Jesse Helms is history, Linda Tripp is broke and all is right with the world.

Zimbabwe's invasions of white-owned farms, beyond destroying this year's harvest and Zimbabwe's economy, is now spreading foot and mouth disease.

Last year Utah's Republicans stopped the legislature passing a bill to ban guns in schools and churches. This year, they've
decided to allow them at the state Republican convention, which Dick Cheney will address.

Well I'm still enjoying the Tory party leadership battle, now going into what seems like its third year. Ian Duncan Smith, it seems, has padded his lack of resume. See, he's been bragging that he has been so disloyal to his party leadership that he turned down offers of government jobs to be able to fight the Major government on Europe. But he was never offered any such job. Kenneth Clarke, on the other hand, has had a day job, as deputy chairman of a tobacco company, BAT (the 2nd biggest in the world), in which capacity he lied to a parliamentary committee about his knowledge of cigarette smuggling operations.

Don't know if anyone else is following Zimbabwe, which gets nastier and nastier. Today it threatened editors and reporters,
including one editor who reprinted a Sunday Times story about Mugabe being haunted by ghosts of his former aides. Anyway, he's now looking to buy 30 riot control vehicles. From Israel.

Recently, I think in the last News of the Weird, there was mention of a St Louis filibuster in which the alderwoman had to use a bucket while a quilt was held around her. She has been charged with public urination.

The LA Times reports that Bush is getting around the Congressional limit on civilian contractors used in Colombia by having the State Department hire foreign pilots, and not reporting the fact to Congress.

Coincidentally, that bill I mentioned some weeks ago in which Colombian military authorities are given supreme authority, and many other nasty provisions, was just enacted.

Prince Edward and Princess Sophie have gone on strike. To quote the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, "Who would that inconvenience?" They have no royal engagements scheduled for
the rest of the year, but evidently still plan to keep the $250,000 or so they are paid by the British public each year.

Headline from a while back, "Canadians Flee in Spanking Dispute." Actually, I never heard more about that. Some cultists left Canada for the US, hoping their belief in rather stern corporal punishment of their children would be protected under the 1st Amendment.

A letter to the LA Times that I clipped as quintessentially SoCal calls for controls on immigration because the guy has to spend 4 hours commuting from Orange County to his job in Culver City, which is much longer than he thinks it should be. The letter doesn't say, but somebody like that has to drive an SUV.

So Israel, pissed with the way Palestine has been policing its terrorists, keeps flattening police stations, presumably pour encourager les autres (which is a French historical reference, translating as "to exercise the Darth Vader School of Management").

Presumably by now little Napoleon Beelzebub, or whatever his name is, has been executed in Texas. Killed the father of a federal judge, who used every contact to have him offed in return. For the first time in history, Supreme Court justices have to recuse themselves from a case, and 3 of them have to, leaving only 3 willing to stop the execution, and evidently ties are resolved in favor of death. Was a minor. Was a black tried by an all-white jury, judge, prosecutor, etc. who had the son looking over their shoulders. [Actually, after I wrote this a stay was issued, but I don’t know on what grounds]

The British suspend the Northern Irish government, in order to reactivate it one day later. The IRA withdraws its disarmament offer from 6 days ago. If you can grab this marble before my hand closes, Grasshopper....

Bush thinks India has suffered long enough for starting that whole nuclear arms race and violating the nuclear test ban,
and lifts sanctions. Also pardoned: the Indonesian military, poised to do who knows what in Acheh.

According to the NY Times of a day or two ago, the drug OxyContin of which so much has been said lately (the high of choice in 2001, for those of you who keep up with those things) could easily have been engineered so that abusing it (snorting or injecting it) would have produced no high at all. The drug company decided not to. I'm sure it was just an oversight.

I'm home again. At two spots on I5, there was only one lane because of what they laughingly called construction. Added an hour to the trip, which I will never get back. After the merger at the second one, we had gotten back up to half-speed when there was a sudden slow-down. Well, not really that sudden, but the truck behind me wasn't paying attention and didn't have time to stop. That’s ten years scared out of me that I’ll never get back.

It would be fun to sheherezade that story and pick it up in an e-mail tomorrow, but I guess I won't, and just tell you that the truck swerved onto the shoulder, avoiding pulverizing me.

So what did you think of Spurious George's stem-cell speech? His very first address to the nation, if you can believe it. Hardly worth interrupting his or my vacation for, if you ask me. It was very Clintonesque, in that it compromised his principles but still undercut the people it was supposed to help, while pissing off both sides. Very gays-in-the-military. My mother pointed out that he was wearing seriously thick makeup to disguise his recent skin cancer procedures. Come to think of it, why is moron-boy outside playing golf every day after that? The New York Times points out that his policy turns out to be more liberal than Clinton's because it dumped all the ethical protections for acquiring stem cells, like not asking permission exactly at the moment they're trying to impregnate a woman, when she is emotionally vulnerable (not least from all the hormones they pump her full of in preparation) to such pressure.

This morning as I was reading the LA Times, a peahen and 4 little peafowl came up to the door, just like Jehovah's Witnesses. I told them I didn't want any.

Germany is looking for a new but really long name for gay
marriages. The new registered homosexual unions (and if you were gay would you be wanting the German government to have your name on a list?) are called Eingetragene Lebenspartnerschaft. There's a bad pun in there, but far be it for me...

Bush is torpedoing yet another international agreement, this one on land mines.

After all that fuss about a new Japanese textbook that whitewashed Japanese atrocities, none of the local education authorities adopted it. It will be used by only 1,300 children (in schools for the mentally handicapped and chronically ill).


From the Daily Probe:
BUSH: "AMERICA NOT ISOLATIONIST, JUST SHY"

Smuggling

Last night I watched a made-for-cable movie in which someone attempts suicide the day before his birthday. Think Showtime was trying to tell me something?

Bush on his month-long vacation in Texas: "I am the kind of person that needs to get outdoors.... it keeps my mind whole." Bush, who is not good with fractions, was of course rounding up.

According to today's LA Times, Ariel Sharon thinks that the whole problem with Israel's current world standing is one of PR. He thinks that besides stressing security, they should repeatedly stress that the land is theirs by divine right. I bring this up to emphasize how out of touch with the universe Sharon is, making an argument based on theology only Jews and a few fundamentalist Christians believe in.

Germany is shocked that the incoming US ambassador, former senator Dan Coats, who has not even been confirmed, is speculating aloud that Germany needs to raise its military spending. In the same story (in the Daily Telegraph) is a side-bar that German soldiers have been ordered to use less toilet paper. German soldiers have become such wimps. It used to be traditional for them to wipe their asses on France.

Dick Cheney says there is "some justification" for Israel's assassination policy.

The Italian parliament passes a law decriminalizing false accounting--coincidentally one of PM Berlusconi's crimes.

A region of China (Huaiji) population unfortunately not named in the article, has been ordered to conduct 20,000 abortions and forced sterlizations by the end of the year.

rebates

I'm in LA, where gas prices are even higher than up north, and indeed even higher by a full dime than what I paid in Kettleman City on I5.

LA is actually more densely built up than ever before, what I saw of it on either side of the SD Freeway, so most of that expensive gas is used in idling. That's the thing about LA: it's laid-back, but even laid-back is expensive here.

Not Nice

A nice headline from the Times: Tories will still oppose Nice, says Clarke. That's the Nice treaty; they're not actually against niceness, at least not to hear them tell it.

Follow up: That Egyptian feminist who was hauled into court by Islamic loons who wanted her forcibly divorced has had the case thrown out.

William Kennedy Smith is thinking of running for Congress, and has already commissioned focus groups to see what they think about a rapist, oh excuse me acquitted rapist, representing them. Wouldn't you love to watch the video on that one?

Yesterday I saw a gas pump with a little tv screen in it, so you can watch CNN Headline News while pumping your gas. This is just plain silly.

Even sillier, walking across a whale carcass in Australia so you can pet the shark feeding on it.

In 1914 and to a lesser extent in 1915, there were Christmas truces in World War I, where British and German soldiers came out of their trenches and played football. The last surviving participant in any truce just died at 106. He was also the oldest man in Britain.

The Danish Justice Minister is threatening to arrest Israel's new ambassador to Denmark, a former head of Shin Bet who has admitted to authorizing torture.

Just plain mean:
BOSNIAN Serb police have sent a £175,000 bill to organisers of a commemoration for the thousands of Muslim men massacred in Srebrenica, saying they must pay for security services.

Everyone reported that when Wahid went out on the balcony to declare that he was still president of Indonesia, he was wearing shorts and a polo shirt. This space can also confirm that he was wearing flip-flops. This is why it's a little hard to take his attempt to retain power all that seriously, although it's not as good as when a couple of days ago his declaration of a state of emergency was read out by an aide while he took a nap--on camera.

I just want to point out that, like Estrada being forced out in the Philippines, this was not repeat not an example of "people power." These were elected leaders who should never have been elected, because it was obvious what they were.

Speaking of wing-nuts, Bush ended the Clinton program of buying back guns from housing projects, which took 20,000 guns off the streets.

On an unrelated note, Ashcroft is on the cover of the NRA magazine this month. I understand the fold-out is an Uzi.

The Basque government plans to hold a referendum on independence, despite threats from the Spanish government.

An Anglican nun was talking about the hostility faced by nuns in East London. Someone yelled "fucking nun" at her, and she told him it was one or the other.

Not a very funny story, but you don't often see the word "fucking" in the Daily Telegraph. But as it turns out, they were quoting the Church Times.

Saw a story on the BBC about an Australian swimming coach who made his students faster by putting a crocodile in the pool with them (mouth taped) (the croc's, not the students'). The Beeb didn't remark on this bit, but the town was Darwin.

There is a credible theory now going round that Van Gogh did not cut off his own ear, but that Gaughin did it. Certainly makes a lot a more sense.

And that leads me back to the question of Lincoln and mercury, addressed here a few days ago. I read that story in two British papers. The NY Times didn't have it and I didn't see it in the Washington Post either. The British are more interested in the American past than the Americans are.

Knowing how trend-conscious all of you are, I thought I'd pass this on: soup is the new salad.

Bush has found yet another international treaty to wreck: chemical warfare.

The Israeli Jewish terrorist group that killed the 3-month old Palestinian is called the Committee for Road Safety.

Why have the police been bothering Gary Condit all this time if they knew he had a brother named Darrell Wayne Condit?

Bush is trying to increase the number of "civilian contractors" sent to assist the Colombian military and/or death squads.

A () bites () story / Getting your sea-legs / exploding cow (oh, is that what it takes to get your attention?)

Bush was in Britain today, chowing down with the Queen. Someone streaked, which is just so '70s. Daughter Barbara went along, but had to eat with the other kids at the card table. No one is saying whether she, like Bill Clinton at around her age, took advantage of the laxer laws of the mother country and had a little wine with her meal.

When writing about Cheney's plan not to pay his electricity bills (and the Daily Show did my joke better with a line about Cheney being plugged into a nickel-cadmium charger over-night), I neglected to mention the small print, which is that he also wants to be able to take donations (read: bribes) from corporations for consumable goods for official functions at Blair House.

As is its usual practice, the Pentagon first declared victory in its Star Wars test Monday, and then admitted later that the system had actually failed, again.

The G8 conference in Genoa will be met by an Italian-style protest. The locals, already pissed off at the heavy-handed security arrangements, are really annoyed at being told not to hang their washing out. Expect a lot of underwear. A lot.

Colin Powell, showing that facility for the language that no doubt won him his current job, said this week, "It takes a while to tighten your saddle and get your sea legs." I think I see what his problem is...

Neat

As expected, Michael Portillo, the only Tory leadership
candidate with a chance of making Blair even breathe hard, was eliminated from the race today. Times' columnist Matthew Parris said that the during the counting it was so quiet you could have heard a dagger drop.

Cheney, about to start his tour in support of his Saving Our Precious Life Style By Putting a Power Plant on Every Block energy plan, has asked that his office not have to pay the skyrocketing electricity bills at the VP mansion. The extra electricity is necessary to charge the robot which replaced the late Mr. Cheney last month. The robot is thought to be the old Gorebot but with a new head. Dick Cheney: his love is real, he is not.

Spurious George has been doing interviews with the British press. He told the Times that the Queen is "neat." He told the BBC that Russia is no longer our enemy, therefore it is necessary to set aside the ABM treaty, which locks us in a hostile relationship.
Something like that. Who knew it was just an arms control treaty standing in the way of eternal peace.

Philip Morris has told the Czech government that killing off smokers 5 years early saves the gov much more money than the additional medical costs. Our heroes.

Abraham Lincoln for years periodically went into homicidal rages because he was taking quack medicine with a large amount of mercury. He went off the stuff several months after becoming president. This never happens with robots.

Virgin nurses and the return of Stakhanov

Turkish student nurses and midwives will have to take virginity tests. I'm gonna take a guess that this applies only to females.

Continuing his onward march to the 1930s, Putin has implemented a program in which model workers will be honored.

Molly Ivins's column today is on the proposal to change North Dakota's name to Just Dakota. She says that since if they seceded from the US they'd be the third largest nuclear power, we should really let them call themselves anything they want.

I now have a position on this. I think it should change its name to Extreme Dakota! That exclamation point isn't my way of ending that sentence; I think it should be part of the name.

Bush Lite will be visiting Britain this week. In advance of that, the British ambassador will present him with a bust of Winston Churchill. He will spend the rest of the trip wondering why they gave him a bust of W.C. Fields.

The Pentagon finally got a successful Star Wars test the only way it knew how: it cheated. They gave their missile crib notes so it could distinguish a real from a fake missile. In real life this wouldn't happen, and the Star Wars system would flounder around like Bush after Cheney's fatal heart attack.

The front-runner to replace Hague as head of the Tory party is about to go down in flames. Michael Portillo, aka The Spaniard, will crash and burn because he's too reasonable for the party (and he's not that reasonable), because he's had sex with men, because his people claimed that he was backed by Margaret Thatcher, who was not pleased, loudly, and because he is a conniving little back-stabber, who leaked against Hague to the press during the last election. This should have come as no surprise. When John Major, in a stunt, resigned as party leader and told the party to back him or sack him, Portillo expressed complete support, but the BBC followed around British Telecom trucks and discovered that he was setting up a campaign office.

Book seen in the window of the UCB bookstore: A History of Lesbian Hair.

A man in Ohio was sentenced to 10 years in prison for child pornography. Not pictures. He wrote stories. In his diary. Which he showed no one else.

Fun web sites

German tv stations are cancelling almost all of their comedies, after finding out that Germans don't get humor.

Bernard Goetz (remember him?) is running for mayor of NY on a platform of vegetarianism, but has yet to be noticed by the NY Times.

Some web-sites to check out:

http://www.kukluxklan.org/just_for_kids.htm is just what it says it is, and could hardly be more creepy. Check out the "But some black people are nice, aren't they?" section. Then click on the main KKK section and buy a t-shirt at the gift shop.

The following will present a dilemma for Chris, because it is the web site of the Dull Men's Club, whose web-site lists all sorts of dull things for dull people to do. However, if Chris reads the whole URL, he will realize that this one has something to do with airports, and will be unable to resist clicking on it.

Actually, the site missed one activity. I mean it mentions watching corn grow, but I seem to remember that there's an actual web-cam somewhere.... Fill out the test to find if you are dull (did you ever have an urge? were you able to get over it?) (and I fully realize the irony that I have been reading this site on a Friday night).

http://www.yourgoingtohell.com
You may be able to guess what this one's like just from the fact that there's a misspelling in its URL. Find out why you will be spending eternity in hellfire, by clicking on atheists, Jews, Catholics, scientologists, people who pray to angels, etc etc etc (some do not work). Also, neato music, more misspellings, and images that seem to have been clipped from some odd sources.

Say kids, what time is it?

Well, someone's finally invented a clock accurate
to a quadrillionth of a second (a femtosecond), and I say it's way overdue.

Actually, the project was based on a misunderstanding caused by a stuck keyboard at the White House, which produced a memo saying, "President Bush will be taking a nap, could someone wake him up around 2:00:00000000000000000."

It's so crazy it just might work: Kenya's Daniel arap Moi says that AIDS can be stopped if all Kenyans would just not have sex for two years. Which is easy for him to say, since he must be pushing eighty.

Come for the legislation, stay for the snuff

According to the Guardian, smoking has been banned in the British House of Commons since 1693, well before the invention of California, but snuff is not only not banned, but is available free to members, not that many have taken advantage of it since Churchill retired in 1964. Indeed, the supplier reports that there have been no re-orders for 7 years. The Guardian is going to ask some poor MP to try it and report back, and I will pass the information along.

Thursday's Washington Post explains the nature of the dealings between the White House and the Salvation Army.

Perhaps I'm wrong in connecting two stories on the same page in today's NY Times, but it seems as if China is proving its capability of staging the Olympics Games by staging war games off Taiwan. Now remember, IOC, a vote for Beijing is a vote for mass deportations of beggars, mass arrests of dissidents and mass slaughter of stray (and other) dogs.

I haven't talked about Gary Condit yet. I'm tired of police engaging in public relations exercises and making deals with other people's PR people, such as whatever deal required them to say over and over that Condit was not a suspect. Of course he is.

Did anyone else see that thing at Kennebunkport, where Bush was asked about Putin and said something about Putin being concerned with extremism and Bush was too, where it was obvious that any follow-up question would have exposed that Bush had no idea what he was talking about?

Puns!

In Berkeley today I saw a woman with a t-shirt that said "I make boys cry."

Well, I was planning to make fun of a headline in the NY Times business section--"Switzerland: Hip Implant Lawsuits"--but I think the pun quota for the day has already been filled by the London Times, which reported the return of a Croatian Wimbeldon winner to his home town of Split with the headline "Split goes bananas for local hero Goran."

Fun stories this week you may have missed because they were broken by one newspaper and not generally picked up by other newspapers:

When asbestos was banned, W R Grace found itself prepared to move into the market vacuum suddenly opened up with a product that did the same product but didn't have asbestos. The only problem: it actually had asbestos. But less of it. So they pressured the (newly formed) EPA into setting a standard just high enough to ban all other products but theirs, and then spent decades lying about its asbestos content, and the danger therefrom.

Bush has a deal with the Salvation Army where they lobby for his "faith-based" policy and he exempts them from state and local government policies about groups that discriminate against gays. The Bush administration's first reaction was to call the Salvation Army a bunch of liars. (By the way, the Salvation Army is about to be banned in Moscow although not, I think, because of its policy re homosexuals.)

The Germans are about to remake Fawlty Towers, starting with updated versions of the scripts used for all but 1 of the originals. No cash prizes for guessing which one.

Most wonderful human being

New Yorker cartoon shows parents talking to their, say, 8-year old son: Now son, its very very important that you remember where you electronically transferred mommy and daddy’s assets to.

The media are a little schizophrenic (or just ignorant) about the Afghan warlord/vice president who was assassinated. I’ve read that he had an aggressive drug eradication program, and that he was implicated in drug sales (not necessarily mutually exclusive, I suppose, on the Bill Gates model), and The Times has 2 headlines, one saying Afghans Mourn Murdered Leader... and the other Feared Warlord... (again, perhaps on the Bill Gates model).

Director John Frankenheimer has died. I think we can all agree that he was the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.!

Speaking of schizophrenic and/or ignorant media, during the conference on African development a couple of weeks back, I saw two different reports, one in a newspaper, one by the BBC on Botswana, presented as the one African country was economy wasnt in the toilet. They looked for the secret of its success, brushing past the obvious answer: location location location; in this case, on type of huge diamond deposits. However today the story in the Telegraph and the Guardian is that Botswana faces extinction from AIDS, now affecting 39% of its adult population.

Headline that could and probably should be taken two ways: Bush Readies Corporate Scandal Plan.

Jenna Bush is slapped on the wrist. A fine and a one-month suspension of her driving license. First, it is stupid to suspend drivers' licenses for offenses unrelated to driving. Second, she'll just get the Secret Service to drive her.

I keep hearing rumors about a fourth Indiana Jones
movie. The Times commented that Indie is an archaelogist searching for old relics before pointedly adding that Harrison Ford is 59 and Mishter Connery 70.

Evidently Stalin used to draw humorous caricatures. For example, in one cartoon, which Ilizarov believes Stalin drew around 1930, his finance minister, Nikolai Bryukhanov, is depicted naked, hanging from a rope by his genitals. You can find the drawing at the www.sunday-times.co.uk, world news section, but it's kind of small.

Weird shit

Putin, through Gazprom, just silenced the last independent national media outlet, a radio station. Not surprisingly, the event received very little coverage inside Russia. And probably not much anywhere else.

If nothing else comes from the war crimes trials of Milosevic, etc, at least it made Ariel Sharon this week have to avoid Belgium, where an investigation of his war crimes is going on (the old ones in Lebanon, not the new ones). Not, of course, that being banned from Belgium is especially onerous.

Click here; don't ask any questions, just do it.

It is now illegal in Colorado to wear aluminum underwear. "This is serious business," insists State Sen. Stephanie Takis, who sponsored the bill. "We have laws against using crowbars as theft devices, but if you were lining your underwear with aluminum foil, that was not a crime." It is now. Apparently, shoplifters found such so-called "iron pants" allow them to sneak stolen items past anti-theft scanners at store doors. The law also allows store security officers to detain people who "crackle when they walk," but provides an exception for aluminum britches worn for "personal amusement". (Colorado Springs Gazette)

Dubya has been told by his advisors to look more relaxed. So he's been playing golf, which as we all know is very presidential. And he cheated, which is also very presidential.

From the NY Times review of Scary Movie 2: "Perhaps, in a rare instance of subtle social satire, this film is being released on July 4 to remind America of the high cost of freedom of speech."

Decision-making

I just got a call from the Chronicle. The caller asked if I was the decision-maker of the household. I said, "Yes, and I'm gonna make a decision now." And hung up the phone. How I do adore a straight line.

Israel says that it is sticking to the cease-fire, except for tracking down and assassinating people.

Zhirinovsky (born Eidelstein??) admits that his father was a Jew.

300 witches are killed in Congo-Kinshasa.

The Dubai husband who divorced his wife by text message
is back with her.

In Britain, the Co-op has decided to resist EU directives not to sell under-size fruit and vegetables. The headline (in both the Times and Daily Telegraph): We Will Fight Them on the Peaches.

NY Times business section headline: "Burger King Pledges Humane Use of Animals." For example, they're planning to eliminate the 1% beef content of their hamburgers. According to the Burger King spokesmodel, "We are the caretakers of God's creation."

Vladimir Putin met Jack Nicholson yesterday, and I still haven't thought of anything funny to say about it. Evidently Putin's favorite movie of Nicholson's was the (banned in the USSR) One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Putin was in the KGB at the time, so he may have thought it was a comedy.

Cheney is getting a pacemaker. Well, they're always saying that Bush is "a little slow," so maybe Cheney should just use him. Cheney said "that he had no long-term concerns about his health". Maybe he should re-phrase that.

So the writer who led Clarence Thomas's character assassination of Anita Hill admits that he made stuff up and blackmailed a witness with information supplied by Thomas. I've been waiting all week since then for anyone, and I mean anyone at all in politics or the media or professional wrestling, to call for his resignation. No one else has, so consider it done. As I remarked in my corner of the ether when Clinton admitted lying to everyone including the Cabinet members who he had front for him about That Woman and no one resigned in protest, shame is absolutely dead in politics.

So every review of Tomb Raider (and no, I wasn't thinking of seeing it, but I do enjoy reviews of bad movies) mentions Angelina Jolie's physical attributes. One could say that they review Angelina Jolie's physical attributes. The NY Times Week In Review section had excerpts from a bunch of reviews just about her lips, but let's face it, even the Daily Show's incredibly gay film reviewer talked about her breasts. When did this become ok? Indeed, is it ok, given that the studios do spend a lot of money to buy a nice pair of breasts, with actress attached, in the hope of using them to open a movie. In Swordfish, for example, a badly reviewed film that just opened, Halle Barrie went topless for the first time and was paid an extra $250,000. Each. Under those circumstances, perhaps it would be appropriate to review the breasts just as one would do for any other expensive special effect ("Every penny is right there up on the screen"). Maybe we need another drawing for that little man in the SF Chronicle.

I forgot to mention the initiative in North Dakota to change its name to Dakota, because evidently "North Dakota" evokes an image of boredom and cold. Or is that Canada?

In case you thought Iran was going to rejoin civilization, the mad mullahs rule that a woman should be flogged 100 times and then stoned while buried up to her neck (men are buried up to their waist and if they have confessed and can escape, they go free). Evidently the size of the stones is carefully regulated. If she survives, which she won't, she gets 16 years in jail. It's for adultery and murder, if that matters, although last month a woman was stoned to death for acting in porno films. Everyone's a critic.

That whole squeaky clean Vicente Fox was trying for didn't last very long. Elected on an austerity campaign, he is refurbishing the presidential mansion, and I really would like to know what you get if you spend $443 each on bath towels. The remote control curtains are $19,000 each.

Sony, the company recently discovered to have invented fake reviewers for its print ads and fake "real people" for its commercials, has rented some real US Army Rangers and combat helicopters for a Ridley Scott film. Better yet, the US military is being deployed in a foreign country--Morocco--on behalf of a movie studio.

Ethnic cleansing comes to Macedonia. Serbs are rioting because of a cease-fire. And that's the side we're on.

In today's mail I received a form from my insurance
company telling me that they'd re-evaluated one of last year's claims and are increasing their payment by $0.12.

Nixon's dog Checkers is to be dug up and buried next to Nixon in Yorba Linda. Next to Nixon for all eternity.

A couple of Russian military planes were almost seized by debt collectors at a Paris air show, but flew off instead, as planes will do.

Interesting piece by William Saletan in Slate comparing the strategies of anti-abortion and anti-death penalty activists.
He says that the foot-in-the-door, slippery-slope strategy that led the former to go after so-called partial-birth abortions is being replicated by the latter in going after the execution of the mentally retarded.

Dead children, dead dog, dead hot tub...

The father of the 5 children whose mother killed them explains: "She wasn't in the right frame of mind." That cleared it up for me, so I didn't bother to read the actual story.

The guy who threw the dog into traffic in a road rage incident (very big news in the Bay Area for a while), is sentenced to 3 years in prison, which the Daily Show explained is actually 21 anal-rape years.

A Washington Post story explains that the California fake energy crisis is damaging the hot tub business. I foresee a mass exodus from Marin County. Something like the Okies, but with hot tubs strapped to the SUVs as they seek a better life.

Bush sent a messenger to Congress to threaten to veto the Patients' Bill of Rights, as they were discussing it. I mean a formal messenger, not quite up to Black Rod's standards, but some sort of formal thing I don't recall having seen before. I watched a bit of the debate on C-SPAN, or actually I watched Phil Gramm for two minutes, after which I felt like I needed health care. He was explaining how forcing health plans to cover Emergency Room visits made ERs unwilling to negotiate prices with insurance companies because under this provision they could charge whatever they wanted, so really we should be restricting people's ability to go to emergency rooms. That sort of logic is the best argument there is for a single-payer health plan. There is an article by Michael Kinsley on this in Slate that's worth reading.

So a 62-year old woman had implanted an embryo from her brother, crippled by 1992 since he tried to blow his brains out. It's not incest, she insists, because the egg, obviously, isn't hers. The offspring would ensure inheritance worth $3 million. On today's Jerry Springer: high tech hillbillies. Worse, they're French.

Jesse Helms is complaining that Bush Lite over-praised
Vladimir Putin. "For these reasons," Helms said, "Mr. Putin was far from deserving the powerful political prestige and influence that comes from an excessively personal endorsement by the president of the Untied States." (typo courtesy of the AP). Yes, Jesse, George Bushs's opinion really does carry that much weight in the world. I know I had to rethink my opinion of Putin because George looked into his soul. Yes, Bush's recommendation is worth a shade below that of one in an ad for a Sony movie.

Saw someone in a t-shirt in Berkeley the other day that said "Satan is a big pooh-pooh head". Probably a Graduate Theological Union student.

Failed to catch the state opening of Parliament today, though I suppose it's available on the Web. I always like to see them slam the door on Black Rod, which only sounds dirty. Only caught some of the provisions of the Queen's Speech before the London Times website packed up, but evidently Blair will eliminate jury trials, the presumption of innocence, and protection against double jeopardy.

But not fox hunting, not yet anyway. The queen practically ran out of the chamber after reading the speech in her usual monotone, so that she could get to the races.

The next feminist outrage (that is, outrage to feminists), will be a study from St Lawrence University which says that women are more likely to get pregnant from rape than from consensual sex
(8% v. 3.1% for women who are using no contraception and actually trying to get pregnant). This "proves," sort of, that rape is a sound evolutionary strategy, which is why it will piss feminists off.

The floodgates are open. The 2nd federal execution. The Attorney general, who doesn't see how 17 of 19 people on the federal death row being non-white could possibly be racist, insists that this execution is ok, because not only is the prisoner Hispanic, but so were his victims and the judge and I forget who else, maybe the prosecutor and some of the jurors. No, Mr. Ashcroft, that's why those people are allowed to call Garza a "wet-back" or possible a "beaner" and you are not, not why he should be executed. Ignoring that his consular rights and a couple of international treaties were violated, the jury was told that he committed murders in Mexico (in addition to those with which he was charged), despite not having been convicted in Mexico--or indeed tried--or indeed arrested.

According to Putin, the arms race is back on.
Thanks, Georgie.

Well, this whole post-Cold War thing is a real let-down anyway. Bulgaria just put its old child king back in charge, despite the fact that he's spent only 2 months of the last 55 years in the country. I'm sure that all his experience in fascist Spain will be a big help in getting Bulgaria back on its feet.

Putin says that he tried out his not very good English on Bush, but he thinks Bush only pretended to understand him. There isn't any joke I could put here that wouldn't be too easy.

Dubya was in Poland yesterday. So the prime minister of Poland, whoever that is, turned to him and said, "Hey I just heard a great joke. How many George Bushes does it take...."

This is his first visit to Europe and I'm reminded of Reagan's first visit to South America, when he came back with the revelation that they were all like different countries down there. Bush has learned the opposite lesson. "I will express to President Putin that Russia is a part of Europe". I'm sure he'll be happy to hear that. Don't tell George that Russia is also a part of Asia; it'll just confuse him. His speech was one long geography lesson. "Our vision of Europe must also include the Balkans." (Headline elsewhere in the Times: US Doesn't Want to Join Any NATO Mission Into Macedonia). "The Europe we are building must include Ukraine". Poland is evidently at the heart of Europe. The Baltics, on the other hand, didn't get a look in.

All of Europe's new democracies, he said, should have the same chance to join the institutions of Europe as Europe's "old democracies." Well, I said it was a geography lesson, not a history lesson. Old democracies indeed. Bush thanked Poland for acting as a bridge to the new democracies of Europe. That's usually what people--Stalin and Hitler, say--call Poland before they send tanks across it. The autobahn of Europe. I trust you noticed that the "institutions of Europe" meant NATO. He assured Russia that NATO is not an enemy of Russia. I said it was not a history lesson. He also said that Poland was not an enemy of Russia. I believe I just said it was not a history lesson. He also said that Warsaw was "razed by the Nazis and destroyed by the Soviets. Its people were mostly displaced." All except the spleens, I guess. When exactly did the Soviets destroy Warsaw?

Amusingly, he defined Communism as materialism and said that man (for a speech presumably written by Condi, its language is consistently sexist; it would not have gone over well if it had been turned in for the Stevenson Core Course) must find goals greater than mere consumption. This is George "You'll take the gear shift of my SUV when you pry it from my cold dead hands" Bush talking.

His aides are telling the papers that behind closed doors Bush is actually a serious statesman. That's interesting, because behind closed doors I'm actually quite thin.

Hey, trust Bush to go to Sweden, Sweden mind you, and start riots and shootings.

A Japanese court rules that compensation to atomic bomb survivors doesn't apply to those living outside the country, like say Koreans brought to Japan as slaves.

British supermarkets are working on changing fruit in order to make it more appealing to children. They're going to carbonate it. Really. Oranges and grapes are said to taste quite good carbonated, but the tomatoes are a bit strange. And it doesn't work with bananas, which explode if you try it. Actually, that would appeal to children too.

Something that never occurred to me. Mein Kampf is still under copyright. The copyright is held by the Bavarian finance ministry, but the book is banned in Germany. In Britain, the money since 1976 has been going to a charity for Jewish refugees from Germany.

The likely next mayor of Berlin is openly gay--the most prominent German gay politician. In contrast, the British Tory party's next leader, at the very least, has had some gay experiences.

FAIR points out that the treasury secretary would like to abolish corporate taxes. Also Social Security and Medicare. I had noticed at the time, but hadn't realized that it was completely buried. This is the same guy who decided to hold on to stock he was supposed to have divested himself of until his boss's policies made their value go way up. And Karl Rove met the CEO of a company he has stock in to advise him on a merger which will make the value of that stock go up. Nice to know that this admin is as ethical as we expect from Republicans.

Incidentally, in 1951 British intelligence concluded that the US was planning a preventive nuclear strike on the USSR in 1952.

A LAY preacher who claimed that God would look after him yesterday failed to persuade magistrates that divine protection was a substitute for motor insurance.

Peter David, 66, who preaches in chapels and on street
corners across South Wales, tried to persuade police that he had the highest level of cover of all, and that it meant he did not need an MoT certificate or road tax either.

Feral

In the touristy part of Spain, the Catholic church has grappled with the problem of offering confession to non-Spanish-speaking tourists. The answer: multiple choice forms in several languages.

According to the Saturday NY Times (so it must be true, right?), the president of Friends of Animals is named Priscilla Feral.

British election

A fairly boring election, but I watched 5 hours of it today. It was too hot to do anything else.

Blair's favorite adviser Peter Mandelson, who's been disgraced, rehabilitated, disgraced and not-quote-rehabilitated since the last election, gives a victory speech talking about his enemies taking a pound of flesh. Euro of flesh, surely?

Normally, these speeches are fairly anodyne, but one Labour victor attacked his opponent for running an especially contemptible race. That opponent: Mark Reckless.

There is a man in a crab suit running for Parliament in Kensington.

One independent candidate wins on a platform of saving the local hospital--that's his whole platform.

Given the reform of the House of Lords, it is possible for the first time for a hereditary peer to be elected to the Commons, and one is, the Earl of Thurso (LibDem, Cairthness). That means that the Commons are no longer common (the giant crab would have done that just as well).

Maintaining calm

NY Times headline: "CIA Chief Going to Israel in Effort to Maintain Calm." Now most people would count to 100 or something. If he did maintain calm, he would be the first person to go to Israel and do so.

Ariel Sharon for example called Arafat a murderer and pathological liar this week.

Speaking of war criminals, I think I forgot to mention that when Henry Kissinger was in Paris last week, a court issued him a summons relative to some French citizens murdered by the Chilean junta in the 1970s. He decided he was too busy. I didn't know you could do that.

For the most tentative endorsement I've ever heard, click here for John Cleese's radio ad (a bit under 2 minutes) for the Lib Dems.

George "A Uniter not a Divider (especially long division)" Bush: "Those who worry about faith in our society, and government's willingness to stand side by side with faith, don't understand the power of faith and the promise of faith and the hope of faith," he said.

He also said, in a press conference about losing the Senate, that every day is a great day when you're president.

Yech. And also how John McCain is his bestest friend. The NY Times ran a headline a few days ago that the people of Arizona were telling McCain to "stick to his own kind," which I thought was very West Side Story of them.

Save the groat

Yet another Mugabe supporter dies. "Hitler" Hunzvi, dead of "malaria" (actually witchcraft, but there's a cover-up), turns out to have had a Polish wife. That's just too weird.

French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, who looks more like Dr. Strangelove than any man alive, evidently first joined the Parti Socialist in 1971 as a Trotskyite infiltrator. Until this week he had always denied his Trot past.

The new Nepalese king's coronation time is still being determined by the court astrologer (also hereditary). In yet another cover-up, he is claiming to have "lost" the astrological chart of two-kings-and-five-days-ago Birendra, since someone who's supposed to be able to predict the future might right now have some 'splaining to do. He also denies knowledge of the prediction which caused Birendra to order Dippy not to marry before 35.

Another return-of-the-Reaganite-living dead: Richard Perle is back.

In case you haven't picked it up, Jenna Bush's recent drinking arrest was her third, counting one when she was 16.

British election in two days. Hague ran against Europe, Blair refused to discuss Europe. Hague said that this was the last chance to "save the pound," despite the promise of a referendum before Britain joins the single currency. The Tories say that Labour will "rig" the referendum, although Labour says it will probably be a really complicated question like "Do you favor adopting the euro?" or "Euro--you like?" The Tories want the question to be, "Are you willing to ditch the pound?" The Guardian has been running features on other currencies of the past. I had no idea the florin was still in use as late as 1993.

A thief took sleeping tablets to calm his nerves while robbing a Jordanian hospital pharmacy. He woke up to find himself in the hands of the police.

The Nepalese are claiming that the assault rifle went off by accident. Oops.

As I write, C-SPAN has the BBC Newsnight program on; a focus group has been asked to compare the party leaders to a beverage.

Earlier, Blair was interviewed and was asked if it was ok for the gap between rich and poor to increase. He refused to answer as the question was repeated maybe six times, but the answer is obviously yes.

The Tories have given up on winning, not that they ever had a chance, and are asking people to give Blair something less than a landslide to wipe the grin off his face. This strategy is likely to be more successful than asking people to vote for them. No one wants to see Hague in office, but no one wants to see Tony grin
either. The main problem in any sure-thing election is apathy.

The Times notes the counter-attractions:
Thursdays television schedule gives the apathetic voter plenty
of scope for staying on the sofa. Rather than heading for
the ballot box, the Royle families of this world will be able to indulge in Carol Smillies Holiday Swaps, EastEnders and Through the Keyhole on BBC1 or The Weakest Link and Ready, Steady, Cook on BBC2. Other terrestrial delights to keep them sprawled on their settees include Crossroads, Wheel of Fortune and Emmerdale on ITV, several Big Brother fixes on Channel 4 and Open House with Gloria Hunniford on Channel 5.

From the Post:

Chief Justice Earl Warren once signed an opinion in which a six-member majority of the Supreme Court referred to people "afflicted with homosexuality." His successor, Warren E. Burger, once wrote of gays as "sex deviates." The current chief justice, William H. Rehnquist, likened a university's refusal to recognize a gay student group to measures necessary to prevent the spread of measles.

Singing Dingoes Stole My Baby: The Sydney Opera House will stage an opera based on the famous event. And yes, there really will be singing dingoes.

The guy who invented Survivor got the idea at a British public school.

Speaking of which, Crown Prince, now King, soon Corpse Dipendra of Nepal was at Eton. Where they called him "Dippy."

Evidently the French are a little pissed that the new US ambassador doesn't speak French. He speaks baseball. 3 European nations are soon to get former baseball team owners as ambassadors. Can you name them all?

Last week Bush was telling graduating Yailies that if they were C students, they could still be president. Do you think he's saying the same thing to do his daughters about their drinking?

Timothy McVeigh has dedicated his life to "bringing integrity to the criminal justice system. So it will all have been worth it.

Many laws have provisions for citizens to sue to enforce them, including civil rights and environmental laws. They typically have provisions for the compensation for court courts to those who bring them and win. The Supreme Court brilliantly just decided that they don't get costs if a deal is done outside of court. So a government that doesn't want to enforce civil rights or environmental laws--not that such a thing is conceivable in this country--might drag a case out as long and expensively as possible, and then give in just before going to court. This is the most important of recent Supreme Court decisions, but not much attention has been paid.

The INS is introducing two-tier service, with faster work visas for those willing to pay more.

The Washington Post has articles on the Florida elections, again. My favorite detail: while a bunch of counties had machines that could detect voting errors, two decided to switch them off. Giving someone a new ballot would cost 25%. The article makes clearer than before how arbitrary and numerous were the differences in aspects of the election from one county to the other.

Trend you didn't need to know about:
THREE million Chinese drink their own urine to improve their
health. "It has no bacteria and is more sanitary than blood,"
said Prof Yang Liansheng, of the Liaoning Institute.

For a Labour poster of William Hague
looking strangely familiar, click here.

You might also enjoy the other posters of this election, and there are links to election posters from 1910 up as well.

I forgot to mention yesterday that Blair went to visit Microsoft yesterday and was promptly integrated into their marketing campaign for some new software (I assume the next version
of Windoze).

The Supreme Court spent this week deciding on the Original Intent of the Founding Fathers of golf. They ruled by 7-2 that involved hitting a ball a ball with a stick, and that therefore a handicapped person could ride a golf cart. Scalia, exercising his usual compassion towards the disabled, compared this with letting a kid with Attention Deficit Disorder have 4 strikes in Little League. Isn't this the guy who spotted Boy George the state of Florida?

Colin Powell, who is evidently black, goes on a 4-nation tour of Africa. If I have this right, he told the leaders of two of those 4 countries that they should step down. He might be right (Daniel arap Moi and Robert Mugabe) but isn't that just a touch arrogant?

Speaking of diplomacy, we're evidently conducting arms control negotiations by press release these days. The Bushie Administration said that it would overcome Russia's objections to our scrapping the ABM treaty by buying its S-300 missiles--for use in our missile defense system. It just hadn't made this offer to anyone in Russia before telling it to the AP. Or presumably running it through Jane's, since it seems that the S-300 only shoots down airplanes, not missiles, whatever the NY Times and Washington Post might think (they didn't do their homework either). That's what happens when you have a moron in charge: no one else feels they have to work very hard either.

The Washington Post today (Tuesday) has a piece on the international police program the UN put into place in Bosnia 5 years ago. It's been marked by massive corruption (the Ukrainians
are only in it for the stolen cars) and lots and lots of underage sex. The police all have diplomatic immunity, you see, exactly what you want in your cops. Many cops have been sent home and their stories carefully covered up. The US contingent are considered to be average. The FBI, which is a law unto itself, as we know, refused to participate. So the job of recruitment and training was handed over to a private corporation, which got a lot of retired cops, some with pace-makers and over 65, and
bored cops looking for sex with 13-year olds, and sent them over.
No matter what they do (one cop *bought* a prostitute), the worst
that happens to them is they get sent home.

I've come back from graveyards before

The Washington Post says that Elliott Abrams, one of the few people who always look more pleased with themself than does Dubya, will be the next National Security Council senior director for democracy, human rights and international operations. The position does not require Senate confirmation. This is bad because it makes the 1980s into a waste. I said that if one good thing came of the Iran-Contra affair, it was that Elliott Abrams would never have a government job again. This is just wrong, people.

Speaking of democracy and human rights, the Colombian Senate has passed a bill allowing the security forces to detain suspects without charges for a week, conscript civilians in some form, arrest people denounced by their neighbors, investigate their own
human rights violations and even perform their own autopsies on the people they kill. Our tax dollars at work.

The Post also says that the new bumper sticker in DC is "Don't mess with Vermont."

And from the same column:

Meanwhile, former president Bill Clinton was playing a charity
round of golf at Ballybunion, Ireland, a few days ago, the Irish Times reports. "There's a graveyard [literally] to the right," warned his playing partner, former Irish foreign minister Dick Spring. "Yeah, I've come back from graveyards before," Clinton said.

A blind man is the first to climb Everest. Well, they *told* him it was Everest.

The former president of Argentina Carolos Menem is marrying the former Miss Universe. Does that mean she out-ranks him?

Some Dutch doctors have set up a boat in international waters off Ireland to offer abortions. The head used to be with the Rainbow Warrior, so at least she's prepared...

Legendary

The Justice Dept has found yet more documents they failed to hand over to McVeigh's lawyers. But Atty Gen Ashcroft says he won't postpone the execution again because there is no doubt that McVeigh is guilty. No there isn't, but there is doubt
over whether he received a fair trial.

Testifying before a House subcommittee on Bush's plan to let religious groups run social services, the Evangelical head of one such drug group bragged about converting Jews into what he calls "completed Jews," which is the cute fundie Christian term for it,
although the rest of us might have images of them trying to tack a foreskin back on.

Predictable headline of the week:
Computer Vandals Clog Antivandalism Web Site.

Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill evidently said: "If you set aside Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the safety record of nuclear is really very good."

One of the great disappointments of the Blair government was that despite coming to power with 102 female MPs--known as Blair's Babes--, very much a record in the UK, they haven't made much impact to date, although there have been amusing discussions
about whether to allow breast-feeding in Parliamentary committees (it was banned because so are other forms of "refreshment"). And the women have really been absent from the election campaign. This has been noted, so today Chancellor Gordon Brown appeared, not just with the usual silent token woman, but with two of them, at what was sarcastically labelled Ladies' Day. A reporter addressed a question to one of them about this very subject:
"Why has it taken until week three of the campaign for more than one token woman to appear on the platform . . . and I think it's the first time that one of them has been allowed to answer a question from the platform?"

At this point Brown couldn't help butting in to answer the question himself.

Opening paragraph of the week:
A COUPLE were jailed yesterday for taking their daughters headmistress hostage and threatening her after the girl was sent home for wearing a nose ring.

Headline of the day: Ministry 'failed to heed advice on pigswill'

Hail to the chief

Turkmenistan president Niyazov, already hailed as Chief of the Turkmens in one of those Central Asian leadership cults that always seem so unearned, has been promoted, if indeed there can be a promotion from Chief of the Turkmens. He is now being called by his spokesmen a national prophet with divine abilities.

Also, Jeremy Irons has painted his 15th-century castle in western Cork peach. The natives are not happy.

Monica (remember her?) wants The Dress returned to her. She says she won't sell it.

You won't have missed this story, but let's make sure (at least one of you currently being out of the country):
The Taliban plan to make all Hindus resident in Afghanistan wear a yellow star, or some such symbol. Oddly, the women will still have to wear Islamic clothing.

So when Al Gore uses his office for fund-raising, it's a crime against humanity, but when Cheney uses the vice-presidential residence to host large donors, it's a "thank-you" and
certainly not a fund-raiser.

Margaret Thatcher accuses Labour of being arrogant. She actually endorsed Hague for prime minister, which is more than Ted Heath is willing to do.

Headline of the day: British Diet May Be Cause of Depression. Because it is deficient in selenium, not because it is crap.

The Official Monster Raving Loony Party has come out with its manifesto: 4 blank pages. You can surely read them online.

http://freespace.virgin.net/raving.loony should do it. Their actual promises include smaller class sizes by making the kids stand closer together, draining Loch Ness to see if there's a monster, and ending the north/side divide by making it a square root.

I don't believe I've mentioned the conviction in South Carolina for homicide of a woman who smoked crack while pregnant. So that's homicide, and an 18-year term, for a fetus.

Colin Powell asked the Israelis not to do something stupid in response to, oh, whatever the last Palestinian atrocity was. Israel immediately sent in the war planes. American war planes. Bought from the US. Which are supposed to be used for defensive purposes only. So can we have them back, please?

Al Capone's lawyer just died, aged 107. Read the obit if you can.

I mentioned that deputy PM John Prescott punched out a protester yesterday. For wall-to-wall coverage that simply has to be seen to be believed, check out the Friday London Times.

For an actual gallery of photos commemorating the event, click here.

Also, more boxing and egg jokes than you would credit. Blair says he won't fire Prescott. Meanwhile, Sky TV is making this the most repeated footage since Elian was seized in Miami. Times sketch writer Matthew Parris says that William Hague was struggling to be interesting enough for anyone to want to hit him.

On Bush the Usurper's argument that those pesky gas prices can be taken care of by cutting taxes to help (wealthy) people pay for gas, Bill Maher asks why the government doesn't just write a check directly to Exxon and cut out the middle-man.

Favorite start to a news story today:

An actress has claimed an opera company sexually discriminated against her after it turned her down for the part of a virgin because she would be heavily pregnant by the end of the show's run.

Israeli official death squads yesterday killed 5 Palestinian cops. At first they said the cops were shooting at them. Then they downgraded that to behaving suspiciously. Then it turns out that 1 of them was cooking suspiciously while 2 were sleeping suspiciously when they were shot in the head at close-range--execution-style, as they say on Law and Order. Israel admits this was an intelligence mistake and says that it might even apologize.

The British elections are moving along nicely. The deputy prime minister was hit with eggs today. He responded by hitting the guy. Which The Times helpfully points out is illegal. Meanwhile a Liberal Party candidate drops out. While canvassing door to door he met a dog, which he sprayed with (illegal) pepper spray, and then ran to his car to make a quick getaway, unfortunately dragging an old woman, I believe the dog's owner, along the road.
Home Secretary Jack Straw was heavily heckled while making claims about having improved crime and the morale of the police. It was the police who were heckling him. Ian Paisley declares line dancing to be sinful. Which may be the only intelligent thing he's ever said. The Tories reveal a party political broadcast in which they blame Labour for 2 rapes, Willie Horton style, by criminals in a home detention curfew scheme.

The Irish Prime Minister--and how things have changed--has been issuing official invitations which include on them the name of his girlfriend (he is separated). The cardinal was not best pleased.

Russia's defence minister says he can understood why a colonel strangled an 18-year old girl in Chechnya, calls him a "victim of circumstances" (he was pissed off because of snipers).

The Egyptian censor came down hard on a proposed song with the lyrics, "I don't like Israel." No, no, he said, change that to "I hate Israel." The song reached #1.

Attorney General Ashcroft holds a Bible study every day, which certainly isn't mandatory for any Justice Department employees wishing to advance their careers, no sirree bob.

The Italian electorate votes into power media magnate and Mafia stooge Berlusconi, again. He plans to run the country like a business. The good news/bad news is that the near-fascist regional separatist party the Northern League has seen its electoral support collapse. This is bad news in that if it had
been part of Berlusconi's government coalition, it would have been easy to treat Italy as the pariah state that Austria was last year (Belgium already threatened to do so).

The British elections are humming along nicely. William Hague, sporting his new Bruce Willis haircut (if I shave it maybe no one will realize I'm bald), was in Wales to launch the Tory party's Welsh manifesto. Which had to be scrapped because it was so badly translated. The slogan behind him was also wrong. Some smartass local reporter asked him to pronounce it, but he refused. I should say that this man was once the Welsh Secretary. And his wife is Welsh. Sad really. The British Politics e-mail discussion group is currently debating why Hague is portrayed as such a loser. The consensus is that he is a loser. Also that his voice is terrible. He sounds like a 13-year old trying to deepen his voice in order to buy cigarettes.

Finally, a sentence one simply does not read every day: AN exercise involving 27,000 American and Australian commandos was temporarily halted last week when a US Marine shot dead an emu.

The state of Alabama (motto: "You shure got a purty mouth") has raised the age of marriage from 14 to 16.

Oregon has recalled a list of helpful hints to welfare recipients on how to cut down their expenses by shopping at thrift stores, clipping coupons and rooting through dumpsters.

The Observer has a story on Japan's practice of tying aid to small countries to its votes on the International Whaling Commission. You have to wonder why this is so important to them.

Douglas Adams, a man who truly knew where his towel was, has died at 49. Good news: he just completed the movie script for Hitchhiker's Guide.

The House has voted to punish the UN for its free vote to exclude seat-holder-for-life US from the Human Rights Commission. They'd also like Powell to figure out who didn't vote for us. Remember, humans have rights, small nations will do whatever the hell we tell them to, or else.

Molly Ivins uses a phrase for the Texas justice system I need to pass on before finding a context in which to steal it, because I don't want to forget it: the cowboy gulag.

Mother Jones's Bushwatch section on its website has a link to a Monday LA Times story, not picked up by either the NY Times or Washington Post, about the US's suspiciously fast expulsion of a Honduran diplomat and former general who could tell the truth about John Negroponte--Bush's designee as ambassador to the UN--and his role as Reagan's ambassador to Honduras in covering up death squad activities.

There was an interesting convergence of rhetoric this week in two very different (one would have thought) policy arenas. John Walters, Bush's nominee as True Czar of All the Drugs, does not believe in drug treatment, which he considers part of a liberal
"therapeutic state in which government serves as the agent of personal rehabilitation." Dick Cheney said something similar about conservation only being to make people feel good about their personal virtue.

I think the link here is the continuing Republican vendetta against the 1960s, despite the fact that environmentalism is a movement against reckless consumption and drug-use is in fact reckless consumption.

At Walters's confirmation hearing, I'd love for someone to ask him, if rehab only works in prison, shouldn't the same apply to alcohol, and shouldn't your boss have been sent away? Bush the Younger's alcohol use wasn't even a victimless crime, since he tended to drink and drive.

As bad an idea as school uniforms are in the US, there are other places where they should be a complete non-starter. The leader of the German Christian Democrats calls for school uniforms, saying they improve the children's sense of belonging and community. I think we've all really had enough of Germans' sense of belonging and community.

From the New Statesman, a competition.

Definitions of a 21st-century gentleman:

A gentleman is someone who only wipes his nose on his sleeve in private. [does doing it while driving your car count?]

A gentleman never argues with a lady in public. If she infers from this that she is being patronised and hits him over the head with her handbag, he will not hit her back.

A gentleman is a man who can play the tuba but does not--at least in public.

A gentleman is someone who stands and gives up his seat for a lap-dancer.

Switches off his mobile during sex, unless he can answer it without disrupting his performance.

Apologizes before he farts.

The Nation's Name the President contest results:
1. Governor Bush (6,625 votes) 2. Spurious George (4,949) 3. President* (4,564) 4. President Select (2,436) 5. Boy George (2,095). The also-rans were His Illegititude (1,789), President per curiam (888), pResident (790).

NY Times headline: "White House Picks Chairman of SEC: A Representative of Industries Will Now Regulate Them." The 2nd phrase is sort of a generic, I think.

There seem to be no more stories on Bush's daughter's drinking. We need a proper tabloid press like the British have. The Sun just flew Ronnie Biggs back to face justice and suck all the news coverage away from the general election that Blair should be announcing today. Ronnie Biggs, if you don't know, once (and by once I mean on the day I was born) helped rob a train. It was either a really great train or a really great robbery, I'm not sure which. He escaped from prison in 1965 and has been living in Brazil most of that time, most recently earning his living by letting Brits come and have tea with him (robbery proceeds last just so long). The British government, which has been rabid about getting this guy back for a rather long time for some reason, naturally expedited his passport, once he said he wanted to return, but the Tories are still accusing the government of doing so as an election stunt. I'm planning to enjoy this particular circus as much as I can. I must check if the Sun is online, I think it is.

I got off track. I meant to try to work into the bit about Jenna Bush a line I'm stealing from a Martin Amis novel about all rich kids going through a cocaine phase--at birth their parents set their names down for the posh drying-out spots.

Still, it's not as weird as trying to sneak into Japan on a fake passport to go to Disneyland.

In its ongoing efforts to start a new cold war, the US yesterday resumed spy plane flights off China's coast, and Rummy Rumsfeld said he'd really like to put offensive weapons into outer space.

If I were the Chinese, I'd break the spy plane down into 1.3 billion pieces and parcel it out amongst the populace. Like the Berlin Wall.

fun and games

I just realized that I completely forgot all about the English department's marathon reading Friday of Beowulf. Shit (to use an appropriately Anglo-Saxon term).

Some scholar type claims that Columbus actually first visited the New World in 1485 on a secret mission from the pope.

According to a New Yorker article I haven't seen, that might not be out yet (although they have a web site now, don't they?), FBI director Louis Freeh, who has just announced his early retirement after just long enough a period that it won't look partisan, loathed and refused to speak to Clinton. More needs to be known about this.

NY Times headline: Increasingly Schools Move to Restrict Dodgeball. Well that should make it easier to hit the little kid with glasses and asthma, shouldn't it?

TV movie with the most tv-movieish title I've ever seen: Baby Monitor: Sound of Fear

Energize, Mr Scott

www.chick.com for those hilariously over-the-top Christian comics

The Louisiana Legislature denounces Charles Darwin as a racist.

Bush: But I also made it clear to [Vladimir Putin] that it's important to think beyond the old days of when we had the concept that if we blew each other up, the world would be safe."--Washington, D.C., May 1, 2001

The magic of networking

Funny web-page, features computers should have:
http://www.rita.thegourmet.com/computers.html

A Minneapolis fire chief has been demoted for posing for a photograph with his arm around the charred body of a woman. Captain John Caston has been demoted to firefighter for conduct unbecoming an officer, but will not be stopped from working his way back up the ranks.

The House votes to make harming a fetus a crime, as part of the long-term strategy to re-criminalize abortion. A bunch of Dems voted for it, showing how deft they aren't over this issue,
and how well the R's are playing it, with "partial-birth" abortion and now this. When the R's refused to support upping the penalties on harming a pregnant woman, which would have the same legal effect, the D's should have walked and trumpeted that the R's rejection of the Lofgren measure showed that they were only interested in establishing a separate legal status for feti.

Meanwhile, the Scottish Parliament is planning to decriminalize gay group sex. Plan your vacations accordingly.

And the British military pays for a dozen servicewomen a year to get breast implants. It makes them happier, more contented soldiers.

The Supreme Court ruled that because federal law only protects people from pervasive sexual discrimination in the workplace and not isolated sexual harassment, it doesn't protect people
who complain about the latter from being fired for it. Way to go,
Supes.

It also said that people who don't wear a seat belt or spit on the sidewalk or whatever can be handcuffed, arrested, and made to post a bond substantially bigger than the fine for their infraction. And oh yes, arresting people also means you can make warrantless searches. The Supes didn't think that this might lead to abuses of any sort.

A pleasant thought from the NY Times: If you can't get a song out of your head, it could be the sign that you have a brain aneuryism. Fun thing to do for the next day or so: try to get the theme song to MASH out of your head now that I have told you not to think about it, or to think about the possibility of your imminent demise. Remember: brain aneuryism is painless, it brings on many changes...

(Note to Googlers: the reason you arrived here is that you misspelled your search term, as I did in this post. The American spelling is aneurism, the British spelling is aneurysm.)

Today Israeli troops shot people at the funeral of someone shot by Israeli troops a couple of days ago, if I'm not mistaken at another funeral... Guns don't kill people, funerals kill people.

Bushism of the Day: "It's very important for folks to understand that when there's more trade, there's more commerce."--Quebec City, Canada, April 21, 2001

It'll be fun watching the CIA, Peru and the missionaries trading charges over the next few days. I've been saying for years that the drug wars were becoming Vietnam, or at least El Salvador in the '80s, all over again, and if it takes a couple of dead missionaries to put the brakes on, well, I don't much like missionaries to "primitive people" (in the words of the father of the guy in the plane, himself a missionary) to begin with.

The British have discovered bugs in the walls of the Ministry of Defense. They think it's... the French. French arms companies, to be precise.

Follow-up:

THE Austrian province of Vorarlberg will [31]ban the practice
of blowing up dead cows with explosives on its Alpine meadows,
state television ORF said yesterday.

What is the world coming to:

THE outwardly placid world of Belgian pigeon racing has been shaken by the seizure of substantial quantities of suspected performance-enhancing drugs.


Horrifying medical story of the week: A woman died in Britain a couple of years ago of a heart attack a couple of hours after a surgeon operated on the wrong lung. What just came out is that it was the patient herself, under local anesthesia, who pointed it out to him.

The guy who invented the Zip code just died.

So did the guy who invented the smiley face in the '60s. :)

When I suggested that Bush apologize and then take it back, I didn't think he'd actually do it.

The press's weak grasp of matters espionagic has been ongoing, with none bothering to educate themselves throughout the last week and a half as to what the spy planes were monitoring. Since spy satellites are so much more efficient at most forms of surveillance and sigint, it is clear, as I said before, that the idea is to trigger China's defences (radar, communications, etc) in order to evaluate them. This is why the Chinese are really so pissed off: this form of spying is part of active preparations for warfare.

I haven't given a detailed analysis of the recent recount of the Florida vote, partly because it isn't done yet, and partly because I assume you found decent reports if you wanted to. What's interesting is how often journalists who knew better insisted that it proved that Bush really won the state, when it did no such thing.

The British decennial census is starting, and Star Wars fans are marking down their religion as "Jedi." New Zealanders have already done this, but the count hasn't been finished yet.

Cambridge professors have calculated the kinetic energy, centrifugal force and co-efficient of friction for different kinds of pasta in order to determine scientifically how not to
make a mess.

The team found that the safest method of eating spaghetti is to hold the fork vertically, rather than horizontally, select a few strands and rotate them against the concave part of a spoon which is held parallel to the plate. The fork can then be lifted out and the spaghetti eaten off the spoon.

The laboratory experiments proved that the risk of sauce
splatter is highest as the last 4.3ins of spaghetti are rolled on to the fork: a final flick of the wrist can accelerate the speed of the spaghetti tip to more than nine feet per second, producing enough centrifugal force to make the sauce fly four feet.

The Dutch implementation of mercy killing has received negative comments from Germans. Being Germans, I assume it's not the killing part that they're objecting to...

Most of Russia's big parties have now merged. One party was always good enough in the past...

Harry Secombe has died. Goodbye, Neddy.

Detroit homicide cops have evidently been making a practice of arresting witnesses in order to pressure them into giving information. Consequently, Detroit is responsible for 8% of the nation's arrests in homicide cases, with a below-average clearance rate. William Saletan has an interesting piece in Slate on how both the US and China waved their hardliners at the other (i.e., good cop/bad cop, or perhaps Nixon's Mad Bomber strategy) in attempts to extract concessions. At least Dubya didn't go on tv, put his fingers next to his eyes to stretch out the skin and say "So solly, so solly," so once again he has exceeded expectations.

Do not tell me which symbol should represent me

The Netherlands legalizes euthanasia. Now it's worried about "death tourism."

A cop in Northumbria, UK, received compensation for being exposed to skunk marijuana, whatever that might be, giving him snoring and a whistling in his noise and other such problems, affecting his marital relations.

You have your choice of disgusting news stories today. There are those Siamese twins joined at the brain. There's the singer who is back at her job (or his) after his/her tongue is surgically reconstructed. And there's the Washington Post's story about meat. Evidently beef is sliced off cows that aren't actually
dead yet.

Boy George has become the 1st Republican president to appoint an openly gay man to a post, albeit to head an AIDS office that was declared abolished in February. According to the NY Times, "refused to discuss Mr. Evertz's sexuality or its significance
in either politics or policy, saying that Mr. Bush did not take such concerns into account when making appointments." So now we're supposed to believe that it was a coincidence that a gay man was appointed to the AIDS office. There's a statement that would insult the intelligence of a George Bush.

In the big British news, a greengrocer was convicted of selling bananas by the pound. Expect the "Metric Martyr" to be a major symbol in the next election.

Gov. Gray Davis accuses PG&E of being selfish. Yes, it is. That's what it's supposed to be. That's why profit-making companies should not be monopolies in basic industries.

Words

Bush Lite seems to be caught between two words (not for the first time)-- apology and hostages. He can't bring himself to use either one. The obvious solution is to use both. First give the Chinese whatever apology they want, and when the spies are returned say that of course we said what they wanted, because they were holding hostages, and no statement or promised under such circumstances counts. It'll never happen, of course.

In a piece of stunning naivete, a NY Times editorial Wednesday "trusts" that the US plane didn't violate Chinese air space because it is so sophisticated that it doesn't need to get that close. Of course one of the things such planes are spying on is the defences, radar, response time etc at the border, so spy planes violate sovereign air space all the time.

Today Colin Powell's non-apology apology, which you may have heard on the radio or seen on tv, was immediately (the sentence before) preceded by an attempt to blame the Chinese pilot. I mention this because that part was not played in several broadcasts I heard or saw today. Evidently Chinese pilots aren't as good as Americans. Something about slanty eyes. All right, he didn't say that part, but he was thinking it. He also said that we should all just move on now. He might have waited until the body was recovered.

All of which leaves the question, who thought Powell would be a good secretary of state anyway?

Israel Radio says that Viagra, because of its coating, is not kosher for Passover. Plan your holiday accordingly.

Bill Clinton buys a Cuban cigar in Britain, where it is not illegal. Does this sound at all familiar?

The Supreme Court allows Medicare and Medicaid money to go to Christian Science "clinics." Evidently it's not ok if the law says that the money can go to Christian Scientists, but it is if they write standards so that their clinics, and no others,
qualify.

A judge in Spain rules that Jesus was wrongly convicted, and that there were irregularities in his trial. That's Spanish efficiency for you.

Faith-based presidency

George W. Bush Jr. III today sent a warship to China. So now we're threatening war (that's not a "show of force" as the London Times put it; it is either an actual threat of force, or it is a completely silly totally pointless symbol, except it's not a symbol because it stands for nothing and a symbol is supposed to stand in for something, that's pretty much the definition. We need a word for a signifier without a referant--possibly we could call it a georgewbush) over a spy plane, which I understand actually had the capability of intercepting Chinese phone calls and e-mail.

Milosevic will be tried, if he is tried, by the Yugoslavs and not the International War Crimes Tribunal, for something like corruption rather than, oh, say genocide. Showing impressive chutzpah for a man who had a gun in his mouth just yesterday, he is actually planning to use genocide as his defence. He admitted today having funded the Croatian Serbs and Bosnian Serbs in their little wars. So he didn't steal money for himself, he used it to fund massacres in neighboring countries. So that's all right then.

An Iraqi newspaper owned by Uday Hussein reported today that food rations would be increased. It was an April Fool's joke. Ha ha.

A US spy plane bumps a Chinese jet, forcing it to crash and the spy plane into a forced landing. The US asks China to consider the plane to be sovereign US territory and please not board it.

Favorite London Times opening paragraph this week:

THE Tory MP who provoked fury by warning that immigrants had undermined Britains Anglo-Saxon society admitted yesterday that he owned a house in France, drove a Mercedes and had a business
importing European wine.

You'd think that if anyone was going to be sympathetic this week, it would be the Israeli parents of the 10-month old baby who got shot by a sniper this week. But they were settlers, so you'd be wrong. They decided to hold their own dead baby hostage, saying they would not bury it until the Israeli army retook a hill.

Speaking of occupying the moral high ground, Mayor Benito Guiliani appointed his "decency panel" this week, to vet art in publicly financed museums. He named his divorce lawyer to it.

The Supreme Court will reconsider whether it is ok to execute the profoundly retarded (an oxymoron, surely).

Like us, Jamaica doesn't put insane people on trial, but it does put them in jail until they're sane enough to be tried. And then, sometimes, forget about them completely, like this guy who broke a window in 1972.....

For the first time in history, the Japanese are now on average taller than the Chinese. This is actually a source of concern to the Chinese government, which is encouraging its youth to grow, dammit, grow. Milk-drinking is now compulsory, despite the fact that most Chinese are lactose-intolerant. The youth themselves are going in for that horrifying leg-lengthening surgery, and taking quack growth pills (I'm sure there's also some endangered species that they're eating for the same end, but it's not mentioned in the Telegraph.

Ashcroft broke the ethics rules of the Justice Department by threatening spy Robert Hanssen with the death penalty if he didn't give information.

Blue

So my electricity rates are going to go up by half, give or take, in order to save PG&E & SCE from bankruptcy. Well, it was the least I could do.

Mitch McConnell voted for an amendment to campaign finance reform that he claims is unconstitutional, in order to kill the bill. Given that he has taken an oath to protect the Constitution, I'd say that vote is equivalent to a resignation. We accept, don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

I actually watched the Academy Awards, although I hadn't seen most of the movies. Julia Roberts thanked everyone in the world except the person she played. She also forgot to thank her breasts for their out-standing performance. Oh, what, like you all weren't thinking the same thing. Steve Martin said at the beginning that there were almost a billion people watching them, all thinking the same thing: You are all gay. Well, no, I wasn't thinking that, not until Gladiator won Best Picture.

The Bush-era EPA (motto: We're Trying to Think of Something Else for that P to Stand For) has decided that nobody really has to know what the emergency plans are for nearby chemical plants, or what they might be exposed to in event of an accident.

I hadn't realized just how long a wish-list American business
had. Bankruptcy reform, arsenic in the water, no repetitive stress standards, and the list goes on. Who knew that Clinton had actually stopped all this stuff, sort of? Indeed, who knew that American business couldn't do any damn thing it wanted?

Zimbabwe is eliminating dual citizenship. This is the next step in Mugabe's ethnic cleansing campaign.

Prince Charles once gave blood. Write your own joke.

Stalked by a game

Oddly enough, it also comes out this week that Mussolini had a first wife and child no one knew about--including the woman he married bigamously. He had both locked up in asylums, where they died in 1937 and 1942 respectively.

Mississippi's Legislature orders that "In God we Trust" be put up in every classroom, school cafeteria, etc. The ACLU sees no reason to contest this, since no one in a Mississippi school is likely to be able to read it.

While in exile in Siberia, Stalin impregnated a 14-year old. Not a lot to do in those Arctic winters, I guess. But still. And never paid child support, either. Who knew that Stalin might not be a good person?

The Supreme Court allows employers to force employers to give up their right to sue them.

Berlin is having a problem with wild boars. There's a joke there, and I wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot Pole.

According to the National Enquirer (so it must be true) (actually on this sort of thing they usually are), Jenna Bush, one of the president's daughters, smokes pot.

Favorite headline in today's Times: Hunt for escaped Filipino cannibal

Website of the week: http://www.smalltime.com/dictator.html.

You pretend to be a dictator or a sit-com character. It asks you a series of questions and then accurately guesses who you are. The amount of work necessary to create something like this is frightening.

Bush ends the Bar Association's role in evaluating prospective judges, observing that there are dozens of professional organizations interested in judicial nominees. So from now on, the Plumbers' Association of America will evaluate judicial nominees.

Bush reverses Clinton's standards for arsenic in the water supply. I'm sorry, but the only place there should be arsenic is in an Agatha Christie novel.

I don't think I mentioned the South Carolina attorney general, running soon for governor, who said that it's ok to kill people breaking into your home. In one case including the a guy who lived there. License to kill. He will *never* prosecute such cases.

The 14th Circuit upholds Texas's anti-sodomy law.

Speaking of which, the Biker from the Village People died this week, and was buried in his biker outfit. Also, Ann Southern, who would like not to be remembered as the title character of My Mother the Car. Also, the, amazingly enough, serial killer who killed Janet Leigh's body double from Psycho, is finally convicted.

And a special hello to those on the list who are up to their asses in snow. It's shorts and sandals weather out here, you'll be pleased to hear.

I got a leaflet in my mailbox today for a "professional Oriental gardener." I'm still not sure if he's a professional gardener or a professional Oriental.

Evidently when Bush promised to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, he was unaware of some important new information he has since learned: it might cost money.

That's not my joke, that's what the White House said.

Clarifying his foreign policy, Bush says that Russia is not an enemy but may be a threat.

Bush, evidently not going after the Nobel Peace Prize that eluded Clinton, has invited Ian Paisley to the White House for St Patrick's Day.

Three Turks were convicted for a ritual murder of a young woman to prevent any more earthquakes like that of August 1999. They received 25-year terms. And 6 months more because they took her handbag. Which I'm guessing they also planned to sacrifice.

Headline from today's NY Times: Fearing Virus, Alabama Quarantines Tractors.

Ariel Sharon's first act as prime minister will be to advocate the re-legalization of torture.

DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME: A Florida boy aged 14 is sentenced in Florida to life without parole for killing a 6-year old girl when he was 12, copying wrestling moves learned from tv. When you heard that a kid was sentenced to life, you did automatically assume that he was black, didn't you? Well, you'd be right. And I know this because another kid whose trial shouldn't have been televised was. Nobody seems to have asked Governor The Body for his opinion.

Next to that story on the front page of today's NY Times is the face of another kid, who was at one of those shot-up high schools, appeared on every talk show he could get on (his mother wouldn't allow him to talk to Geraldo or Larry King), and is
suffering from withdrawal of media attention three days later. If
you want to write a think-piece about the relationship between tv & violence, those 2 stories would seem to be related.

There is a Christian group here in California I believe called Snowflakes, whose job is to convince Christians to adopt embryos created for IVF but not used. Nice sense of proportion, guys.

Bush speaks / websites

First, the websites. Well, there's
and there's http://www.cookingbynumbers.com

which I didn't look at myself but which I understand involves your telling the site what stuff is in your refrigerator, and it tells you what you can make. For more of this sort of thing, you might check out http://www.seethru.co.uk,
which is a sort of fake webzine in connection with a BBC drama set in the offices of the webzine, if you follow, but its links are certainly interesting and I've passed some on before. You might also check out their random URL generator, which selects a word at random from a large dictionary, adds dot com to the end and goes there. Well I enjoyed it anyhow. Somewhere on their list of links is one for crappy corporate anthems. Enjoy.

That's how the president speaks

The US military has been clearing Kosovo Albanian guerillas out of their bases, along with our new best friends, the Serbs. Today, they protected the Kosovo-Montenegran border in a military action whose only flaw was that it took place in entirely the
wrong country, thanks to faulty NATO maps.

Isn't it great how the same Republicans who complained about Clinton turning the Lincoln bedroom into a Holiday Inn are equally outspoken about the Navy using its subs as a roller coaster for the rich? Oh, right, they haven't done that. Just as well; if Trent Lott decided to do something principled his fiber-glass toupee could do major damage in the emergency surfacing exercise as he pulled his head out of his ass.

That joke worked better in my head than when I tried to condense it into a single sentence.

Ariel Sharon finally has his government, ranging from alleged peacenik Shimon Peres (who should be ashamed of himself) to people who want to expel all the "Arabs." Finally, a Cabinet that looks like Israel (except for those self-same Arabs, who have been ethnically cleansed from the Cabinet, again).

On yesterday's news, I saw footage from the courtroom of the kid who shot up his school. Why are we seeing the face of an unconvicted minor on tv?

So was Bush downplaying Cheney's latest heart "incident" or just desperate when he kept saying how sure he was that the best thing was for Cheney to return to work immediately, if not sooner? Obviously the sub hasn't been giving him enough homework, as demonstrated in this quote from today's NY Times:

In a brief exchange with reporters after meeting Mr. Kim in the Oval Office, Mr. Bush said: "We're not certain as to whether or not they're keeping all terms of all agreements." But the United States has only one agreement with North Korea -- the 1994 accord that froze North Korea's plutonium processing at a suspected nuclear weapons plant. And at a briefing this afternoon two senior administration officials, asked about the president's statement, said there was no evidence that North Korea is violating its terms.

Later, a White House spokesman said that Mr. Bush was referring to his concern about whether the North would comply with future accords, even though he did not use the future tense. "That's how the president speaks," the official said.

So the Taliban (which is Pushtu for "everyone's a critic") have been firing artillery at ancient statuary. Don't tell Mayor Guiliani.

Speaking of picking on someone your own size, 35 Muslims on haj in Mecca were stampled during the Stoning Satan ceremony. That would be Muslims 0, Satan 35. Go team.

Now if only the giant Buddha would get off his fat ass and kick some tiny Afghani butt of his own.

Speaking of religious loons, the NY Times reported Monday that US AID money to aid victims of El Salvador's earthquake is being funnelled through a little organization called Samaritan's Purse, run by the son of Billy Graham, which forces people to sit through prayer sessions and talks about how Jesus (a Protestant Jesus, yet) loves them before they get any food and shelter. All of which leads to the question, what sort of a name is Samaritan's Purse, anyway? One thing about those God-botherers, they do know how to accessorize.

Speaking of sending a message, the Supreme Court says that the Klan should be allowed to pick up trash (but not white trash) on the highway between St. Louis and the suburbs. Please note that this is not just about free speech within a government program (and picking up garbage next to a highway in a government-sponsored program goes beyond even my expansive views of what should be covered by the 1st Amendment). They had actually been allowed into the program. No, what they wanted was a stretch of highway used by black children in school busing programs.

A few days ago, the Times noted that jury verdicts now decide the results of only 4.3% of federal criminal trials (down from 10.4% in 1988) and 1.5% in federal civil trials. It's not just in the US that lawyers no longer trust juries. In Britain too, government plans to eliminate the option of jury trials for certain crimes has been presented as a cost-saving measure but actually reflects the fact that juries will no longer reliably convict. Government-appointed judges, of course, will.