Disney's records company, whatever it's called, just pulled a new CD from Insane Clown Posse (I think I heard that right), which evidently has unpleasant lyrics of the sort which which they do not wish to associate the Disney name. Funny, I'd have thought that a group called the Insane Clown Posse would produce tender love ballads.

You're all probably wondering if I've forgiven the Supreme Court, and the answer is no. The opinion on the internet indecency act was more broadly protective of the 1st Amendment than I'd have expected of this court, and unanimous too. And while I disagree with them politically about assisted suicide, only a loon or a lawyer could find an actual right to assisted suicide in the constitution. I'm also willing to allow it to kill the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, since we already have a perfectly good 1st Amendment. But what is this nonsense about congresscritters not having standing to challenge the line-item veto? If they don't have standing to ask the court to protect the separation of powers, who does? Evidently if Clinton had vetoed their free parking spaces, they could have sued because they lost something tangible, but if their legislative powers are stripped from them, they have no recourse in the courts. An interestingly materialist way to look at something as abstract as constitutional powers. This means Clinton will actually have to veto something before the Court acts. And if he vetoes, say, money to the UN or foreign aid, then no one at all has standing to challenge it, since furriners don't count.

It has been discovered that one of the, er, um, "fellows" at the all-women Newnham College, Cambridge, in fact once was a fellow before one of those operations we men don't like to think about.

From the AP: "Prosecutors have dropped aggravated sexual battery charges in the case of a 9-year old boy who was accused of pressing himself against a girl in a lunch line."

The Kansas case that led to that stupid Supreme Court decision on sexual offenders was worse than I realized. The prisoner involved had served 10 years on a plea bargain. A plea bargain! He could have been sentenced to 180 years if it had gone to trial, but the prosecutor pled it and then, the very same prosecutor went back to get more time via civil commitment.

The Whitewater prosecutor's drones have been interviewing Arkansas state troopers and every woman Clinton's ever been rumored to have slept with (that should drag it out until Clinton's Strom Thurmond's age) about his various affairs. What does Kenneth Starr plan to do, prosecute Clinton for adultery?

Way out there

This week is the 50th anniversary of both Roswell and the murder of Bugsy Siegal (who has a street named after him, although misspelled, in Las Vegas). A coincidence? I think not!

The truth is out there.

Fuck the Supreme Court

Right now I am so pissed off about the sexual predator decision that I don't have room to be pissed off about the decision allowing state teachers to teach in parochial schools.

First, let me point out, as neither the NY Times nor the Washington Post had the bad taste to, the incredible irony of Clarence "Pubic Hair in My Coke" Thomas writing a decision about so-called sexual predators. So people without the legal definition of mental illness can be incarcerated in mental hospitals forever, after serving criminal sentences. Nice to see mental hospitals (doesn't that word imply treatment?) being used for criminal purposes, just like the Soviet Union used to. Thomas says this is not punishment, hence subject to some sort of constitutional protection, such as that against double jeopardy, because it doesn't involve retribution or deterrence. Sure it doesn't. And it's ok that no treatment is on offer, by definition making the incarceration life-long. The people covered by the Kansas law are defined as suffering a mental abnormality or personality disorder that prevents them exercising adequate control over their behaviour. And who in prison does this not apply to? Including most of the guards.

If you're ever in Somalia, don't drink the water, since every UN soldier sent there in 1992 seems to have gone insane in a way that prevented them exercising adequate control over their behaviour. The meek, mild Canadians tortured Somalis, so did the Italians, Belgians roasted a Somalian boy over a brazier (and they will be sentenced this week to as much a month in jail and a $300 fine), and that's the most polite thing I know of Belgians doing; I will spare you the rest. Operation Restore Hope, wasn't that the name?

Hong Kong's currently illegal shadow legislature will not only implement all those awful laws you've been hearing about, but doing so retroactively to the first minute of Chinese rule, so that the demonstrations on the stroke of midnight July 1 will be illegalized ex post facto. The day after this announcement, Britain caved in to Chinese demands that it's troops be allowed in early, presumably so they can be in place to Tiananmen the Hong Kongese.

It's now clear that JFK had truly lousy intelligence during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and that armageddon was a lot closer than he ever realized. It also now comes out, from the Russian archives, that there were still 98 tactical nukes in Cuba when Kruschev was promising there weren't. They'd have stayed there, too, but the Cuban foreign minister couldn't keep his mouth shut about them.

I trust you're all following the tobacco settlement ($2 billion for the lawyers! Money so well spent) and the Louisiana implementation of two-tier marriage law (married, and really really married) without my prodding. And of course, the Russian justice minister videoed frolicking with naked women in a mafia sauna. And the sudden realization that since no one ever did anything about a crimes against humanity tribunal, if Pol Pot is ever really arrested, there's no place to try him.

Oh, I think I forgot, when I was making fun last week of the House analysis of the CIA, to mention that one provision of the new intelligence budget is whistleblower protection, for anyone who brings to the attention of Congresscritters, and only those on the appropriate oversight committees, of crimes, fraud and lying to Congress by the intelligence agencies. Clinton has the nerve to threaten to veto the bill because of this provision. Evidently it interferes with his authority to, well, um, presumably to order crimes, fraud and lying to Congress. He gets more Nixonian every year.

McNutrition

During the British McLibel suit just ended, Micky D's senior VP for marketing, answering the charge the their food was not nutritious, said that Coca-Cola is nutricious because it is "providing water, and I think that is part of a balanced diet."

The House Committee on Intelligence thinks the CIA should have more money. Its report says that the CIA lacks analytic depth and that information is collected but not analyzed. Asked to respond, a CIA spokesman, and I am quoting the NY Times here, "said the agency had not seen the panel's report and could not comment on the criticisms it contained." Point taken.

OK, a couple of days ago two Orthodox rabbis in NY were arrested for laundering Colombian drug money, yesterday it was two SF interior decorators. I'm sure there's a pattern here, but I can't think what it might be.

Cardinal O'Connor joined the anti-Disney bandwagon, criticizing the new movie Hercules for I guess promoting the worship of pagan deities. Also, it lacks the homoerotic element he so enjoyed in all those badly-dubbed Italian Hercules movies. (Joke courtesy of the Daily Show)

The Russian Duma passes a bill, sponsored by a Communist yet, establishing the primacy of the Orthodox Church and establishing registration of religions with an aim to illegalizing any activities, including publishing and missionary work, by any sect they dislike. Especially the Baptists.
Probably a joint Disney-Russian Orthodox plot.

Not content with a Prime Minister who models himself after Clinton, Britain's Tory party elects itself a vibrant (cough) young leader, one William Jefferson Hague (yes, really). Mr. Hague was more ambitious at a younger age than even Clinton. When other kids were memorizing football team lineups, he knew by heart the names and constituencies of all 650+ MPs and regularly read Hansard. His mother (who is not a Tory and thinks he should have gone into business) still gave him a Tory party membership for his 15th birthday. When he was 16, he was annoited by Thatcher in a moment akin to little Billy Bob Clinton shaking hands with JFK. He vowed not to have a girlfriend until he became a cabinet minister. By an amazing coincidence, he became the youngest cabinet minister in quite some time. OK, that part's not that much like Clinton, but he has been called Hague the Vague, and now Hague the Younger. But remember, he is completely bald, and that makes me feel better.

Watergate

I think it's CNN that has rented the actual room of the break-in, 25 years ago today, and hired G. Gordon Liddy. What a great career move that burglary was for him; I wonder how the Cubans are doing? The Washington Post is still wallowing in Watergate nostalgia, so you might check out their web-site. I wonder if I'd feel less of a personal connection to all this if Nixon hadn't chosen my birthday to resign on.

My question about the Cubans might be significant, for all I know. Remember Mohammed Hashemi, one of the lesser figures in the Iran-Contra affair? He's been talking to the Sunday Times (of London), and I think has a book coming out. It seems that in 1984 the CIA spirited him out of the country to London after he was charged with 56 counts of various malfeasci (or whatever the plural of malfeasance is), where MI6 put him to work at what he did best, arms dealing. 1st they were trying to buy some Chinese Silkworm missiles, to see how to counter them. They aborted that purchase when the US did it first, but Hashemi wound up brokering the delivery of Chinese weaponry to Iran, in breach of the UN embargo and with MI6's permission for every deal. He sold them those fast motorboats that were used to attack American and British freighters, and the Silkworms used for the same purpose. Basically, he made possible the tanker war of the mid-80s, with all that lead to.

I hope everyone is breaking the barriers in their heart, as Clinton has suggested we do to rid the country of the scourge of racism. I have put "breaking the barriers in my heart" on my To Do list, right after washing the car and having sex with a supermodel.

Hollywood needs another pet cause now that the Dalai Lama has said that homosexuality is a bad thing, along with anal and oral sex (I leave it to your imaginations where these are on my To Do list), but that prostitution is okay, as long as you pay for it yourself. This was presumably to placate Richard "Pretty Woman" Gere.

Clinton is thinking about apologizing for slavery. Bill Maher says he wants to start off by apologizing for things that happened 200 years ago and work up to Paula Jones. Gingrich thinks we shouldn't apologize for slavery because that would just be meaningless "emotional symbolism." He said this the day after the House again passed the flag burning Amendment.
Speaking of which, the shadow Hong Kong legislature has already passed a law providing a penalty of 3-years prison for defacing the Chinese flag.

Stupid criminal tricks

A judge in Michigan resigns after newspaper finds he phoned sex lines 124 times from the courthouse. He says he's quitting "due to continuing difficulties with my hearing." That's probably how he was found out: "SPEAK UP, GIRLY! YOU WANT TO DO WHAT TO MY WHAT?"

And while a Santa Rosa real estate person can't benefit from the insurance he had on the partner he strangled, evidently his son can get the $500,000. This is the famous case where the victim's parrot was heard to utter "Richard, no no no no."

What is it with Alabama politicians lately? How many items have I sent out in the last few months about Alabama? Well, here's another one. Sleazy former governor Guy Hunt is pardoned by the Pardon Board, most of which he appointed, on the grounds that he is totally innocent and didn't really mean to steal $200,000. The only previous time the Board has ever pardoned someone on the grounds of innocence was one of the Scottsboro boys, in 1976, a tad late. But the interesting bit to me was that his original fine was $211,000, payable at a rate of $100 per month. You do the math.

A Spanish court just issued the first ever sentence for cruelty to animals. I forgot what for. But I know it wasn't for bullfighting. Or those people at the festival who force-fed a cow whisky until its heart exploded. Or that guy who likes to hang greyhounds. Or that town that has the festival (hey, this is tourism, folks!) where every year they put the fattest person in town on a donkey and beat the donkey to make it move. Or....

100 years of the Swiss army knife. And remember, if it doesn't have that loud click, it's a cheap Chinese knock-off.

George Bush has decided to be the first president since Truman who didn't actually have his brains splattered all over his wife's pill-box hat not to write his memoirs. On the other hand, Kato Kaelin's memoirs are forthcoming...

Desert droop, indeed

A recent Village Voice movie review said that Wesley Snipes is a very versatile actor who works well with a variety of weapons.

From the Sunday Times (London), which has been doing sex lives of the rich and famous for several weeks now. The last couple of weeks it was Hitler and his niece, and Bertrand Russell at 79 with his son's wife. Beats real news. By the way, does the name Bertie Ahern not sound exactly like someone clearing their throat? The only interesting thing about the Irish election is that Ahern has been shacking up with a woman not his wife.

Jeez, how can I get any work done when the cat is doing her Elmer Fudd impression all over the living room. "Be vewwy vewwy qwiet. I'm hunting dwagonfly."

Duplicity, senility

And you can decide which is which:

Item the first: Yesterday Hong Kong held its probable last-ever commemoration of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Amazingly, it was covered by the Chinese media. Oh, of course they reported that it was a celebration of the end of British colonialism, but they did cover it...

Item the second: Strom Thurmond, 3rd in line to the presidency, wrote the foreword to a book which says that all of recent American technology was adapted from the crashed Roswell UFO. The author, who evidently participated in this program while in the military, was an aide to Thurmond, now chair of the armed services committee, so he must be in on it too. Which explains the hair.

The truth is out there.

Paula Jones's lawyer is running for Virginia attorney general, which I'd never have known if I just read the NY Times. He recently got into trouble when one of his former clients reported (or had a tape of? I've already forgotten) him suggesting she pose for Playboy. He excused himself by saying that it was after he'd had a couple of drinks. So that's ok then.

Frank Rich in today's column says that the AMA's sudden switch to support of the bill banning late-term abortions is not without precedent. In 1964 the AMA opposed putting warning labels on cigarettes, trying to get Southern congresscritters to support its opposition to the establishment of Medicare.

After Palestine said that selling land to Jews now carries the death penalty, there was a lot of coverage of the 2 people assassinated, but none of the fact that 12 people have so far been arrested under this law. Which Palestine just extended to cover all Palestinians living in Israel, marking the first time, I believe, it has tried to claim sovereignty over the whole area of Israel.

Speaking of enlightened acts, Israel just sentenced a right-wing Jew under the Prevention of Terrorism Act for having put a curse on Rabin a month before the assassination. It was news to me that Jews even had curses, just like gypsies. Anyone care to speculate on what a Jewish curse would be like?

Just saw the Clinton-Blair summit on tv. I had to turn the "smarm" knob way down.

Blair's "spiritual mentor" at public school turns out to have been a major pedophile.

Your fact of the day: the phrase Peeping Tom comes from the one guy in Coventry who peeped at Lady Godiva. Which makes the term several hundred years old. I just read this in a 1849 book.

Tony Blair may not be reversing any of the disastrous policies of the Thatcher-Major years, but he is setting up a review of the cases of the 307 soldiers executed during World War I for cowardice.

A NY Times story on the many executions in Texas says that the last meal cannot include liquor, cigarettes or bubble gum, as these are against the rules. And no dirt either. Evidently someone once asked. He ate yogurt instead.

Everyone has noticed that the new dictator of Zaire has banned political parties and demonstrations, but I haven't seen much coverage of the Taliban-style decrees banning women from wearing pants and short skirts.

The commerce secretary is trying to get fast-track authority from Congress to add Chile to NAFTA. To do it, he's willing to drop those pesky labor and environmental provisions. By the way, there was supposed to be a report on the environmental impact of the existing NAFTA by now, but Mexico wanted a veto.

A company has denied lead-free, environmentally-friendly bullets. Now when you dump that corpse in the river, you won't be poisoning the water supply. Not with lead, anyway.

The former East German spy chief Markus Wolf, who the government keeps trying to put in jail, is about to publish his memoirs. First revelation: the US offered him $1 million to come on over in 1990. Just like '45 all over again.

Someone copyrighted the phrase "Summer of Love."

Why can't a woman be more like a gay man?

That air force pilot was discussed on Politically Incorrect tonight. Harvey Fierstein says that while she's being court-martialled for lying, gay men are supposed to. So she'd have been ok if she slept with a married woman, but not a married man.

Also, Reagan's son Michael insisted that Bill Clinton's friends all die of gangland-style killings, but he's not drawing any conclusions.

Why can't a woman be more like a man?

Does anyone else think that the court martial of the woman B-52 pilot is actually an elaborate practical joke? I mean, I thought it was amusing that they were charging an unmarried woman with adultery, but today's NY Times says that another part of the charge is conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.

Speaking of conduct unbecoming, there's a new biography out of Viscount Melbourne, the British prime minister 1834-41. Evidently he beat up his wife and his mistresses pretty regularly, but really got off on whipping children. He encouraged his friends and relatives to leave their children with him so he could "educate" them. He actually had discussions with young Queen Victoria about this. She thought that the practice of beating school boys was degrading, while he said that Eton hadn't flogged him enough. This was before the birth of Victoria's children, so she may have changed her mind later. Edward could probably have benefited from a good paddling in his 50s.

Speaking of mad, bad and dangerous to know (actually originally said about Lord Byron, whose mistress Melbourne's wife had once been--he beat her up too--and who wrote the first vampire literature in the English language)(ok, it's not a great segue, but it's still a segue), Romania has lately taken up Vlad Draculya as a national hero and is quite pissed off at all the fuss over the 100th anniversary of Bram Stoker's little book.

Speaking of not treating your citizens very well at all, it seems that 5,000 Russian soldiers are now dying each year. 1,000 are suicides, the rest are, well, hazing. Really really bad hazing.

And speaking of soldiers behaving badly, I trust you are all following the newly-released British intercepts of German radio messages in 1941, indicating that it was not the SS but ordinary German police (well, occupation police, but still police) who killed most of the Jews in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, starting at the very beginning of the invasion of Russia. This could bring those Holocaust figures up another million.

Bribery made easy

Singapore sentenced a 16-year old to 2 yrs for the crime of possessing a pack of cigarettes. Think all those Southerners who were so enamored of caning are paying attention?

Just what beautiful downtown Ashkhabad (the capital of Turkmenistan, but of course you all knew that) needed: a 240-foot tower topped by a 40-foot revolving statue of President Niyazev. Yup, I knew that skyline needed something.

A followup to my e-mail of December 3:

Secondly, a heart-warming story from the NY Times: a 14-year old girl sets fire to her house after years of physical and sexual abuse such that one could only be sorry she hadn't taken out more of her family. Her father has never visited her in jail but did send a picture of the burned-out house on her birthday. Naturally, the state of Indiana put her in a maximum-security prison ($25,000 a year) instead of the juvenile treatment center ($82k) the judge begged the state to put her in. You're waiting for the punchline, well I've got two: she has found a new mom in the joint, or "the closest thing to a mom I ever had" in another murderer, and second, she has been ordered not to talk about being abused in group therapy sessions because her fellow inmates in the special-needs unit are upset by her stories, since they all abused or killed their children.

The Indiana Court of Appeals now says incarcerating her with adults violates the state Constitution.

The British Parliament is shy 2 members, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuiness, elected for Sinn Fein from Ulster. They can't take an oath of loyalty to the Queen, so they can't take their seats. On a historical note, the first woman elected to Parliament was also a Sinn Feiner, and therefore was not technically the first woman MP, who was another damn foreigner, Nancy Astor. I don't know why they couldn't just take the oath with their fingers crossed; after all, Labour MP Tony Banks did...

I don't expect much from Tony Blair, although if Scotland gets its own Parliament again it may be worth it. I especially don't expect much on the civil rights front, given that the new Home Secretary Jack Straw is as rabid as the last one, about whom more anon, in the same way that Janet Reno is a worse Attorney General than whoever held that job under Bush (I know she's worse since I can't remember his name). But there might be some improvement on immigration. Amazingly, the Tories were sending 97% of Algerian asylum-seekers back. One just got killed, so that's been suspended. And everyone's favorite sob story, a Nepalese boy brought into Britain by a millionaire whose life was saved in the Himalayas by the boy's father, who died a bit later, only to be ordered out of the country years later by Michael Howard, has also been reversed.

But my favorite soap opera is the Tory leadership fight. The front-runner to replace Major was Michael Portillo, who lost a safe seat at the general election (to one of the 2 new gay MPs). The new front-runner Michael Heseltine withdrew from his hospital bed when his heart acted up again. The current front-runner may be William Hague, who is 36. The theory is that he may be too young now, but by the time his party has any chance at all of regaining power, he should be 45 or so. Or it may be Michael Howard, the ex-Home Sec. Neither is close to electable, so I'd be happy with either. Howard right now is facing charges that he misled Parliament about the circumstances in which he fired the head of the prison service a couple of years back. This used to be a serious matter when there were still standards in British public life, before sleaze or sex scandals became the Tory equivalent of a bar mitzvah, like a statutory rape charge is for a Kennedy. The charge is coming from the former Prison Minister Anne Widdecombe, so Howard's people are responding with a really offensive sexist smear campaign, suggesting that the fired guy wooed Widdecombe over to his side by sending her chocolate and flowers, the inference being that a 49-year old spinster (her term) is so starved for affection....

Finally, a quote from Jonathan Swift: "The bulk of mankind is as well qualified for flying as for thinking."

Paper or plastic: In Afghanistan, only the latter is now an option. See, the recycled paper in paper bags may be recycled from the Koran...

John Redwood, the right-wing candidate for next leader of the Tory party, announced his candidacy in a press conference at the Goring Hotel.