for one of the 600 murders he's confessed to. Seems he was at the other end of the country at the time. Not that that's ever stopped Texas before.

One present the Chinese presented Clinton with, that seems to have gone unremarked in the US press: the execution of a Chinese who killed an American tourist.

If, like me, you read the NY Times and Washington Post and actually expect to get the news, you've been driven crazy by reports that John McCain told a joke that no one in either paper is willing to print, although they're all willing to talk about it. So here it is: "Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Janet Reno is her father." Big deal.

I knew that story about the military using sarin gas against defectors in the Vietnam war was too good to be true.

So there was a Polish Jewish family whose land was expropriated by the Nazis. Decades later they try to reclaim their land, only to find out that, hey, they own Auschwitz.

Last week, Trent Lott, the former cheerleader, a) killed the tobacco bill, b) said that homosexuals need treatment for their addiction. Right. So, take that penis out of your mouth and try a cigarette instead. (Or, if the penis in question is like mine, a cigar.)

The US is pushing Colombia to use a chemical to kill coca crops that its manufacturer, Dow Chemical, the good people who brought you Agent Orange, says really shouldn't be used in Colombia and will certainly contaminate the ground water.

Somewhere in the Senate legislative process, the tobacco bill has lost all its funding to help smokers quit smoking, keep people from starting and keeping children from buying cigarettes.

Christopher Hitchens was on C-SPAN last night. One of the things he said was that the president of Pakistan had written to Clinton and Albright weeks before the Indian nuclear tests warning of their imminence and asking what the US was going to do about it. The US never replied. When asked what happened to the letters, State & White House said that they passed them on to the CIA. Which was then blamed for not warning the White House. Hitchens thinks the story of an "intelligence failure" was accepted a little too readily, when complicity seems more likely.

Some British teenage hackers got into the Indian nuclear computers and erased a bunch of files and told them exactly what they thought of nuclear weapons.

Kenneth Starr finally admits that he regularly leaks to the press, but says it is necessary "to engender confidence in the work of this office." The interviews are of course on a not-for-attribution basis. I feel more confident already.

A racist party does very well indeed in the Queensland elections, as I'm sure you've all been following.

The US government finally apologizes and pays off those Japanese we kidnapped out of Latin American countries during World War II. Of course they only get one-fourth what Japanese-Americans got, and only when the latter are paid off, if there's any money left. But, hell, they were illegal aliens.

Jewish settlers on the West Bank are now to be allowed to form their own armed civil guard units.

Creepy medical procedure of the week: babies with two mommies for real. You take nutrient from the egg of a young woman and mix it in with the egg of an older woman, ensuring that 50-year olds can give birth, like that's a good idea. No one's quite sure how much of the DNA from the donor gets mixed in, but some of it definitely does. 2 women are pregnant by this technique now.

Republicans in the Senate are blocking a judge (big news there, huh?), one Sonia Sotomayor, a hispanic woman, for the 2nd Circuit. They can't find anything in her record to object to, but they're afraid that if she gets this slot, she'll be appointed to the Supreme Court by Clinton or Gore, and they don't want Dems to have any viable options for the Stevens seat (or whomever), especially a hispanic woman.

The Flemish regional government has voted to give state aid to Nazi collaborators on the same basis as war victims.

Ireland still has a list of banned books: H.G. Wells, Upton Sinclair, The Second Sex, Marie Stopes, etc etc. That may change this week.

Is everybody ready for another Balkans war? I thought not.

There are so many brushfire wars these days, I can't keep track of them all. Whatever happened to the Namibia-Botswana border dispute? What's going on in Kashmir? Start looking out now for the next one, Cyprus, due to commence sometime in July.
That offer everyone reported from that nice Mr. Habibie to give autonomy to East Timor? The price tag was that the UN, Portugal and everyone have to recognize that Indonesia owns it. No thanks.

With Reagan, it was ketchup

If Bill and Hillary are Southern Baptists, does that mean she has to submit to him? Isn't that what interns are for?

With Charlton Heston leading the NRA, does that mean they have to spend 40 years in the desert? Soylent green, I mean the NRA, is people!

Ethiopia and Eritrea are not terribly impressed with the US's attempt to get them to settle the war by sending a 33-year old woman from the State Department to sort it all out for them. Where is Warren Christopher when you need him?

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'Let Them Eat Grass' -- the Pakistani Elite's Solution
Impoverished Public Is Skeptical of Patriotic Belt-Tightening Urged by Leaders Amid Costly Arms Race

By John Ward Anderson and Kamran Khan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, June 11, 1998

With Pakistan facing bankruptcy because of sanctions stemming from its nuclear weapons program and defense spending likely to rise because of a new arms race with India, top leaders have asked their countrymen to do their patriotic duty and "eat grass" so money will be available for national security. ...

So the neutrino has mass after all. Well I'm pleased to hear it.

CNN & Time magazine say that during the Vietnamese War the US dumped sarin gas on a Laotian village, killing at least 100 people, in order to kill some US defectors they thought were living there.

Bumper sticker on sale in Berkeley: Will be President for food.

And a special thank you to whoever it was chopped off most of the parking meters south of the Berkeley campus.

Check out, and you'll have to take my word on this one, www.godhatesfags.com. Go to their list of pamphlets and read it.

So, do we have to start calling it Spaceship Oakland now?

The school prayer & subsidized religious schooling amendment only gets a majority in the House of Representatives.

The Department of Health and Human Services found the money it needed to fix its Y2K problem. It raided a program for homeless teenagers. Good priorities, guys! Congress would have objected but it was too busy voting on school prayer. By the way, they did sneak through a change to the law of debt as it has existed for many centuries, allowing bankrupts to give to charities rather than pay off the people they owe money to.

The Daily Show tonight had a segment on a sheriff who, unlike Sheriff Joe in Phoenix who believes in bologna sandwiches for prisoners, serves lots and lots of good fattening food, because he likes his prisoners chubby and complacent.

Clearly what has to be done is just to flood the world with Viagra. In Third World countries, the fake stuff has been killing people. And there would be a benefit I hadn't even thought of until today: think how much safer African rhinos and Chinese bears will be if no one's killing them for their horns or testicles (um, respectively, of course).

Hey, Kevin, I've also just thought what to get you for a wedding present!

Will Durst says of the end of the primary and the beginning of the actual election race: $64 million down, a gazillion to go.

But at least we have B1-Bob to kick around again.

Speaking of insane right-wing losers, Alabama governor Fob James is in trouble. The primary was not conclusive and will require a run-off. His opponent Winton Blout 3rd (yes, the third) says that Fob is an embarrassment to the state of Alabama, as if that was possible. Fobbio replies that Blout is a fat monkey.

Factoid of the day: the word cannibal was coined by Christopher Columbus.

If you watch a late broadcast of today's MacNeil-Lehrer, you will hear a debate of sorts between on tomorrow's vote to amend the first amendment to allow school prayer (and loads of other stuff). No atheists present, so there was no one to suggest that perfect religious freedom is not guaranteed by the amendment's phrase about letting people "acknowledge God". The fun part of the segment is watching the Baptist guy in favor of the amendment continually fail to come to terms with the idea of a non-Christian religion. The opponent was a rabbi, and the Baptist kept referring to him as "Reverend, I mean rabbi.." or "Mister, I mean rabbi".

Still not much talk about punishing Israel for having the atomic bomb, as we have India and Pakistan. I'm waiting to see if there's any coverage in the US of the fact that the top Indian nuclear scientist, who is the new national hero, has spent a lot of time visiting Israel in the last couple of years. By the way, the Japanese think that North Korea has the bomb as well.

Last month Israeli spy planes flew over Pakistan, presumably looking for the "Islamic bomb". Pakistan was sure Israel was about to bomb it. There's a lesson in there somewhere.


As much as I really felt I needed to know about this story:

[56]Better Access to Gravesite Of Stonewall Jackson's Arm
SPOTSYLVANIA, Va.The National Park Service, responding to the interest of Civil War buffs, is making it easier to find the spot where Stonewall Jackson's arm is buried.

Yes, you always knew where you stood with Barry Goldwater. And Adolf Hitler. Enough with the eulogies already!

In 1961 a US warplane caught fire at an RAF base in the south of England. The fire almost succeeded in opening up the nuclear bomb on board, in which case Suffolk would have been an irradiated desert for centuries to come.

"I'm Troy McClure. You may remember me..." Yes we do, Phil. Yes we do.

The only joke I remember from Will Durst's special last night: Kenneth Starr is like a cat that keeps dragging stuff into the house that we don't want to see. "Oh good, a dead mouse."

According to the Press Clips section of the Village Voice, India's nuclear tests were not only a surprise to the CIA, but to the news media, which had almost uniformly missed the BJP's election manifesto promise to do so. Of course I read the British papers, and they actually give a shit about what goes on in the sub-continent even without someone hitting them over the head with a nuclear hammer.

Pakistani PM Nawaz Sharif: "We paid them back." Pakistan immediately declares a state of emergency and suspends all press freedom and civil rights (I just read a Pakistani newspaper. They didn't know what to do with press freedom anyway) to deal with the upcoming sanctions. And just as the shit is about to hit the fans of the world stock markets again. Bad timing. Well they didn't need civil rights, and India didn't need electricity (the World Bank has suspended loans for electrification).

Of course we all knew that Pakistan was a nuclear power. They are not only not more of a nuclear power today than they were yesterday, but they are less of one, since they just wasted about half of their weapons-grade uranium. Our nuclear non-proliferation policy is evidently based on the Don't Ask, Don't Tell principle.

So how are these nuclear powers different from all other nuclear powers? If mutual assured destruction was good enough for Europe, why not for India? For a start, the warning time is way too short. It'll be like a permanent Cuban Missile Crisis. Second, there aren't enough nukes to make nuclear war unthinkable. Maybe we need to make sure that Pakistan gets the uranium it needs? In the last few years the Indian military has been increasing its superiority over Pakistan, which means that Pakistani thinking has increasingly been that Paki nukes would be used to prevent conventional attacks from India (just like those going on in Kashmir the last few days). They would probably have to anyway, as Indian air superiority means it could quickly shut down the Pakistani ability to get its Mirages into the air--Pakistan would either have to use its nukes earlier on in any war, or lose them.

The Supreme Court gives police immunity from deaths caused by reckless police chases even if they display reckless disregard or deliberate indifference to life. You can sue them if you can prove intent to run you over. The Court's rationale is that decisions have to be made really really quickly. Oh, good. How long does it take to pull a trigger? Actually, cops kill more people each year by running them over than by shooting them.

Even stupider: the Supremes let stand South Carolina's interpretation of life as beginning at the viability of the fetus for purposes of child endangerment laws.

California primary: People, let's remember that it's a primary. The Bay Guardian brilliantly endorses the Green party candidate for governor. Well, maybe he's great, maybe I'll even wind up voting for him in November. But the Greens only have one candidate running for governor, so a vote for him truly is a wasted vote. When you choose candidates, keep in mind that they're not running against the fifty others on the ballot, just those from their own party. So go out and do some mischief with your vote, like the open primary was intended for. If you can find a Democrat with an ounce of integrity, vote for them. Or vote for Dennis Peron to annoy Darth Lungren.

Follow up: the Gloucestershire cheese roll, banned as too dangerous, was performed surreptitiously in the early hours with a single cheese and four idiots chasing after it. Freedom wins again!

Duck and cover: newest thing in US schools: the psycho drill.

Trying to derail the tobacco bill, Republicans in Congress try to set a limit to lawyer fees. The Republican Party has come out against greed. You heard it here first.

Watching C-SPAN earlier today, I heard Tom DeLay ask for an end to partisan attacks in the investigation of campaign contributions to Clinton who, he had just finished saying, had by selling satellite technology to the Chinese in response to contributions, caused India to test its nuclear weapons and Pakistan to respond, and thereby to threaten the lives of everybody on the planet.

I'm not exaggerating any of that.

India has already threatened Pakistan with nukes over Kashmir.

Milosevic, having sent troops into Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo in turn, is now thinking about Montenegro. Hey, it worked so well in the past.

Someone at the LA Times wrote that the only way to get LA tv stations to cover the governor's race would be for the candidates to get into four cars and chase each other up and down the San Diego Freeway. May I recommend the Ford Pinto?

Two die in blast at gnome plant

Warsaw: Two young men died in an explosion at a Polish garden gnome factory, PAP news agency reported. Three other people were injured in the blast at the plant in Kozuchow, western Poland, it said. A police spokeswoman said paint fumes might be to blame. (Reuters)

The California Supreme Court rules that a single crime can generate more than one strike for the 3 strikes law. The example given is that carjacking is usually prosecuted as both robbery and kidnapping. In the case involved, the guy was in a fight 15 years ago (strikes 1 & 2), and is now convicted of stealing a carton of cigarettes. The brand isn't given, but in a perfect universe, they would be Lucky Strikes.

According to Wisconsin doctors, a poorly-drafted partial birth abortion law has outlawed all abortions in the state. Legislators disagree, but no abortions are now being performed, doctors not being willing to risk life imprisonment.

Why the hell is Clinton in Germany campaigning for Helmut Kohl?

Israel celebrates its 50th anniversary by shooting 9 Palestinians dead. I guess it wasn't a big enough cake to have 50.

Does anyone actually feel sad that Seinfeld is no longer on the air?

That Chinese law professor will not be deported from the US for slapping his kid--he has pleaded to a lesser charge.

Jon Christensen did not win the primary to become governor of Nebraska but came in 3rd, despite all the stories I read which said that he was the front-runner. He cried.

I KNEW RONALD REAGAN: Estrada seems to have won the Philippines presidential elections. Yeah, he's a drinker and a gambler and has several illegitimate children, but he was a famous Filipino actor. I think he played a motorcycle cop or something (joke).

A New York judge returns a 5-year old to his mother, who killed her other kid, an 18-month old, for spilling her dinner, and then tried to blame it on the other kid. She's served her full 9 months and the judge thinks she's shown enough remorse to have a shot at killing the other one. I'll say one thing: that kid is going to have the best table manners in New York.

A couple of years ago, there was a story by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker to the effect that India and Pakistan had come very close a couple of years before that to a nuclear war. Nice to know that next time, they'll be doing it with fully tested weapons. Or not. The US claims that India's claim to have detonated an H-bomb Monday is a lie. The country of Gandhi has no dissenters to the nuclear policy. A petition in support of the testing was signed in Bombay by over 100,000 so far. Signed in blood. Their own, for once.

South Africa and Rhode Island both legalize sodomy. There's a joke in there somewhere.

Guatemala celebrates getting off a UN list of human rights violators by beating a bishop to death with a concrete block. In a move typical of Guatemalan efficiency, the guy they're trying to frame as the lone, um, concrete-man, turns out to have a deformed arm that leaves him unable to lift concrete blocks.

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that the IRA had shot a 79-year old man in both knees and both ankles. Seems they got the wrong address. Oops.

"I'm not only the president of impotence pills for men, but I'm also a member": gee, Bob, thanks for sharing. Or as Liddy used to say, "Where's the erection, Bob, where's the erection?" And all this time he's been living right next door to a famous practitioner of the felatalic arts. There must be a joke in there somewhere but coitate si cognito (fuck if I know).

Some immigrants from China slapped their 8-year old for lying and will appear in family court in Chicago Monday. If convicted, they will automatically be deported, thanks to the 1996 Immigration Act.

In yesterday's local elections, the people of London voted to have an elected mayor. This looks to be a very silly race. Jeffrey Archer, who evidently can't read any better than he can write, is studying up on the subject of the city he hopes to lead into the millennium by reading the *London Encyclopedia* -- one page per day. By far the most popular choice is the one Tony Blair is desperately trying to figure out how to block from running and still be able to use that annoying "we trust the people" line: Ken Livingston, or Red Ken to his friends, was last seen running the Greater London Council until Thatcher abolished it just to be rid of him. He's calling for a special greedy bastard tax. His words, not mine. Not very "New Labour".

Jon Christensen (R-Palookaville), generally regarded as the stupidest man in the US Congress, is front-runner to become the next governor of Nebraska. His platform consists of a promise never to hire a homosexual and that his fiancé is a former Miss America and is a virgin.

Merrian-Webster refuses to bow to pressure to remove "nigger" from the dictionary.

Namibia and Botswana are moving towards war. Over a tiny uninhabited marsh island submerged several months a year.

Alabama Governor Fob "Crazy as a Fruitcake and Twice as Stupid" James has filed before the Supreme Court on the 10-Commandments-in-the-courtroom case, saying that government officials should ignore Supreme Court decisions they consider unconstitutional. Also says that Sandra Day O'Connor's agnostic beliefs have caused her to closer her mind to the fact that abortion is murder. So there.



Cockroach hunt turns into lottery

Tucson, Arizona: In a publicity stunt, a pest control company has released 100 cockroaches with barcodes on their bellies. Whoever catches the roach with the winning number will win $50,000 (#31,000) while $100 will go to anyone who tracks down any of the remaining 99. The company admits that the odds are not great as there are more than a million roaches in Tucson. (Reuters)

With all the talk about the procedure to kill off all cancers, at least in mice, no one has answered the one question I want answers to. Who collected the mouse pee? The tests involved gallons and gallons of the stuff, so who was it who made them go in the little itty bitty botttles?

The head of the pope's Swiss guard is murdered. There has to be an interesting story there. Evidently, the Vatican doesn't have a very high murder rate. So the first one in 150 years, and its the head of the cops (and his wife).

In Clinton's stupidest and most spineless cave-in since the last one, he has agreed to let Senator Slade Gorton name a far-right judge to the 9th Circuit and generally take over the power to appoint judges in Washington state. By the way, if anyone knows anything about Barbara Durham, the current chief justice of Wash Sup Court and soon to be 9th Circuiter, do pass it on.

Speaking of idiots who shouldn't be allowed the power to veto nominees made by their betters, have you all been following the wrangling over the first head of the EU's central bank? The term was supposed to be 8 years for reasons of continuity and to stay above politics, so France only agreed not to veto the unanimous choice of everybody else if he'd resign after 4 years in favor of a Frog, who would have a full 8-year term (for reasons of continuity and to keep the office above politics, of course). The only contribution the French have hitherto made in EU financial policy was to appoint a commission that decided that "euro" is masculine, le euro, not l'euro. We'll all sleep better at nights knowing that one is settled. This means that euros can be created from a standing position (euros in Greek means urine) (Greece is not joining monetary union, so it won't have to worry for a while yet about jokes about keeping your assets liquid).

I've gotten my sample ballot. Vote yes no yes no no no no no no

Bad news for Filipino stand-up comics: Imelda Marcos has dropped out of the presidential race.

The British government decides not to pardon deserters shot during World War I.

Those Colombians who protested working conditions by having themselves crucified were up there for 50 hours. And won their strike.

Gingrich says he won't allow a vote on funding for the IMF unless the Democrats agree to grant immunity to 4 witnesses on campaign finance issues. Well, it may seem irrelevant, but this is nothing compared to the dozens of amendments stuck on to a bill to pay UN back dues.

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?"

The British Labour party has started giving potential candidates for local councils literacy and math tests. Not everyone is passing.

Stupid website of the week: www.lindatripp.com. See if you are inspired to give money to this poor beleaguered woman.

Imelda Marcos has signed to do commercials for Harvey Nichols's new shoe departments.

British zoos and wildlife parks are selling off ostriches, bison, wild boar etc to be sold (or bred) as exotic food.

In Britain, a 92-year old is divorcing his wife of 70 years. No, the children are not dead.

I said the Asian economic situation would produce racism, but it gets worse. Malaysia has started poisoning the water of the refugee camps it interns Indonesians in. The sweep is subtly named Operation Go Away.

The IRA has displayed its commitment to peace and nonviolence by shooting a 79-year old in both kneecaps and both ankles.

The famed Washington Correspondents Dinner will air Saturday afternoon on C-SPAN. Everyone will be watching because Paula Jones and Billy Bob Bubba will both be there.

Favorite headline in today's London Times: "Oriental Elvis Impersonators Attacked Diners".
The IRA has displayed its commitment to peace and nonviolence by shooting a 79-year old in both kneecaps and both ankles.

The pope says that the end of the world is not nigh, so far as he knows. I know I'll sleep better tonight.

Texas screws up a lethal injection. So the guy gets two sets of last words. Neither of them interesting.

A new book says that pirates were actually democratic, not especially violent (only one documented instance of someone being made to walk the plank), multi-racial, egalitarian, and all that other good '90s stuff.

In a few hours, the big show-down in the Russian Duma. To recap, the boy wonder Yeltsin appointed as Prime Minister only needed to be named because Yeltsin never bothered to read the constitution under which he allegedly operates, and thought he could fill the position himself. If the Duma rejects him a 3rd time, which seems to depend on whether or not they can vote secretly, Yeltsin gets to dissolve the Duma, at which point he has threatened to have all its members evicted from their Moscow flats, which means eviction from Moscow, since the mayor, who doesn't believe in the constitution either, retains Soviet-era residency permits. Yeltsin also plans to unconstitutionally rewrite the election laws in the absence of the Duma, and the puppet he named to head the electoral commission has threatened to keep all existing parties out of the elections. The Communists don't want early elections, but they don't want to try to face the electorate in a year having given in to Yeltsin now. Childish, vindictive, petty, calculating, arrogant: I think they've finally mastered the principles of democracy.

That couple in marriage counselling in Fresno: you have to question how seriously they were trying to make it work when they both came packing heat.

Of the major candidates running for governor of California, Harman, Checchi and Lungren have never had any children in the public school system (Davis has no children). Do they at least buy lottery tickets?