Indonesia, with a singular lack of understanding of the history of the twentieth century, has hired Henry Kissinger as an adviser on the transition to democracy.

When McCain attacked the Christian right, he specifically exempted homophobe and general asshole James Dobson, presumably as part of the price for his endorsement by homophobe and general asshole and dwarf Gary Bauer. Also, one of McCain's major supporters, Lindsey "No it's not a girl's name" Graham, who you learned to hate during the Clinton impeachment, denounced Dubya's visit to Bob Jones University, although Graham himself has an honorary degree from it. Incidentally, why is the main controversy about BJU (and doesn't a university with such an informal name as Bob sound like a laidback Santa Cruz kind of a place?) the anti-catholicism of its presidents rather than its racism?

Molly Ivins's current column takes Bush to task for his commercials saying that he "passed" a patient's bill of rights, which actually passed over his dead body and after he vetoed the first one, it was passed again with a veto-proof majority and went into law without him signing it.

Robert Mugabe, the increasingly asinine president of Zimbabwe, has been touring the flood damage in two helicopters. There are only 3 helicopters doing actual rescue work. There are also a couple of dozen air force copters, but they're all in Congo fighting that stupid proxy war.

From the wonderful world of sharia, the 3 northern Nigeria states that recently passed sharia just revoked it after quite predictable religious rioting. And Saudi Arabia executes someone, by beheading, for sorcery. (Note to Daily Telegraph: when you say someone is executed for sorcery, a little more detail might be appropriate. If anyone sees anything, please pass it on).

Bob Herbert reports that Dubya said "I know how hard it is to put food on your family."

CA election & whatnot

The Washington Post has a headline that Mexicans are stunned at the murder of the police chief of Tijuana. Given that a previous police chief was killed on the same street, it seems unlikely that it comes as that much of a surprise.

The latest in 10 Commandments gimmicks, as passed most recently by the Indiana legislature, is to post it in classrooms alongside other "historical" documents like the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence. Nice try.

The Supreme Court will decide the constitutionality of a lovely practice, drug-testing pregnant women without their consent and then reporting them to the police. Is there an actual question here?

McCain and Bradley are preparing to go out in a final burst of glory. McCain said what everyone thinks about the Christian right, which must feel good. Now tell us, what do you really think about the North Vietnamese? And he calls Bush a Pat Robertson Republican who will lose to Al Gore. By the way, he said will lose, not would lose, which is an admission unto itself. Bush says that he is a problem-solver and McCain is a finger-pointer, whatever that means. And says that Reagan was never so divisive, so far as he remembers. Of course he spent the '80s in a drug-induced stupor, and probably remembers Reagan as the guy who beat off the invasion of giant spiders from the Crab Nebula.

And Boo Bradley is running really hard in... Washington state. Ignoring, oh say, New York and California, just so that he can say he won one state when he has to pull out.

OK, the California election. It seems that I was wrong about 29 being the evil twin of 1A. It's actually the puny younger brother, and should be voted for in case 1A is defeated.

Also, I finally have an opinion on Prop 25, campaign financing. The need for campaign financing is shown by the fact that Governor Beige is raising money he won't have to disclose the source of for another year and can use for whatever he wants, including defeating this proposition. But this one ain't it. Too many loopholes and, the killer provision, unions are restricted to the same limits in total as a single individual person.

Prince Charles was in Trinidad this week. They just could not get the man to limbo.

I'm sure you all want to know just what Monica Lewinsky's deal with Jenny Craig is. Well, she's paid by the pound. $25,000 per pound she keeps off for a year, to a maximum of 40, and more for a second year. They can weigh her at any time and she doesn't have to do anything she considers immoral.

The Utah House of Reps votes ban discussion of birth control in public schools and that children be taught that "any sexual relations outside of marriage constitutes criminal conduct." One presumes the latter is not actually true.

A jury in Albany acquits four NY city policemen of shooting Dialou, whose name was not spelled that way, but never mind. The trial was marred only by the fact that when the foreman of the jury reached into his pocket to bring out the verdict, one of the cops yelled "Gun!" and the rest shot him 682 times.

If you wish to consult an actual South African witchdoctor, his website is woza.co.za. I know what woza means, but I can't remember if it's from Zulu or Khosa.

UCSC committed suicide today, if you haven't heard, voting to require grades. No decision yet on whether narrative evaluations survive, but if so they will be gone within five years, I would guess.

George II's ads, the only ads he's running here so far that I've seen, are directed at McCain, telling him that he can disagree with him, but can't attack Bush's integrity. I can't for the life of me think why he thinks his integrity is out of bounds. He looks very determined in this ad; his eyes are squinting and you can hear this little voice in his head telling him "don't smirk don't smirk don't smirk."

The Paris newspaper Liberation has horrified French snobs everywhere (60 million and counting) for praising the cuisine of a restaurant with an imported Scottish chef, introducing some of the worst cuisine in Europe to the frogs-leg crowd, such as chicken in 7-Up, chocolate-filled ravioli, and the height of Glaswegian cuisine, the deep-fried Mars bar.

At the Harlem debate, Gore still refused to ask Clinton to sign an executive order ending racial profiling and accused the state of New Jersey of "practically inventing racial profiling." That's right, ladies and gentlemen, the former senator from the state of Tennessee is accusing New Jersey of racism. Bradley was too polite to bring up that whole lynching thing.

Bush II keeps talking about Democrats "hijacking" the Michigan primary to vote for his opponent. I hope Al Gore stuffs those words back down his throat when he starts appealing to the voters who might actually elect him president in November, the ones to the left of Pat Robertson. More to the point, did anyone tell him that 35% of Michigan's registered voters are independents? This is what happens in a state with open primaries. He should really watch who he keeps insulting.

I've been thinking about diplomatic immunity today. The feds recently arrested an INS agent who spied for Cuba. Actually, if he told Cuba anything, it was about some of their military people who were thinking of defecting. That may be wrong, but why should it be illegal? That the US is trying to bribe members of another country's military may be one of our secrets, but really he was just telling another country that one of their citizens was about to commit a crime. Now if he'd told Colombia about drug traffickers...

OK, so they arrest him and then tell his Cuban diplomatic contact to leave the country. The Cuban refuses. He is after all, the witness for the defense. He's got a point. Should the US be allowed to make its case by deporting witnesses for the other side? But if he has diplomatic immunity, should be be able to testify when there is no perjury penalty hanging over him? In either case, the US has given him until Saturday to leave, at which point he reverts to civilian status. My question is whether they can then arrest him for spying. The real question is, of what does diplomatic immunity consist? Does it turn a crime into a non-crime, in the way that a police officer is allowed to speed? Or is it more like a statute of limitations, where something remains a crime, but the perp can be prosecuted on one side of a line but not the other? If that is the case, then he can be prosecuted the minute his immunity lapses.

The thing about presidential elections is that everyone is so busy with politics that they forget about politics. We now know what pretty much everybody thinks about the bigotry of Bob Jones but have any of the candidates mentioned that of Haidar? Was anyone asked about China's new threat of war with Taiwan if it doesn't start negotiating pronto?

Chicago has a new ordinance allowing the cops to order loiterers to disperse and order them to stay away from sight and sound of a given spot for three hours. Just in case you didn't think this was giving arbitrary power to the police that would only be exercised over minorities, the ordinance only covers the bad part of town.

Bush and McCain are accusing each other of running "negative smear campaigns." As opposed to the positive smear campaigns.

Pakistani soldiers have been chasing wild boar over the border into India, wreaking havoc with local farmers. Could this war get any sillier?

Yes, probably.

Twenty years ago this week J.R. was shot on "Dallas." Also Archbishop Oscar Romero.

A lesbian couple legally marries in Britain. One was born a boy and has since had a sex change operation. By the same loophole, somewhere there is a woman Catholic priest who I haven't heard anything about in five years. Do they still have catacombs under the Vatican?

The pope was in Israel, in an event that didn't require one-tenth of the news coverage it received. Vis a vis the Holocaust, he asked today, "How could man have such utter contempt for man?" He added that the Catholic church usually prefers that utter contempt be directed towards women.

To some people, the issue of the papacy's silence on fascism in the 1930s might bring up the question of what it has to say about the rise of the fascists in Austria. Well, there's a story in tomorrow's London Times about a bishop in Austria who did in fact speak out and has been forced to go into hiding in the face of a hate campaign, out of fear for the safety of her children. The Times didn't say what the bishop's religion was, but I'm betting not Catholic.

Interestingly, the pope evidently thinks that Jesus was born 2,000 years ago.

He stood next to Arafat, the only other world leader with a really atrocious command of the English language who nonetheless insists on speaking in English.

Clinton is still on the sub-continent. His trip to a Bangladeshi village was called off because of concerns his helicopter would be shot down by missiles which were those originally given to the Afghans by the US to kill Russians.

Mississippi becomes the second state to ban adoption by homosexuals. It occurs to me that I don't know how you define homosexuality in a legal sense. Florida was the first.

Well wasn't that a vicious little primary? Who was it who set the rule that Gore and Bush can smear their opponents but not the other way around? At least when they turn on each other neither one will be constrained in any way, since they're already down in the mud. Bush Bush Bush. Never has one man looked so smug with so little cause. Except for Clinton, Starr and Guiliani. Poor McCain has now been branded an out-of-wedlock father, a corrupter of children, an abortionist (for supporting fetal tissue research along with 92 other Senators), a tax raiser (tobacco taxes, but the ads didn't say that), the candidate of the Democrats and fags...

More on the great-grandmother Bush will execute this week: it seems that the person who could have been the witness to prevent her getting the death penalty was actually her lawyer. See, he had been the one to advise her to try to collect the insurance on one of her several, um, missing husbands. This means that she wasn't planning to gain by his death, which is what got her the needle, but her lawyer then was also her lawyer for the trial, so he would have had to give up the potentially lucrative media rights in order to be a witness. Mr. Ethical, a major alcoholic, was later a DA who tried to sell exemptions from the death penalty. But this is Texas, where snoring is not considered proof of ineffective counsel, so don't expect much from that.

Mark Shields commented that the National Right to Life group has proven itself the wholly-owned subsidiary of the official Republican party by its smears of McCain, who is as anti-abortion as they could wish for.

Bush is now a "reformer with results", which will doubtless prove to be as meaningful a label as "compassionate conservative."

A follow-up: a while back I mentioned that the South Carolina Republican party had been criticized for not opening polling booths for its primary in black areas. I don't know if that situation is changed, but the D's realized that if they were going to criticize the R's, they'd better not do the same. Then they realized how expensive it would be, and cancelled the primary.

Speaking of primaries, it's time for the Californians on this list to make up their minds who they're going to vote for for president. Remember, the vote doesn't count in any meaningful way unless it's in the party in which you are registered. So you can technically vote for Alan Keyes to make mischief for the R's, but under the compromise by which the parties decided to ignore the express will of the voters, they would get to ignore you. This only applies to the presidential race. If you want to change your party registration, the deadline is Feb. 7.

Speaking of circuses, one of the first things his caring relatives did for Elian Gonzales after he came to this country after watching his mother drown, was take him to Disneyworld and stick him on a boat in a ride. He was heard to ask whether it would sink. Worse, it was It's a Small World. No fit guardian would subject a child to It's a Small World at the best of times.

The EU, en masse, told the Austrians not to let fascists into government. Finally, the EU is good for something.

And the governor of Illinois is planning to actually pay attention to executions and maybe stop them altogether, because they keep convicting innocent people. Put that way, it's entirely reasonable, but I don't see any other state doing it. I understand that Michael Moore sent a brass band to join one of those little Fry the Guy parties they hold outside the prison during executions in Texas, and some cheerleaders--George George, he's our man, if he can't kill him, no one can!

The Times & Post are downplaying it for some reason, but Britain just convicted a doctor of 15 murders. He killed old patients, some of whom he got to leave him him money. And he didn't kill just 15, he killed as many as ten times that number. Don't know if they were National Health patients. They also have a doctor over there who is defending, nay proud, of having cut the perfectly healthy legs off a couple of people with strange ideas of what is sexually arousing. And a doctor last week took out a patient's good kidney, leaving the ailing one. There's a simple solution when such things happen--at least, depending on how many kidneys the doctor still has left.

So those are the stories I've been reading for the last week in preparation for my doctor's visit today. Which turned out ok.

T-shirt seen on sale in Berkeley: “Fuck your Valentine.” Who buys these things?

Bush Lite said of McCain that "You can't take the high horse and then claim the low road." No indeedy, you cannot.

On Nightline Friday he corrected Ted Koppel, no, you can't call them anti-abortion, they are more properly called pro-life. A minute later he referred to the other side as anti-life.

We just can't elect another president who pronounces nuclear as nook-yu-ler. We just can't.

Speaking of anti-life, this week Boy George gets to execute his, I believe, 120th, a great-grandmother of all things.

Has anyone else noticed that the California ballot contains one initiative against gay marriage (22) and another that would pretty much create them (21)?

Anyone else seen those ads against Props 30 & 31 featuring a discussion of how to jump in front of a car and then collect insurance? What did they call it, curb jumping or something? Winner of this year's Reefer Madness award.

King Letsie of Lesotho gets married and says that he will only marry the once. Of course Lesotho doesn't have that annual topless women dancing event like Swaziland, whose king always seems to pick up a new wife each year.

Prague refuses to name a square or street after Kafka. Insert your own joke here, I can't be expected to do all the work.

During yesterday's Republican debate, Governor Smirk said that his economic policy was to make the pie higher. Something like that.

Dubya now has a campaign finance reform plan, which somehow magically only affects stuff that McCain might ever have done, and not anything he has ever done. Last month of course campaign finance reform was evil because it would hurt the Republicans and help the Democrats. Now he's got one of his own, without evidently needing to explain why this u-turn is anything other than a cynical ploy to steal McCain anti-establishment voters. Or does it have something to do with those stories that he's running out of money?

At Clinton's press conference today, some reporter asked if he had any advice for his wife on how to connect to women voters. 'Cause if anyone knows how to connect to women, it's Billy Bob. I can't remember what his answer was, but it probably wasn't anything to the effect that if Hillary connected with women, he wanted to watch.

Czech prime minister Zeman says that there is no place for women in his cabinet.

Under sharia law, the eldest male relative of a murder victim gets to personally execute their killer. In Afghanistan this weekend, a ten year old shot his father's killer four times with a rifle in a sports stadium.

At tickettoheaven.com you can buy, for a mere $10, a ticket that gets you into heaven. I'm guessing Greyhound.

New product, available soon: Crop Circle Beer, brewed entirely from barley grown in fields with crop circles.

The next story is about how if you really want to screw up a situation beyond imagining, it requires a lawyer. Which reminds me. I've been reading the ballot statements for superior court judge, and none of them are written in decent English. "Respect and courtesy are the way I treat victims of crime, jurors, witnesses..." One guy ends "I have a wonderful wife and two beautiful children. We ask for your vote." Well, I might vote for the wife and one child, but two seems excessive.

Governor Smirk is now accusing McCain of taking special interest money. Of course no one has more of that than Shrub, and everyone knows it, so the point is to increase the cynicism and apathy of the electorate, reduce turnout and slide through unnoticed.

Putin to reestablish military training for school boys (and girls to a lesser extent), including lessons in patriotism. The good old days. Remind me, didn't Yeltsin promise to abolish the draft?

Haidar's illegally-gotten estate is worked by underpaid immigrant workers. It just gets better and better. (Please note that I just used Dubya's technique of pointing out the hypocrisy of my opponent, of which I complained two paragraphs ago).

Prince Charles is thinking about becoming a King George rather than a King Charles.

George II says that Bob Jones University's ban on interracial dating is not based on hatred or bigotry. So that's all right, then.

China orders that Tibetan women be sterilized after two children, in violation of previous promises.

Northern Ireland devolution, RIP, age 72 days. I told you so. Well I did.

Another reason to vote for gay marriage in California and elsewhere: the demagoguery about the "marriage penalty." Which is actually a penalty for only a bare majority of married couples filing jointly, as it turns out. In the context of this mailing list, that means that the rest of us will pay higher taxes to subsidize Kevin's chosen lifestyle. Say thank you to the good people, Kevin.

Another Israeli soldier was killed in Lebanon by a missile. What you don't see in the US media is a discussion of where those missiles came from. Remember Iran-Contra? Remember the TOW missiles given to Iran in exchange for hostages, a deal brokered by Israel? Well guess what...

Other countries' troops are being sent to "support" French troops in Kosovo. Which actually means doing their job for them, since by all reports the French have been incredible cowards, even by French standards.

British soldiers in Kosovo are still in tents. They could have used the Serbs' barracks except the US insisted on bombing them all. Not because they were of any military use, having already been abandoned by the Serbs, but because they would look good blowing up on CNN.

The Bay Guardian says that P G & E donated $50,000 to Prop 21, the one to put juveniles in adult courts and prisons.

Today the British Parliament voted to reduce the age of (male) homosexual consent to 16. This gave a lot of Tory MPs the opportunity to see how many times they could say buggery in the course of a ten-minute speech.

Don Imus said that Forbes spent $100 million to make himself a laughingstock. The New York Times says that is is "a harsh formulation." It was actually $70 million.

NY Times headline: Bush and McCain, Sittin' in a Tree, D-I-S-S-I-N-G

Finland elects a single mother president. The US is making great progress in that direction, as there are now fewer straight white guys running for president than there were last week.

The East German illegitimacy rate is now over 50%, about twice that of the West.

Jorg Haidar today offered to compensate Austrian Jews who were victims of Nazis. Of course he linked it with compensation for Austrian Nazis who were victims of the Russians. He has also demanded compensation from the Czech Republic (would that include Slovakia as well, I wonder?) for Sudeten Germans expelled after the war.

The embargo on Austria is already breaking down. Princess Whosis of the Belgium went there, although Prince Charles cancelled a planned visit. But the right wings of several European countries are not cooperating. Tory MEPs, for example. And the Bavarian CSU is going out of its way to be friendly with the new Austrian government, because 1) they are assholes, 2) they have links with the other party in the right-wing coalition.

Tony Blair's attempt to give freedom to Wales through devolution and then given them slavery by imposing his own First Minister on them failed spectacularly today.

Russia gives the monopoly over Chechnya's oil and gas reserves to the last remaining state-owned company. Also, they're talking about leaving Grozny in ruins...well, they'll do that in any case...and remove the capital to the 2nd city.

It seems that in 1862 Abe Lincoln offered the command of the Union armies to Garibaldi, the Italian who led the country to unity. Only, Garibaldi wanted a statement that the war was to end slavery, and Lincoln wasn't willing to do it.

Spain lowers the minimum IQ to get into the military from 90 to 70.

Vietnam is going to pave the Ho Chi Minh Trail and turn it into a freeway. There's a joke there about turning the country into a parking lot, but it isn't worth the effort.

Israel has announced it will ignore its agreement not to kill civilians in Lebanon.

This Chinese guy who's been living in the US 20 years goes to China with $25,000 in charity money for the victims of Tienanmen Square. They arrest him and demand that he turn all the money over to them or they'll put him in prison. He agrees, leaves the country, the check he wrote is stopped. Now they're threatening his 78-year old father with taking away his house unless he gives them the money.

This week's Bay Guardian (in paper or on the Web) looks like having some useful articles on the California propositions. Even for non-Californians, some of it looks like fun reading.

Greece is *still* trying to pressure Macedonia into changing its name, this time to Northern Macedonia.

And the good news from the pharmaceutical industry is that Eflornithine may go into production again. It cures sleeping
sickness, an especially nasty disease that unfortunately for them, only effects poor people in Africa. So no one's made it since 1999. But since it also eliminates facial hair in rich white women, there's now a market that the industry cares about. How'd you like to explain that one to the Africans?

Correction of the Week

"Because of an editing error, an article on Tuesday about the court case in Chile against Gen. Augusto Pinochet misidentified the ocean into which the military apparently dumped the father of Viviana Diaz, a woman who leads a group of surviving family members. It was the Pacific, not the Atlantic."--The New York Times, Feb. 3, 2001

From London Times, best topic sentence of the week: “A HOSPITAL apologised to patients yesterday for selling their skin for chemical warfare research.”

From the Daily Telegraph: “An American student sold his soul for $400 on an internet auction site yesterday.”

California primary

So I've been reading the election booklet, and here are my thoughts and recommendations.

First, the arguments are getting wackier each year. Something has to be done to make them at least honest. Where is Gary Wesley, attorney at law, when we need him?

1A Indian gambling. Yes, we just voted on this. Evidently this will allow the use of video slot machines, the crack cocaine of gambling. Well that's what it says here. Vote yes.

Bond measures, 12 through 16, no as always. No reason to go into debt during an economic boom.

12 is evidently to "buy more land for insects, rats and weeds that your family will never get to see or use."

13, say the people against, is not *that* Prop 13. They actually feel they have to say that. And don't wear platform shoes and mood rings to the polling places, people, it's not 1978. The people for say that "Without it, we all face a very uncertain water future." As long as it doesn't have Kevin Costner in it.

15, for crime labs, aka the O J Simpson Initiative. "If it were the opponents' father who was murdered, sister who was raped, or child killed by a drunken driver, we believe there would be no argument against Proposition 15."

16, for Veterans' homes: one statement beings "Pear Harbor, Iwo Jima, Omaha Beach...Khe Sanh, Kuwait, Bosnia..." Yup, the only mention of Vietnam is one designed not to be understood by anyone who wasn't there. We want to help veterans, but not *those* veterans.

17 to legalize raffles for charities. The opponents present it as a "professional gambling operator's dream" although the Prop specifically says that the money has to actually go to charity and the operator has to belong to the charity. Vote yes, or no, who cares.

18, the hand of George Deukmejian reaches out of the political grave on this one, which would make all sorts of things into "special circumstances" for the purposes of death penalty. Vote no, of course, but note that it would make kidnapping or arson or lying in wait in relation to murder a special circumstance, even if it was always intended to be a murder, rather than a real kidnapping or arson. In other words, it's really one crime, murder, but they're trying to treat it as two crimes for the purpose of inflicting a death penalty. Dishonest, but par for the course. Note one of the opponents was B.J. on MASH.

19 increases penalties for murder of BART police & Cal State police (but not UC, for some reason) to those for the murder of, ya know, real cops. Vote no, but note that the arguments against are entirely fictional, saying that the Prop does things like let BART impress people into a posse and fine people $1,000 who refuse, and that it covers bomb threats and falsely reporting crimes. The actual text of the prop is quite short and mentions none of that.

20. Allocation of the lottery to school districts, telling them how to spend it (a % on textbooks). First, who cares, second, let the districts make their own decisions. So vote who cares, I mean no.

21. Every election has an atrocity, and this is it. Especially after the figures on what LA does to juvenile criminals in the adult court system, this would require trying as adults a lot more 14 year olds, requires registration for gang members just like sex criminals, imprison juveniles before trial, bar sealing juvenile records and, here's my favorite part, allowing the cops to release the name of juveniles arrested, before any actual charges are even made. Oh, and more crimes count towards 3 strikes, although without trawling through the 13 pages of this initiative, I can't tell you which ones. Spitting on the sidewalk, no doubt. No no no no.

22. No gay marriages. The statement in favor was written by a 20-year old Hispanic woman, and is not the only personal statement on this ballot, the other being a thing by a recovering gambling addict against Prop 1A. This is a trend that should stop at once. Anyway, Ms. Santacruz says "Marriage is an important part of our lives, our families, and our future. Someday I hope to meet a wonderful man, marry and have children of my own. By voting Yes on 22, I'm doing my part to keep the dream alive. If it fails, I will have to marry a big bull dyke." I made up that last sentence. Lady, you're 20 and Hispanic; tick tock, that mustache isn't growing any smaller.

23. A None of the Above ballot option. If anyone knows how this got on the ballot, tell me. I suspect a dirty trick. It is non-binding, so Mr. Above can never win an election, so it is politically meaningless. But it would siphon votes away from the Greens, Libertarians and such, who might subsequently lose their ballot status like Peace and Freedom has, which is where the dirty trick comes in. The argument is written by 3 California citizens who usually don't vote, and think many more citizens will register and will vote in order to cast a pointless vote. I've cast more than my share of pointless votes, but this is too pointless. No.

All together in an Australian accent: Proposition 22: No pooftas! Proposition 24: there is no proposition 24.

Prop 25 campaign spending limits. I need more time on this one. There are voluntary aspects to it, including a fine on people who break a voluntary pledge, and there is something about millionaires being able to spend whatever they like, a reference which I think means that this is Ron Unz's initiative.

Prop 26 removes the requirement of a 2/3 majority for school districts to issue bonds, and gives money to charter schools. You know, I was going to say yes on the theory that 2/3 is undemocratic, but if it's just to issue bonds, which I don't believe in anyway, I think I will recommend a no vote. Both sides on this one have typewriters whose CAP key keeps sticking.

Prop 27, a voluntary declaration of adherence to term limits can be put on the ballot next to a candidate's name. Term limits are bad, politicizing the ballot form is bad, and I believe other states that tried this had it struck down in the courts. No.

Prop 28 to repeal to Prop 10's cigarette tax and anti-smoking programs, has an amusing statement by the sponsor, the president of Cigarettes Cheaper! That's his exclamation mark, not mine, so it's rather surprising he gets through a statement and a rebuttal with only 2 of them, 3 if you count the sentence that you can call them at 1-800-Cheaper! I didn't know my telephone even had punctuation marks. Evidently "The primary use for Prop 10 funds has been to publicize Rob Reiner." Although elsewhere he says none of the money has been spent. As the aliens told Woody Allen in Stardust Memories, if you want to benefit humanity, just make funnier movies, Meathead. Mr. Exclamation Point also says that Prop 10 money will be spent on a Brave New World approach to raising children wherein bureaucrats will take over from parents. Sounds like Epsilon thinking to me. Vote no.

Prop 29, the evil twin of 1A. No.

By the way, James Doohan, who played Scotty, just fathered a child at 80. I dinnae know how much more of this my testicles can stand, captain!

Jorg Haidar is threatening to use the Austrian veto on everything in the EU to *make* them talk to Austria. This is actually rather promising, I think. If he still doesn't get his way, he'll invade Poland.

Actually, that would probably be against the paper the Austrian president (who was actually lobbying other EU countries to protest events in his own country) made them sign, saying that democracy is good and fascism is bad. Now if only President von Hindenburg had thought of that in '33.

A by-election in Wales sends into Parliament its first earring-wearing male MP (Plaid Cymru party)(which is pronounced exactly like it's spelled, except not).

I actually know the perfect country for Haidar to rule. The water off Sicily is bubbling and they're expecting Graham Island to rise again. Last seen in 1831, when it was claimed, according to the London Times, by Britain, France, and Italy (which did not exist at the time, so that was remarkably prescient).

In my continuing search for alternative ways to render George Walker Bush's name, I am adding two more:

Governor Smirk.

Boy George (after the tendency of his mother and father to refer to him as "my boy").

I will continue using Dubya, Bush the Younger, Bush Lite, and
Shrub. Collect them all.

Web sites

Christian nudists.

alienresistance.org. Evidently you can stop aliens from anal-probing you by just saying the name of Jesus.

tencommandments.org. On why we need to make the 10 Commandments the basis of US government. Read the essay on how the US Constitution actually turns people into homosexuals.

All of these sites are serious, and are compiled on ship-of-fools.org (or com? I forget). Enjoy.

In case the sanctions on Iraq weren't beginning to look silly enough, a bunch of Jordanians (I believe) have brought a bunch of pencils to the border in violation of the sanctions (graphite can be used in military applications). Not Gandhi making salt, but a pretty effective stunt, I thought.

Don't remember if I followed up on the NY psychics thing: as soon as it was found out, they stopped it, of course.

A NY Times letter suggests Elian should stay in the US so that he can receive all the therapy he'll need for what's been inflicted on him by his Miami relatives.

Went into my bank the other day and noticed bottles of ketchup at various spots along the counter. I had to ask, even knowing that the answer was going to be stupid. I was told that it was to advertise loans so that one might "catch up" on one's bills. Even stupider feeling than me for asking: the guy who had to repeat that 30 times a day. Stupider still: the person who came up with the idea. Stupider still: the person who bought the ketchup, because they bought a brand that calls it catsup, ruining the whole pun.

A British MP is stabbed with a samurai sword.

The New York Times today broke, on page 1 yet, a story about the city putting welfare recipients to work as telephone psychics. If they're not already clairvoyant, they are given intensive training.

Speaking of stupid banking ideas, the state bank of Zimbabwe had an idea of having a lottery, every month, in which they'd give away money to owners of accounts, with extra tickets going for each, oh say $5,000, in those accounts. The first winner: President Mugabe, who no doubt owns half the money in the banks.

And no, I'm not making up the welfare psychic thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bushisms / finger shots

One of those creepy 107-year old Japanese twins died. Aren't they the ones who used to call Mothra?

Letter in the Sunday NY Times about Microsoft's market value now equaling Spain's GDP: "Hey, I've been to Spain. Windows 98 works better."

So the Chechens didn't really capture that general after all. What's the point of even making up an easily checkable lie? At least when the US military lied about the performance of Patriot missiles or Sudanese chemical plants or who they were killing in Kosovo, it usually took weeks or months to find out, by when it's evidently ancient history (god knows what you call the sort of history I work on).

I'd been dismayed by the German SPD's incompetence in office, its squabbling and its inability to win a single state election. I figured all those years out of power would take a lot of time in office to overcome, learning the job and so on, and they didn't look like having it. Thank god for financial scandals, huh? The Hesse elections might even have to be re-run since the CDU spent illegal money. And how about Kohl defying the law and his own party, which is threatening to sue him, by citing his "honor." His honor is a pretty small thing to hide behind, and he's such a great big fat thing. The worry, though, is that the CDU could break up or be too badly depressed in subsequent elections, to the benefit of the far-right racist parties.

In my continuing quest to bring you the latest news of Shrub's inability to speak the English language, here are excerpts from the London Times:

Ben Macintyre reports on the mangled messages from the Republican front-runner

GEORGE W. BUSH had the audience eating out of the palm of his hand until suddenly, in the middle of a riff about free trade, he appeared to launch an unprovoked attack on a species of small dog.

The world will be a better place, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination said, when "all the terriers are torn down".


Mr Bush is also prey to what might be called the jammed compact-disc stutter, when he gets impaled on a single word. "We must all hear the universal call to like your neighbour just like you like to be liked yourself." Then there is the grand word glitch, triggered by his occasional forays into the deeper bits of the dictionary. Three times in two days, Mr Bush said that, if elected, he would never "obsfucate". It is a measure of the Bush charm that when the candidate finds himself up a blind verbal alley being assaulted by his own syntax, he is as amused anyone else.

"Bumble through OK?" he grins.

After more than seven years of syntactical precision by Bill Clinton, it is refreshing to have the Bush-isms back, and a candidate who does not obsfucate but say things how they are is.

The Supreme Court rules that it's ok for judges not to clarify their instructions when the jury asks. Why on earth don't these juries just refuse to come to a verdict rather than say, oh well, I guess we should vote for the death penalty just to be sure

The Chinese are holding Falun Gong members in psychiatric hospitals.

A doctor in NY is being sued by a woman for carving his initials on her stomach after a caesarian.

Dan Burton will hold hearings in LA on stuff the Soviet Union did during the Cold War. He says it's because some of the stuff happened in California so CA will want to hear about it. However, most of the hearings will of necessity be behind closed doors. And all those federal employees will have to be flown to the coast to testify. But at least Burton will get a free plane ride to California so he can play in the Bob Hope Classic at Palm Springs.

The Bush campaign is accusing the Forbes campaign of doctoring a photo of Shrub in an ad, to make his ears look funny.

Quote of the week: "These people [refugees from Russian bombing] used to live in a great country where no one asked them if they were Chechen or Ingush or Dagestani," Russia's Deputy Energy Minister, Khodzh-ahmed Arsanov, said. "Everything we're doing now for them is free - the gas, the electricity. The bombing is free too, but we have to find the money for that from other budgets."

There are now 1.2 billion under-nourished people in the world, and 1.2 billion fatties.

The Supreme Court upheld segregation of prisoners with HIV, including exclusion from religious services and educational and work programs that reduce prison time.

See article in Slate on the arguments in a case about the no-protest zones around abortion clinics.

Rumor has it that Chechen rebels are paying the Russian army not to bomb certain towns.

The D's have a Bush Stump Speech Search Engine, to show how scripted and repetitious he is. He's never once mentioned cocaine.

An op-ed piece in today's NY Times captures what is most obnoxious about the Elian Gonzales thing with an apt comparison to the wholesale removal of Amerind children from their parents earlier this century on the theory that the government could do a better job than dirty Injuns. Which may be the case with Elian's mother, who subjected her kid to the worst form of child endangerment, but you know what I mean.

Washington Post says that after the invasion of Grenada, the US found Maurice Bishop's body and had it secretly buried to prevent it being a rallying point.

Whenever British Home Secretary Jack Straw decides to release Pinochet, the Chileans will try to race him to the airport before the Crown Prosecution Service can file its appeal. Worse, Straw's decision is based on medical tests he will not release, or even say what is supposed to be wrong with Pinochet. And the head of the medical team just came out and said that they were misrepresented by Straw.

Y'all remember that state prosecutor in Moscow, investigating Yeltsin family corruption, of whom possibly faked videos, naked and with teenage prostitutes, were aired on state tv? The man in charge of that particular operation, which was blackmail at the very best, was Vladimir Putin. The prosecutor has a book coming out shortly.

Those suspicious apartment bombings were also probably Putin's doing, one month after he got the KGB job. This past week they just found three more explosive devices, right about the time the media started getting critical of the stalled war.

Salon says that the Drug Kaiser actively hid his office's subsidizing of anti-drug messages on tv from congress. And that it's almost definitely illegal to run those programs without disclosure under the 1950s payola laws, that require the "Ted Koppel's shoes were provided by Hush Puppies" disclosures.

Last night on Nightline, they were discussing Elian Gonzales with his father. "When Elian comes home, will you allow him to bring that puppy?" "Yes, he looks delicious." My favorite Bad Transition moment was that right after the line "And then things got ugly", or something like that, they switched to the image of Janet Reno.

This morning Chris called me up to tell me to watch Jerry Springer. They had midget KKK members on. In the upper left corner there was a little box that said "exclusive." I should bloody well hope so. This provoked a theological debate, with Chris saying that America would be punished for this program, while I said that this was the punishment for some past misdeed, possibly the genocide of the Amerinds.

Speaking of midget KKK members, the Republican party in South Carolina, which evidently pays for and administers its own primary (the New York Times thinks that SC is the only state where primaries are run by the parties, but didn't bother to do the research), is not bothering to have many polling stations in black precincts.

In Britain, a professional footballer is playing wearing one of those prison monitoring ankle bracelets.

From the obits page comes news that Bob McFadden, the voice of the parrot who said "Ring around the collar" in those 1970s commercials you all remember no matter how much you drink to block out the memory, has died at 76.

An interesting article in Salon. In 1997 Congress authorized a 5-year, $1 billion buy of tv commercial time for anti-drug messages. Part of the deal was that it would pay half price. As the economy improved and all those dot.coms started advertising, the networks wanted to get out of the deal, so the office of the Drug Tsar is letting them buy their way out by negotiating insertions of anti-drug messages into programs. This is not just on the little shows, and it is all the networks, and the Drug Caesar is literally negotiating script changes, as in, a story line on Beverly Hills 90210 is worth $500,000-750,000. This is evil, and must be stopped.

First, I want to announce that I have been bought out by Time-Warner-Turner-AOL-Satan.com. My next e-mail will concern the need to eliminate the capital gains tax.

Taking advantage of Gore's sloppy language on "litmus tests" on gays in the military for appointments to the Joint Chiefs of Staff (and by the way isn't Joint Chiefs of Staff the most homoerotic name of any government organization?), when it should have been obvious to everyone that all he meant was that his appointments should carry out his policies, the Republican National Committee is running commercials attacking him saying "The only litmus test ought to be patriotism." In future on-line dictionaries--doubtless sponsored by my new sponsor, the media giant which I understand celebrated the deal by putting the names of all the executives involved into a hat, and whoever's name was picked out got to go home with Jane Fonda--under the word "irony" there will be a link to that commercial.

A German newspaper says that Vladimir Putin was expelled from West Germany for spying in the 1970s, when he was pretending to be a Tass reporter.

4 debates down, 1,996 to go. At last Friday's debate, Gary Bauer was asked the question that tripped up Dan Quayle, about what he'd tell a family member who had been raped and got pregnant, and wanted an abortion. Fortunately, it seems that it wouldn't arise, because under a Bauer presidency, there would be no rape. Yes, he actually said that.

Stupid criminal of the week, so far: the guy who robbed a bank in Connecticut and was caught behind the bank, where he'd stopped to count his money.

At a performance of Aida in Italy, the lead tenor's flu made it impossible for him to continue half-way through, so they called up someone sitting in the audience, another tenor I hadn't heard of either, who finished it. Is there a tenor in the house?

China has banned the perfume Opium, because it encourages spiritual pollution and reminds them of their humiliating defeat in the Opium Wars.

911 calls of the week: actually 999 in Britain, where a woman watching wrestling on telly called the police because the one she supported was losing. And god knows what they dial in Denmark, but someone there set off a whole sea rescue operation, although it seems it was his toy boat that sank in the bath tub. Alcohol is believed to have been involved in that one.

During the funeral for Jordan's King Hussein, there was a joint Israeli-Jordanian secret service operation to collect Syrian President Assad's pee to find out how sick he was.

A document released under Britain's 30-year rule suggests that the Cold War actually came to an end right after the invasion of Prague in 1968. Russia was contemplating following up with an invasion of Romania, where Ceaucescu had criticized the Czech invasion. Had it done so, Yugoslavia would have defended Romania, Britain would have defended Yugoslavia, and god knows where it would have ended.

Florida speeds up its death penalty appeals process, with an eye to reducing the time spent on death row to 5 years. Of the 87 people released from death row, and prison, since 1973 because of innocence, the average stay on death row was 7 1/2 years. In the words of Jeb Bush's death penalty adviser, "let's rock and roll!"

If the reporters won't hound Dubya about his cocaine use (and a reporter who asked a seemingly innocuous question at yesterday's debate, what their biggest mistake of their adult life was and what did they learn from it, was roundly booed), they should make him say who he thinks goes to heaven. He refused to exactly say that non-Christians don't, but it was clearly what he thought. I think voters should know what he thinks of them.

Asisi bans feeding the pigeons.

What on earth is going on in Chechnya?

Misuse of power of the week: Rep Dan Burton for subpoenaing Elian Gonzales. I think he should be made to carry it through and actually call the kid to the stand. What could he ask him, who his favorite power ranger is?

A weird lite news day. This is an edited-down version of the table of contents to the Daily Telegraph's international section.


[21]War crimes suspect met by protests in Australia
KONRAD KALEJS, the suspected Nazi war criminal, returned to Australia
from Britain yesterday amid angry protests by Jewish students
demanding further investigations into allegations against him.
[did anyone catch the I think justice minister of Australia saying that they wouldn’t put him on trial because Australia doesn't do "show trials"? Incidentally, I don't think a Latvian should be called a Nazi war criminal, since he's unlikely to have been a member of the party.]

[24]Internet threat to Israel, say rabbis
ISRAEL'S leading orthodox rabbis have issued a ruling banning the
internet from Jewish homes, arguing that it is "1,000 times more
dangerous than television" and threatens the survival of the country.

[27]Head of foot cult is stepping down
THE leader of a Japanese cult who read his followers' fortunes in the
soles of their feet said yesterday that he was resigning on advice
from God.

[28]Bungee ride rebounds on counsellor
THE screams of thrill-seekers on an inner-city bungee ride are proving too much for the patients of a trauma therapist whose consulting rooms are next door.

[29]News in brief
* Rapist and victim, 11, both guilty, says judge
[this was in Maryland--the rapist is 24]
* Red card for women's football
[one of the I believe 3 Nigerian states that have now adopted sharia law finds women's footie to be unIslamic]
* Mob attack after circumcision
[Kenya--the circumcision (male) was performed at a hospital instead of by a witch doctor]
* Farmer kills drunken pigs
[Somewhere Eastern Europe, Bulgaria maybe. He thought they had a horrible disease, but they'd been getting into the waste of a distillery]

As I write I am watching the hilarious Republican debate. At the start of yesterday's Dem debate, Peter Jennings said "This is the first debate of 2000." So after today, it'll be 2 down, 1,998 to go. Read the Jacob Weisberg report on this debate in Slate, it's hilarious reading.

Alan Keyes is a loon. I don't have anything funny to say about that, it's just sad.

Dubya referred to the little Cuban kid as Alien Gonzales.

The first millennial baby is already undergoing open-heart surgery in New Zealand. Always a good sign.

The "Secret Society of Happy People" has announced its holiday, National Admit You're Happy Day.

It's on my fucking birthday.

It is now legal for California drivers not to use hand signals when making turns and stops. You were all using hand signals, weren't you? Besides the obvious one?

In Scranton, a billboard for a shoe store, Shoestrings, the billboard measuring 14 X 48 feet, said on it "Bring in this ad, and you'll get a free pair of shoes." Presumably intended as a joke, but some people did. The store gave them their shoes in exchange for getting the sign back.

A story for former Manhattan Beach residents, who will understand: a gym that opened there this year advertised "Join before 3-7-99 and we will pay your next parking ticket."

Alan Greenspan, economic dictator for life. Why is it that in order to be credible, Democratic presidents have to appoint Republicans to the Supreme Court, Republicans to the Fed and Republicans to head DOD?

So John Anderson will probably be on the California ballot. I might just vote for him, since I was too young to in 1980 (although I was a Barry Commoner fan that year). Of course now he's too old, but what the hell. I'd like to vote for Bill Bradley's wife for First Lady without actually having to vote for Bill Bradley. I think we should get the Constitution amended to allow for this. Of course in 1992 this would have meant that Bill Clinton would have been elected president and Barbara Bush first lady. Sounds like the makings of a sitcom. Oh well, don't mind me, it's way too late at night.

Now Barak wants $14 billion in US arms, including cruise missiles, and real-time access to US spy satellites. I don't think the US can afford for there to be peace in the Middle East. Alternately, those countries could just sign a peace deal because peace is good for their countries, without extorting the massive bribes.

So who was it who, out of the goodness of their heart, paid for Linda Tripp's plastic surgery? Off the top of my head I can think of only a few million better causes, but that's me.

Speaking of fatsos, who would have thought Helmut Kohl was corrupt? The president of Israel has also just been found to have taken a rather large bribe.

But on the integrity side, the parents of Britain's millennium baby did not accept the hundreds of thousands of pounds they could have done. They want their baby to have privacy. Some day the kid will look back and become deeply depressed.

The political games-playing re Elian whatsis, the Cuban boy, goes on. All 6 Republican candidates support his being kept in the US. The Clinton admin wants to make it go away without their ever having to take an actual decision, by getting the father to come to the US, at which point he has the legal right to leave the country with his son. Your mother has just died in front of you and you were found floating in an ocean, what will you do now? I'm going to Disney World! If he were Haitian he'd have been expelled as an illegal alien long since.

As part of the peace deal, if it ever comes, Syria wants to be removed from the US list of states which sponsor terrorism.

Dubya has presided over 113 executions. In the week following the Iowa primaries he is scheduled to execute 3 who were 17. Guess what else they all have in common? If you said, they are black, pat yourself on the back for your excellent understanding of the judicial system.

The Clinton Admin is calling on the Supreme Court not to hear an appeal of the discrimination in Alabama prisons (and others) against HIV-positive prisoners, who are barred from educational and religious and recreational programs, including work-release programs which would get them out of prison faster.

All those British couples competing to have the first kid of the millennium minus one and have it be on tv and stuff, and who wins but a premie. Actually I think they fixed it and that a black kid really won. Also in the running, someone who not only wasn't competing but didn't know she was pregnant.

Other millennial freaks: 3 pairs of twins in America and one in Bulgaria with the kids born in different centuries. First marriage, in New Zealand--televised. First massacre: Natal, South Africa.

On the millennium, the ashes of Graham Chapman of Monty Python were fired on a rocket over a Welsh mountain.

As in Britain, one of the contenders for first millenial baby in Germany was born to a woman who, at 11:30, didn't know she was baby, felt a pain, went to the hospital, and had the baby 15 seconds after midnight. But the probable winner was an unmarried 18-year old.

Some idiot who has officially changed his name to DotComGuy will live off of the Internet for the next year in Dallas. You can watch him on the web, assuming you have even less of a life than he does.

Australia and New Zealand are currently battling it out over who has the millennium baby.

Personally, at midnight I was watching a discussion over the future of Britain and the EU on C-SPAN, if anyone was wondering.

I got the first newspaper with the year 2000 on it and, as I was afraid, it just looks fake, not like a real year at all, rather like the new twenty-dollar bills.

There is fighting in the Spice Islands in Indonesia. I’m not sure, since there hasn’t been much reportage on it, but I think it’s because they just found out that just because they’re the Spice Islands doesn’t mean they get the Spice Girls.

There was a secret plan to build Belfast’s millennium beacon out of decommissioned terrorist weapons. Unfortunately, no one turned any in.

I just ran another check on my computer and found that while it recognizes the year 2000, it does not recognize 2100, when I still plan to be using the computer, if only to piss Kevin off.

A goodbye to the oldest person in the world, who died just before the millennium minus one, at 119. And to anybody else who happens to be raptured.

And a big hello to President Putin, which is Russian for Gerald Ford.

Shouldn’t it be the bi-millennium? Anyway, for those not of the Christian faith, which as far as I know is all of us, the millennium, according to South Park, is the day every thousand years when Jesus comes out and if he sees his own shadow, we will have a thousand years of peace and contentment.

Jesus will appear on the Mount of Olives, and you can watch it on web-cam. Well, you can if your web-server isn’t an incredible wimp like mine, which is shutting down for a day just to be safe.

With increasing mutterings about whether the Russian apartment building bombings were just a Reichstag/Tonkin Gulf-type incident, the Russians miraculously arrested some of the culprits yesterday. Very believable.

So on Monday Turkmenistan abolishes the death penalty, and on Tuesday it names Niyazov president-for-life. I’m sure this amounts to some sort of collective statement about life imprisonment, but whatever.

Guatemala elects a president who is a confessed multiple murderer and, worse, a crony slash puppet of Efrian Rios Montt of evil memory. And it wasn’t even close. In Peru, Fujimori is also giving that president for life thing a go. And in Venezuela, the first thing former failed-coup leader and now elected-president Hugo Chavez does when there’s a national disaster is start wearing military fatigues. At least in the good old days immortalized by the movie Bananas, when these assholes seized power through coups rather than elections, you could kid yourself that the locals would probably prefer to live in a democracy.

A perhaps unfortunate headline in the Washington Post: “Tipper Gore Has Lump Removed.” But he’s still running for president, right?

NY Times headline: Scientists Place Jellyfish Genes into Monkeys. It’s good to have a hobby. And their hobby is Tampering in God’s Domain.

Britain discovered it first, because of their tradition of the Queen sending telegrams to people on their 100th birthday: the YXCX Bug. Computers made Y2K compliant no longer recognize the year 1900, which they now think is 2000. That sound you’ll be hearing a week from today is every computer in the world singing “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do...” in chorus.

A news update from my vacation period.

Texas removed a death row inmate from intensive care two days after he attempted suicide in order to execute him. Dubya’s 113th execution, I believe.

A Zimbabwe couple have a bet as to which of them is infertile. A judge allows the wife until Feb. 22 to have affairs without risking divorce in order to win the bet, which is I believe for $200.

Forbes accused Dubya of being weak on abortion because a stretch of Texas highway is named after a doctor who performed abortions (and whose son is in the state legislature).

A second and third Nigerian state adopt sharia law.

The US wished Panama a merry isthmus (I know, I know).

I said it in one of these very e-mails: Kenneth Starr’s office did not have the authority to waive Maryland law. Tripp and Starr’s people get into a he-said-she-said in court over the alleged promise of immunity, raising the question of why it wasn’t on tape. The members of the Starr Chamber say that what they told her is that they would make it almost impossible for Maryland to convict her, which sounds rather like obstruction. Fortunately for MD, Tripp bragged about taping Monica to her bridge group, and had an Xmas party to which Monica was invited so that all her bridge cronies could look her over.

A robber was caught after holding up someone at an ATM machine. The machine was located in the lobby of the 77th Street police station in LA.

India discovers a prisoner who’s been sitting in a cell since 1963. They postponed his trial due to his mental instability, and forgot to get back to it.

The pope apologizes for the execution of Jan Hus in 1415.

A new law bans crush videos, in which women in high heels crush small animals. Something else you probably read here first, back in 1996 or so.

Two Brits become the first gay couple jointly listed as father on a California birth certificate, with no mother. They hired one woman to bear the in vitro embryo from another woman--reproduction as three-card monte. You can tell they spent too long in Cal. because the kids (twins) are named (shudder) Aspen and Saffron.

Macau goes back to the Chinese, if you consider something that was a Portuguese colony for three plus centuries to belong to China. No one will miss the Portuguese, as ever the worst of all European colonialists. There are a lot of casinos, though, as befits a reservation.

If Barak manages to negotiate a peace deal with Syria, which would evidently cost the US tens of billions of dollars, he will have to use some of that money to bribe the Shas party in order for it to pass the Knesset. Shas’s religious schools have been going bankrupt and have been forced into such expedients as selling videos of a fake exorcism (I hadn’t even known that Jews had exorcisms; I’m picturing Linda Blair spitting up matzo ball soup).

As the Russian elections show, genocide is just good politics.

In one of the great public relations moves of the war, Russia creates a puppet Chechen militia unit under a puppet former mayor of Grozny, who they found, conveniently enough, in a prison serving a term for embezzlement.

Unity in Northern Ireland achieved at last: the first move of the new Stormont Assembly, literally the first, is to vote itself a 30% pay rise.

Emma Thompson has her first child, named, until she can come up with something better, Jane.com.

A church in Little Rock has set up a drive-through Nativity scene. Now normally I’m against drunk driving....

The Daily Telegraph has another of its odd little juxtapositions. One story says that paintballing war games has led to a rise in serious eye injuries. The next says that marijuana improves the vision, that scientists have discovered the ingredient that causes Caribbean fishermen who drink a rum & cannabis concoction to say that they can see in the dark. I think I may just cancel my Thursday opthamologist appointment.

Some of the best political news this year, in case you weren’t paying attention, is the Newt Gingrich divorce. It will give us lots of opportunities to hear about Newtie’s sex life (shudder shudder), but the political part is that his decision to contest it, and allow every sordid detail to be examined publicly, means that his political career is dead forever.

On the other hand, Bob Dornan’s son is thinking about running for Congress.

At the first debate he bothers showing up for, George Dubya says over and over that if Texas were a country it would have the 11th largest economy in the world. He also said that he was the only one of the candidates who had ever signed a tax-cut bill. Great, he signed a bill. He can sign his name on a piece of paper. That qualifies him to run the fries machine at McDonald’s or graduate from USC, but not be president. Still, if word leaked out that there was going to be a test on name-signing at some point in the presidential primaries, it would explain why Quayle dropped out.

New Zealand has the world’s first transexual MP.

How nice that at the Seattle conference on world trade, the US got to display one of its best exports--crowd control weaponry.

Bumper sticker seen in Berkeley: The truly educated never graduate. I don’t think I’ll repeat that one to my mother. The bumper sticker was on a beat-up old Peugeot, if you were wondering.

For everyone on your Christmas list: a book called Meditation for Dummies.

The IRA now has control over education in Northern Ireland. Mostly Protestant education, actually, since the Catholics mostly go to private schools. The rumor is that truancy or throwing spitballs will now be punished by kneecapping.

“Ice Spice” wins the New Zealand election, beating out “Big Spice.”

$50 billion on the Stealth planes, and it can now all be flushed down the toilet, since the Chinese have figured out how to beat it. What the Pentagon planners didn’t think of was the growth in computing power, evidently. The planes may be semi-impervious to radar (as long as they don’t make any sharp turns or open a door to drop a bomb, as I recall) but do make disturbances in ordinary radio and tv waves. These disturbances can be very cheaply monitored, and the pattern figured out through a computer. It’s not only easy, but it’s pretty cheap.

So now that the Iron Curtain is down, a lot of Israeli schools send out parties of students to visit the death camps, which is personally my idea of a waste of a good trip to Europe, but that’s me. The problem is, they’re teenagers. On a field trip. So these kids, from a kibbutz yet, after an afternoon’s entertainment at Treblinka, get back to the hotel and they order up some stippers. This is the latest national scandal in Israel. Incidentally, there were male strippers for the girls and female strippers for the boys, so that famed kibbutzim equality is still going strong.

For any of you now needing to read about a more depressing family than your own: a woman just died in Britain, age 53, who has been in a coma since 1965 following a car crash. Her mother cared for her for 25 years at home.

On tour, the National Philharmonic Orchestra of Russia (est 1879), not selling that many tickets, had to busk on street corners for food in Swansea (Wales).

New Zealand is having an election where the heads of both major parties are women. It has been dubbed the Xena election.

So is Yeltsin playing sick to get out of signing the unification treaty with Belarus? or to escape responsibility for atrocities in Chechnya? Or is he actually sick? Or drunk? Or in withdrawal from the drugs they used to prop him up at that conference in Turkey?

The Kuwaiti parliament fails to approve votes for women. Iraq has sold Scud missiles to Congo-Kinshasa. Florida to have “Choose Life” license plates.

A letter in the NY Times on the case in Michigan of a kid convicted of a murder committed when he was 11 suggests that if 11-year olds can be tried as adults, they should have a jury of their peers as well.

Yesterday I mentioned a nicotine vaccination that will never see the light of day. Today I read of a study showing that certain types of female infertility are traceable to teenage girls wearing too-tight clothing. Whoever wrote this study must be tracked down and killed before they spread it any further.

Ambulances in Romania have installed taxi meters. They will charge the same per-mile rates as the local taxis, but are not supposed to collect from the unconscious or DOAs.

The London mayoral race gets even more interesting as Lord Jeffrey Archer quits as Tory candidate (and unfortunately returns to his career as novelist) after it comes out that he suborned perjury in a libel case that netted him 500,000 pounds (and he only paid the prostitute 2,000 to leave the country). The Tories, who like the Bourbons never forget and never learn, have nominated another adulterer (at least 5 times that we know of) to replace him.

Amazon.com stops selling Mein Kampf to Germany.

“O Come All Ye Faithful” was evidently meant as a covert coded rallying song for Bonnie Prince Charlie in the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion.

An article in Salon reveals jokes Bush the Elder planned to use against Clinton in the 1992 election to show his ignorance of foreign affairs, being a mere governor and all. Every joke can be used against Shrub, of course.

Someone has invented a vaccine against nicotine. OK, so some scientists will get very rich and this invention will never be heard of again, but its potential is interesting. For existing smokers, it would do nothing to help their nicotine addiction, but would make sure that cigarettes didn’t assuage it. It’s potential is more interesting for children. Vaccinate your 12 year old (it’s an annual vaccine) and make sure he never starts smoking.

Tony Blair’s wife is going to have a baby, the first baby born to a sitting PM in 150 years (that baby being Bertrand Russell’s father). The British media are going wild, including trying to figure out where it was conceived (yesterday they thought Tuscany, today France). It brings up the question, how different would the Clinton presidency have turned out, image-wise, if he had knocked up Hillary in 1993? The last kid born in the White House, a still-born, was born the week of my birth.

An article a couple of day’s ago in the NY Times on Gore’s several-year stint as a newspaper reporter commented that he lost interest in the job after a corrupt city councilman he’d helped set up in a bribery sting was acquitted. According to a friend, “I think it destroyed his feelings about justice”. So Gore went to law school instead.

The future smells like socks / Party like it’s 3111

A name has been put to the author of the Protocols of Zion. Something Russian, you could look it up. The guy had quite an interesting life in the secret societies and secret services of Tsarist Russia, exile and whatnot.

I think this is a follow-up, since I think I remember some time ago mentioning a California woman who got a lottery ticket worth over $1 million, promptly divorced her husband of 25 years without telling him, and got sued by him. The judge just awarded all the money to him.

California will allow homosexual couples to adopt.

This week’s Dave Barry column is about his visit to his son’s dorm room. An enjoyable trip down memory lane, except that it sounds like my apartment. Barry says that it’s ok, because they are not there to do housework, they are there to prepare for the future. Which is going to smell like socks.

Congress accused IRS agents of having a quota system. So it set up an inspector general’s office, which will evidently have more investigations of IRS agents next year than there will be audits. How do we know this? Becuase the inspector general’s office has set up a quota system. Before you laugh too hard at the irony of it all, realize that the Republicans’ castration of the IRS means that it is no longer willing to do almost any audits, and those only of poor people (really), and that many rich people now cheat on their taxes with impunity. By by budget surplus. I guess Forbes will get his flat tax after all, but the old-fashioned way, through individual deceit and government complicity.

Trent Lott killed the new organ donation rules in a flat-out grab by the less-urban states for organs. Unseemly and it will kill people, but changing the system so that the more needy get the organs would also mean killing off the transplant expertise in the smaller states, which wouldn’t be good either. We should look at how the blood supply works to see if that system, which is the free-market version, works. Did you know that, by the way? Blood is siphoned off from donor-rich states like Iowa, by the Red Cross which operates as a rather vicious Microsoft-type monopolist, and sells it to the highest bidder, places like NY City.

This is a very important day, the last day on which all the digits of the date (11/19/1999) are odd numbers, until New Year’s, 3111. Party appropriately (oddly, I guess).

Russia has severely chastised the Czech Republic, whose, I forget, president, foreign minister, whatever, met the foreign minister of the Chechen Republic. Russia says this constitutes interference in its internal affairs. Irony is just lost on the Russians, isn’t it?

In Interview, a Little Help on Chechnya
Friday, November 19, 1999; Page A34
(Washington Post)

Texas Gov. George W. Bush has spent much of this week promoting the foreign policy speech he will deliver today in California, giving numerous interviews to television and print journalists to talk about his worldview.

In a telephone interview with the Associated Press on Tuesday, the Republican presidential front-runner read from a draft of his speech that said he would take action “if the Russian government attacks innocent women and children in Chechnya.”

Asked whether that was now happening, Bush moved the phone away from his mouth and shouted, “They are attacking women and children, aren’t they?”

Answer in hand, he resumed the interview and said, “Condi Rice is shaking her head in agreement.”

Singapore puts a couple in jail for a year for smoking marijuana--in Australia, while they were on vacation.

The Queen’s Speech was today. You can’t get tired of all that truly silly ceremony. I especially like the bit where the Queen’s rep, Black Rod (that’s a person, not Clarence Thomas’s nickname for his Little Justice) has the door to the Commons slammed in his face and has to knock three times before they let him in. The queen uttered a split infinitive, which is Tony Blair’s fault and a sign of declining standards everywhere. But then, a nurse addressing the General Synod of the Church of England told it that the homeless lead “shitty” lives. Incidentally, I have said nothing up to now about the race for mayor of London, but it’s the most entertaining political story around and will go on for months. Go Red Ken!

THE END IS NIGH DEPARTMENT: The new Jane Austen movie has had to have some of the sex scenes cut to give it a PG rating.

Donald Trump has successfully passed his first hurdle on the road to the presidency--learning how to shake hands. In the past he’s always avoided the practice, preferring that people bow to him.

A thing I was reading about types of knowledge that will be useful in the future included a bit by the novelist Julie Burchill, who said “There is a lot of cant from the government about the importance of flexibility and not expecting to have a job for life, but this is yet another way of weakening and disorienting the working class, so that eventually they’ll take any job at any price. You don’t see the likes of Tony and Cherie Blair [substitute the Clintons if you like] ever being flexible; they decided what they wanted at a very early age and went for it. The same is true, I bet, of the little Blairs, all of whom were probably hot-housed from the moment they could walk. Once again it’s one law for the rich and another for the poor.”

So a guy’s dog is missing. He takes out an ad in the paper. The ad says, “Here, boy.”

The NY Times review of the movie The Messenger says that “Don’t shoot The Messenger” would have been sound advice.

For the last few years, as you all know, the US has been deporting people through the use of courts that are given secret evidence the defendants and their lawyers aren’t allowed to see. Some of the documents from one such trial have been released. Well, first, it sounds like even the judge didn’t get to see all the evidence. Some of it was sourced as from a friendly intelligence service, and the man is Egyptian, so it was probably his own government framing him in order to get their hands on him. But the best part is the gov said that if he was released after being held three years, it would improve his credibility among Arabs.

Read Molly Ivins on the crap loaded onto the minimum wage bill.

Read, well maybe the Friday LA Times will do a better job than the Thursday paper of analyzing the newly-released files of the California state legislature’s version of HUAC. If anyone knows how precisely sex education in Chico schools was supposed to be communist-inspired, do drop me a note. Unless they’re thinking of Chico Marx. Probably not as energetic as sex ed in the Harpo school district, much less the Groucho school district, but there you are.

Congress brilliantly halved the money to employ Russian nuclear scientists, and eliminated the money to destroy Russian chemical weapons. What are those idiots thinking?

The stupidest member of Congress, Helen Chenoweth, evidently plans to retire.

Mayor Benito Giuliani today said that “The use of soft money has been turned into an art form by the Clintons.” And if there’s one thing we know, it’s that Giuliani doesn’t like anything soft being turned into art.

Still nothing in the New York Times or elsewhere about the Nato bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. And speaking of lack of follow-up, I was really expecting the news a few weeks ago that 100,000 rape kits were gathering dust without any tests being performed would have produced some sort of reaction by now. Evidently politicians are not anti-rape anymore. Still speaking of lack of follow-up, the pope went to India last week, and was met by a lot of protests by Hindus complaining about forced conversion. This gave us the amusing spectacle of the pope speaking out for religious freedom, well his religious freedom anyway.

That reminds me, I heckled a Jew for Jesus on campus today. Evidently if you turn to Jesus you get the gift of the holy spirit. That just proves that Jews for Jesus aren’t real Jews. Jews could get it for you wholesale, but would never give it away. Anyway, even though this got more coverage in the British papers than the American ones, for obvious reasons, no one bothered to investigate or even ask what the Hindus might have meant by forced conversion.

Hillary was in Israel today campaigning for the Jewish vote in New York. I haven’t seen the New York Times yet (where the hell is that paper, anyway?) but the Washington Post’s report doesn’t even begin to suggest what a cluster fuck this event was. The London Times article was much clearer. She was stony faced while being lectured by Arafat’s wife, among other Palestinians, about Israeli atrocities. She let herself be escorted around occcupied East Jerusalem by the Israelis. She tried to work the crowd at the Wailing Wall, which is evidently a bit of a no no. Her guards and the Israeli guards “desecrated” the women’s section of the Wall, people praying were shoved out of the way, nobody told her that you’re not supposed to turn your back on the wall (like the Queen of England, I guess) (or like Bill Clinton, but it’s just common sense not to turn your back on him).

The London Times has an article about the last British cavalryman alive to have wielded a sword in battle, at the Somme in 1916.

Bradley refuses to take his pop quiz, tisk tisk. Gore is no doubt eager to remind the teacher to give him his pop quiz, but is a little hesitant because he’s not sure if that’s alpha male behaviour or not.

Guatemala is evidently about to elect as president an admitted killer (2 he shot in a bar fight in Mexico) who is also a member of the party of Efrain Rios Montt.

The New York Times says that Clinton was a couple of days away from beginning the ground invasion of Kosovo when Milosevic surrendered.

Tajikistan’s dictator Rakhmanov, a name Dubya surely does not know, was just reelected by an entirely legitimate and above board 96%, in a turnout of 98%.

Epsilon male: London Times headline on the story about Dubya’s failure to put names to world leaders, including the one whose coup he praised: “Bush Has Blank Spot for World Leaders.”

The results of the House of Lords elections are in. Baroness Strange can continue to bring flowers. Lord Onslow (It would be as vainglorious etc) also wins, as does Conrad Russell, a historian, so there, and son of Bertrand Russell. I’m reading a biography of his great-grandfather right now, as it happens.

Oregon rejects a referendum that would have allowed conviction for murder by 11 of 12 members of a jury, so there may be some sanity left in the world after all.

An I told you so: a few weeks back I said the way to embarrass Dubya was not to ask about cocaine but to ask him to name the prime minister of France. A Boston station asked him to name 4 prime ministers. He got one.

Check out the Molly Ivins column in the Star-Telegram about the Colombia war. Again, she says what I said months ago.

Yet another NY Times editorial about the New Isolationism. There isn’t really a new isolationism, in that no one is advocating that the US abandon the international arena. Some are advocating that it abandon its international responsibilities, but that is another matter entirely. What they are saying is that the US won the cold war and can do anything it wants, including forcing other countries to do whatever we want them to, but without any pretense of ideology, or any of the duties that accrue to power. And that is my final word on the New Isolationism.

Monty Python once envisioned elections fought by the Sensible Party, the Slightly Silly Party, and the Very Silly Party. I think we’ve got something like that now. I saw several headlines about the new Argentine president that used the word “boring.” Now about three years back one of the genres that could be spotted in my e-mails was the wacky South American politician story. You couldn’t be elected mayor of Lima or president of Ecuador without getting married inside a lion’s cage and calling yourself El Loco. Now the old election-o-meter has swung back to the boring party. I think this country needs to scrap the existing party system and switch to the Boring Party and the Entertaining Party. Gore versus Ventura. Hell, the only way Gore will ever get elected president is in a massive reaction to four years of rule by the Silly Party. A modest proposal for 4 in the morning. Or 3 in the morning, but I’m entirely in support of the guy in the Czech Republic who’s trying to stop Daylight Savings Time in court. He calls it genocide, I’m not quite sure why, but I know what party he supports.

I understand the website of the Florida Supreme Court has pictures from an execution. Those whacky guys! One execution just got postponed because the guy now thinks he’s Jesus or something. A state legislator offered to build a cross himself.

The Russians finally admit that they knew all along what happened to Hitler, and he’s evidently not in Argentina. They kept the bones, burning and disposing of most of them in the German sewer system in 1970. The skull is still somewhere in KGB files. Is this a perfect Halloween story or what?

So the US & NATO went into Kosovo, killed 1,500 or so civilians through bombing, in order to stop the massive genocide going on. So where are all the bodies? Where are the mass graves? We can find these things from orbit now, so where are they? Well, they’ve turned up some bodies so far, maybe 1,400, and it doesn’t look like there are going to be more than a few thousand.

The newest country in the UN--evidently it slipped in last month without my noticing--is Nauru. Nauru’s economy is evidently no longer entirely dependent on bird shit, since they’ve evidently mined it all, and is now based on laundering Russian mob money.

In 1857, faced with the entry of the British, the Xhosa (of South Africa--Nelson Mandela is one) came up with the brilliant idea, well actually a 15-year old girl had a vision, and killed all of their cattle, 200,000 head, and stopped planting crops. Oddly enough, this resulted in many of them starving to death. Naturally, they blame the British and yesterday sent Prince Charles a bill.

Clinton signs pork-laden DOD budget, saying “I cannot allow our national security needs to be held hostage to this budget battle.” Ah, an arms-for-hostages deal. Come back, Ollie North, all is forgiven.

Pat Buchanan said yesterday “The backsliding toward hyphenated Americanism must end.” Buchanan, a fascist-American, then went on tv and divided blame for Auschwitz between the Nazis and oddly enough the Russian NKVD.

AP article from Franklin, Ohio: “A high school teacher has been reprimanded for offering as a writing assignment the question: “If you had to assassinate one famous person who is alive right now, who would it be and how would you do it?”

NY Times headline, “For Her 52d Birthday, the First Lady Feels Like Raising a Million, and Does”. At the fund-raiser, Mia Farrow read from Hillary’s book It Takes a Village. You cannot make stuff like that up. Nor would you want to.

Fairness and Accuracy in Media reports that the Observer story about the US intentionally bombing the Chinese embassy in Belgrade has still not been picked up by the evening broadcasts of the 3 networks, the NY Times, US Today, etc...

Things to read: Molly Ivins’s analysis of the dangers of the new banking/insurance re-monopolization bill; Jacob Weisberg’s piece in Slate analyzing last Friday’s Republican debates.

Pat Buchanan is not worried about running against The Donald, insisting that the Reform Party nomination is not for sale. Um, right. I forget, who have they nominated in the past?

Obit of the week, Van France, who wrote the Disneyland manual “for teaching Disneyland employees precisely how to smile”. To quote the NY Times: “Among graduates of Mr. France’s Disney University are the comedian Steve Martin and Ronald Ziegler, Richard Nixon’s press secretary.”

Now that we’re seriously entering the business of transplanting hearts and lungs from pigs to humans, Britain will require transplantees to promise not to have children. We should be going further and requiring sterilization; this is too seriously dangerous to fuck around with.

----------------------------------------


A New York magazine competition, calling for brief smart-aleck reviews:

Eyes Wide Shut: And keep them that way.

The Making of the President: No, it’s not what you think.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High: Some assembly required.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre: Two thumbs off.

Misery: doesn’t love company.

Unfinished Business: Mediocr.

The Stranger: In bookstores today. Or yesterday...

The Dead: You better believe it.

Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations: You’ve read the title, now read the book.

Witness: Amish-mash.

Das Kapital: It’s the economy, stupid.

The Prince of Egypt: Passover.

The Last Emperor: Deja fu.

Hamlet: Mundane.

[NOTE: More New York Magazine competitions here.]

follow-up

A few days ago I sent out the annual Turner Prize article, which mentioned a piece of “art” at the Tate Gallery featuring a bed with stains and rumpled sheets and whatnot recalling the four days the artist spent sick on it.

Today, some Chinese performance artists stripped to their underwear and jumped up and down on the bed, having a pillow fight. Everybody’s a critic.

More peers’ campaign statements

Russia is saying the Grozny market they bombed yesterday was an arms market. Right.

More of those 75-word manifestos by peers seeking to be elected to retain their seats in the House of Lords (earlier post here), culled from a couple of papers:

The 13th Earl of Seafield, a Tory Old Etonian, used Latin to argue his case: “Being a small and happy bison farmer with aspirations above his station has not yet been a bar to energetic service of Country and Sovereign through an independent chamber. Si fractum non sit, noli id reficere [If it ain’t bust, don’t mend it.]”

Lord Pender, an old Etonian former Army officer, is admirably succinct and has put forward the shortest manifesto containing one word: “Duty”.

The veteran Liberal Democrat peer, Lord Avebury, sets out his stall as a “full time member, Buddhist, cyclist, Camberwell resident, paterfamilias”.

Earl Alexander of Tunis: ‘By the living God who made me, but I love this country. My father fought for her all his life and I too have worn her colours with pride. If it is given to me to remain in your Lordships’ House I will struggle with all I have to offer.’ [You’re a better hereditary peer than I am, Gunga Din]

Earl Arran: ‘With a sometimes over zealous and triumphalist Executive, a Second Chamber of independence and good sense, of reflection and correction, is so important to the respect for Parliament by the British people. Such lifeblood of independence I will fight to preserve.’

Earl De La Warr: ‘Attendance record poor. Reason - full-time job in City (Director of Corporate Finance Department of a European Investment Bank), not lack of interest.”

Earl Granard: ‘Vote for a conservative counterbalance to the ‘Trendy’ modernising influence of The Lords Spiritual. Is nothing sacred?’

Earl Lauderdale: ‘Chairman European Scrutiny Sub-Committee F (later D) 1974-79 notorious therein for requiring crisp clarity instead of verbose ‘officialese’ in Committee reports.’

Lord Seaford: ‘Being a small and happy bison farmer with aspirations above his station has not yet been a bar to energetic service of Country and Sovereign through an independent chamber.’ [Now, wait, is *he* small and happy or are the bison small and happy?]

Cross-benchers

Viscount Alanbrooke: ‘The THIRD REICH was defeated largely through the strategic planning of Sir Winston Churchill and Field Marshal The Viscount Alanbrooke, CIGS and Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee. Alanbrooke was awarded a HEREDITARY peerage in 1946. His massive contribution to the continuance of our freedom can be respected by ensuring that the Honour conferred on him by Monarch and People should be maintained in the exact detail intended for perpetuity.’

Lord Amwell: ‘A working class hereditary peer - rare species. A chartered engineer and the House’s only chartered geologist.’

Baroness Arlington: ‘My determination and resolve has been immeasurably strengthened by the sudden death of my husband who played such an important part in supporting me this year when I took my seat.’

Lord Catto: ‘For the last 40 years since my father died I have considered it morally wrong, purely from accident of birth, to presume to become a member of a legislative body. On the other hand I strongly support a bicameral system with a small number of representative hereditary peers included to maintain and support the monarchy and the great traditions of our country.’ [So what the hey]

Lord Craigmyle: ‘I came to your Lordships’ House in the same spirit as I would have accepted jury duty, or call-up in times of war. Had I wanted to stand for election, I would have tried another place, long ago.’

Labour

Lord Rea: ‘Initially a reluctant peer, I now attend and sing for my supper regularly.’

So has anyone heard of this California state senator Pete Wright who is sponsoring an anti-gay marriage initiative and has a gay son and a dead gay brother, mentioned in tomorrow’s Washington Post? The son is evidently writing op-ed pieces about what a bigot his father is. I’m just guessing that Orange County is involved in this story somewhere.

Russia, still following NATO’s Kosovo playbook, bombs a maternity hospital.

Britain, to make Jiang Zemin at home during his state visit, has been beating up protestors and taking away Tibetan flags. One protestor who probably won’t be beaten up: Prince Charles, who is boycotting the state banquet.

Women MPs in Britain are getting a breastfeeding room. I’ll bet Congress doesn’t have that.

Did you know that nuclear weapons are illegal? Evidently the International Court of Justice ruled that in 1996. Today, a British court let off some women who snuck onto a Trident submarine base and started wrecking the place, on the grounds that the nukes were illegal.

Elizabeth Dole pulls out of the Presidential race, citing lack of money, and calls for the passing of stringent campaign finance reform. I kid, of course. Now the elections will be sadly lacking her message and her issues, which had something to do with being chosen as vice president and being a woman (although she did always look like a man in drag to me).

A report is released listing most of the 23 countries in which the US stored nukes in the ‘50s. What doesn’t seem to have made the American papers is that less than 10 years after the end of World War II Luftwaffe pilots had effective control over nuclear warheads. This ended in 1960, when we figured out how to put The Club on them.

Jesse Helms is holding up the nomination of former Senator Carol Moseley-Braun as ambassador to New Zealand because she opposed the United Daughters of the Confederacy using the Confederate battle flag.

Russia is finally ending its military occupation of Latvia on Thursday. Yeah, it was a surprise to me too.

A Teheran court sentences someone to have his eyes gouged out before he is hanged.

David Trimble, the Ulster Unionist leader, says that the sectarian marches are just good old fashioned fun for the whole family, folk festivals if you will, which one day will be major tourist attractions. I can just see it. The Macy’s Anniversary of King Billy Kicking the Crap Out of the Bloody Papists Day Parade. Just needs the addition of large helium balloons of lovable cartoon characters like Bullwinkle, Snoopy and Ian Paisley.