"I am running for mayor," said Roach, 41. "I moved to Houston in 1963. My father helped start NASA here. Houston has given me a tremendous opportunity. "The city has overlooked my obvious disability and enabled me to become a lawyer, (assistant) district attorney, councilman and to have a tremendous law practice right now," said Roach, who is a dwarf. "Now, it's time to help those who helped me."

Republican political consultant Allen Blakemore accords the councilman a bit more respect. He believes Berry could draw Republican support away from Sanchez in a general election because "he's done as much on the issue of tax cuts in six months as Sanchez did in six years."

The Guadalupe River could be closed to tubing and other recreation below the Canyon Dam for the rest of the year, compounding the economic hardships wrought by the Central Texas floods. A ban on recreation on the Comal River also will remain in effect for at least another week, officials said Wednesday. "None of this is good news," said New Braunfels Chamber of Commerce President Michael Meek. Flooding ruined river-related business on the Fourth of July, one of the summer's three crucial holiday weekends. Meek called the floods a "worst-case scenario" that hasn't finished unfolding. Comal County and Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority officials extended the bans on water recreation that had been in place since torrential rains and flooding struck the region beginning July 1. The ban covers the waterways in Comal and Guadalupe counties and also applies to lakes in the region. [...] "I would think it would be close to the end of the year," said Comal County Judge Danny Scheel when asked how soon full use of the Guadalupe River might be restored. People who live in the area will soon be allowed to use the river to access their flooded homes, Scheel said. Scheel said that without doubt, the loss of almost an entire summer season will compound the economic misery of riverside concessions and other businesses that were flooded or rely on tourism. "This has a trickle-down effect through the entire community as well as city and county government. On the Fourth of July weekend, we probably lost $125,000 in sales tax revenue," he said. The disaster's full impact hasn't been felt or measured, Scheel said. "Right now, we're still working on debris removal. We're trying to get people placed in housing of some sort, either rentals or mobiles," the judge said.

A judge's ruling brings University of Houston political scientist Richard Murray a couple of steps closer to sipping what he calls "nature's great gift to the world" without having to retreat to his home in California's wine country. Laying aside recent rulings to the contrary, U.S. District Judge Melinda Harmon on Wednesday decided that Texas' ban on the direct import of out-of-state wine to individual consumers is unconstitutional.

If President Bush really wants "strict constructionists" on the federal bench, why on earth did he nominate Priscilla R. Owen to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals? She's got to be a finalist for Judicial Activist of the Year. [...] It doesn't take a raving pinko to catch on to Owen's act. Actually, it was pointed out very astutely by Alberto R. Gonzales, now Bush's White House counsel, when he was on the state's top civil court with her. In dissents and concurrences in abortion cases two years ago, Owen said everything except that the U.S. Supreme Court majority in Roe v. Wade should be shot at dawn. She sought to contort the state court's already conservative interpretation of the parental notification provision to make it even more, well, conservative. Gonzales, hardly an ACLU flamer, took a moment in his concurring opinion in one abortion case to point out that what the dissenters (who included Owen) were trying to accomplish were "policy decisions for the Legislature." What the dissenters had in mind, Gonzales said, "would be an unconscionable act of judicial activism."

"You can throw the names of all these fancy accounting firms around all you want," said Gregg Zaun, the backup catcher who serves as the Astros' player rep. "When the big giants like Arthur Andersen go down and they're proven to be dirty, what are you going to think about the rest of these people and their creative bookkeeping? "We've seen all the ways that they can hide money and make it look like they're losing so that the big momma corporation or the big pappa corporation gets a tax write-off at the end of the year." [...] "They're telling us one thing, and Forbes Magazine is telling us another," said Zaun, referring to a Forbes article the refuted MLB's claims earlier this year. "Until Major League Baseball is willing to open up the books to an independent auditor, it doesn't make any sense. They've lied to us so many times. But if I was going to believe any owner, Drayton would be it."

McLane's comments are the latest salvo fired by management in recent days. Last week, commissioner Bud Selig said two teams have such severe financial problems that they were in danger of not finishing the season. One team, he said, might not even make its next payroll. That team, the Detroit Tigers, did pay its players Monday, but Selig insisted the problems he described were real. Since allowing owners to speak publicly on labor matters, they've come forward to detail their losses and the need for significant changes in the labor agreement.

Top-to-bottom management and budget review. I will direct a review of the structure and budget of every state agency to identify cost-saving measures and organizational changes to improve performance and save money. I will draw on the expertise of leaders from the private, public, and non-profit sectors during this review. Economic Growth, Fiscal Responsibility Tough choices. Based on this top-to-bottom budget review, we will make tough choices and eliminate any wasteful and duplicative spending. Last year, we took steps to freeze hiring and reduce spending across state agencies, and eliminated 3,500 vacant positions from the budget this spring. Until our economy is fully recovered, we will examine all budget options carefully and continue to make tough decisions where necessary.

Excessive government spending has led to a $1.5 billion deficit. Maryland's budget must be balanced in an honest and efficient manner, without sacrificing programs for the poor and others in need. Excessive spending on non- essential initiatives must be curtailed and our budget priorities redefined.

I want to reassure our audience, they could be forgiven for not being sure who Larry Klayman is, because when he was filing an avalanche against the Clinton administration, he was largely ignored. Now that he's filing lawsuits against Dick Cheney, he's an avenging Clarence Darrow leading off all the network shows. �Kate O�Bierne, CG

Fox�s Tony Snow showed three contrasting clips of network reporting on Klayman. He was always �conservative� when filing suits against Clinton; he was a �watchdog� filing against Cheney.

The second-most generous donor [to Governor Perry] was Sam Wyly at $90,000. Wyly founded a Dallas investment fund that manages funds for the University of Texas. He also is a major owner of Green Mountain Energy Co., which competes in the deregulated electricity market.

BRUSSELS killjoys want to wipe the smiles off drinkers� faces by BANNING pub happy hours. Euro MPs will vote next month on outlawing the practice of cutting booze prices for an hour or two to attract punters. Scandinavian socialists in the European Parliament claim big pub firms lose money on happy hours simply to crush rival bars that can�t afford discounts. They also say happy hours encourage irresponsible drinking.

Granted, nobody has to pay [high concession prices], and I don't. But it shows some real nerve for Drayton to ask so much from fans when he won't even shell out the cash to keep, say, a Castilla or Alou or Astacio, or consider trading for Hampton (who is on the trading block, but deemed too expensive).

Magdalena Donea, a system administrator at Web hosting company KIA Internet Solutions, found a set of her company's IP addresses blacklisted recently on SPEWS. She successfully lobbied to get the listing removed, but it was relisted a second time with additional IP addresses, a move that also affected a company client, the Libertarian Party. "The SPEWS system is unapologetic about false positives and even regards them as a plus. They've taken the 'ends justify the means' argument way farther than I've seen anyone else take it," Donea said. "Their philosophy appears to be that if innocent businesses and individuals on the periphery of spam-house blocklists are affected, then those innocents will have no other choice but to pressure their upstream provider to remove the spammers from their blocks, thereby solving the spam problem bit by a bit. Draconian, yes. Effective? Sure."

"We talked at length about the prospects of adding some more high capacity, whether light rail or otherwise, particularly going to the two airports and other key centers that need to move people," [USOC task force chair Charles] Moore said. "It's not done, but it looks promising."

Pink-bikini-clad Nicole Taylor is on a delivery mission for Tug's Bar B Que. Before she makes it back to the mothership, she'll drop off five sacks of brisket sandwiches, jot down orders from a dozen customers floating in life jackets and politely deflect the catcalls of several admirers. The bright yellow restaurant, a 1969 Stardust Cruiser houseboat equipped with a large warming oven and remodeled to look like a tugboat, first pulled into the cove on Memorial Day weekend. A week later, it added the delivery boat to ferry barbecue and watermelon directly to boaters. As you might imagine, the sun-baked, beer-fueled clientele tends to differ from that of, say, a quiet little French restaurant in downtown Austin. "Yesterday we served a naked woman," said Nicole's father Norm Taylor, who runs the business. "It's a hoot."

New station owners with a bottom-line philosophy have canceled public-affairs programming, dismantled news departments and replaced local DJs with broadcasts of prefabricated material to cut costs. Case in point: When KRBE's Sam Malone and Maria Todd first went on the air in 1993, most radio stations in Houston had a flashy, larger-than-life morning show. Now they're among the dwindling number of megawatt morning personalities. Malone and Todd consider themselves lucky to work for a relatively small company -- Susquehanna Radio Corp. -- that runs its 29 stations the old-fashioned way, with on-air personalities around the clock and a full-time production, marketing and promotion staff that concentrates on only one station and touts its program at every opportunity. "The tables have turned in 10 years," Malone said. "(Back then) people were saying, 'Don't go to KRBE in Houston, because they're a mom-and-pop operation.' Now everybody wants to work for a mom-and-pop operation." "Instead of an evil empire," Todd added.

Clear Channel spokeswoman Pam Taylor argues that consolidation has led to more diversity in formats rather than less. "If you own the No. 1 and No. 2 stations in the market, you're not going to compete against yourself. You're going to position yourself in some other niche," she said.

The House Transportation Committee's ranking Democrat, Rep. James Oberstar of Minnesota, had called the original House proposal "horrible." He said he embraced the compromise on Wednesday because other security measures, such as reinforced cockpit doors and the screening of all baggage for explosives, were not completely in place.

The Government of Canada has already made numerous enhancements to the air transportation security system since the attacks of September 11, 2001. For example, the Government of Canada:

• required that cockpit doors on all Canadian airlines' passenger flights, domestic and international, be locked for the full duration of flights; and
• committed more than $2.2 billion in the December 2001 budget to new aviation security initiatives, including:
• the creation of the new Canadian Air Transport Security Authority, which is responsible for the provision of several key aviation security services including pre-board screening;
• implementing a national program of armed RCMP officers on selected domestic and international flights;
• funding of up to $128 million per year for pre-board screening; and
• funding of more than $1 billion over the next five years for the purchase, deployment, maintenance and operation of new explosives detection systems.

1. The NFL model has led to greater competitive balance
2. The NFL model would be an appropriate one for baseball to adopt
3. A salary cap would help small market teams to compete better
4. Competitive balance is in itself a good thing

1. Joe Sheehan has put forth the best argument regarding the NFL's competitive balance: It's mostly perception based on a small number of games and a large number of playoff spots (12 for the NFL versus 6 for MLB). In many years, a 6-8 team still has a shot at the NFL playoffs, whereas a 60-80 MLB team is probably 20 games out. The NFL has an unbalanced schedule that rewards weaker teams, so it's not unusual for a 6-10 or 7-9 team to make no significant changes and win a wild card with a 9-7 or 10-6 record the next year. If you allow 12 teams (6 from each league) to the MLB playoffs, you add Toronto, Minnesota, Anaheim, and Montreal to Jeff's chart. As the yearly standings show, many years any club over .500 would be in contention. Isn't that how it is in football?
2. In the same Baseball Prospectus article linked above, Sheehan also discusses how the NFL, with its national TV revenue, operates on a completely different financial model than MLB. For one thing, there's no such thing as a "small market" in the NFL since everyone gets 1/32nd of the TV money, and even if there were it has no effect on competitiveness, as teams have been willing to move from LA to St. Louis and Oakland as well as from Houston to Memphis.
3. Back in the golden days of the reserve clause, when salaries were entirely dependent on what the owners wanted to pay, there was essentially no competitive balance as I showed back in May. From 1921 to 1964, the Yankees won 29 pennants, while the Cardinals, Giants, and Dodgers combined to win 30. Of the other teams, only Detroit (6) and the Cubs (5) won more than three pennants over this time frame. It's true that there were only two playoff spots per year during this time, but there were also only 16 teams and no such thing as free agency. Having the ultimate salary cap in place was no help to the majority of teams. In this article, Joe Sheehan discusses salary caps in much more detail. The Baseball Prospectus has been all over this issue for months now.
4. In baseball, we talk about "competitive balance" as a good thing. In football, the supposed model for competitive balance, we talk about "parity", usually in a negative fashion. In the 1995 to 2001 time period that Jeff discusses, there are usually one or two really good teams in the NFL and a whole lot of mediocre ones that will compete for the playoffs but have no real chance of getting to (much less winning) the Super Bowl. This is directly attributable to their hard salary cap. To quote Sheehan one more time:

   To the extent that the salary cap contributes to competitive balance, I would say that it works negatively: it punishes success, forcing well-built, winning teams to shed talent on a near-constant basis. It also makes it virtually impossible to trade, increasing the impact of a single catastrophic event in a league where teams cannot make adjustments on the fly. A system that punishes success, rather than rewards it, seems an odd construct for any endeavor, and it's one I have difficulty supporting.

   Even in the era of free agency, a well-built baseball team can be competitive for years because they are not forced to make personnel decisions based on an artificial construct. The Yankees can continue to employ players that they developed in their farm system like Mariano Rivera and Bernie Williams because they won't be prohibited from paying them market value when they acheive free agent eligibility. Not to get all Sam the Eagle on you here, but shouldn't hard work and success be rewarded in America?

The partnership [between Massachusettes Senator John Kerry and John McCain] is so tight, in fact, that insiders in both camps are speculating about the pair teaming for a 2004 presidential ticket, according to a source close to the buzz -- even without McCain switching parties, as Beltway rumors have previously hinted.

[N]ot all canines are suitable for the dog-eat-dog world of business. Animals which have coat odour or flatulence would be inappropriate, as would those who are over-excitable or over-sexed.

"It�s not a good idea to go for small dogs who wear ribbons or which are yappy and excitable. Some people have strong prejudices about such animals."

Throughout his political career, Bush has cited his experience in corporate America as proof that he understands the world of business and is, by extension, a capable steward of the American economy. But if the "charitable" explanation for Bush's explanation is true--if Bush really had no idea about Harken's troubled finances--it casts the president's business experience in a far less flattering light, whatever the legal implications. Put simply, more important than whether Bush is guilty of insider trading, his Harken past shows him to be either lazy, or stupid, or both.

Let's not blame this one on the managers. The managers are always caretakers of their owners' investments, and it is perfectly understandable that a manager wouldn't want to risk overusing (or, just as bad, to be accused of overusing) someone else's pitcher. That's why it was the commissioner's job to overrule the managers' requests -- in other words, to overrule the owners' wishes -- and let the game continue.

As for what is to be done if future games go into extra innings, I would have thought the solution to be staggeringly simple: Let the players play. I mean, this isn't the World Series; isn't everyone entitled to a little fun? Why not let the fielders pitch an inning apiece until the issue is settled? Call for volunteers among the players already in the lineup: Who wants to pitch an inning?

Since 1998, 26 states have adopted no-call legislation, and nearly everyone in the industry expects the other 24 to follow suit. Keeping up with the differences in the existing laws has created a costly nightmare for the $668 billion industry, which claims the regulations threaten jobs and violate commercial free speech. "The problem is each of the 26 states has its own list with its own set of rules," said Christina Duffney, a spokeswoman for the Direct Marketing Association, the largest trade group for telemarketers. "For a marketer to have to learn all 26 of the rules and abide by them, it increases the chance for errors, and it increases the cost of services provided by the marketers."

The Federal Trade Commission also has proposed a national do-not-call list that could arm consumers with one more weapon in the battle against unsolicited calls as early as next year. The national list, which would fine telemarketers $11,000 per violation, may or may not override the state restrictions, but it looms as another obstacle for the industry to overcome.

The no-call lists do, however, provide a time-saving benefit for some companies, said C.J. Johnson, senior vice president of CCC Interactive Corp., which employs 385 people at the Houston Community Call Center. "The people that get on to the DNC lists are the people who are not going to buy anyway," Johnson said, meaning time and expenses can be better spent on potential customers for his call center's Fortune 100 clients.

The problem is that All-Star managers want to get all of their players into the game. They'll try to do that if the roster is 30 men or 32 or 35 or 40. With skillful substitutions, it can be done. But if the manager wants to get everyone in the game, he has to get them in before the ninth inning ends, because he can't count on extra innings. So if the game does go into extra frames, he's out of luck. That's what happened Tuesday. Both Bob Brenly of the National League and Joe Torre of the American League used all their players in the first nine innings except one emergency leftover pitcher, Vicente Padilla of the Phillies for the N.L., Freddy Garcia of the Mariners for the A.L. By the 11th, those two had both gone two innings. It would have been unfair to them and to their teams to ask them to pitch for the duration, when it wasn't their regular day to start and they had prepared themselves to pitch only an inning or two. These guys have regular jobs, you know, in real games, which resume Thursday. "These organizations and other managers entrust us with their players," Brenly said. "We have to make sure we don't do anything that could hurt them."

Can a Bush � born on third base but thinking he hit a triple � ever really understand the problems of the guys in the bleachers?

Berry, 30, has served on council since January after beating Claudia Williamson in a runoff election for the at-large seat formerly held by Chris Bell, who ran last year for mayor and now is a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives. So far in his short council tenure, Berry's only real push was for a property tax rollback that council rejected last month when it set the city budget. He has said he will make another run at cutting taxes by 1 cent per $100 valuation this September.

In Abilene on Sunday, hundreds of people returned to homes that had been deluged by the same storm that dumped more than 30 inches of rain in Central and South Texas last week. The storm moved north and west and poured a foot of rain on Abilene and surrounding areas in a single day.

Most people who can count to three know the separation of powers is why we have three branches of government, instead of two. The judiciary is supposed to declare the law, no matter how unpopular. Unlike the executive and the legislative departments, the judiciary is not supposed to declare public opinion. If people don't like a judicial decision, they can amend a constitution or a statute or they can elect a new judge. But, until now, they could not expect candidates for judge to say in advance how they would vote on particular cases. Is that change good or bad? Some say it's good. They say the public can't cast a meaningful vote for a judge without knowing how he or she will rule. Without that information, there's nothing to vote for or against. Others say it's bad. How, they ask, can you get a fair trial from a judge who has declared how he'll rule before he has heard the case? A judge who has publicly pledged to vote one way cannot be, or be perceived to be, the neutral magistrate the law requires. If the judiciary is not neutral, it is worse than useless. It's fraudulent.

People in the suburbs are generally satisfied with their neighborhood schools. They want to protect the physical and financial independence of those schools, as well as suburban property values, which are tied to local school quality (real or perceived). School choice threatens the independence of suburban schools by creating the possibility that outsiders, particularly urban students, will enter them and that local funds will exit them. When suburbanites perceive a threat to their schools, they fight back -- and usually win. Consider school desegregation and school finance reform. Suburban districts largely succeeded in insulating their schools from the reach of desegregation decrees, which rarely went beyond urban districts or required suburban schools to participate. Consequently, urban school districts were left to experience the costs and benefits of school desegregation, while most suburban schools remained safely on the sidelines. Suburban school districts have been equally successful in protecting their financial independence. Efforts to equalize school funding have largely failed. Even when funding schemes are reformed, wealthier, suburban districts are usually left free to devote as much of their local resources as they wish to their own schools. A similar pattern can be seen in school choice plans, almost all of which work to protect the autonomy of suburban schools. Public school choice programs, which include charter schools, rarely require suburban schools to open their doors to students from neighboring districts or to send locally raised revenues to another district. The Cleveland plan, at issue in the Supreme Court's decision, is an example: Students in Cleveland were given a voucher that could be used in private schools within Cleveland and in any suburban public school that volunteered to accept voucher students. No schools volunteered. Meanwhile, proposals to expand voucher programs have been defeated time and again, in both legislative arenas and at the ballot box. Those proposals failed not because teachers' unions opposed them but because suburbanites did.

I generally don't find him very interesting at all (just went poking through Reductio to see how often he shows up, and the answer is -- not very). I don't really consider him to be one of the columnists that I just can't miss while doing my daily reading. And isn't that a more damning critique than any denunciation TAPped might want from conservative bloggers: I just don't read the guy because, frankly, columns like this aren't all that surprising!

So what's a flag-waving leftist to do? Well, there's always bashing the right, which the Nuisance does with zeal and pleasure. I don't spend equivalent energy going after the American far left simply because at this time they don't matter very much, although I always enjoy a shot at Ralph Nader.

But the Texas Legislature amended the judicial pension requirements in 1985, diminishing the economic incentive to become a judge and remain one. Before the legislative change, judges could begin earning a pension after serving 12 years on the bench or after eight years if the judge had prior military service. Now, judges must serve 20 years on the bench to qualify for a pension. Because of financial and political uncertainty, many judges do not stay on the job that long anymore.

Judges say money is often a factor in determining whether a lawyer runs for or stays with a judgeship, considering the lucrative urban market for top-notch lawyers. A first-year associate at one of Houston's prestigious firms can earn an average of $150,000 annually, lawyers and judges said. The average state district judicial salary is about $114,000, although county-court-at-law salaries, tied to more county benefits, average about $122,000. "Clearly if the Legislature wants judges to spend more than a few years on the bench, it will have to pay judges at least what top-notch, first-year lawyers make," [state District Judge Mark] Davidson said. "How much can you ask of children to sacrifice their education because you want to do public service as a judge?"

So here's the beauty part for the Democrats: it doesn't matter whether or not Bush broke the law in his insider trading. The scandal here is moral, rather than legal: Bush was intimately connected with a corporate accounting scandal precisely akin to those now in the headlines, and costing tens of thousands of jobs. If the Democrats focus solely on the legalistic question of how Bush made his eight hundred large, they'll be making a Starr-esque error. It really didn't matter whether or not Clinton lied to the grand jury about his affair, the real Lewinsky scandal was that he'd been having the affair at all. The conservatives were right: character matters. In Harken-gate, it makes little difference whether Bush broke the law by waiting thirty weeks to alert the SEC of his stock sale, instead of the required two or three (yawn... eyes... glazing... over... must... follow... the money...). What will be harder for Bush to shake off between now and 2004, particularly if the corporate accounting scandals continue to drag down the economy, is his guilt-by-close-association with a book-cooking energy company.

During the 1994 gubernatorial campaign, Bush denied knowing Harken was having financial problems at the time of his stock sale even though he was on the board's audit committee.

"I don't see why you need to change a horse in the middle of the stream," said alliance member the Rev. F.N. Williams of Antioch Missionary Baptist Church.

As Perry received the endorsement, the UH Center for Public Policy released its new Texas Public Policy Survey showing that Perry leads Sanchez by 42 percent to 32 percent. Pollster Richard Murray, a UH political science professor, said the poll indicates a sizable gain for Sanchez, an oilman and banker from Laredo. A separate Scripps-Howard Texas Poll released in early June showed that Perry had a 20-point lead. Murray said Perry appears to be slipping amid attack ads by Sanchez and a recent string of bad news for Texas, including a projected $5 billion state budget shortfall. "Sanchez isn't so much gaining support as softening up Perry," Murray said. "Perry is an incumbent governor, but he succeeded to the office and is not yet well known to many Texas voters." [...] The Texas Public Policy Survey -- a telephone poll of 739 registered Texas voters conducted June 20-29 -- had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points. The poll also showed that:

• Democrat Ron Kirk holds a lead of 36 percent to 28 percent over Republican John Cornyn for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Phil Gramm. The earlier Texas poll showed Cornyn leading 35 percent to 30 percent. Cornyn is Texas attorney general, and Kirk is a former mayor of Dallas.
• The race for lieutenant governor is tight, with Republican David Dewhurst, the state land commissioner, at 31 percent to 29 percent for Democrat John Sharp, a former state comptroller who narrowly lost the 1998 lieutenant governor's race to Perry. Dewhurst led the Texas Poll 36 percent to 29 percent.

The fact that Coulter can proclaim this crap and not be excoriated from the rooftops of all conservative institutions bothers me a great deal. A great deal. How you can claim this woman as one of your own astonishes me. How you can respect anything this woman writes astonishes me. How you can take seriously anything she utters angers me. You ask liberals to decry the Cynthia McKinney loons. Fine. Now I'm asking conservatives to do the same for Ann Coulter. Stop being proud of idiots like Coulter and slam them the way you slam McKinney. I'm getting a little tired of the bozos getting a free pass because you agree with a few of the things they say. Fair practices, my conservative friends�that's all I'm asking for.

It was amusing last week to hear Sanchez, the Democratic outsider, vowing to "scrub" the budget and Perry, the Republican governmental veteran, defending state spending and insisting that Sanchez didn't know what he was talking about.

Republican Gov. Rick Perry, who has already forfeited $85,000 in campaign contributions from failed energy giant Enron, has decided he won't keep a $10,000 contribution from WorldCom Inc. "We will not keep the funds," said Perry spokesman Ray Sullivan. "We are looking for alternatives rather than return the money to the company."

Federal agents are investigating allegations that an employee at the University of Texas Medical Branch illegally sold body parts for his own gain, an FBI spokesman said Monday. And, in what UTMB President Dr. John Stobo called "an unforgivable failure of oversight," officials at the medical school said they have discovered that the cremated remains of many people who willed their bodies to science were mixed. [...] The problems were revealed in a management audit of UTMB's Willed Body Program that began in March and resulted in the May 9 firing of Allen Tyler Jr., 56, of Galveston. Tyler was responsible for receiving and shipping all bodies and body parts at the medical school, as well as for dismembering bodies and shipping parts to other research facilities across the state and nation, according to a document obtained by the Houston Chronicle. The Willed Body Program receives an average of 300 bodies a year, officials say, only about half of which are used by medical students and researchers at the Galveston medical center. Under direction of the Anatomical Board of the State of Texas, UTMB can ship cadavers and body parts to medical schools and research facilities in other states, but not for profit. The FBI is investigating whether an employee at the center was running an illegal body-part brokering operation, Houston FBI spokesman Bob Doguim said. "There may have been someone inside that program who was selling those body parts," Doguim said. He did not mention Tyler but said officials at the medical center had asked the FBI to investigate its Willed Body Program. Stobo said Monday that UTMB requested the investigation when Tyler was fired.

"I think folks at the state and federal levels had in their mind that this was kind of a small business that kind of annoyed people, so it's OK to revile it," said Louis Mastria, spokesman for the New York-based DMA. "But those things don't match up with the economic reality." An estimated 185 million Americans purchase goods or services by phone each year, including many older residents who don't feel comfortable doing business over the Internet, according to industry records. For every 19 people who yell at or hang up on telemarketers, there's at least one who's receptive to the sales pitch, according to industry statistics. "I don't think people mind being called at home. Most consumers are bothered by the volume of calls," said Kevin Brosnahan, spokesman for the Washington, D.C.-based American Teleservices Association.

It's too soon to tell whether the no-call laws will prompt companies to cut back on telemarketing, industry officials say. But the additional costs -- registering with the state, buying no-call lists several times a year, hiring people to input the lists and paying hefty fines for violations -- likely will be passed on to consumers. "It will force legitimate telemarketers to pay for the sins of the 20 percent of the industry that give us all a black eye," Mastria said.

Many telemarketing industry officials say the Texas no-call list, effective today -- and more than two dozen other states' similar lists of residents who don't want telemarketing calls -- is unnecessary. They say consumers already are protected under federal law, which:

• Prohibits telemarketing calls before 8 a.m. and after 9 p.m., based on the resident's time zone.
• Prohibits companies from using automated dialers and leaving prerecorded messages for commercial purposes on a resident's answering machine.
• Requires firms to keep a no-call list of residents who specifically have asked that company not to call them anymore.
• Requires every telemarketer to state his or her name, which can be an alias as long as the company can identify the employee if a customer files a complaint.
• Requires telemarketers to state their company, that they are calling to sell a good or service, and the seller's address or phone number if a customer wants to cancel the order or lodge a complaint.

If he'd said, "I believe it's a greater injury..." then I might say, what an idiot. But he's simply saying that many will conclude that, which may, as far as I know, be perfectly true.

On the eve of our great national birthday party and in the aftermath of Sept. 11, when millions of us turned to God and prayed for forgiveness of individual and corporate sins and asked for His protection against future attacks, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco has inflicted on this nation what many will conclude is a greater injury than that caused by the terrorists.

Houston's new "fitness czar" is using the city's weight-loss Web site to push a diet that nutrition experts say is potentially harmful and that promotes protein powders and other nutritional supplements he sells.

If [Mayor Lee] Brown wants to promote fitness, he can loosen taxes on fitness centers, provide incentives for employers who allow their employees access to a weight room or motivate employees to take time to exercise, quit tearing up the bike paths with short-term construction projects, etc. and so forth. Standing on the sidelines and cheering with rah rah rah go Houston while letting his buddy sell something that's contrary to what the USDA recommends isn't going to work.

George Parker Young, a Fort Worth lawyer who represented the family, said the jury was outraged by evidence that Cigna's medical director and utilization review nurse received bonuses for reducing inpatient stays. "It was clear that Cigna put cost-cutting ahead of patient safety at a time when the patient most needed care," said Young. [...] In addition to finding Cigna was grossly negligent, the Dallas jury said that the company caused serious bodily injury to Pybas, a violation of the state's criminal law against elder abuse. Young said that finding negated otherwise applicable caps on punitive damages. According to the lawsuit, [Herschel] Pybas was in and out of the hospital from Oct. 6, 1998, until his admission to the skilled nursing facility on Dec. 31, 1998. He was forced out of the facility on Jan. 22, 1999. Dr. Nathan Watson, who was treating Pybas, testified that he wanted to keep his patient in the nursing facility but Cigna was pushing to get him out. Pybas suffered from congestive heart failure and progressive renal failure as well as a bedsore. He had a history of stroke, anemia, upper respiratory infection and malnutrition. Young said evidence showed that Cigna officials never reviewed Pybas' medical records before deciding he should be sent home. Although Pybas required oxygen, he was not provided any when an ambulance took him home from the nursing facility.

County Commissioner Steve Radack, in whose precinct the freeway lies, called it "a shame that a few people would get together and conspire to inconvenience hundreds of thousands of people because of their own selfish beliefs."

The [defendants] were involved as outside players in some of the complex and controversial partnerships set up by Enron Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow and his aide Michael Kopper that critics have said eventually helped sink the company. [...] According to the Justice Department's charging document, the three bankers used a series of intricate financial transactions involving an Enron entity called Southampton LP to defraud the British bank they worked for. The fraud occurred when the men secretly invested in Southampton, eventually reaping $7.3 million in profits that belonged to the bank that employed them, the Justice Department charged. [...] Southampton has been under scrutiny by federal and congressional investigators almost from the outset of the Enron debacle because of huge profits made by executives of the company and others from relatively tiny investments. In early 2000, Fastow and Kopper each turned a $25,000 investment in Southampton into a $4.5 million gain within a few months, according to a special report released earlier this year by the Enron board. Others, like former Enron treasurer Ben Glisan and lawyer Kristina Mordaunt also reaped huge cash payments from investments in Southampton.

The meeting that address concerns inside the Loop was one of three organized by the Metro team to gather comments on the highway study's progress. Their work is focused on an area that runs about 30 miles from downtown to The Woodlands along I-45, and between I-45 and the Hardy Toll Road. About four miles of I-45 and U.S. 59 segments south of downtown are included. As part of the study, Metro is analyzing a variety of advanced high-capacity options such as light rail or high-speed bus, as well as highway improvements. [...] Located near Houston's largest and busiest airport and a north Houston business district, and surrounded by several growing suburbs, the Greenspoint area should serve as a mass transit crossroads, said many participants at Metro's Greenspoint/IAH planning session. While the majority agreed that a light-rail system running through the area is a must, many ideas surfaced on what route that train should take and where and how many stops it should make. "Is there any reason we can't ask for all at the same time?" said Houston Police Department Sgt. Corby Weber. Some common themes that emerged from the meeting, Smith said, included the need for light-rail access from Greenspoint along Greens Road and the Hardy Toll Road, a stop at Greenspoint Mall, a light-rail line that serves local residents, and a line continuing north with stops at FM 1960, FM 2920, The Woodlands and Texas 242. Eager for a high-speed alternative to lengthy and congested road trips to downtown Houston and points beyond, Woodlands-area residents and business owners voiced strong support for a light-rail line down I-45.

It's blushingly appropriate for the times, some would say, that on the same day WorldCom was making headlines for having overstated its cash flow by more than $3.8 billion, "the women of Enron" were making a splash and some cash by baring their personal assets in Playboy magazine. Had the same level of transparency applied to WorldCom, the nation's second-largest long-distance carrier, to Enron and to a growing host of other corporate giants, investors and employees might not be losing the proverbial shirts off their backs and the fig leaf of corporate ethics wouldn't be in the media mulcher.

U.S. District Judge Ewing Werlein Jr. ruled last week that UH must allow the student group Pro-Life Cougars to put up the controversial display this fall in the heavily trafficked Butler Plaza, near UH's Hoffman Hall and M.D. Anderson Library. The judge concluded that UH violated the group's First Amendment rights to free speech and 14th Amendment rights to equal protection last October by not permitting the display in the plaza. UH spokesman Mike Cinelli said Werlein's order is moot because it only applies to a previous university policy on regulating speech. He said a new policy enacted Tuesday will allow UH to restrict the proposed display to one of four so-called "free speech zones" in less visible areas of campus. "This whole issue is really a case about where free speech will occur as opposed to the ability to express free speech," Cinelli said.

The same exhibit was allowed on Butler Plaza in March 2001, leading to student protests and partly causing UH to form a committee that summer to re-evaluate its free speech policy, Cinelli said. The exhibit also caused the University of Texas and Baylor University to re-examine their free speech policies after controversies erupted in those universities last year.

For weeks, the Rockets had targeted Bostjan Nachbar with their second first-round pick. Then Nachbar put on a show that left the Rockets concerned only that he would be gone before they were up with the 15th pick. But as impressive as Nachbar's performance was to the Rockets, he was more sold on the Rockets. He checked flight schedules from Houston to his home in Slovenia. He imagined himself filling a wing with Yao Ming sending an outlet pass and Steve Francis handling the ball on a break. He penned a letter to general manager Carroll Dawson and coach Rudy Tomjanovich to thank them for considering him, the first letter of its type they had ever received and the only one he sent. [...] "After one day in Houston, I fell in love with Houston," Nachbar said in a phone interview from New York, where he attended the draft. "I love the team, the personnel. Everyone was great to me. I had four workouts (in Charlotte, Indiana, Houston and Washington). Houston was something special. From the beginning, I knew this is where I wanted to be."

[A] parasite called a trematode may be involved in some frog deformities. Trematodes burrow into the limb buds of tadpoles and can, in fact, cause at least one of the deformities seen in Minnesota frogs.

Enron worker Shari Daugherty, 22, who grew up in nearby Richmond and graduated from Fort Bend Baptist Academy, told reporters that it was "a big fantasy" when she posed in the raw in front of Enron's downtown skyscrapers. She said skin show was fate: "I (posed nude) because it was there for me to do."

"A profession that we are a nation 'under God' is identical, for Establishment Clause purposes, to a profession that we are a nation 'under Jesus,' a nation 'under Vishnu,' a nation 'under Zeus,' or a nation 'under no god,' because none of these professions can be neutral with respect to religion," Judge Alfred T. Goodwin wrote for the three-judge panel. The appeals said that when President Eisenhower signed the legislation inserting "under God" after the words "one nation," he wrote that "millions of our schoolchildren will daily proclaim in every city and town, every village and rural schoolhouse, the dedication of our nation and our people to the Almighty." The court noted that the U.S. Supreme Court has said students cannot hold religious invocations at graduations and cannot be compelled to recite the pledge. But when the pledge is recited in a classroom, a student who objects is confronted with an "unacceptable choice between participating and protesting," the appeals court said. "Although students cannot be forced to participate in recitation of the pledge, the school district is nonetheless conveying a message of state endorsement of a religious belief when it requires public school teachers to recite, and lead the recitation of, the current form of the pledge," the court said.

But the Republican governor rebuked Sanchez for claiming that he could use businesslike efficiency to milk enough money from the state budget to pay for extensive educational improvements.

The Laredo businessman scored one of the biggest rounds of applause from the audience when, answering a question, he reaffirmed his opposition to private school vouchers, which are widely disliked among public school officials. Silence, in contrast, greeted Perry's call for a limited, pilot voucher program to enable some low-income children to use tax dollars to pay tuition at private or parochial schools.

Rockets general counsel Michael Goldberg issued the following statement today: �I received a letter early this morning from Chinese Basketball Association Chief Executive Xin Lancheng confirming that all of his concerns had been addressed. We are looking forward to drafting Yao Ming with the first overall selection in the 2002 NBA Draft. The fact that we arrived at such a mutually beneficial understanding in such a short period of time illustrates the spirit of cooperation and trust that existed throughout these discussions. There were many rounds of congratulations exchanged this morning with Chief Executive Xin, Yao Ming�s representatives and officials from the Shanghai Sharks.�

Soup Nazi rules will be in effect Thursday when the "Women of Enron" autograph their pictorial in Playboy magazine at the SuperStand in Uptown Park. Here's the drill: Buy the magazine, open it to the pictorial and step sideways to the table. You may chitchat briefly with the women, but cheesy pickup lines are discouraged (like they ever work, anyway). The scribble session will run from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. The Enron issue of Playboy will be available everywhere else on Friday. In case you're wondering, 300 past and present Enron women volunteered to pose for the magazine. Ten made it.

Haven't these folks heard the President's "axis of evil" speech? After all, they are working with two of the three rogue state miscreants. One of their ranks even stated, "We have realized that without countries like Sudan, abortion would have been recognized as a universal human right in a U.N. document." Hello! Sudan is the notorious state that still practices slavery against its Christian population. Freedom for the unborn, but chains for the born? [...] What's next? A strategic alliance with Satan? A religious right conference on Hezbollah family values?

This issue also gives Dems a golden opportunity to wrest the monopoly on flag-waving currently enjoyed by the GOP. There are a large number of liberal/libertarian hawks who disdain religious fundamentalism but see the Dems as soft on foreign policy. The Dems need to become the party of exporting liberal values (first and foremost gender equality) abroad. The question is whether they will be able to shed their own culture warriors' instinctive relativism to do so.

1. Are you for us or against us in the war on terrorism?
2. When will you be holding free and open elections?

"Britney herself has a lot of the values that represent NASCAR and her dad is a big NASCAR fan," said [NASCAR vice president of broadcasting Paul] Brooks. "She is close with her family, she's from Louisiana and represents true Americana."

"We look at them as allies, not necessarily as friends," said Austin Ruse, founder and president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, a New York-based organization that promotes conservative values at U.N. social conferences. "We have realized that without countries like Sudan, abortion would have been recognized as a universal human right in a U.N. document."

The alliance of conservative Islamic states and Christian organizations has placed the Bush administration in the awkward position of siding with some of its most reviled adversaries -- including Iraq and Iran -- in a cultural skirmish against its closest European allies, which broadly support expanding sexual and political rights. U.S. and Iranian officials even huddled during coffee breaks at the U.N. summit on children in New York last month, according to U.N. diplomats.

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, the world was generous with its support and sympathy for New York. The decision by the editors of The New York Times to publish an article sneering at Houston as it reels from a devastating flood and business reversals in the energy sector betrays an unbecoming, unperceptive snobbery from which most Houstonians -- even the most outlandish residents -- are blessedly free.

"I am going to restore respect, integrity, honesty and decency to the governor's office," Sanchez told the Texas Democratic Convention, paraphrasing a line that President Bush used in the 2000 presidential campaign to link Democrat Al Gore to the scandals of the Clinton White House. "Insurance companies, HMOs, electric utilities, favored real estate developers in Austin ... have lined up, paid the freight ... and turned the governor's office into little more than a checkout line at the grocery store," Sanchez said.

When the government fails in its most basic functions -- say, protecting our citizens from foreign enemies -- no one at the FBI or CIA loses his job, we all gather around to salute the flag and Washington gives us yet another bureaucracy. But if business stumbles -- say a minor recession and the collapse of stock values many had thought inflated -- businessmen are hauled into court and the air is full of proposals for "reform."

Metro Detroit hip-hop artist Eminem (news - web sites) has reportedly received threats in response to a video he made in which he dresses up like Osama bin Laden (news - web sites). Bin Laden's supporters allegedly threatened the artist, whose real name is Marshal Mathers, after the release of the video for the single "Without Me." The threats were reported on a music Web site and appeared Thursday in print and television reports. Eminem hired more bodyguards and consulted with a specialist in terrorism, according to Local 4.

But Edward, a 32-year-old native of Long Island, has not fessed up to all of his talents. As it happens, he is more than a psychic medium; he is also a master statistician. The smoke and mirrors behind his self-professed ability to communicate with the dead is a simple application of the summation law of probability. The law states that the calculated probabilities of events that are independent (i.e., the occurrence of one event has no effect on the probability that another event will occur) may be added together. In symbolic terms, where A is the first event, B is the second event and P stands for probability: P(A) + P(B) = P(A or B) For example, if you roll a six-sided die betting on a 3, your chances for success are 1 in 6, or 17 percent. Roll the die six times, and you are almost guaranteed to see a 3 (17 percent x 6 = 102 percent). Lucky for Edward, most audience members on his television show, "Crossing Over," are too hopeful and trusting to pull out a calculator and expose the charlatan behind the prophet.

I prefer to believe Edward's fans are not unintelligent, but simply in need of something to believe in, to feel good about, or to relieve the anxiety of what cannot be controlled. If he is fulfilling these needs, then in some ways, his gig is legit. Just like playing the lottery, if you really want to believe, you are better off not knowing the odds.

The reason women succeed as sex columnists is because lustful guys like myself (and I would lay long odds that the Rachael Kleins of the world -- we had one of her back when I was in school -- have more male readers than female) (a) are curious to know what an attractive woman thinks about sex (b) really, really want to believe that such attractive women think about sex just as much as we do (c) secretly hope for mentions of "experimentation," if you know what I mean, and every guy does and (d) already know all there is to know about the straight male perspective on sex -- because we are straight males!

If the Yankees are so bad for baseball, how come they're on national TV every time you turn on your set? If the Yankees are so bad for baseball, how come they outdraw every team in the sport in road attendance? If the Yankees are so bad for baseball, why were we all so worked up last weekend when Barry Bonds finally came to the Bronx? Because, in so many ways, they're not bad for baseball. They're great for baseball. So what bothers us about the way Bud Selig's crowd complains about the Yankees isn't the merits of their arguments. It's all in the attitude with which they make those arguments. It's about time baseball started doing more to sell everything that's right about its sport instead of everything that's wrong. The NBA has problems, too. It just doesn't turn them into a national marketing campaign. So listen closely as David Stern presents the championship trophy to Jerry Buss and Shaq and Kobe this week. We bet he won't mention competitive balance for one mili-second -- even though his league has had so little of it, it makes baseball look like the World Cup.

State Democratic Chairwoman Molly Beth Malcolm on Monday said the new Texas Republican Party platform is a religious document that tries to question the loyalty of Democrats. "I think it is rather frightening that these people are trying to say everybody ought to believe alike or they are not good Americans. They are wrong," Malcolm said. "When the Republicans try to say they are people of faith and the Democrats are not, they also are very, very wrong," Malcolm said.

Besides the call for a Christian nation, some of the other faith-oriented items in the GOP platform include:

• A call on Congress to sanction any country that persecutes citizens for religious beliefs. The platform specifically calls for rejection of "most favored nation" status for the People's Republic of China until it allows freedom of religion.
• A restoration of the chapel in the Texas Capitol.
• Increased government attention on promoting faith-based community and business organizations that help the needy.
• Public group prayer in schools as well as "the return of Bibles and other religious books to the shelves of all public schools and libraries."

The party also called for character education "based upon biblical principles upon which our nation and state law system were founded."

The state Democratic Party's 2000 platform, subject to revision at the party's state convention later this week, calls for "government to scrupulously honor every Texan's right to religious freedom while respecting the separation of church and state," according to the state party's Web site. The platform adds, "We recognize the importance of religion and prayer in the lives of Texans and support every individual's right to practice his or her own beliefs without imposing them on others."

Pending regulator approval, Dallas-based TXU Energy will gain NewPower's 34,000 electricity customers in the Houston area, and Houston-based Reliant will get 45,000 NewPower customers in the Dallas market. Also, although they will be paying less than local customers who pay the "price to beat" rates of incumbent provider Reliant, many former NewPower customers in Houston will be paying more as customers of TXU. NewPower has been the most aggressive among competing electricity retailers in the state -- the leader among providers that had convinced customers to switch over from their incumbent provider. "I think it's going to shake some confidence in the system," said Reggie James, director of the southwest region of Consumers Union in Austin. When deregulation was first proposed, James said, "there was all this hype about how everyone would save all this money." The reality, James said, has been numerous billing problems and "now we see the biggest marketer going down the tubes."

Rep. Steven Wolens, D-Dallas, who co-chairs the legislative committee which has oversight over electricity deregulation, issued a statement affirming the overall strength of the market. Wolens noted that Texas customers are continuing to pay less than they did under last year's regulated electric rates. That's in part because the state's new laws on deregulation mandated a significant decrease in the base rates offered by the incumbent providers.

It has been reported that as of the school year 2003 "peer" complaints of "sexual assault" will not be investigated by Harvard University without "corroborating evidence". This change in the student handbook has been brought about by asserted "financial" burdens necessarily incurred by investigating all claims of peer sexual assault. Does any of the claptrap make anyone take pause as to the underlying message coming from the administration, faculty and student body of this University? The cost of investigation is putting a burden on their already tight "budget" is the message, or more bluntly, "we don't want to spend the money looking at all those claims of sexual assault coming from our student population." Would the result have been the same of complaints about faculty sexual assaults of students? The question has to be asked, how many complaints are we talking about for the years 1999 to 2002? According to the Harvard's website, in 1999 there we 18541 students enrolled in all courses, fulltime and part-time, in all divisions. 34 sex offenses reported were listed in the Harvard University Police Department's crime stats in 2000. For my purposes, I include their statutory definition of forcible fondling since it most nearly squares up with "sexual assault". Forcible fondling includes, inter alia, touching the body where the bathing suit covers for the purposes of sexual gratification against the will of the touchee. As a comparison, according to the Cambridge Police Department, between 1998 and 2000, 41 rapes were reported. Certainly I am not comparing "sexual assault" to rape, but if we used the classification of sex crime, these stats become significant. 34 "sexual assaults" for the calendar year of 2000 with a student population of 18,500+! Some how I find it difficult to understand the amendment to the student handbook and how eliminating investigations when there is no "corroborating evidence" a cost effective remedy. Much less, I view this amendment as a significant blow to the pursuit of justice. "Corroborating evidence" is a fascinating phrase. How do you corroborate "forcible fondling" when you are at a frat party or whatever and you are the victim of an unappreciated, unwelcome and intrusive hand on your body? Previously, it's only your word if you want to file a complaint, but now, you cannot file a complaint, you have no "corroborating evidence", no bruise, no scrap on your body, no "medals", only your word and your credibility. Historically, the credibility of the complainant been the basis of many charges and convictions simply because a seasoned cop or prosecutor had the experience and wisdom to go forward with only the complainant's word. I can attest to that fact, since there are a few inmates doing time after convictions based upon the credibility of the complainant in case tried before me. Someone is going the have to explain all this to me, the old fashioned, out of touch believer in using all those years of experience and all the common sense acquired doing business with the person on the other end of the conversation. Do I believe what this person just said, does it make sense, have the ring of truth, and what is this persons ability to recall past events and report them with accurately? Consider this set of facts: A coed dorm; a roommate who has a frequent visitor, also living on the same floor; the complainant is in the dorm on a weekend night and the dorm floor is empty; sometime during the early evening the complainant awakes to find the friend of the roommate in bed and fondling the complainant's genitals. The victim makes enough noise that the perp leaves. There is no physical assault so as to leave telltale "medals" (bruises), scraps or lacerations, nothing; identity is not an issue, but under the new policy of Harvard, the is no "corroborating evidence". No harm no foul? I guess that single sex dorms, curfews, dress code and mandatory attendance at religious services are next, after all, without "corroborating evidence" there is no problem with sexual assault at Harvard. Would an informed citizenry vote to retain in office the Legislators who voted for such a bill?

"There is no democracy in physics," the physicist Luis Alvarez once said. "We can't say that some second-rate guy has as much right to opinion as Fermi." The same goes for any field of science. And if that's true within fields, it's even more true between fields. Anthropologists have very little useful to say about high-energy physics (which I'm sure they'll be the first to admit), and physicists are very unlikely to be credible on the subject of angiogenesis. Science has gotten too deep, the questions are too specialized. [...] The world is complicated. Science is complicated. The scientific method is a time-proven process that has lead to a great understand, and mastery, of the natural world.It takes time for it to reach conclusions, and scientists put in that time. As I've written before, the IPCC Assessment Reports are some of the most peer-reviewed scientific documents in history. When I've attend conferences such as those of the American Geophysical Union and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, I see little debate on the fundamentals conclusions of climate science in the sessions.The skeptics aren't there. Of course, this subject has now taken on a life of its own, and it's the polemical battlefield that [Thomas] Sowell et. al. are fighting over. But just be clear it's not the scientific battleground. If our society and our politicians decide they want to ignore the scientific findings of climatologists, that is of course their right -- it certainly happens with other scientific topics. But that doesn't make the consequences any less grounded in science. To borrow a phrase from the early days of Los Alamos, that doesn't mean you're not tickling the dragon.

After the disaster, I got back to Houston as quickly as possible and at first could hardly tell anything had happened. It was not as if a bomb had exploded or a building had collapsed. There had been a disappearance, that is all, and the effect was not apparent until I got out of the car. It was the fear I noticed, and I saw it first when I sat down with Elyse Lanier.

It has never been like other cities -- not like San Francisco or Denver or Palm Beach. People have never gone to Houston for its beauty or climate, or because it is in any natural way a good place to live. Houston from the start has been a place to make money -- the great interior commercial emporium of Texas,'' as the Allen brothers promised. And if money was Houston's singular attraction, then certainly the city would impose no heavy restrictions on the making of it.

The Rev. C.L. Jackson of Houston's Pleasant Grove Missionary Baptist Church provided a show of support for Gov. Rick Perry by announcing at the Republican State Convention that he is switching parties. To the cheers of some 8,500 party stalwarts, Jackson said that his two days at the convention convinced him that he now is a Republican after years of being a Democrat.

DALLAS -- Texas Republicans argued over whether their state convention was mainstream or filled with "religious zealots" Saturday as delegates approved a party platform that called for the repeal of the state lottery, declared the United States a Christian nation and favored posting the Ten Commandments on public property. The Republican platform also reaffirmed the state party's belief that the nation needs to "dispel the myth of the separation of church and state."

Amendment I Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

With his effort to help restore higher speed limits on Houston highways, Gov. Rick Perry stepped on the gas in his own race to remain in the Governor's Mansion. And while Perry can expect to face scrutiny about his dedication to clean the air, political analysts say he scored with voters on an issue that will be difficult for Democratic opponent Tony Sanchez to oppose. "It doesn't take much imagination to understand that almost every Texan wants to drive faster," said Rice University political scientist Bob Stein. "The candidate who can deliver a 70-mph speed limit to the people of Harris County will have, if not their votes, their gratitude."

Some Democrats, including U.S. Reps. Ken Bentsen, Gene Green and Sheila Jackson Lee, have complained about the lower speed. But it has been largely a Republican effort. "I'm sure that Democrats are more concerned with the environment, and the 55-mph speed limit is part of the effort of cleaning up the air," said Harris County Democratic Party Chairwoman Sue Schechter.

A spokesman for Texas Attorney General John Cornyn, Kirk's Republican opponent, said the Democratic candidate was "wilting" under pressure from Cornyn, who has repeatedly criticized Senate Democrats for delaying confirmation proceedings. [...] Cornyn has repeatedly challenged Kirk and other Democrats on the judicial confirmation issue. He has specifically gone to bat for Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owen, whose nomination to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has been on hold for more than a year.

With a sly reference to his own need for speed, Gov. Rick Perry on Tuesday ordered the Texas Department of Transportation to use clean diesel in its Houston-area fleet, a measure that could bolster the case for repealing the end of the unpopular 55 mph environmental speed limit. [...] Neither Perry nor TNRCC Chairman Robert Huston would speculate on what will happen with the 55 mph speed limit at the commission meeting. Asked flatly whether he supported repealing the limit, Perry became slyly cryptic. "Being a young man who grew up in the '60s and '70s and '80s, drove on relatively large and open and straight and long highways, I'm a big fan of Sammy Hagar," the governor deadpanned. For those who didn't grow up in those decades, Perry was referring to a track on Hagar's 1984 album VOA titled I Can't Drive 55.

Ginger Stampley

Unqualified Offerings: David Broder gets spidey-smacked [...] I need to add my own rant to the Broder-bashing, because this passage promotes an idea that seriously gets (and annoys) my goat: David Broder writes, "In 1962, when the first Spider-Man comic appeared, the notion of making his alter ego a New York City kid was unobjectionable. We were an innocent country then, not yet familiar with assassinations, urban riots and terrorist attacks." I HATE this cliche. I hate how America didn't lose its innocence with slavery--or the removal of the Cherokee--or the Civil War--or the World Wars--or Hiroshima and Nagasaki--but a pretty president pulls a Lincoln and suddenly America's lost her virginity? What kind of blinkered, privileged, everything-everyone-hates-about-the-Boomers perspective is this? C'mon.

Q. I applaud Karen Hughes' decision to return to Texas to spend more time with her husband and son. But was that really the only reason she quit as counselor to President Bush? A. No. President Bush asked Hughes to buck up their state's Republican Party, which is in danger of losing this fall's governor's race and the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Phil Gramm. Such a defeat would be a major (ed. note: surely he meant to say "major league"?) humiliation for the President. Hughes, 45, is intimately familiar with the Lone Star State's rough-and-tumble politics, and Mr. Bush is counting on her to save face for him and the GOP.

Some Republicans fear that at least one item up for consideration at the convention could work against that mainstream appeal. It is a proposal that the party require its candidates to assume all core positions of the party platform. Opponents believe that some of the more conservative planks of the platform -- such as strict opposition to abortion or a return to the gold standard -- could scare away many middle-of-the-road voters.

Under the old policy, the school would automatically look into any claim of a peer dispute, including a sexual assault. The May 7 change mandates anyone filing a dispute complaint provide "sufficient independent corroboration" of misconduct before the school investigates. The new policy -- believed by some to be the first such requirement in the nation -- sparked soul-searching among faculty who approved it, a protest from angry students and women's groups, and fierce debate over Harvard's responsibility to investigate difficult-to-prove claims.

It's a language issue: when I say "intelligent design", I'm discussing the intelligent design movement, which makes actual contentions that are demonstrably false, including the contention that ID is scientific. With that definition, there's nothing incorrect with saying that "intelligent design proponents are wrong." Eugene would surely agree with that (he states his agreement with the premises in his posts, and the conclusion naturally follows), just as I would agree with Eugene's narrower (but ultimately trivial) point that the hypothesis "An omniscient being created both humanity and all of the evidence pointing towards evolution and away from intelligent design" cannot ultimately be said to be "wrong" or anything worse than "not helpful."

1. It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory - if we look for confirmations. 2. Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions; that is to say, if, unenlightened by the theory in question, we should have expected an event which was incompatible with the theory - an event which would have refuted the theory. 3. Every "good" scientific theory is a prohibition: it forbids certain things to happen. The more a theory forbids, the better it is. 4. A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice. 5. Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it. Testability is falsifiability; but there are degrees of testability: some theories are more testable, more exposed to refutation, than others; they take, as it were, greater risks. 6. Confirming evidence should not count except when it is the result of a genuine test of the theory; and this means that it can be presented as a serious but unsuccessful attempt to falsify the theory. (I now speak in such cases of "corroborating evidence.") 7. Some genuinely testable theories, when found to be false, are still upheld by their admirers - for example by introducing ad hoc some auxiliary assumption, or by reinterpreting the theory ad hoc in such a way that it escapes refutation. Such a procedure is always possible, but it rescues the theory from refutation only at the price of destroying, or at least lowering, its scientific status. (I later described such a rescuing operation as a "conventionalist twist" or a "conventionalist stratagem.") One can sum up all this by saying that the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability.

[I]n 2002, with enough oil for a century and a half, the planet awash in cut-price minerals, and less global famine, starvation and malnutrition than ever before, the end of the world has had to be rescheduled.

Oil is the world's largest source of energy, supplying nearly half of total primary energy demand. Three-quarters of world oil reserves are in OPEC countries and of these, two-thirds are in just four countries: Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. It might be expected that priority would be given to producing Middle East oil, given its abundance and the fact that it is relatively cheap to produce. However, as a result of economic, political and strategic considerations, the search for oil has extended into remote parts of the earth, both onshore and, increasingly, offshore. Exploring for and producing oil offshore is both difficult and expensive. Oil companies will continue to seek technical innovations needed to make such activities cost-effective. Improved geological and seismic data have led to more accurate estimates of oil reserves. In some cases, reservoirs have been reassessed and reserves upgraded in the light of prevailing economics. On the production side, improved drilling techniques and the use of lighter materials on platforms have cut costs considerably, sometimes by as much as a third. Oil supply can be augmented by unconventional sources such as oil shale and tar sands. There are major oil shale deposits in the Western United States, Australia and Morocco, and tar sands occur in Canada, Venezuela and Madagascar. Such sources are more expensive to produce than conventional oil and therefore tend to be uneconomic to develop in times of low oil prices. So much for oil supply. But what about oil demand in the future? Demand in developed countries is likely to show little growth, due to energy conservation measures and moves towards greater energy efficiency and alternative energy sources. Well-insulated homes require less heating, modern car engines use gasoline more efficiently. Demand in the developing countries, on the other hand, is likely to increase, owing to greater industrialization and population growth, especially in urban areas. As people become more affluent, there are more cars on the road and demand for oil - still the main transport fuel - therefore increases. In the early 1970s, there were concerns that the world's oil might be running out. This view has now changed and it is believed that with today's technology there is enough oil to last well into the next century. Public debate is now focused on the environment and the term 'sustainable development' has become increasingly familiar. People want a higher standard of living, but not at the expense of permanent damage to the environment. The use of all fossil fuels, including oil, will depend not only on technical, political and economic decisions but, increasingly, on environmental considerations.

Thirty years after the first doom-mongering eco-confab in Stockholm, it should be obvious even to the UN frequent-flyer crowd. Markets aren't the problem, but the solution to the problem. The best way to clean up the neighbourhood is to make people wealthier. To do that, you need free markets, democracy, the rule of law and public accountability. None of those things exist in the Middle East, which is the real reason they'll be taking communal showers once a month in 2032. Since 1970, when the great northern forest was being felled to print Paul Ehrlich best-sellers, the U.S. economy has swollen by 150%; automobile traffic has increased by 143%; and energy consumption has grown 45%.

[Also since 1970], air pollutants have declined by 29%, toxic emissions by 48.5%, sulphur dioxide levels by 65.3%, and airborne lead by 97.3%.

Critics of the owners say that if the game is in such bad financial shape, "Why don't the owners exercise some financial discipline?" It's a legit question. But if you think about it, it's not all that hard to understand. You ever needed to lose weight? Has the doctor ever looked at your cholesterol level and told you to cut out the six-egg, five-cheese omelet you enjoy each morning? Has a doctor ever taken out a restraining order forbidding you to come within 100 yards of Hayes Hamburgers after midnight? OK, let's say you've never needed to lose weight. Have you ever tried to get out of a painful, destructive relationship with someone you're really attracted to? Has one last sleepover ever turned into 10 more months of dysfunction and an unwanted pregnancy? You feel me? Just because the owners lack the discipline to correct the problem doesn't mean that there's no problem.

If the owners take the proper, hardcore negotiating position and my sportswriting colleagues properly explain what's at stake, I believe baseball fans will side with the owners, and there will be little fan hostility.

Look around. It is May, and how many teams have a realistic chance to win the World Series? Three? Four? How many teams have a chance to win next year's World Series? And the next? About the same number? And so it goes. Now look at the NFL. How many teams have a chance to win the 2005 Super Bowl? Pretty much everyone except the Bengals. That, more than anything, is what is wrong with baseball.

The 16-game schedule, and 12-team playoffs, enhance the perception of competitive balance in the NFL. An MLB team that is 60-80 after 87.5% of the schedule is completed is playing the kids and looking towards next year. An NFL team that is 6-8 after 87.5% of the schedule is completed is often a two-game winning streak from the wild card. This is perhaps the biggest factor in the way the two sports are perceived. People think of the NFL as having great races in which everyone has a chance, but there's simply a limit as to how much separation you can create in 15 weeks. If MLB played a 16-game season, you'd not only have tremendous races, but a lot more turnover. Add in six playoff spots per league, which lowers the bar for success, and you have a huge pileup between 9-7 and 7-9 that looks like a "great race," but is actually just a function of structure. I can�t emphasize this enough: NFL competitive balance is as much perception as it is reality. Expecting MLB, with 162 games and one wild-card spot, to shape itself to meet the perception of another league is a bad idea

Those who do care, however, always seem to have the same question when they ask about the Rays. It's a question asked with pained eyes and a pleading voice. "Is there any hope?" Sure, if you want to be the Minnesota Twins. Sure, if you want to be the Oakland A's. Sure, if you want to trade in fifth place for, say, a nice little season where you finish third. But if you're talking about winning the World Series? About leveling the playing field with the Yankees? About reaching the World Series? No, there isn't a lot of hope.

The Rays are the same as the Royals, who are the same as the Tigers, who are the same as the Padres, who are the same as the Pirates, who are the same as the rest of baseball's great unwashed. None of them has a chance. Either.

People seem to have grown weary of it. Attendance is down 5 percent. Remember those spanking new ballparks that were supposed to be the place to be? People aren't going there, either. Pittsburgh built a new park, and its attendance is down 33 percent, according to Street and Smith's Sports Business Journal. In Milwaukee, where another new park opened last year, attendance is down 27 percent. It's down 25 percent with the Rangers and their star-studded lineup, for goodness' sakes.

Why don�t people like [Barry Bonds]? Is it race? Is it the fault of some liberal media conspiracy I haven�t even heard of? I don�t get it. Bonds is about to become the only player ever to hit 500 homers and steal 500 bases. Guess who the only guy ever to reach 400 of each is? Whoa, trick question. It�s Bonds. He�s nearly 40 percent better by this crucial measurement than his closest competitors. Just what is the problem, people? Where�s the excitement? �Splain, please.

Israeli specialists have a low regard for American security searches. They say they tend to cause unnecessary discomfort for travelers, while being prone to missing potential assailants. "The United States does not have a security system, it has a system for bothering people," [security consultant Shlomo] Dror says. "The difference between the Israeli and American systems is that we are looking for the terrorist, while the Americans look for the weapons," he adds. [...] But Dror adds that Israeli methods, even if fully adopted, will not stop all attacks. "There is no 100 percent in security. If you want 100 percent security on flights, every passenger has to take all his clothes off, have his suitcase checked, and be handcuffed and tied to his seat. For sure this can never be. The idea is to enable people to continue their lives while making an attack less possible."

Victor Morales, who lost the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate, said he will not run for office again as a Democrat. "At this point in time, I am independent," Morales said, citing what he called lousy treatment by established members of the Democratic Party. "I wouldn't run as a Democrat again," Morales told the San Antonio Express-News for a story posted on the paper's Web site Friday.

Dalal Salamah, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, was in Houston on Friday to issue a plea for aid as well as understanding for fellow Palestinians. "There is a need to talk about our situation," Salamah said in an interview. "Through the media, people are able to see the attacks and the damage, but the daily life -- how people manage their daily lives. I want to paint a real picture of how they manage to live," Salamah said.

As she spoke Friday, the Israeli army was surrounding the Palestinian city of Ramallah with barbed wire, blocking what was a way to leave and enter Ramallah without passing checkpoints. The move, according to international aid officials, is the first step in an Israeli plan to encircle all eight major cities of the West Bank, and their outlying villages, including Salamah's home, Nablus. "There is no semblance of normal life in the camps and villages now," said Salamah. "In Palestinian West Bank and Gaza, each city and refugee camp is separated from the others. Sixteen cities, totally separated from one another," Salamah said. "Some people who tried walking (from one village to another) to get milk and bread for their kids died," she said. "They are suffering because they have finished their water, their own wells are empty." "No laborers may now go into Israel, or between Nablus, Jerusalem, or the other villages," Salamah said. "They must stay in their villages.

"The students in the schools cannot get to the university. Ambulances may come to sick people, but they are forbidden from taking people in the ambulances, they must leave them there," she said.

Salamah said she wants to talk about those things, as well as "the difference between the national struggle (against Israeli occupation) and terrorism." "We condemn terrorism," she said, adding that suicide bombings carried out in Israel "are acts of young people and some political parties." "It is condemned by me and by the Palestinian Authority. But how can we explain to the younger generation, they are not allowed to bomb themselves in Israel while the Israeli forces attack Palestinian villages and camps?"

State District Judge Zeke Zbranek had refused to release [Odis] Briggs to visit his ailing wife or attend her funeral after she died March 29, 1999. Zbranek said Briggs "held the keys" to his freedom -- and state appellate courts agreed -- if he would turn over financial records to show what happened to the $120,000 he admits swindling from 18 black families in Chambers County. Briggs' attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, David George, said he had not found anyone else in Texas held on a civil contempt charge longer than Briggs.

In 1999, the Rev. Jesse Jackson and a representative of his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition interceded on "humanitarian" grounds to have Briggs released to see his sick wife, but were turned down by the courts. PUSH attorney Leonard Mungo called Zbranek an "instrument of Satan" and an example of a "national trend to incarcerate African-Americans unjustly." However, members of the swindled families wrote Jackson that he was fighting for the wrong side. Edna Jensen, 92, who walks with a cane, praised Zbranek for "doing the right thing" to stop these families from being swindled twice -- from their oil royalties and by Briggs. Mungo later offered to assist the families with their claims if they would allow Briggs to be released, but they refused.

Document destruction when there's an outstanding subpoena calling for the documents is one thing, and clearly illegal; document destruction when there's outstanding litigation that will likely call for the documents is another, though generally agreed to be illegal when done with nefarious intent, and at issue in the Andersen case now. But here the court held that British American Tobacco's destruction of documents with no litigation pending was illegal and sanctionable, because it was done in anticipation of future litigation against unknown parties that had yet to be filed! The problem here is that this proves too much. All document destruction policies are in place, in part, to limit the expense of future litigation. If your company saves forty-year old documents, someday someone will sue you and want to look through those forty-year-old documents for evidence, and you'll need to hire lawyers and paralegals and copying services to manage all that potential evidence at a cost that, if I had to guess, works out to about a buck a page. Most companies automatically delete e-mails for just such a reason. (I'm a litigator in my day job. I've sat in a warehouse and looked at forty-year old documents. I've also spent days of my life leafing through executives' ancient personal e-mails because they were stored with their business e-mails.) Meanwhile, BAT's "discovery abuse" was sanctioned by prohibiting them from introducing contrary evidence in defense of their case, and they naturally lost the one-sided trial, as the plaintiff pointed to the evidence destruction as the evidence of wrongdoing.

Sports columnist fired The New York Post fired sports columnist Wallace Matthews Wednesday after he took his "killed" column critical of the newspaper and another Post columnist and put it on the message board of the Web site sportsjournalists.com. Matthews wrote that the paper had "no integrity," and accused gossip columnist Neal Travis of "deplorable journalism" for writing without evidence that an unnamed New York Mets star was gay. Before Tuesday's game with Philadelphia, reacting to rumors, Mets star catcher Mike Piazza told a press conference he was a heterosexual. In a statement, the Post said Matthews was fired for "derogatory comments and insubordination."

THERE were no fancy invitations and no "open for business" signs at 1302 W. Gray. But customers started arriving on Friday and before Linda Lay was ready. Jus' Stuff, the resale shop celebrated in the cartoon strip Doonesbury all of last week, was up and running. And merchandise flew out of the store. It was one bit of good karma on the less-than-glowing horizon for Lay, wife of former Enron CEO Ken Lay. By Saturday, a standing-room-only crowd had gathered in the former pet-store location making parking a challenge and a few neighbors jittery. So many items were sold over the weekend that Jus' Stuff ran out of its signature zebra-print tissue wrap and the supply of business cards was all but depleted.

The White House said it has been gathering and reviewing documents, e-mails and entry records of visitors and interviewing people with relevant information, and it plans to send material to the committee Wednesday. Presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer, traveling with Bush to Germany on Air Force One, said the subpoenas were unnecessary in light of those plans. [...] "The White House has cooperated with Senator [Joe] Lieberman, [chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, which issued the subpoenas]" Fleischer told reporters. He said the White House's own review showed "no instance in which Enron approached anyone in the executive office of the president for financial help before they filed for bankruptcy."

Baseball salaries have this magic ability to turn raging free-market conservatives into autocrats with the snap of a finger. Frothing Republicans who lusted after Jack Kemp's "enterprise zone" concepts are often appalled that Jason Giambi is able to make $120 million on the same free market that they defend so vigorously in other segments of society. The owners work very hard to keep their financial information quiet, but are quick to publicize how much money the latest free agent is raking in.

While they wouldn't want bin Laden, or anyone of non-European descent, living next door, leaders of the hard-core racist movement in the United States have seized upon the Sept. 11 attacks as an opportunity to expand their strategic alliance with Islamic radicals under the pretext of supporting Palestinian rights. After hijacked airplanes demolished the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon, a number of Muslim newspapers published a flurry of articles by American white supremacists ranting against Israel and the Jews. Anti-Zionist commentary by neo-Nazi David Duke appeared on the front page of the Oman Times, for instance, and on an extremist Web site based in Pakistan (www.tanzeen.com). Another opinion piece by Duke ran in Muslims, a New York-based English-language weekly, which also featured a lengthy critique of U.S. foreign policy by William Pierce, head of the rabidly racist National Alliance. In the wake of Sept. 11, several American neo-Nazi web sites also started to offer links to Islamic Web sites.

Once reproductive cloning is made physically safe for the fetus, its enthusiasts may find an ally in U.S. law. The U.S. Congress, of course, could decide to ban human cloning for any purpose, claiming the power to do so because it can regulate interstate commerce, and a cloning clinic would be open to women from anywhere in the country. But such a law could well run afoul of the U.S. Supreme Court�s ruling in Roe v. Wade, which, by upholding the right of a woman to choose an abortion, arguably implies that the state cannot interfere with how she chooses to reproduce.

Look, in hindsight, there are connections maybe we should have made. Communications should have been better between various intelligence and law enforcement agencies. But hindsight is 20/20 and these things were not as clear then as they are now. Our people did the best they knew how. But I'm the Commander-in-Chief. And I'm responsible. The buck stops here. Let's move ahead now and make whatever improvements we can.

I think that stats will verify that most [homeless people] are substance abusers or mentally ill persons with addictions (MICA). Spending large sums of money at the end process, arrest, jail, etc. is not an answer. Maybe we should allocate more and more money earlier and earlier. For example, in the schools where we could have certified intervention people addressing substance abuse as soon as there is any evidence of abuse. I learned from bitter, but repeated experience in reading sentence reports from Probation officers that the substance abuse began with the defendant as early as 10 years old. These reports would show beer drinking, marijuana smoking, cocaine and then anything that would give them a high to the point that they were hopelessly addicted by their early 20's. Repeated jail did little to rehab these folks or teach them any recovery skills. Time tested AA on the other hand, if the addicted person was caught early, gave them a better chance of recovering. The unfortunate thing about all of this is that politicians don't get votes for realistic approaches to addiction, but garner votes by being "tough on crime". Sad but true; however my experience, personally and professionally, is that if you aggressively attack the problem sooner rather than later, you get a better bang for your buck.

"I am literally comparing Bush and his cronies to Hitler," Adams said, "only Hitler had a smaller vision."

"[I] don't understand why a ball bouncer makes more than a schoolteacher," Adams said.

"I think there are a majority of people who want love, peace and cooperation," said Caldicott. "But we find it hard to reach out to each other."

1. Loudly and constantly touts his or her commitment to the ends (i.e., "promoting peace", "getting tough on crime", etc).
2. Demonizes those who do not stand firmly with them, and
3. Has no clearly articulated plan for acheiving their desired end, or has a clearly articulated plan without having any idea of the costs and consequences of that plan.

I used EarthFirst! as lazy shorthand for "destructive environmentalists." Charles is justified in challenging the parallel, but I think it holds -- especially given my intent in writing it. They share language and analyses to a startling degree. As Al Gore says in "Earth in the Balance":

....our activities are now beginning to have fundamental, systemic effects upon the entire life-support system of the planet - upsetting the world's climate, poisoning the oceans, destroying the ozone layer which protects us from excessive ultraviolet radiation, changing the CO2 ratio in the atmosphere, and spreading acid rain, radioactive fallout, pesticides and industrial contamination throughout the biosphere.

Sorry, that wasn't Al Gore at all, but EarthFirst's (EarthFirst!'s?) website. But if you've read Gore's book -- or even representative samples of it -- you know that the vocabulary and the logic are strikingly similar. Charles says that they "agree in a broad sense that something ought to be done to protect the environment, but the paths diverge pretty sharply from there." But that's not quite true. They agree in more than just a broad sense -- they agree on specific problems, and specific causes. Their paths don't really diverge significantly until it comes to remedies.

I have minimum standards for considering an opinion on [matters] worth bothering to argue with.

The belief in conservative bigotry is more than a misunderstanding. It is liberalism's indispensable drug � the opium of the elites. Are there some bigoted conservatives? Sure. But conservative bias can't hold a candle to the thunderous bigotry of the Left toward conservatives.

The pastor of my parish has been removed because of a recent allegation that 35 years ago he committed an act of sexual misconduct involving a teen-ager. In fact, I don't believe the allegation, but it seemed important to ask myself: What if the allegation were true? Would I still support the Rev. Kenneth Nee, who served Our Lady of Fatima parish in Manorhaven, N.Y., and be upset about his removal from his position, the parish and our lives? [...] The risk of recidivism is a strong argument for removing from ministry priests who have been guilty of sexual abuse. But it is a strong argument only in those cases where there is a risk of repeat offense. The mere fact that someone committed an act does not mean there is risk he will do it again. I am not talking about pedophilia, which clearly presents an ongoing risk. In cases, however, that involve newly made accusations of a single act that occurred 20 or 30 years ago, there seems no risk of repeat offense. The fact that the priests in question have effectively ministered their parishes in the intervening years without any further allegations of wrongdoing testifies to that. The absence of repeated offenses testifies to the fact that some acts of sexual abuse against minors are the product of a moment of sin and not pathology. So, if not fear of recidivism, what is the argument for removing from ministry a priest who many years ago committed a single act, as heinous as the act may have been?

So, if not fear of recidivism, what is the argument for removing from ministry a priest who many years ago committed a single act, as heinous as the act may have been? Is it that we expect priests to be sinless? [...] Can a church built on a belief in Christ deny the possibility of redemption and refuse to forgive? [...] Some may dispute this phrasing of the issue, arguing that we are not talking about whether to forgive, but simply whether to allow the priest to continue his ministry. That distinction is lost on me. If we forgive, if we accept the possibility of redemption, what is served by removing the priest?

And with the [Sen. Florence] Shapiro [R, Plano] bill, a company automatically has an "insurable interest" when an employee gives his consent to the coverage. The rule took effect Jan. 1, 2000, on new or renewing insurance policies. But that's not what the House sponsor, Rep. Brian McCall, R-Plano, intended the bill to do, said his aide, who asked not to be identified. McCall had no intention of making corporate-owned life insurance legal if it wasn't already legal, the aide insisted. The aide said McCall was concerned that a company could take out a policy on an employee's life without his knowledge. The bill was a way to empower employees, the aide said, adding McCall wanted to avoid the situation in other states that permit employers to take out the insurance without employees' consent. McCall, currently a candidate for the speaker of the House, is an insurance and investment consultant. Until he sold his insurance agencies, he was the president and CEO of McCall Insurance Agency and A.M. Scott Agency in Plano. Rep. Craig Eiland, D-Galveston, vice chairman of the House Committee on Insurance, said he had no idea Shapiro's bill would allow companies to buy policies on the lives of their low-level employees. Eiland said he thought the bill would expand the definition of who's a "key man" to include top-level employees below the rank of CEO. For example, a law firm might like to insure a partner who brings in a lot of business because the firm could stand to lose if the partner died, said Eiland. But janitors and laborers? "No one envisioned it would be used in this manner," he said, adding that he can't imagine McCall envisioned it either. Another concern: The law doesn't specify what level of consent is required, said Ana Smith-Daley, Texas Department of Insurance's deputy commissioner of life and health. And nothing in the law prevents a company from requiring an employee or applicant to consent to the insurance as a condition of employment.

Harris County Civil Court at Law Judge Gary Michael Block ordered the owner of a telemarketing company to leave his name and home telephone number on his company's recorded messages so that frustrated recipients can return the favor and call him at home with their complaints. Block ordered Lone Star Utility Savers Inc., which does business as Home Improvements of Texas and Kingdom Builders, to stop making recorded telephone solicitations without the specific consent of the recipient. Joe Shields sued the company and its owner, Donald Stafford Borden, along with several other telemarketers, claiming that they violated the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. Block ordered the company to pay Shields $5,000. Shields' attorney, Kenneth Kaye of League City, said Shields has already won nearly $100,000 in judgments and settlements with other telemarketers.

The coldest place in Houston isn't the Galleria ice rink, it's physicist Randall Hulet's lab. The temperature inside a small tube there isn't absolute zero -- at minus 459 Fahrenheit, the lowest possible temperature -- but at one-billionth of a degree above it, it's as cold as any place in the universe. The physics and astronomy professor and his Rice University colleagues have cooled atoms to sub-freezing temperatures to study a phenomenon theorists first thought possible decades ago: that matter, like light, could take the form of both a particle and a wave. In his latest experiment, the results of which were published Thursday in the journal Nature, Hulet created a tiny bundle of matter that, in wave form, can be transported a short distance. It's not a Star Trek transporter -- the collection of 10,000 atoms he transported is a far cry from the trillions in a human body -- but the matter sent a fraction of an inch in the lab traveled back and forth in tube as a coherent wave. "This has never happened in the universe," Hulet said. "It's something that can only be found in a laboratory."

"The survey is moderately interesting, but historically Texans have wanted partisan elections in courts," said Court Koenning, new executive director of the Republican Party of Harris County. "It seems like a Democratic attempt to take the judiciary back," he said. County Democratic Chair Sue Schechter, a lawyer who participated in the survey, questioned whether it accurately reflects lawyers' sentiments, given the low response rate. She said she's open to considering alternatives to the present system, but doesn't believe most voters are familiar with the merit option. Changing the system would be politically difficult. "Whoever is in power at the time is usually against changing the judicial selection," Schechter said.

Yesterday about 5 PM Pacific Time, Luke J. Helder, AKA Mailbomb Boy was arrested after he tried to outrun the Nevada Highway Patrol for over 50 miles on I-80. The car chase exceeded over 100 mph at times . Federal authorities were tipped off by his father after a letter he received according to court documents filed Wednesday. Obviously Dad wasn't thrilled at the letter he got from Luke. The hand-written letter, Helder told investigators, referred to death and dying and contained several anti-government comments. After receiving the letter at his home in Pine Island, Minn., Cameron Helder talked by phone with his son's roommate in Menomonie. The roommate, James Divine, and two friends searched Luke Helder's bedroom and found clues under the bed that suggested Helder might be involved in the bombings. They found a bag with nails, paper clips, a funnel and two plastic bottles labeled shotgun or gun powder, according to the court papers.

It's not terrifically surprising that Pim Fortuyn's assassin is a radical leftist. I've long maintained that the hard left is the greatest threat to social order in the West, and this only drives the lesson home. From near-insurrections in Seattle, Prague, Washington, Genoa, and Sweden; to pipe bombs in the Midwest; to the killing of Italian technocrats; to the FARC; to race riots in Cleveland and Crown Heights; to apologists for Islamic terrorism -- it is today's left that aids, abets, and/or apologizes for most of the violence in and against the Western world. (Notable non-leftist standouts are the Rockwell/Raimondo crowd of libertarians; but unlike the left, they've never actually killed anyone.) The strange thing is that the left seems not to notice. Its rhetoric, after all, is the rhetoric of justice -- sometimes even of peace. And all manner of self-deception is employed to keep it that way[.] [...] By this light, Fortuyn brought his murder upon himself, by preaching "hate." That he did nothing of the sort is irrelevant. Cause must be tailored for the effect to be palatable. One may easily argue that Roger Boyes is an idiot -- he goes on to assert that JFK, shot by a committed Marxist, was a victim of the right. But that misses the point, which is that almost nothing -- not civil disturbance, not a massacre in Manhattan, not a slaughter at a Seder, not decades of Soviet barbarism, nor the cold-blooded shooting of Pim Fortuyn -- nothing will convince the hard core of the left that its goals, which necessitate its methods, lead inevitably to woe. Not that all leftists are murderers. They're not. But just as neo-Confederates have a duty to root out the racists in their ranks; just as the right has a duty to weed out its paranoiacs and violent element; so too does the left have a duty to disavow and disassociate itself from its loathesome extremists. But for the most part, they don't. In Europe, the FARC and Hezbollah remain off the official lists of terrorist organizations, and EU money demonstrably funds Arafat's terror. Here in the US, the Democratic party does not shun Al Sharpton; pacifists see no problem marching alongside Palestinian terror-apologists; and Tom Daschle and Al Gore do not repudiate the extremists of EarthFirst! or PETA -- after all, they're a reliable voting bloc, even if they block common-sense measures.

[T]he process of straining political events through the standard journalistic narrative templates - especially the right-vs.-left narrative -- can simplify a story so greatly that it emerges as a different story, perhaps even the wrong story.

It's men victimizing women for the sake of money and ratings," said Jan LaRue, chief counsel of Concerned Women for America. CWA is one of seven groups, including the Christian Coalition and Focus on the Family, that protested the show in a letter to Rupert Murdoch, chairman of Fox's parent News Corp. [...] LaRue said she was concerned the special would encourage men to treat women as sex objects and send a dangerous message to girls. "It communicates to 12- and 13-year-old girls that this is what you have to do to be attractive to men," she said.

Further, most employees make zero direct difference to a company's bottom line.

The ad, purchased by a Los Angeles Internet marketing firm named IntelliTech Web Solutions, was designed to automatically redirect visitors away from Flowgo (no mouse click required) and to dump them at a booby-trapped site called KoolKatalog. Once at KoolKatalog, visitors were invited to feed an e-mail address into a digital slot machine created in the Shockwave animation format. Solve the puzzle faster than anyone else, and KoolKatalog would send you a swell prize! In the nanosecond it took most people to recognize the obvious junk mail trap, the real damage was already nearly done. According to virus experts, code in the pages at KoolKatalog exploited a known flaw in an old version of the Java engine of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser to covertly download the first of 10 files onto visitors' computers

President Bush's campaign promise to control government spending grows more elusive, with the nation's wartime budget about to mushroom and election-year politics promising huge new programs, particularly for the elderly. Added to the mix are an enormous farm subsidy plan finalized by the House last week and to be cleared by the Senate this week; billions of dollars in child care funding Democrats want to add when Congress updates the nation's welfare laws later this year; an expensive drug subsidy both parties say they'll give senior citizens this year, and the inestimable cost of protecting the nation from another terrorist attack. The bottom line for Bush, as diligent as his administration tries to be about clamping down on spending not related to the war on terrorism, will be a discretionary spending budget reaching $740 billion.

To try to contain nondefense expenditures, the Bush administration last week set the tone on two fronts for this year's budget battles. First, it floated plans to rescind spending on programs such as student loan consolidation subsidies to help cover Bush's $27.1 billion emergency budget request for the war on terrorism and homeland security. Then the White House used a veto threat to try to stop lawmakers from adding their own spending priorities to the emergency measure.

The added spending is expected to push the federal deficit for this year to more than $100 billion. The new spending continues an upward swing that began in the second half of the Clinton administration, while both the House and Senate were controlled by Republicans. "We're very concerned that we don't continue the trend that was started under Clinton," said Neil Bradley, director of the Republican Study Committee, representing a group of 70 fiscally conservative GOP House members. He and many other conservatives blame the federal government's bad spending habits on Clinton. However, even GOP aides acknowledge that lawmakers from both parties took advantage of the surpluses created by strong economic growth in the late 1990s.

But all that extra spending -- combined with revenue losses both from increased unemployment, continued lower than expected corporate revenues and major tax cuts Bush ushered through Congress last year and again this year as part of an economic stimulus package -- promises to produce hundreds of billions of dollars in deficits.

Bonilla's District 23 is geographically the second-largest congressional district in the United States, outsized only by an Alaskan seat. The district includes 625 miles of U.S.-Mexico border and sprawls from Laredo at the south end, north to pick up a portion of Bexar County and San Antonio, then west for a slice of El Paso County. The population is diverse and dispersed, spanning from needy colonias and border towns to salt-of-the-earth West Texas farms and ranches, to flush and mainly Anglo suburban enclaves in northwest Bexar County, Bonilla's home turf. Laredo's Webb County is one of two population anchors of the district with about 193,000 people. The other is northwest San Antonio and Bexar County with about 173,000 people. But because Webb turnout in general elections historically has hovered around 20 percent, the high-vote Bexar portion has dominated the district. In the last nonpresidential election, Cuellar's home base produced only about 20,000 votes; Bonilla's home base, 38,000. "Historically, the Anglo precincts in Bexar have had very high turnout, while the poor border precincts have done terribly," said University of Houston political scientist Richard Murray. "But you've got to throw out those recent election histories."

Under Texas law, motorists who exceed posted limits are assumed to be driving in an unsafe, imprudent manner. But they actually are ticketed for driving in an unsafe manner, not because they went over a speed limit. The law thus opens the door to the argument that a motorist who exceeds the speed limit was nonetheless driving in a safe manner, Rosenthal said. "I believe that it would be difficult to convince a jury that a speed in excess of 55 is unreasonable, given the historical fact a speed of 70 was considered by the Texas Transportation Commission to be reasonable and prudent a few short weeks ago," Rosenthal wrote.

Stafford is trying to persuade the commission to substitute another measure for the lowered speed limit, such as tighter controls on industrial pollution. He said he will present the TNRCC with a highway safety expert's findings that a 55-mph speed limit creates dangers because motorists drive at vastly different speeds. Stafford said the signals coming from the TNRCC are that it will restore the old speed limit. "I think the commission will vote 'yes,' " he said. "I remain optimistic."

State laws often require an "insurable interest" in the individual covered by the policy. I can't just look through the comments on this site and buy life insurance on the commenters. Likewise, a corporation can't just buy life insurance on anybody's life. Since the corporation has an interest in its employees well-being, the law has allowed companies to insure employees. In fact, banks often require that key employees have substantial life insurance (with the bank as loss payee) as part of a loan agreement. First of all, companies need their employees alive, for obvious reasons. In fact, the law governing "insurable interest" actually recognizes that interest in allowing these transactions. Second, companies benefit from "COLI" or "BOLI" regardless of how fast or slow their employees die. The scope of a company's COLI program makes almost no difference to the company's interest in the employees well-being.

Finally, if this is so outrageous, why don't we mind that the government has a stake in rich people dying? In that case the state's interest is crystal clear - the faster rich folks die, the more government benefits through the estate tax. The government suffers no identifiable loss to offset, unlike those who must make due without an income producer.

Perth prostitutes were reeling from exhaustion following an influx of United States sailors stressed from a stint in a war zone, a well-known madam said today. Mary-Anne Kenworthy said she was forced to close the doors of her famous Langtrees brothel for only the third time ever yesterday because her prostitutes were so worn out they could no longer provide a quality service. When she realised the sex workers just couldn't cope any more she closed Langtrees doors for a day rather than risk the brothel's reputation. "We're the biggest and the best, I'd rather take nothing than offer a poor service," Ms Kenworthy said.

Laura and I were honored that the Prince came to our humble Texas home. Over the years, the Saudi royal family has played gracious host to the Bush family on dozens and dozens of occasions while we negotiated private and fabulously lucrative oil deals, so it really was a pleasure to finally return the hospitality. Of course, I was sad to be unable to entertain the Prince with the wonderful after-dinner beheadings I know he and King Fahd enjoy so much, but I did assure him that on his next visit, we would go down to the prison and electrocute a mongoloid or two. He seemed to like that.

When we reached Locker yesterday, he confessed to making up the exchange. "It was a complete hoax," Locker said, "and I feel really bad about it." Sahrbeck has e-mailed Michel an apology.

From: Locker, Jonathan Sent: Thursday, April 25, 2002 8:39 AM To: 'alex.michel@REMOVED Subject: The Bachelor Alex, Jeffrey Sahrbeck was giving out your email address so I figured I would shoot you an email telling you how disappointed I was with your decision. Do you like fat girls or something? Amanda is nasty-- she is packing extra lbs all over the place. Trista is smoking hot AND she is a Heat dancer. Anyway, I lost a lot of faith in both you and the ABC network. Regards, Jon

From: Michel Alex Sent: Thursday, April 25, 2002 12:42 PM To: Locker, Jonathan Subject: RE: The Bachelor Jon, Please do not email me anymore and tell Jeff that if I ever meet him, I will kick his ass for giving my address to all of his high school friends. Anyway, there is no doubt that Amanda is much fatter than Trista, but the producers made me pick the underdog. Don't worry, I bagged Trista. Alex

1. It's ridiculously easy to forge email. The other two emails Rubalcava provides show the same time and date as these two - the first mail to Alex has the same time and date as the second, and the first reply from Alex has the same time and date as the second. Rubalcava offers no explanation for that, saying that's how they appeared in the mail as it was forwarded to him. I'm not worried about the synchronicity here as I am about the possibility that Rubalcava or the person who sent him these notes is faking the whole thing. I know a thing or two about SMTP mail protocols and email headers, and I know people who know a whole lot more about them than I do. Until I can see the full headers and show them to some pros I trust, I will remain skeptical about this. It's just too easy to be a joker. For reference on how to read email headers and determine what is real and what may be forged, see the following links: Pobox: How to Read Email Headers Pobox: Examples of Forged Headers StopSpam: Reading Email Headers Email Protocols: SMTP, MIME, POP & IMAP
2. If Alex Michel is pissed enough to kick Jeff's ass for passing his email address on to people Alex doesn't know without his permission to do so, then why in the world is Alex insulting his bride-to-be and bragging that he "bagged" Trista to this total stranger? Is he that stupid and/or indiscreet? You'd think the networks might have learned something about background checks after the whole Rick Rockwell/Darva Conger thing. If it turns out this is genuine, I'd say that Alex's marriage to Amanda will make the Rockwell/Conger union look like Ward and June Cleaver.
3. Any man who thinks that a 5'10" woman who weighs 130 pounds is "fat" is not living on Planet Earth.

Kristine Kotta, O'Reilly's producer, sees my column online and calls to ask if I will represent the pro side, as no one from the University of Minnesota has consented to do so, with the con position to be filled by Minnesota House majority leader Tim Pawlenty (R-Eagan), who has spoken out against the book. I'm apprehensive, knowing what a pit bull O'Reilly can be with anyone to his left, but decide to go for it. [...] IN THE HOT SEAT: I knew the deck was stacked heavily against me going in, with Pawlenty on my right and O'Reilly in my face (figuratively, that is; all I could see during the taping was a camera lens). I knew of the risk that no matter what I was able to say, some viewers would think I was pro-pedophilia. What I didn't know was that they would seat Pawlenty and me so close together we were practically in each other's laps, or how difficult it would be to get a word in edgewise without seeming as rude as O'Reilly, who gave Pawlenty -- with whom he was in complete agreement -- the first and last word. At one point, O'Reilly said it wasn't necessary to read the whole book, that you don't have to read all of "Mein Kampf" to get its gist, either. The only response I was allowed was nonverbal, so I rolled my eyes. What I wish I could have said was, "Not only is that analogy absurd, you stole it [from Judith Reisner, a Dr. Laura crony]." O'Reilly is fond of saying "the spin stops here." Not exactly: During this segment, O'Reilly twice hammered me with a passage from Levine's book that said, "We relish our erotic attraction to children." Two problems: a) Levine didn't write those words; she was citing another author, and b) if you read the entire paragraph, you get a much different meaning: " 'We relish our erotic attraction to children,' says Kincaid (witness the child beauty pageants in which JonBenet Ramsey was entered). But we also find that attraction abhorrent (witness the public shock and disgust at JonBenet's 'sexualization' in those pageants)."

Who knows how accurate this is, but it's worth sharing a bit from an e-mail of a friend who's working on Ron Kirk's Democratic Senate campaign in Texas:

The Senate campaign that I am working on is going really well. We handily won our Primary Election on April 9th and now we are in the marathon heading to November. The cool thing is that this race has attracted national attention, so it should be a very exciting campaign season for us. We are doing so well, in fact, that the Republicans have actually come up with an excuse to send Bush's counselor Karen Hughes back to Texas to deal with us. Honestly, I am a little scared of her...

Just figured I'd feed the rumor mill.

There ought to be a monitor, I thought, that could tell when a SIDS attack was about to begin. In the neonatal intensive care unit, where Chase spent his first few days, there are lots of monitors and they go off when they detect apnea -- a cessation of breathing lasting for 20 seconds or more. Chase had a problem with apnea. Twice he turned blue right in my arms, simply forgetting to breathe. The treatment for apnea is literally shaking a leg, reminding the kid to take a breath. The cure for apnea comes with age, and can be helped by treating with caffeine. A double latte for my baby, please. But to the medical establishment, apnea isn't SIDS. If apnea is falling asleep at the wheel and driving off the road, SIDS is falling asleep at the wheel and driving into a bridge abutment. The doctors tell me leg shaking won't end a SIDS attack and monitoring won't detect one. Still, as a grieving nerd, I feel the need to do something. And I am not at all convinced that epidemiologists are to be trusted in this. After all, they are medical statisticians and mainly play the odds. I want to defy the odds. If current monitors won't work, I want to make ones that do. So here is what I propose. It is my plan to devote much of my resources and a good portion of the rest of my life to combating SIDS. I can't cure it, but I think I can help babies to evade it. The trick is to first develop a very cheap, very accurate, recording medical sensor.

It is the unenlightened rule of Arab dictators, not the plight of the Palestinians, that condemns the Arab world to the civilizational crisis in which it finds itself. Which Middle Eastern nation grants its Arab citizens the most political freedom? Israel. Which countries' leaders have the blood of innocents on their hands but hear nothing about it from the Arab League? Iraq, Syria, and Sudan, for starters. Which country has the most egregious record of occupying another today? Syria, in Lebanon. In which countries do Palestinian refugees suffer without rights and the most basic freedoms? Other than Israel, only Jordan has treated these people with any dignity. Which nation in the region has matched its payments to the families of Palestinian murderers with money for health care, education, and other development in the territories? Not one. How Arab leaders can abide their own hypocrisy is one question. Why they expect us to do so is a better one. Arab leaders recoil in mock indignation from any suggestion that they have a responsibility to discourage Palestinian treachery. Instead, they demand that the United States pressure the government of Israel into forsaking its obligation to defend its citizens from terrorism that Arab governments celebrate and support. I'm also distressed that some of our European allies are dismissing Israel's legitimate security concerns. In some quarters, Jews are once again threatened with attacks on their institutions. We are witnessing once again the torching of European synagogues. All world leaders must condemn, in the strongest terms, such despicable behavior.

Representatives of Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah reportedly asked that female air traffic controllers be barred from their duties during his flights in Texas. A Federal Aviation Administration employee, speaking to The Dallas Morning News on condition of anonymity, said the request was granted on portions of the prince's flights between Houston and Waco. Abdullah was in Texas this week and met with President Bush at his Crawford ranch on Thursday. The prince then flew in Houston and took a train to College Station to tour former President George Bush's presidential library on Friday.

Last week the Houston Chronicle reported remarks by U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Sugar Land, critical of Texas A&M and Baylor universities, as part of a debate concerning the teaching of evolution. Let's not allow a false conflict between science and scripture to divide us. Many people of both science and faith have flourished at great Texas universities. And let's respect the rights of DeLay and other public figures to express their own beliefs in a house of worship.

Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was absent from the Houston session but will attend the Crawford talks, said Wednesday he plans to discuss recent Saudi sponsorship of a $100 million telethon to aid relatives of Palestinian "martyrs." "There are some troubling aspects as to how that telethon money would be distributed," Powell said, referring to reports that money raised by the Saudis was being funneled to Hamas, a Palestinian group that has claimed responsibility for attacks on Israel.

2. The Arkansas sales tax scheme that taxes general interest magazines, but exempts newspapers and religious, professional, trade, and sports journals, violates the First Amendment's freedom of the press guarantee. Pp. 227-234. (a) Even though there is no evidence of an improper censorial motive, the Arkansas tax burdens rights protected by the First Amendment by discriminating against a small group of magazines, including appellant's, which are the only magazines that pay the tax. Such selective taxation is one of the types of discrimination identified in Minneapolis Star. Indeed, its use here is even more disturbing than in that case because the Arkansas statute requires official scrutiny of publications' content as the basis for imposing a tax. This is incompatible with the First Amendment, whose requirements are not avoided merely because the statute does not burden the expression of particular views expressed by specific magazines, and exempts other members of the media that might publish discussions of the various subjects contained in appellant's magazine. Pp. 227-231. (b) Appellee has not satisfied its heavy burden of showing that its discriminatory tax scheme is necessary to serve a compelling state interest and is narrowly drawn to achieve that end. The State's general interest in raising revenue does not justify selective imposition of the sales tax on some magazines and not others, based solely on their content, since revenues could be raised simply by taxing businesses generally. Furthermore, appellee's assertion that the magazine exemption serves the state interest of encouraging "fledgling" publishers is not persuasive, since the exemption is not narrowly tailored to achieve that end. To the contrary, the exemption is both overinclusive and underinclusive in that it exempts the enumerated types of magazines regardless of whether they are "fledgling" or are lucrative and well established, while making general interest magazines and struggling specialty magazines on other subjects ineligible for favorable tax treatment. Moreover, although the asserted state need to "foster communication" might support a blanket exemption of the press from the sales tax, it cannot justify selective taxation of certain publishers. Pp. 231-232.

Calculate the total amount of income -- income at its most spendable -- drained from the economy; how much spending power did we lose? Then look at where the winnings went; what did it build? Then look at the net income to the government for all this and who paid and how much it cost to generate that income. Then answer the question: Are we better off?

Maybe a better objection against government lotteries is that they're such a piss-poor ripoff. You don't see government lotteries in Nevada, because the state is full of casinos, and any casino that offered odds as bad as a state lottery would be out of business in a week. The government-enforced monopoly on gambling is what makes lotteries feasible. But the Jarvis objection to state lotteries would presumably go tenfold for legalized gambling.

The son and grandson of prominent Navy admirals, John McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936.

At this rate, they're going to run out of government agencies and departments pretty soon. 2003: Customs 2004: D.O.E. 2005: Postmaster! 2006: Joe Collins, FDA Inspector 2007: SSA Theatre 2008: Price Supports

What the [WaPo] article does, and what most people have done, is conflate two entirely separate points she makes, which she herself likely didn't mean to do. She says two basic things: a) The administration likely knew something beforehand. and b) There are people who are close to the administration that stand to profit from the war on Terra. It is only if you link these two things that her comments were potentially over the line. At least, over the line if she has no further evidence. In doing this, it makes it sound as if McKinney was saying the administration caused or let 9/11 happen in order to reap great profit. Though her radio remarks could be interpreted this way by a reasonable person, I admit, she didn't actually say it. And, her written statement makes quite clear what she meant.

I am not aware of any evidence showing that President Bush or members of his administration have personally profited from the attacks of 9-11. A complete investigation might reveal that to be the case. For example, it is known that President Bush's father, through the Carlyle Group had -- at the time of the attacks -- joint business interests with the bin Laden construction company and many defense industry holdings, the stocks of which, have soared since September 11.

Last week, DeLay was tape recorded without his knowledge telling 300 people at Pearland's First Baptist Church not to send their children to Baylor or A&M. A male questioner had expressed frustration that major Texas universities do not teach creationism, and asked DeLay for advice. The Chronicle published Delay's comments Thursday, prompting him to issue the following statement: "My response to a concerned parent has created a misunderstanding. I was giving advice for the specific type of education they were seeking for their child. Let me make it Texas clear: I've been a longtime supporter of Baylor and Texas A&M. My daughter went to A&M and in Congress I've worked hard to help fund these two prestigious universities. I apologize for any misunderstandings my comments may have caused." DeLay also urged the churchgoers to pressure state legislators to "throw the PC out and bring God in" at Texas public universities.

The thing is, they are all legitimate questions. The suggestion of impropriety in the Bush family relationship to the Carlyle Group and the bin Ladens is certainly more compelling than the one that still obsesses the Republicans about the Rich pardon, but there shouldn't even be questions asked? The warnings from before September 11 are well known and were known at the time even to observant members of the public. The FBI itself has complained about being actively prevented both before and after 9/11 from investigating the bin Ladens - including Osama. And George Bush's arrogance toward other world leaders, both before the tragedy at the WTC and since then, has not exactly ameliorated world tension. He appears to be throwing away the victory in Afghanistan and to have exacerbated the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I've heard it said that McKinney is just blaming "us" for the attacks on 9/11, but I seem to have missed the part where she says that. As far as I can see, it's pretty generally accepted that bad guys arranged for those planes to fly into those buildings, and those bad guys aren't "us" - there is no need to keep reiterating this. But if there was incompetence and neglect in Washington that left us unnecessarily vulnerable to actions against us by others (or even natural disasters), then we need to know about it and make sure it is corrected. The absence of an investigation is itself more neglect. In fact, it is astonishing that there is anyone who is resisting such an investigation - unless, of course, they actually have something to hide. If you don't believe me, just ask your insurance company how they feel about you leaving your car unattended with the doors open. Once again: The people who planned and executed the 9/11 attacks are the ones who are responsible for the attacks. But if the administration's neglect resulted in leaving us more vulnerable and unable to prevent the attacks or the amount of damage they did, we need to know - and if it's true, than it's not "us" who is responsible for that neglect, it's them. I'm not George Bush and I take no responsibility for his arrogance and incompetence. After all, we didn't even elect this guy.

The board met several times after rehearsals were under way and began questioning the propriety of the profanity and the casting of several teen-age girls as prostitutes, [director David Fernachak] said. Fernachak added that rumors had been swirling in the community that he intended to shock the community with a pornographic production. [...] He said board members were satisfied when they learned that the parents of actors younger than 18 were at the auditions and were aware of the musical's content. Board members insisted that the profanity -- the ultimate four-letter word was used three times in the script and g--damn 27 times -- be removed from the script, Fernachak said. Fernachak agreed to remove the four-letter word, [Ric] Sadler [who portrays Sheriff Earl Dodd] said. "He had even come up with some places where we could soften" the other profanity, he said. But Fernachak refused to remove all of them, arguing that they were central to the understanding of the play. According to the play, the Chicken Ranch closed after an outcry over the sheriff's use of profanity toward Zindler while the cameras were rolling. "In a scene following that, other characters talk about how nobody would have cared how we had a whorehouse, but the one thing you can't do is say bad words on television," Fernachak said.

The board issued Fernachak an ultimatum at a Monday meeting: Delete the words or resign as director, he said. Fernachak chose to resign and [theater board president Don] Hampton agreed to break the news to the cast at Tuesday's meeting. Learning of the decision, some of the teen-age cast members called Hampton's attention to the name of the play and how its title advertised its adult theme. "What were you people thinking?" he recalled one teen asking.

At Friday's gathering, DeLay said his daughter attended A&M and was appalled to discover that students have sex in dormitories. "Texas A&M used to be a conservative university," he said. "It's lost all of its conservatism, and it's renounced its traditions. It's really sad. My daughter went there, you know, she had horrible experiences with coed dorms and guys who spent the weekends in the rooms with girls, and all this kind of stuff went on there. It's just unbelievable."

John Hawkins: Why do you think that so many of the popular political websites on the web are conservative? Tim Blair: Because conservatives are starved for conservative content and analysis in the general media. Lefties always point out Rush and O�Reilly and Will in the US and the few con pundits who exist in Australia, but these people are massively outweighed by the liberal bias of the non-pundit mainstream press. And, for that matter, by the non-con punditry as well. I don�t see the government helping fund a right-wing NPR.

A Houston Chronicle Freedom of Information request to the CIA seeking information on Dewhurst's service received a reply that the agency could neither confirm nor deny that he had ever worked there.

The Israeli doctor who will perform the transplant operation, Reuven Or, said the doctors at Hadassah treat patients of all religions. "For us a human being is the most important thing,'' he said. We don't have any criteria.'' In a place where thousands have died because of their differences, hatreds and history, Or said, "We'll fight all day to save one life.''

It's not as if I've been any particular friend of the Bush administration, but complaining that it's "cynical" for them to even hire a pollster is naive. And complaining about remarks from Bush administration officials, including Bush himself, which soft-pedal and downplay the use of polls (even though they do in fact use them) isn't much better; to some extent, they're just acknowledging the difference Green pointed out.

[It's] a strategy that has served Bush extremely well since he first launched his campaign for president---the myth that his administration doesn't use polling. As Bush endlessly insisted on the campaign trail, he governs "based upon principle and not polls and focus groups."

On average, Astros Field sells about 10,000 all-beef hot dogs per game. Veggie dogs? "So far, we've had six regular-season games and two exhibition games," says Marty Price, top dog for Astros concessions. "On average, and I'm estimating high here, we sell about ... "Five veggie dogs per game."

In its fight, MoFo is suing a Silicon Valley e-mail marketing firm called Etracks. Mr Jacobs says while it wasn't the only company sending unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE), it was one of the biggest offenders and more importantly it's based in California. [...] In its suit, MoFo says Etracks broke California's anti-spam laws by sending unwanted e-mail and advertising a range of items without the required advertising label and using the company's mail server to distribute the e-mails. MoFo also claims a legally mandated free phone number or valid return e-mail service to request removal from the marketer's list was missing.

The lawyers for Etracks did not return calls to BBC News Online but its attorney Kenneth Wilson told the San Francisco Chronicle that Etracks only uses e-mail lists provided by clients who assert the recipients have opted to receive its messages or have an existing relationship. On its website Etracks says it is a member of the Direct Marketing Association, an 85-year-old organisation which sets out ethical guidelines to its 5,000 members on best practice. The organisation distances itself from spamming. "No DMA member can send spam and the DMA agrees that people should be able to ask to get off mailing lists and stay off," says DMA's vice president of ethics and consumer affairs, Pat Faley. To that end the DMA has designed the "e-mail preference service" where anyone can submit their e-mail address to be removed from all members' lists, says Ms Faley. The problem, she says, is that it has no control over anyone who is not a member of DMA.

Does anyone, from the distant historical vantage point of two months later, think Enron will be a huge issue for the Democrats?

As part of his plea agreement [Duncan] will meet with investigators at their bidding to testify, review documents, provide documents and share any other information he has related to "knowledge of all criminal activities."

The difference between the land prices is the implicit cost of all the local land-use controls, from zoning to the time it takes to get a permit. Some regulations simply raise the cost of building by slowing down the process. Others limit density, making it illegal to subdivide expensive land. "If I look around me in Cambridge," Professor Glaeser explained, "there are a large number of $3 million houses on one-half of an acre. Cambridge is also filled with $1 million town houses on a 20th of an acre. If you're an enterprising developer, if you're not stymied by zoning regulations, you tear down the $3 million house, you use the half an acre, and you put up 10 town houses." Presto: You've made $7 million, minus construction costs, and Cambridge has added nine units to meet the rising demand for housing. If land could be subdivided, that sort of process would happen whenever land prices became high. But it cannot happen in Cambridge, or most other places in "blue America," because of land-use regulations. The result is soaring prices. That's fine, of course, with people who already own their homes. "The overwhelming political story is that the majority of homeowners have absolutely no interest in there being affordable housing," Professor Glaeser noted. "The overwhelming reason that we have the web of zoning controls that we have is that local homeowners are powerful over their local areas, and they want to make their housing as expensive as possible."

[J]urors today are better educated than those who made up the pool when that idea became the norm. In my experience, a jury of twelve in cases I tried were almost all college graduates or at the least had education beyond high school. As a matter of fact, I tried a case when 9 of the 12 had advanced degrees.

I tried a Grand Larceny case. The defendant's fingerprints were found on the cash box. Open and shut if you believed the DA. Defense counsel left on the panel a 24 year veteran detective, [a] guy [who] looked like [Don] Zimmer. Anyway, after the case was put to the jury and we waited hours for a verdict, the jury came back and acquitted the defendant. Intrigued, I spoke to the cop and asked him about the deliberations. He said he didn't say a word until they asked for his opinion. He told the jury the only issue they had to determine was when did the fingerprint get on the box. If it was as the DA claimed, during the taking, or as the defense claimed it was before he separated from his wife (they were living with the cash box owner then) the case was easy to decide. Good choice for the defendant since he needed a cop on the jury who was an investigator; good choice for the DA because he wanted someone who had worked these cases before.

Meanwhile, state Democratic Party Chairwoman Molly Beth Malcolm accused Texas Republicans of trying to sabotage the Kirk-Morales runoff. Malcolm said that since Sunday afternoon, thousands of automated phone calls have been placed to Democratic primary voters in several parts of the state blasting Kirk for being a "paid lobbyist for corporate special interests," including tobacco giant Philip Morris. Before he was elected mayor of Dallas, Kirk was a lawyer-lobbyist and Philip Morris was one of his firm's clients. He continues to draw a salary from the law firm while campaigning for the Senate. The same calls praised Morales and urged voters to challenge the "Austin bosses" and encourage Morales to "keep fighting for the little guy." The calls, which didn't identify their source, didn't specifically ask for votes for the schoolteacher. Malcolm said Republicans were trying to suppress the vote for Kirk because they believe he would be a stronger candidate than Morales against the GOP Senate nominee, state Attorney General John Cornyn. "This is a classic Republican dirty trick," she said. Texas Republican Party spokesman Ted Royer said the state party wasn't behind the calls. "This is another Democrat conspiracy theory with no basis in fact," he said.

The most comprehensive study of light pollution found that it affects 99 percent of the population in the United States. It also found that two-thirds of all people in the country live in places where they can no longer discern our own galaxy, the Milky Way, with the naked eye.

"Conservative columnists are a bit more popular," agreed Alan Shearer, editorial director and general manager of WPWG, which has four liberal, three conservative, and eight moderate or hard-to-pigeonhole Op-Ed columnists. He said one reason why conservatives tend to sell better is that conservative publishers, especially at smaller papers, often influence editorial-page editors' column buys.

"White voters decide this race," said University of Houston political science professor Richard Murray. "And this time, I think they will go with Kirk." Murray and other analysts are quick to add a caveat: Anglo voters will decide the race only if enough of them go to the polls. "If whites don't go to the polls Tuesday, that could change everything," Murray said.

Until the mid-1980s, social conservatives led by textbook critics Mel and Norma Gabler largely confined themselves to monitoring state textbooks and keeping out references to evolution. Their influence was checked when the Legislature abolished the elected board and appointed moderates to a new one. But after four years, voters chose to return to an elected board, which in 1990 voted for the first time to adopt textbooks that taught evolution. The social conservatives' efforts to regain control of the school board date from 1992, with the election of Miller and former board member Bob Offutt, R-San Antonio. The far right won four more seats in 1994 and began opposing the education plans of then-Gov. George W. Bush. They said the plans were insufficiently conservative, and two of them campaigned against Bush when he ran for president. They also resumed their inspection of textbooks, objecting to such things as a photograph of a woman carrying a briefcase. They argued that women in the workplace undermined family values. The objections caused many publishers to stop offering textbooks to Texas. The Legislature in 1995 moved to end squabbling on the board by reducing its power, including its power over textbooks. The board could reject a textbook only for factual error, physical defects or failure to follow state policy.

Of course, some of the cash must filter through the fingers of the Palestinian Authority. Israelis claim to have found a counterfeiting press in Ramallah -- one for faking shekels, not dollars. Shekels, however, are the local hard currency. One wonders if a few martyr families have been slipped plug nickels in exchange for a kamikaze child.

But the principal reason the Bush administration can't intervene effectively in the crisis is that it can't make up its mind. Actually, it has two of them. And that's not likely to change. One, the "even-handed" approach, resides primarily at the State Department and is exemplified by Powell, Policy Planning Director Richard Haass, Assistant Secretary of State William Burns and his deputy David Satterfield, Ambassador to Israel David Kurtzer, and others. The other consists of the White House--where Cheney, his staff, and increasingly the president himself tout a line barely distinguishable from Sharon's--and the Pentagon, where officials like Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz have in the past taken an even harder line. Every time the administration wades into the conflict, this schizophrenia becomes more apparent. Just two weeks ago, for example, the Bush team was characterizing Israeli military operations as "not helpful" and professing sympathy for Arafat. Last week, however, the White House lent its support to Sharon's much more ambitious offensive into the West Bank. But State Department officials claim that Powell's words on the day the offensive was launched, which seemed to endorse Israel's strategy, weren't his own: Rather they bore the hallmarks of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their staffs, who weighed in on the substance of Powell's statement at the White House. In January the same factions split over the significance of the Iranian arms shipment to Arafat: Foggy Bottom publicly downplayed it, while Cheney and Rumsfeld proposed severing ties with the Palestinian leader. The two camps also repeatedly clashed over whether to dispatch Zinni to the region and over the content of Powell's November speech endorsing a Palestinian state.

Let me be clear: After the outrage of September 11, I do not believe that the United States could have reacted in any way other than as she did. But doing so will carry a cost. The long term significance of what happened some months ago may be that it forced America decisively along a course of action that�by emphasising her military dominance, by requiring her to use her vast power conspicuously, by making restraint and moderation virtually impossible, and by making unilateralism an increasing feature of American behavior�is bound to generate widespread and increased criticism and hostility towards her. That may turn out to be the real tragedy of September 11.

The way it should be: Fans thrilled to the moves of Duke All-America Kobe Bryant, Michigan star Kevin Garnett and Kentucky hero Tracy McGrady. The way it is: Accountants thrilled to the moves of Bryant, Garnett and McGrady, all of whom jumped from high school to a paycheck in the pros.

In the 2001 draft 54 underclassmen entered early, but only 36 were drafted, and five of those are already out of the league.

Not only has that not happened, but by some measures black political power has actually regressed since Schneider's words. While black Democrats continue to win city, county, and down-ticket statewide offices, there are currently no African Americans in governor's mansions or in the U.S. Senate. And it doesn't look like that's going to change anytime soon. Just this week, Roland Burris--who in 1991 became Illinois's first black attorney general--lost that state's Democratic gubernatorial primary to a white challenger. And in New York, Carl McCall--a black Democrat who's served two terms as state comptroller--is in a fierce gubernatorial primary fight against Andrew Cuomo, who's never held elected office. In Louisiana, outgoing New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial unsuccessfully tried to amend his city's charter so he could serve a third term--reportedly because he knew that, despite two successful terms, his race meant he had little chance of winning higher office.

• Man, you leave the country for a few days and the celebrities start dropping like dime bags at Marion Barry's campaign headquarters. Dudley Moore, Milton Berle, Billy Wilder, the Queen Mum - did I miss anybody?
• Did you know that Europe starts Daylight Savings Time a week before North America? That means we get to spring forward - and lose an hour's sleep - on two consecutive weekends.
• I swear, the one time we fail to put an emergency change of clothes into our carryon luggage is the time that our checked bags fail to make it to the connecting flight. Fortunately, British Airways fulfilled its promise to deliver them to us on the next flight, which was (also fortunately) later that same day.
• I hate the Big 12, so if they had to have two teams make it to the Final Four at least they both had the decency to lose there. Congrats to the Terps for their championship and to the Connecticut women for their perfect season.
• Baseball season! Woo hoo!!
• A week without Internet access is a loooooong time...

[President] Bush touted free trade as a means of lifting the region's economies, and said: "We're going to analyze all options available to help Peru."

Presumably, women could exercise their true power to tame men by using celibacy (and other ladylike behavior) to induce men into monogamous stable relationships and eventually into marriage. [...] But women have historically been the civilizing forces for men. That is biological. Moreover, several verses in the Scriptures refer to the important role that women have in the moral uplift of men.

The Catholic Church in America will not endure as we know it unless the current hierarchy is rooted out and unless the issue of a celibate all-male priesthood is addressed head-on without euphemism or denial. Others may differ, but it seems to me that the exclusion of women from the priesthood is the root of the problem. None of this hideous abuse of children would have occurred in the same way if women were fully a part of the institution. Not only would they have blown the whistle on some of this evil, their very presence would have helped prevent it from happening.

Societies built on special privileges -- the all-male Saudi rulers, Catholic priesthood and Taliban, and the boys' club running Enron -- become far too invested in preserving those privileges. They will never do the kind of soul-baring and housecleaning that might raise questions about the kind of secret society that creates that kind of privilege.

Conservatives seemed genuinely puzzled by the outcry over Ashcroft's words. "I think General Ashcroft was quite inclusive," said Ken Connor, president of the Family Research Council. "He made reference to Christians, Jews, and Muslims all recognizing the Creator as the origin of freedom."

Is it possible to appear in public with the likes of [Senator Jesse] Helms and [President] Bush and preserve that precious commodity - street-cred? If it's not, says Bono, it's a price worth paying. "Edge was pleading with me not to hang out with the conservatives. He said, 'You're not going to have a picture with George Bush?' I said I'd have lunch with Satan if there was so much at stake. I have friends who won't speak to me because of Helms. But its very important not to play politics with this. Millions of lives are being lost for the stupidest of reasons: money. And not even very much money. So let's not play, Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys? Let's rely on the moral force of our arguments."

Meanwhile, the US wing of Jubilee 2000 hit on the idea of persuading the Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, a Baptist, to write a letter to Baptist churches across southern US states explaining the Biblical principles behind debt cancellation. Suddenly, Bono found he had access to a swathe of strongly Christian Republicans compelled by his Biblical theme - what Bono calls "the melody line" of his pitch. "We knew we had to get both sides," he explains. "So we got Billy Graham and the Pope and I went to people like Jesse Helms, who had been very tough on the the concept of foreign assistance and very bleak on Aids. He's a religious man so I told him that 2103 verses of scripture pertain to the poor and Jesus speaks of judgment only once - and it's not about being gay or sexual morality, but about poverty. I quoted that verse of Matthew chapter 25: 'I was naked and you clothed me.' He was really moved. He was in tears. Later he publicly acknowledged that he was ashamed..."

16 And behold, one came and said unto Him, "Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life?" 17 And He said unto him, "Why callest thou Me good? There is none good but One, that is, God. But if thou wilt enter into Life, keep the commandments." 18 He said unto Him, "Which?" Jesus said, "`Thou shalt do no murder; thou shalt not commit adultery; thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not bear false witness; 19 honor thy father and thy mother; and, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.'" 20 The young man said unto Him, "All these things have I kept from my youth up. What lack I yet?" 21 Jesus said unto him, "If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell what thou hast and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in Heaven; and come and follow Me." 22 But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions. 23 Then said Jesus unto His disciples, "Verily I say unto you, that a rich man shall hardly enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. 24 And again I say unto you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God."

The ethnic portrait of the Democratic primary is dramatically evident when this year's voting is compared with 1994, the last nonpresidential election year with a healthy Democratic turnout. The 1998 primary turnout was too low in all segments to be used as a point of comparison. About 1,036,000 people voted in the 1994 Democratic gubernatorial primary when incumbent Richards faced only token opposition. In this year's race between Sanchez, former Attorney General Dan Morales and two little-known opponents, about 1,028,000 people voted.

Asked about criticism of his role, Russell Yates told NBC's Today show today that some people "don't understand the biochemical nature of Andrea's illness ... so they'll say there must have been something else going on in that household, or there must have been this or that and it's all false."

Systematic workplace discrimination on irrelevancies like race is unprofitable � it�s just bad business practice. If blacks could really be paid less than whites for �the same work,� such an arrangement would create high unemployment for whites and low unemployment for blacks, as firms competed to snap up the same quality labor at cheaper rates. (This simple economic truth also demolishes the idea of the �glass ceiling� for women.) Similarly, if the owner of a firm refuses to hire candidates on the basis of productivity and instead hires on the basis of irrelevant factors, he provides a larger pool of available talent for his competitors, reducing his competitiveness in the market, said uncompetitiveness in the end being fatal to the business. If the best man for the job is a black woman, and you won�t hire her because of that, your competitor will get her, to his benefit and your detriment. Businesses that make consistently irrational decisions don�t last very long � the market weeds them out in favor of those that are more rational.

The firm's lawyers were grilled at length about their work investigating allegations raised by Enron Vice President Sherron Watkins in an Aug. 15 memo to former Chairman Ken Lay, warning the company could "implode in a wave of accounting scandals." In addition to numerous accounting issues, Watkins' portentous memo warned about conflicts of interest and questionable dealmaking that threatened to topple the company. Derrick, a former partner at V&E who recently retired from Enron, asked the firm to conduct a limited probe of Watkins' concerns. Under sharp questioning from lawmakers, the V&E lawyers said they never talked to many of the potential witnesses named by Watkins. They also did not pursue Watkins' claim that bankers may have been pressured to invest in questionable deals with Enron as a condition of future business with the company. Instead, the firm talked to accountants at Arthur Andersen and executives at Enron, who assured them that issues raised by Watkins were well-known and being managed, the lawyers said. [...] For months, V&E has been defending its work on the Watkins probe, saying the firm was not asked to look at Enron's accounting practices. "If a transaction is not legal and it's been approved by the appropriate levels of a corporation's management, lawyers ... may appropriately provide the requisite legal advice," Dilg said. "In doing so, the lawyers are not approving of the business decisions that were made by their clients. Likewise, lawyers are not passing on the accounting treatment of the transactions." [Rep. James] Greenwood [R, PA] took the firm to task for apparently accepting the assurances of former Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow regarding the partnerships and his own conflicts of interest. "I don't understand why you didn't feel responsible for Enron and its stockholders and make those calls right away," Greenwood said. "You just took Andy Fastow's word for it."

The campaigns' hard feelings were evident as the votes came in. Marc Cowart, Polland's campaign consultant, said his candidate fell behind because of "a combination of negative campaigning and being overwhelmed by a bunch of lobby money."

Polland laid into Janek, saying he received poor ratings from conservative groups, including the American Eagle Forum and the Young Conservatives of Texas. Polland has accused Janek of often voting with Democrats. "He's just part of the get-along gang in Austin," Polland has said. He's not part of the solution, he's part of the problem."

[Lt. John Denholm, who commands the Harris County Sheriff's Department traffic division] put the priorities bluntly: "Our focus is on traffic safety issues, not pollution control. We try to put the enforcement where we're having accidents." That emphasis is no surprise to local transportation department spokeswoman Janelle Gbur, who noted the reduced limit did not come with any new state or federal funds for enforcement. "We were hearing prior to the decrease that law enforcement was strapped for manpower, and that even with the (previous maximum) 70-mph limit, they were pushed to the limit to enforce speed laws," she said.

Dale clearly doesn't harbor an opinion either way on WTP's specific agenda -- he provides a link and urges readers to decide for themselves. No editorializing at all, which is a rarity for Samizdata (or any blog, really). That's not good enough for Kuffner:

Had Dale Amon taken a few moments to do some research, he would have discovered what kind of arguments, legal and otherwise, that We the People use against the income tax.

What? Okay, Amon's post wasn't a model of thoroughness. But Kuffner is positing a blogging standard that I'm willing to bet he doesn't always meet. (Heck, I know Yglesias doesn't meet it.) The crux of his critique of Amon is that Amon simply didn't do adequate background research on his subject. Come on. Posting links of possible interest is what blogs do. Heck, I put up a link for chihuahua vindaloo, and I'm afraid I was suckered into posting a fair amount about the probably-baseless allegations of Israeli art students-cum-spies. So what? Live and learn. It's blogging, people. Just because we're better than the New York Times doesn't mean we're Real Journalists. The real motivation behind this trio of leftist bloggers is, I suspect, a generalized dislike for Samizdata and its ideology per se. War Liberal says it "drives [him] crazy," Kuffner discusses the "tooth-grinding factor" inherent in his reading of it, and Yglesias simply engages in routine petty mockery against it. The result is cases like this, wherein War Liberal is unecessarily caustic; Kuffner is inappropriately condemnatory; and Yglesias is a pathetic bandwagoner. While two of the three mount effective assaults on WTP, none of them can build a realistic case against Dale Amon.

US income tax is illegal The We The People Foundation held their own hearing as the US Federal Government broke its word to do so. They claim testimony taken under oath shows the entire income tax system to be unconstitutional. Decide for yourself. The hearing webcast is available here.

[T]he assertions addressed in this FAQ are not merely false, but completely ridiculous, requiring not just ignorance of law and history, but a suspension of logic and reason. In this FAQ, you will read many decisions of judges who refer to the views of tax protesters as "frivolous," "ridiculous," "absurd," "preposterous," or "gibberish." If you don't read a lot of judicial opinions, you may not understand the full weight of what it means when a judge calls an argument "frivolous" or "ridiculous." Perhaps an analogy will help the attitude of judges. Imagine a group of professional scientists who have met to discuss important issues of physics and chemistry, and then someone comes into their meeting and challenges them to prove that the earth revolves around the sun. At first, they might be unable to believe that the challenger is serious. Eventually, they might be polite enough to explain the observations and calculations which lead inevitably to the conclusion that the earth does indeed revolve around the sun. Suppose the challenger is not convinced, but insists that there is actually no evidence that the earth revolves around the sun, and that all of the calculations of the scientists are deliberately misleading. At that point, they will be jaw-droppingly astounded, and will no longer be polite, but will evict the challenger/lunatic from their meeting because he is wasting their time. That is the way judges view tax protesters. At first, they try to be civil and treat the claims as seriously as they can. However, after dismissing case after case with the same insane claims, sometimes by the same litigant, judges start pulling out the dictionary to see how many synonyms they can find for "absurd."

The record of the hearing proves conclusively for history:

• The Internal Revenue Code does not make most Americans liable to file a tax return and pay an income tax.
• People have a right to the fruits of their labor; the income tax is a slave tax, and is prohibited by the 13th Amendment.
• Congress lacks the authority to legislate an income tax on the people except in the District of Columbia, the U.S. Territories and in those geographic areas within any of the 50 states where the States have specifically approved it, in writing. No legislative jurisdiction means no taxing authority.
• There is no income tax exception to the 5th Amendment's guarantee of the Peoples' unalienable right not to be compelled to be a witness against themselves; individuals do, in fact, waive their 5th Amendment (Miranda) right not to be a witness against themselves when they sign and file a Form 1040 tax return.
• Personal income taxes polarize and divide an otherwise united nation and promote class warfare and mistrust of our government.
• The IRS, the courts and even the NY Times cite the 16th Amendment as government's authority to impose a tax directly on the People's labor. However, the 16th Amendment did not come close to being lawfully ratified by � of the states as constitutionally required, and was fraudulently declared to have been ratified in 1913 by Philander Knox, the Secretary of State. The 16th Amendment is null and void.
• The IRS routinely violates the 4th Amendment due process and privacy protections of Americans by seizing assets without lawful authority or a court order and by denying citizens their right to statutorily-prescribed, administrative remedies.
• The IRS willfully and illegally manipulates taxpayers' Individual Master Files for the purpose of creating time-barred assessments, creating and providing fraudulent certificates of official records to the court to support illegal assessments, manipulating master files to short-pay taxpayers' legal interest owed by the government, collecting social security from taxpayers via levy in direct violation of the law, willful and intentional creation of fraudulent penalty and interest against taxpayers, and willful and intentional violation of taxpayers rights to due process.
• The IRS, without legal authority, routinely and illegally prepares "dummy returns" with inflated assessments for taxpayers who legitimately do not file a tax return as a means of punishing those who stand on their legal rights in choosing not to file.

Another toy seller, Masoumeh Rahimi, said Barbie was "foreign to Iran's culture" because some of the popular Western dolls wear revealing clothing. She said young girls who play with Barbie, a doll she sees as wanton, could grow into women who reject Iranian values. "I think every Barbie doll is more harmful than an American missile," Rahimi said.

• 10 in Texas, of which all but Karin are in Houston.
• 17 on the East Coast - 4 in Boston (counting Oliver Willis, who is moving to Boston on 3/16), 2 in DC (counting Will Vehrs and Tony Adragna as one blog; Josh Marshall is the other), 2 in Jersey, one each in Delaware, Connecticut, Florida and North Carolina, and five in New York City.
• 12 on the West Coast - 8 in LA, 2 in Portland, one each in Modesto and San Diego.

NOT CENSORSHIP: Andrew Sullivan and others are making much of this Telegraph report that left-wing British publications are rejecting articles that support the war on terrorism. The Telegraph calls this "censorship." I'd call it "editorial judgment." That judgment may be stupid. It may support bad policy. But it's no different from The New Republic's party line on Bush's economic policy (bad, bad, bad) or The Weekly Standard's line on biotechnology (end of humanity). I don't remember a lot of articles opposing gay marriage when Andrew was editing TNR. Was that "suppression of dissent"? Or was it an editor doing what he was supposed to do, and making judgments he felt strongly about?

Not every story has a happy ending. Some suspect that Dino Adriano's departure from the top job at Sainsbury's owed something to his poor showing on Back to the Floor. Millionaire restaurateur Luke Johnson, head of the popular British chain Belgo, decided that he'd peeled one onion too many for a moody chef, ripped off his microphone, told producers to "Shove your program!" and refused to allow the camera to keep filming.

Bosses, though, often return to the boardroom ready to right wrongs. Take the Radisson Edwardian managing director who nearly halved the prices of his smallest rooms or the head of Wedgwood, who sued the supplier of the robots that were dropping his cups. Even Johnson agreed to hire six more chefs. Almost without exception, CEOs learn a lesson in communication. "We find people at the heart of every organization who know exactly what's right and what's wrong with it," says [producer Robert] Thirkell. "But between them and the bosses is a layer of people -- those whose careers depend on sanitizing that information. Bosses are always surprised at how much knowledge exists further down the ladder."

"The majority of the junk mail (is) not created in China, so why (should) they block mail from China?" said Zeng Xiaozhen, a professor at Jilin University in the northeastern province of Jilin. He said spam was a global issue and China should make a law to punish creators of junk e-mail.

Folk singer Miriam Makeba is 70. Actress-singer Barbara McNair is 68. Actress Paula Prentiss is 63. Movie director Adrian Lyne is 61. Singer Bobby Womack is 58. Rock musician Chris Squire (Yes) is 54. Singer Shakin' Stevens is 54. Singer Chris Rea is 51. Actor Ronn Moss (``The Bold and the Beautiful'') is 50. Actress Kay Lenz is 49. Musician Emilio Estefan is 49. Movie director Scott Hicks is 49. Actress Catherine O'Hara is 48. Actress Patricia Heaton is 43. Actor Mykelti Williamson is 42. Actor Steven Weber is 41. Rock musician Jason Newsted (Metallica (news - web sites)) is 39. Actress Stacy Edwards is 37. Rapper Grand Puba is 36. Rock musician Patrick Hannan (The Sundays) is 36. Rock singer Evan Dando (Lemonheads) is 35. Actress Patsy Kensit is 34. Chastity Bono is 33. Actor Nick Stabile is 32. Rock musician Fergal Lawler (The Cranberries) is 31. Country singer Jason Sellers is 31.

SAN MARCOS -- Southwest Texas State University student Amber Kulhanek went to spring break in 2000 on South Padre Island for her 21st birthday and ended up taking off her shirt at a wet T-shirt contest in Mexico. A few months later Kulhanek saw herself in national ads for a "Wild Party Girls" video on the E! cable network, a red strip proclaiming "Too hot for TV" stamped across her naked breasts. Kulhanek, now a senior, said she was mortified when friends and relatives saw the ad and strangers began asking her to take her top off. Claiming she had been targeted by the video's makers, who she said plied her with alcohol at a Matamoros bar, Kulhanek sued E! and the Florida-based Arco Media Group Inc. for invasion of privacy and emotional distress. On Wednesday morning, Kulhanek won what her lawyer says is the first judgment of its kind against the video makers and earned a $5 million default judgment in the 22nd District Court. Lawyers for Arco Media never officially responded to the lawsuit and could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

[Kulhanek's lawyer David] Sergi said Kulhanek was put in a barbershop type chair where liquor was poured down her throat. "Before she knew it, she was dead drunk," he said. "The people from Arco were egging her on to enter the wet T-shirt contest. The next thing she knew she was in front of a bunch of people with her shirt off."

• The scope of the problem and its potential for catastophe are bigger than the mainstream media and its anointed experts would have you think.
• There are zillions of lines of code which may have the Y2K bug in them. Fixing this will take jillions of person hours and cost gazillions of dollars.
• Government and business have a vested interest in downplaying the problem. Those of us who dare to question their claims and tell the truth about what's going on will be harassed and silenced.

I was wrong about Y2K. Not about the magnitude and pervasive nature of the problem, and not about the likely consequences if millions of computer systems and embedded chips around the world had not been repaired or replaced. But I was wrong about the likelihood that enough of the repair/remediation would be finished in order to prevent serious disruptions. Indeed, it has gradually become apparent during the first few weeks and months of 2000 that Y2K has caused a number of moderate-to-serious problems in various parts of the world -- but it has not turned out to be the crisis that some of us had anticipated.

If the lights are out, if the phones are dead, if the banks are closed, if the airplanes are not flying, and if the hospitals are not accepting patients, I can assure you that the average citizen will not be spending much time wondering whether he still has more computer power than MIT. [...] [P]lease tell the American people that several of the oil companies are terrified of the problem they face here, because many of the chips are down on the bottom of the ocean floor -- and thus incredibly difficult to find, fix, or replace. If the oil rigs shut down, our supply of oil is threatened; if we don't get enough oil, you're going to be faced with the alternative of rationing gasoline or shutting down the oil-fired electric utilities.

In any case, we didn't know how Y2K would work out in 1998. Perhaps there are a few who can honestly say that they absolutely, positively knew that Y2K would be a non-event, but the vast majority of us had to admit, if only in private, that we wouldn't really be absolutely sure. And, in the context of this postmortem, I'm not sure if it would work out the same way -- i.e., a Y2K non-event -- if we had it all to do over again. Indeed, my mental image of the whole situation is that God flipped a coin to determine whether to decide whether to make Y2K a disaster or a non-event. This time, the coin came up heads, and God shrugged and let the world off with only a few glitches. But if we rolled the calendar back a couple years and went through the whole process again, that same coin-toss might come up tails -- in which case, God might have decided to let a few electric grids shut down, a few banks collapse, and maybe even a few airplanes fall from the sky. I know that this is an area of intense debate and controversy, and that many people are deeply convinced that there was no possible way -- no way, no-how -- for the incipient Y2K bugs to have caused a serious disaster. But there are others of us, myself included, who feel that we were incredibly lucky, and that the outcome could easily have been much, much different.

What will the Internet's best-known doomsayer do if Y2K results in just minor disruptions? "A few years later he'll reappear with another apocalyptic scenario," Berlet predicts.

...the party needs a strong gubernatorial candidate who has more than deep pockets with which to unite and energize the party. ...his record of service to the state is long, substantial and familiar.

LONDON -- No one would ever accuse him of political correctness. In his long career as Queen Elizabeth II's consort, the Duke of Edinburgh has mastered the princely gaffe with ill-considered remarks about Indians, Scots, women and deaf people, among others. The tongue that spares none struck again Friday. During a tour of Australia to mark his wife's Golden Jubilee, Prince Philip added Aborigines to his verbal hit list when he asked a tribal leader, "Do you still throw spears at each other?" William Brim, the entrepreneur whom the prince addressed, replied politely that, no, they didn't do that anymore, and he told reporters in Queensland that he was more surprised than offended by the question.

[T]hey file into their Islamic studies class, where the textbooks tell them the Day of Judgment can't come until Jesus Christ returns to Earth, breaks the cross and converts everyone to Islam, and until Muslims start attacking Jews.

In Tuesday's hearing, Skilling clashed with senators over his stock sales, repeatedly blamed auditor Arthur Andersen for signing off on questionable accounting transactions, and told disbelieving lawmakers he could not recall receiving $5.6 million in bonuses from Enron.

Now for my one political thought that the whole world can click on. I once won $1000 in a Super Bowl pool. God bless the Cowboys! I remember that like it was yesterday. How come Jeff Skilling can't remember getting 6 million dollars?

Cafe Express is Wendy's first investment in the fast-casual restaurant business. The term "fast-casual" refers to a growing market in the industry, combining the casual dining of a restaurant like Chili's or Friday's with the self-service, walk-up concept. Robert Del Grande, president of Cafe Express, said he was told by Wendy's CEO Jack Schuessler that the fast-casual market is "just beginning. It's teeny now, but it's going to be huge, and he expects it to grow exponentially."

The jury is still out on the intent and consequences of NATO's war and history would doubtless make the adequate judgement

The conflict in Bosnia is largely the result of outside interference in the internal affairs of Yugoslavia. Germany in particular greatly contributed to the present problems by encouraging Croatia and Slovenia to declare their independence and then pressuring the European Economic Community and the United States to support the move.

Taking sides in a three-way civil war is the worst thing the United States can do. Someone should tell our government that, among other things, bombing of the Bosnian Serbs will: Not help but ruin the peace negotiations in Geneva. Not bring peace to the region, but incite a long-term war. Damage and close the existing humanitarian supply routes. Bring about more killings of innocent civilians -- the Croats, the Muslims and the Serbs -- due to their close proximity to the front lines. Cause a permanent rift between the United States, its NATO allies in Europe and the United Nations. Upset the delicate balance in the U.S. relationship with Russia.

Thanks to [...] the media, we are led to forget the fact that the people of Serbia are innocent. Compassion for human suffering, if genuine, is not limited to any particular nation or group of people. We should ask ourselves why is the Bosnian Muslim population more deserving of the sympathy of the world then the suffering peoples of any other nation including Georgia (in the former Soviet Union) or Serbia.

In her March 16 Outlook article, "Bosnian Serbs, too, have vowed: "Never again,' " Sonja Myers attempts to justify the genocide committed by Serbs on Croats and Muslims during the last four years of Serbia's aggression on Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. She depicts Serbs as victims of Croats and Muslims during World War II. She distorts the WWII statistics, in a similar way that the former communist-dominated Yugoslavia had done for nearly 50 years to justify Serbian dominance over all other nationalities in that country. In that war, however, there were massive exterminations of Croats and Muslims by Serbs which continued after the war ended. But in that totalitarian, communist Yugoslavia ruled by Serbs, even to mention the Serbian actions resulted in imprisonment, exile or worse.

Contrary to the current popular belief, there is a solution to end the civil war in Bosnia. It is the same solution that could have prevented the war. It requires applying the same moral principles and affording equal treatment to all sides, including the Serbs. A short trip to the library would reveal that the Serbs in Bosnia have a case: their legitimate rights and concerns to be heard, acknowledged and respected. This would open the way to meaningful negotiations and secure necessary Serb concessions for a long-term political settlement and peace in the Balkans. The alternatives are too awful to even contemplate.

My entire family in Belgrade demonstrated for days demanding that Slobodan Milosevic accept the results of the presidential elections and concede defeat to his opponent, Vojislav Kostunica. The ruling party used election officials, courts and the media - all run by Milosevic's political party - to deny victory to Kostunica. The main weapon for manipulating public opinion was to call the people of Serbia "traitors, bandits and mobsters," and swear that the "will of the people," the "fair and accurate vote recount" and the "rule of law" should prevail. Many Serbs and those who followed news reports on the Yugoslav elections probably had a strong sense of deja vu regarding the 2000 U.S. presidential election as they watched the "ruling party" and its operatives manipulate public opinion, pressure the courts to change existing laws, harass and threaten election boards to do all they could to change the bad outcome for their Democratic candidate, Al Gore. History has a weird sense of humor, but in my wildest dreams I could not have imagined that the actions and intentions of the power-obsessed Milosevic could have been matched up exactly to the last dirty trick by America's Democratic Party and its candidate for the presidency.

"Since the attacks of September 11th, we have seen the unfolding of a national ritual denunciation of this crime that is much more than an expression of outrage and sadness. A disciplined military-financial-industrial press is harmonizing us in this ritual, and the orchestra director is theBush regime. Failure to participate is being constructed as heresy. Heresy includes:

1. The failure to call for war or support out leaders when they call for war
2. The denial that this can be reduced to a test between good and evil
3. The refusal to accept official explanations
4. The temerity to suggest that our own rulers have committed equally offensive actions
5. And finally, that our own financial, political, military, and intelligence establishments bear a portion of the blame.

There is a new McCarthyism emerging here, and a new loyalty oath along with it."

"The left, if it has the capacity to self-organize out of its oblivion, needs to understand its critical roles here. We have to play the role of credible, hard-working, and non-sectarian partners in a broader peace-movement. We have to study, synthesize, and describe our current historical conjuncture. And we have to prepare leadership for the decisive conflict that will emerge to first defeat fascism then take political power."

"Civilized people -- Muslims, Christians and Jews -- all understand that the source of freedom and human dignity is the Creator. Civilized people of all religious faiths are called to the defense of His creation. We are a nation called to defend freedom -- a freedom that is not the grant of any government or document, but is our endowment from God."

Q. You write that people who accused you of merely taking votes away from Gore missed the point. What was the point? A. The point was to build a broad-based political movement that transcended any single election. [...]

Q. Did you accomplish your goal? A. The first stage, certainly. When was the last time any progressive party got 3 million votes? [...]

Q. What is the biggest impediment to the rise of a progressive third party in this country? A. One is the winner-take-all mentality. If people don't think you can win, they won't vote for you. [...]

Q. Would you rather Al Gore had won? A. The similarities between the two towered over dwindling differences, so I was indifferent to whether Bush or Gore won. [...]

• Abortion? Different.
• Gun control? Different.
• Huge tax cuts which skew towards the upper income brackets? Different.
• Privatizing Social Security? Different.
• School vouchers? Different.
• Drilling in the ANWR? Different.

Q. Would you have made an effective wartime president? A. This war would never have happened had I been president, because for 30 years we have had an aviation safety group, and we have been urging the airlines to toughen cockpit doors and improve the strength of the locks, and they have been resisting for 30 years.

Q. But could a president from the Green Party, which advocates non-violence, wage war? A. Non-violence does not mean that you let people destroy you, because that encourages violence. In other words, we wouldn't foment aggressive war, but we would certainly have a very strong defense. The Green Party stands for health and safety, and safety means security. But we'll do it in a smarter way. The key in the Green Party is to foresee and forestall, and one way you do that is to put meat and potatoes on what Don Rumsfeld and Colin Powell said: that this kind of terrorism is tolerated and bred by poverty, injustice, dictatorships, destitution and human suffering.

We are the Folk Song Army. Everyone of us cares. We all hate poverty, war, and injustice, Unlike the rest of you squares.

Finally, I want you to know that I will be looking forward to only one thing during this entire book tour -- Opening Day of the 2002 Major League Baseball season! Why? Because that is the day I am asking George W. Bush to resign. And I want the resignation to take place right in the middle of Enron Field in Houston during the 7th-inning stretch of the Astros-Brewers game. I've asked if I can throw out the first pitch at 4:05pm CT. I mean, can there be a more perfect way to end the madness -- Bush, Lay, Mike, Texas, America's Favorite Pastime, and the visiting team from a Blue State owned by the Commissioner of Baseball (who will hand over his job to the ex-"president" as the fans sing "Da Do En-ron-ron Da Do En-ron")? C'mon, George, are ya listening? Just step up to the microphone and go out like Gehrig! Opening Day, April 2, 2002. Yoooou're Ouuuuuuuut!!!

Originalism (colloquially known also as "strict construction") requires interpreting the law based on the principle that the Constitution means only what it meant to the framers who adopted it. For Scalia, capital punishment was constitutional at the time of the framers, so it is constitutional today. Period. Since the framers had no intention of protecting the right to choose, he can oppose abortion as a constitutional matter while purporting to be morally neutral on the issue. As he said at the Pew conference: "[M]y difficulty with Roe v. Wade is a legal rather than moral one. I do not believe - and no one believed for 200 years - that the Constitution contains a right to abortion." By following the flame of originalism, Scalia can lead his flock of tortured Catholic judges out of the constitutional wilderness. Their personal morality and even the dictates of the church are immaterial. Their only judicial task is to follow the intent of the framers. This method of interpretation allows Scalia to look value-neutral, even when his own writings often belie that neutrality. As he told the Pew conference while defending the death penalty, "That is not to say that I favor the death penalty. I am judicially and judiciously neutral on that point."

The question of what exactly Scottish men keep under their kilts has long been a source of titillation and mirth for folk south of the border. Now a team of hardened celtic rowers have left nothing to the imagination - by practising in the nude. The Robert Gordon University rowing team has never beaten Aberdeen University in the seven-year history of their annual race. So this year, ahead of the race on 2 March, the Robert Gordon team have decided to toughen themselves up by rowing naked on the River Dee. A spokesman for the team told the Daily Record: "The Aberdeen University team have been wearing the trousers in this race for far too long and we are absolutely determined to put an end to their winning streak. "We thought we'd go back to nature and find out exactly what natural assets we have for rowing. "However, I'm not sure this will be a regular fixture on our training schedule for this time of year. We have been very cold."

The first is to ask how you would feel if Oral Roberts and their ilk were the gateway to the good life for your children? Would you be happy that the only way you could get your children the most prestigious education was by sending them somwhere where the political center was around, say, the National Review -- and there were no professors in many departments with any other point of view?

The total dominance of the left is encouraging intellectual complacency, shutting down debate in many areas, and in general creating an unhealthy atrophy in the intellectual atmosphere of many humanities departments -- just as it would be if 94% of the academy hailed from the right.

It's important to look at the whole academy, but especially at humanities at elite schools, because that's where a majority of the media, especially the major media, derive their ideas, and there is data that suggests that they perceive the world to be centered considerably to the left of the country's political center, and that they tend to discount the bona fides of conservative intellectuals. Moreover, it would be better for the academy as a whole to have all sides represented in debates, so that students could develop sharper analytical skills. However, while it is important to address hiring bias, or self-selection due to perceived discrimination, it would be folly to enact remedies that lower the rigorous intellectual standards of the academy. The only caveat is that we must ensure that the existing professors don't set up the rigorous standards to exclude conservative thought. Now, how do we bell the cat? Any suggestions?

It is not unusual that a lot of people don't know of Victor Morales' strength in this year's primary. What most people don't know is that for the last 5 years Victor has been touring the state of Texas ( and other states to a lesser extent) as a Motivational speaker, speaking at the major Texas colleges, high schools, and elementaries. All of those kids (which would add up to the thousands) would go home and naturally in some if not most cases tell their parents about their school experiences. Victor was doing this full time but of course it was not newsworthy so many people did not know except those of us involved, such as family, friends and students, that his name and face was out in the public eye almost non-stop since 1996. That was one of the main reasons given our discussions, that Victor decided to run. Many hundreds of adults still remembered him, liked his sincerity and knowledge of issues (which were never reported in the media) and encouraged him to run again. After all, he was a high school civics and government teacher for years and years so he had more knowledge than given credit for. So his strength to those close to him was no surprise even to the Democratic higher ups who were calling him trying to get him to not run for office. One Democratic leader went so far as to offer a high government office (which I won't divulge to prevent embarressment for that person) if he would support their candidate, work in his campaign and not run for office. Even Mayor Kirk called to ask for his support. I could go on and on about what happened behind the scenes but let's just wait and see where this Senate race ends up. I'll bet more folks will be surprised by the outcome. After all, the polls show Victor only 5 points behind The AG in a head to head matchup in Nov.

Until Monday, only a few diehard figure skating fans in North America knew who Sale and Pelletier were. That's all changed. "Their agent told me he's had about a hundred calls," Brennan said. "I'm guessing they are now a household name, which never would have been if they'd won the gold medal with no controversy. I would imagine that they became millionaires in the last 24 hours. The sympathy factor is huge."

Ramon Alvarez, a scientist for Environmental Defense in Austin, said the group has not promoted the 55-mph speed limit. "We do not believe the strategy is as effective as the plan claims it to be. We think it will be difficult to enforce and involves the risk of creating public resentment of environmental programs," he said. A better strategy, Alvarez said, would be to use financial incentives to reduce driving, such as basing auto insurance premiums on miles traveled instead of time, and allowing employees to pay transit fares out of pre-tax dollars.

Heinz launches chocolate french fries Beginning in May, H.J. Heinz Co. will ship a new line of Ore-Ida frozen potato products called Funky Fries featuring five new shapes, colors and flavors, all intended to give kids even more say over their parents' grocery store lists. The new products include French fries flavored with sour cream and chives, or cinnamon and sugar, and a new product called Crunchy Rings - basically Tater Tots with a hole in the middle. Then there's Kool Blue - a sky blue seasoned French fry, and Cocoa Crispers -- a brown chocolate fry designed "for kids with a sweet tooth." "We asked the kids what would make them want to eat more French fries," said John Carroll, managing director of North American potatoes and snacks for Heinz' frozen food division.

The shadow of 1985 still hovers over this franchise like a giant albatross, brainwashing the Royals into thinking that offense is strictly optional for World Championship teams. The Royals won a World Series with George Brett and seven defensive specialists...In some ways, winning a World Championship with Buddy Biancalana as the starting shortstop was the worst thing that happened to the Royals.

Which John Cusack Are You?

1) Find a liberal 2) Get him to say someone is a 'fascist' 3) Then say, "Other than one fascist's regimes penchant for genocide, what specifically do you have against fascism?"

"[At] the work station in the police chief's office, there was a pattern that showed there were frequent visits to these sites during a six-day period," [the West University Place city manager] said. According to the surveillance software, [he] made 34 visits to cybersex sites, spending about 3.4 minutes a day perusing porn.

Three high school girls, from a small Georgia town, who used to be best friends when they were younger, but now have very different personalities (a cheerleader, a straight-A student and a "burnout", whatever that means) (Spears plays the smart one) get together for a trip across the country. Along the way, they meet a musician who persuades them to go to Los Angeles to compete in a musical contest.

In general, the lighter a vehicle and the smaller and cleaner its engine, the less improvement in pollution from a lower speed. As a group, [Randy Wood, deputy director for environmental policy at the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission in Austin] said, heavy-duty vehicles, including big trucks and larger pickups and sport utility vehicles, release about 10 times the [Nitrogen oxides, called NOX for short] per mile as light-duty vehicles, which include cars and smaller pickups and SUVs.

The 55-mph speed limit is part of a two-prong plan to cut vehicle emissions, which the H-GAC estimates produce 24 percent of NOX emissions in the region. The other prong, certain to also elicit howls of complaint from motorists, is a tightened tailpipe testing program scheduled to begin May 1. The slower speed limit is projected to account for a NOX reduction of about 12 tons a day, the tailpipe test about 36 tons. Together, they would achieve about 7 percent of the needed reductions, set at 750 to 800 tons a day under the state's air plan.

Because the fundamental aim of the more prominent groups is to outlaw handguns entirely, and in some cases long guns as well. The fundamental vision of the gun control groups is that there is no legitimate right to self defense with a weapon.

As the largest national, non-partisan, grassroots organization leading the fight to prevent gun violence, the Brady Campaign and the Brady Center are dedicated to creating an America free from gun violence, where all Americans are safe at home, at school, at work, and in their communities. The Brady Campaign and the Brady Center believe that a safer America can be achieved without banning all guns. The Brady Campaign works to enact and enforce sensible gun laws, regulations and public policies through grassroots activism, electing progun control public officials and increasing public awareness of gun violence. The Brady Center works to reform the gun industry and educate the public about gun violence through litigation and grassroots mobilization, and works to enact and enforce sensible regulations to reduce gun violence including regulations governing the gun industry.

• Tiffany and I were heading over to her sister's place to watch the game on their amazing HDTV-ready widescreen TV when we passed a Ford Excursion with a baby stroller attached to its rear door on a bike rack. This made us wonder: Do these people really have so much stuff (or so many kids) in there that they need to carry the stroller on the outside?
• The Rams defensive coordinator is named Lovie Smith. What the heck kind of name is "Lovie" for a football coach? Every time I hear it, I think of Mrs. Howell.
• Was it just me or were the ads boring this year? The only ones that stand out to me are the Budweiser valentine-card ad, and the Docker's little-black-dress ad. Other than that, snoozeville.
• I admit it - we switched to NBC to watch Fear Factor with the Playboy Playmates. We laughed at it, but in the end we were hooked enough to turn back after the game. Poor Angel Boris. She was robbed.
• Pretty damn good game, too. I was sure it was going to go into overtime. I still can't believe the Rams' defense let the Pats down the field like that at the end.
• Top story on the local news after Fear Factor: Ken Lay is now refusing to testify before Congress. Oooohhh...

Mark Rutherford, chairman of the Indiana Libertarian Party, offered another angle. "If the Democrats want to weaken the efforts of the Green Party in Indiana, in a perverse way, easier ballot access might do that. It will cause Greens to focus less on statewide organization, and more on candidates, which will splinter their efforts and effectiveness." He pointed out that tough ballot access rules have actually helped organize and motivate the Libertarians, who have more elected officeholders than all the other alternative parties combined. Rutherford was quick to add a counterpoint: "The more names on the ballots, the more issues are raised; and all the candidates then become more focused to the needs and desires of the voters. This is good for the astute Democrat and Republican who picks this up, and steals the issue from the Libertarian."

Party leaders say [...] term limits take away critical experience from government, especially in rural areas where many small towns have struggled to fill local offices.

15 KIDS AND ADULTS WERE INJURED, SOME CRITICALLY, AT A SCHOOL in Los Angeles, as a car veered into a crowd. It was a Mercedes. Will we hear calls for "car control," and explanations that "no one needs" a car with "that much power"?

The connection between incarceration and crime rates appears as elusive at the end of the 90s as it has been in previous decades. There is little correlation between states with skyrocketing incarceration rates and the recent crime declines witnessed across the country. The "New York Miracle" - the sharp drops in homicides and violent crime rates experienced by America's largest city between 1992 and 1997 - have occurred at the same time that New York State had the second slowest growing prison system in the country, and at a time when the city's jail system downsized. New York's modest prison growth provides a solid contrast to the explosive use of incarceration in other states. During the same 1992-97 period, California's prison population grew by 30%, or about 270 inmates per week, compared to New York State's more modest 30 inmates a week. Between 1992 and 1997, New York State's violent crime rate fell by 38.6%, and its murder rate by 54.5%. By contrast, California's violent crime rate fell by a more modest 23%, and its murder rate fell by 28%. Put another way, New York experienced a percentage drop in homicides which was half again as great as the percentage drop in California's homicide rate, despite the fact that California added 9 times as many inmates per week to its prisons as New York.

It was an appeals court judge in New York who pointed out in a magazine article that a penniless mother who steals powdered milk for her baby and a thug who steals powdered milk to cut heroin have committed the same crime. Does anyone really want to see them given identical, "mandatory" prison sentences?

I got about 2/3 of the way through The Sum of All Fears. It was at that point I realized Clancy was just another poser in the mold of Zane Grey and Danielle Steele. A sell-out. A fake, a fraud, a user of template-based-MadLib-fill-in-the-blanks-book-writing.

In perhaps the most unusual marketing marriage, San Diego is partnered with a defibrillator company. Cardiac Science will pay that city $225,000 over three years to be San Diego's official partner. The city also will get a cut of the company's defibrillator sales in San Diego during the contract term. The deal came after the city bought defibrillators for its municipal buildings. Teaming up on a public-safety campaign for defibrillator training seemed a natural, said Mary Braunwarth, director of San Diego's Corporate Partnership Program. "It's not just designed as a revenue (generator)," Braunwarth said. "It was tied with the city's desire to provide a new level of service that we did not have the money for in our regular budget." In addition to getting free publicity, Cardiac Science gets its brochures distributed by city fire officials during commercial building inspections. The fire department also provides defibrillator training.

The Rove associates say the recommendation, which Enron accepted, was intended to keep Reed's allegiance to the Bush campaign without putting him on the Bush payroll. Bush, they say, was then developing his "compassionate conservatism" message and did not want to be linked too closely to Reed, who had just stepped down as executive director of the Christian Coalition, an organization of committed religious conservatives. At the same time, they say, the contract discouraged Reed, a prominent operative who was being courted by several other campaigns, from backing anyone other than Bush. Enron paid Reed $10,000 to $20,000 a month, the amount varying by year and the particular work, people familiar with the arrangement say. He was hired in September 1997 and worked intermittently for Enron until the company collapsed.

"If Karl Rove was partly responsible for [Reed] getting the job at Enron, it illustrates the close relations between the Bush political world and Enron," said Trevor Potter, a Republican, who is a former chairman of the Federal Election Commission. "If it was done for the avowed reason to keep Reed satisfied and out of someone else's political camp, it illustrates what everyone in the Republican world has known for years: Enron has been an important source of political power in the party." Potter said Reed's hiring could have been a violation of federal election law if it turned out that "it was a backdoor way of getting him extra compensation for the time he was spending on Bush activity."

Most of the widening will occur along the former railroad right of way north of the freeway, but some will be on the south side, [Texas Department of Transportation spokewoman Janelle] Gbur said.

It's a sweet story about a young girl who is following her dream. When she finally reaches it, her parents disapprove. So, she had to raise the money for the trip on her own. Her friends, sympathizing with their pal's plight, decide to pitch in and lend a helping hand. The story is that of the Texas Cowgirl Cheerleader wanna-be in Debbie Does Dallas, which made its way from the curtained section of video rental stores to the New York stage as part of the New York International Fringe Festival. The highly anticipated adaptation received mixed reviews but sold out its run at downtown Manhattan's Kraine Theatre Aug. 10-19.

"Whereas Sept. 11 was a shock for the nation and indeed the world, this is a second shock for Houston, certainly not of equal magnitude, but up there on the Richter scale," says Peter Bishop, chair of the studies of the future department at the University of Houston-Clear Lake. "Ken Lay. You couldn't find a fairer person, a person who did more for the community, and just like the World Trade Center, that doesn't exist anymore." It's a sign of how shocked Houstonians are about Enron's ignominious demise that Sept. 11 can be invoked -- and is frequently -- to explain the shock of the company's collapse.

"They had rock-star status here," says Carlos Hernandez, a native Houstonian and business consultant of the Enron top dogs. Last year, before Enron's downfall, when Jeff Skilling was still CEO, he'd be approached in local bars like a celebrity. "Out of nowhere people would come up to him and tell him how great he was. A friend of mine saw him at Volcano unshaven, wearing a leather bomber jacket, a white T-shirt and jeans," says Hernandez. "He was a god, and Lay was king."

Regardless of what illegal shenanigans the Enron boys may or may not have gotten up to in the past, Bush will and should be judged for having such a miserable scumbag as a close friend and supporter.

[15] And it came to pass, that, as Jesus sat at meat in his house, many publicans and sinners sat also together with Jesus and his disciples: for there were many, and they followed him. [16] And when the scribes and Pharisees saw him eat with publicans and sinners, they said unto his disciples, How is it that he eateth and drinketh with publicans and sinners? [17] When Jesus heard it, he saith unto them, They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.

``The government may be overstepping its boundaries by spending taxpayer dollars to limit communication that is protected by the first amendment,'' said H. Robert Wientzen, president of the Direct Marketing Association. He said the proposals could cost the telemarketing industry money and jobs by having companies relocate to other countries to avoid the regulations. Wientzen said people who do not want to be called can request that their names be added his group's list, which now has 4.1 million names. The bulk of telemarketers voluntarily participate in this service and abide by the list, he said.

Known as "Mr. Dallas" for his devotion to the city where he was born and lived for much of his life, Marcus nevertheless infuriated the conservative establishment in the 1950s and 1960s. He championed civil rights and free speech. During the height of the "red scare" in the 1950s, he publicly defended the Dallas Museum of Art, accused of showing "communist art" in showcasing works by Picasso and other artists. He was among the first Dallas merchants to hire blacks as salespeople and welcome blacks to shop at his stores. Despite threats of boycotts, picket lines and canceling of charge accounts, Marcus' business never suffered much, because the wives of the most conservative Dallas leaders couldn't bear to live without shopping at Neiman's.

We'd say it's also impossible to understand Enron outside of the moral climate in which it flourished. Those were the roaring '90s, when all of America reveled in the economic boom. They were also the Clinton years, when we learned that "everybody does it." The culture wanted to believe in Enron's promises, which helps explain why 16 of 17 Wall Street analysts rated Enron a "buy" as recently as last October.

Harried commuters just want fewer traffic jams. But anti-sprawl technocrats have something more grandiose in mind. They want everyone to live the way I do: in an urban townhouse off a busy street, with no yard but plenty of shops and restaurants within walking distance. Their "smart growth" planning means confining family life to crowded cities so that the countryside can be left open for wildlife, recreation and a few farmers. They crave "density," which they believe is more efficient and more interesting.

For smart-growth supporters, the enemy is the suburb. It's urban sprawl. Sprawl should go, replaced by more people living in the inner city in multifamily dwellings and putting severe limits on driving.

The involvement of Perry's staff in keeping the growing deficit secret last fall marks the third time his office has tried to block the release of information potentially embarrassing to the governor. Perry's office last month under questioning from the news media dropped a lawsuit against Cornyn over his ruling that the governor's office had to make public documents about the eligibility of three of his appointees to serve in office. Perry's staff also had to admit that it had altered the appointment application of former Public Utility Commissioner Max Yzaguirre, hiding his conviction for accidentally shooting a whooping crane to death during a goose hunting trip. The application had been requested under the state's open government law by a Democratic gubernatorial campaign. Yzaguirre resigned from the Public Utility Commission last week.

Repeal of the alternative minimum tax sought by Enron was included by President Bush as part of an economic stimulus package that stalled in the Senate. The measure earlier passed the House, where a provision was added that would have given Enron a $254 million infusion of cash if the legislation had become law.

But should DirecTV be part of any female pickup strategy? Reader Jack reports that on a recent episode of Boston Public, former Star Trek mega-babe Jeri Ryan�freed from the prissy Trek realm and now specializing in gratuitous cheesecake scenes�tried to pick up another character with the line, "I have a great body and a satellite dish." TMQ guesses that 100 percent of heterosexual males, including Thomas Merton and Thich Nhat Hanh, including all men on their wedding days with their brides standing at their sides, if offered Jeri Ryan's body would immediately agree. The question is, what would happen once you got back to Ryan's apartment and were forced to choose between her bod and the satellite dish? There might be some really good games on.

This whole kerfuffle reminds me of an incident which occurred here in Newfoundland a couple of years ago. The provincial community college changed its name to "College of the North Atlantic", with the acronym "CONA", naturally. T-shirts, jackets and other trinkets were printed up with "CONA" written on them. Then, someone raised a major stink about what how shocking and offensive the acronym was - it turns out "Cona" is a slang term for the female anatomy. In Norwegian.

"I think that people need to remember that the American people are sick and tired of partisan witch hunts, and endless investigations, particularly in the case here, if people try to make hay out of one party's involvement and contacts or relationships with Enron"

Selig's resignation may be an intriguing notion to some, but he is still an employee rather than an emperor. If he is someday to be replaced, it should be not by another guy with a daughter who can run the store while Dad's away, but by someone who is paid by both the owners and players, who has a sufficiently long and lucrative contract and a sizable enough buyout to give him (or her) freedom of action to lead baseball with a clear, understandable, fully beneficial vision. In other words, a kind of commissioner baseball has never had.

Bush is most clearly NOT Frodo...Frodo has the legacy of the ring thrust on him, but he lacks a great deal of strength and moral dimension...The credit for the successful completion of the quest goes to Sam, whose virtues are simple but essential: faithfulness, determination, endurance, love and hope...Bush is not Frodo. Bush is Sam.

A writer to Roger Ebert's Movie Answer Man reports that a school district in Fargo, ND, cancelled a school trip to see the "Harry Potter" movie out of fears its portrayal of witchcraft would violate the separation of church and state. That's bad enough, but Ebert's response - that "I can understand the principle involved" - is even worse. I hope to God he was being sarcastic. I've feared for Ebert's critical faculties ever since he thrashed the hilarious Zoolander for being offensive to Malaysians.

Q. A school district in North Dakota did not allow students to attend the premiere of ''Harry Potter'' in Fargo. They feel the portrayal of witchcraft would be in violation of the separation of church and state. I am very disappointed about the action being taken and I really feel for the kids. A. Since this was to be an official class trip, I can understand the principle involved, and hope the school district applies the same standards to public prayers at football games, etc.

• I learned the French expressions for the F word and the S word. Later, when I took French in college and was required to buy a Harrap's dictionary, I learned that the French have different words for them depending on whether they're used as nouns or verbs. You gotta love a language like that.
• Being a French movie, it was required by French law to feature a nekkid woman. I would have enjoyed that a lot more if my mother had not been a chaperone for the trip.