I have no joke for this.

Salon.com People | Man accused in wedgie case LOWER SOUTHAMPTON, Pa. (AP) - LOWER SOUTHAMPTON, Pa. (AP) -- A man accused of trying to kill a friend who gave him a "wedgie" will stand trial on an attempted murder charge, a judge ruled.

Daniel Strouss, 19, was attending a Phish concert last year when Eric Kassoway sneaked up behind him and yanked up his underwear, according to testimony at a hearing Thursday.

Strouss, of Richboro, held a grudge for months before shooting Kassoway on June 12, authorities said.

On the night of the shooting, Strouss drove to Kassoway's home and waited until Kassoway came home, then shot him in the arm and leg, authorities said. Kassoway nearly died from loss of blood.

Strouss' attorney, Al Cepparulo, said he did not dispute the prosecution's version of events.

"This is a tragedy for the victim. All I can say is my client is going through therapy," he said last week.

The first research of it's kind.

Independent News Scientists have worked out the ideal dimensions for a European nose. In the first research of its kind, scientists and doctors have put together growth charts showing normal nose sizes for every age group from newborn to 97, and discovered that the nose of the average European 20-year-old man will be almost one centimetre longer by the time he reaches the age of 97. By the time he gets to 30, the average European man's nose is 5.8cm long, and sticks out 2.6cm from the face.

You know, it's weird, but the federal government has officially declared me a person of no interest.

TAP: Web Feature: Tapped:. by . August 19, 2002.

Tapped approves of a Bush initiative:

TAP: Web Feature: Tapped:. by . August 19, 2002. . We're glad to hear the Bush administration is going to devote $25 million to pro-democracy intitiatives in the Middle East.

I'd like to see some money spent on pro-democracy intiatives in say, Florida.

I'm as surprised as you are -- Thomas Friedman making all kinds of sense.

Bush's Mideast Sand Trap The Bush team is pushing democracy on Yasir Arafat and the Palestinian Authority, but it will not utter a word against an Israeli settlement policy in the West Bank that helps poison the atmosphere there, empowering Palestinian radicals and weakening the liberals.

"Up to now, the Bush administration has been using democracy-promotion in the Mideast only as a tool to punish its enemies, not to create opportunities for its friends," notes the Middle East expert Stephen P. Cohen.

It's true. The Bush team is advocating democracy only in authoritarian regimes that oppose America, not in authoritarian regimes that are ostensibly pro-American.

A good review for Ionesco, Stoppard, Pinter

Three-Way Confusion (washingtonpost.com) Longacre Lea is a small theater company that gets some big laughs in its latest outing, a production of "The Bald Soprano," "After Magritte" and "The Dumb Waiter," three one-act farces by, respectively, Eugene Ionesco, Tom Stoppard and Harold Pinter. Each of the pieces, which share a preoccupation with the elusiveness of meaning, has strengths and weaknesses. Fortunately, director Kathleen Akerley seizes on the former to build an absurdist whirligig of an evening that, while a little long, holds together.

For more information on the show, go to the Longacre Lea website.

There's nothin I like better than a little viciousness.

TeeVee - Home of The Vidiots Once among the best series on TV, ER is now so stomach-cramplingly, bowel-rattlingly awful that the only reason to watch this past season was to root for the tumor baking inside Mark Greene's head.

Does he think we are idiots? Evidently.

Bush Promises to Consult Allies on Iraq (washingtonpost.com) Emerging into the midday heat from a meeting at his ranch with Vice President Cheney and his senior defense advisers, Bush, however, said that topic of Iraq "didn't come up."

Why is it that conservatives think you can't legislate moralitry in the corporate boardroom, but you can on the streets and in the bedroom?

On the 100th Birthday of Ogden Nash (A Few Days Late)

Famous poet Ogden Nash,
if cremated, would be ash;
if frozen like Red Sock Ted,
would be a poetic fountain-head.

Ogden was ne’er a Pulitzer champ;
but is now rewarded with a stamp.
I’m surely not his poetic equal,
but I hope he accepts this humble sequel.

When I agree with Bahrain, Brent Scowcroft, Dick Armey, Wesley Clark and Norman Schwartzkopf, then there are only 2 possibilities: the world has come to an end; or, the Bush Administration is very, very wrong.

Re. regretting our ties to the Northern Alliance: read this disturbing article from Newsweek about our allies' atrocities.

The Death Convoy of Afghanistan
The benefit in fighting a proxy-style war in Afghanistan was victory on the cheap—cheap, at any rate, in American blood. The cost, NEWSWEEK’s investigation has established, is that American forces were working intimately with “allies” who committed what could well qualify as war crimes.

Do the revelations from The New York Times that the Reagan administration "provided Iraq with critical battle planning assistance at a time when American intelligence agencies knew that Iraqi commanders would employ chemical weapons in waging the decisive battles of the Iran-Iraq war really surprise anyone? One of the great shames of American history is our willingness to aid, abet, and ally with the worst and most murderous regimes in the world on the dubious basis that the enemy of our enemy is our friend. Since 1945, we have always come to regret these relationships. Think about it: the South Vietnamese, Batista's Cuba, the Shah's Iran, Marcos in the Philippines, Baathist Iraq, Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan, the Saudis (finally) -- is there any example of the United States supporting a dictatorial and oppressive regime that we have not come to recognize as having been a mistake? We are already regretting having allied with the thugs who make up the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. I am eager to hear if I'm wrong -- but I don't think so.

Is it me, or are these just sick.

Just as we always regret alliances with repressive regimes, the United States always come to realize that abuses of civil liberties in the name of national security are mistakes. Always. For example:

The Village Voice: Nation: Nat Hentoff: Joe Lieberman Joins Big Brother by Nat Hentoff In World War I, Leahy had discovered, the "Department of Justice established the American Protective League, which enrolled 250,000 citizens in at least 600 cities and towns . . . to enlist 'informants' with wide access in their communities . . . to report suspicious conduct and investigate fellow citizens. The APL spied on workers and unions in thousands of industrial plants with defense contracts, and organized raids on German-language newspapers."

With the power to make arrests, "members of the League used such methods as tar and feathers, beatings, and forcing those who were suspected of disloyalty to kiss the flag. The New York Bar Association issued a report after the war, stating of the APL:

" 'No other one cause contributed so much to the oppression of innocent men as the systematic and indiscriminate agitation against what was claimed to be an all-pervasive system of German espionage.' "

I can't believe that in 2002 people still use "Man" to mean "humanity."
Mosquitoes are most deadly animal known to man

What have they been doing with the trillions they spend?

TechNews.com Security consultants entered scores of confidential military and government computers without approval this summer, exposing vulnerabilities that specialists say open the networks to electronic attacks and spying.

The consultants, inexperienced but armed with free, widely available software, identified unprotected PCs and then roamed at will through sensitive files containing military procedures, personnel records and financial data.

Richard Cohen on Ann Coulter

Blaming of the Shrew (washingtonpost.com) could you think of another commentator -- especially one on the left -- who could have written what Coulter did about Muslims and go on to bestsellerdom? Being conservative is like being criminally insane: You can't be held accountable.

Paul Krugman's disturbing analysis of our economy

I've been very disturbed by the stagnation in our economy. Fortunately, I'm not an expert, so I can ignore the problems, hoping they will go away. Well Paul Krugman is an expert, and his analysis of parallels between our economy and Japan's is scary:

Mind the Gap Back when I first got professionally obsessed with Japan's problems, around four years ago, I made myself a mental checklist of reasons that Japan's decade of stagnation could not happen to the United States. It went like this:

1. The Fed has plenty of room to cut interest rates, which should be enough to deal with any eventuality.

2. The U.S. long-term budget position is very strong, so there's plenty of room for fiscal stimulus in the unlikely event interest rate cuts aren't enough.

3. We don't have to worry about an Asian-style loss of confidence in our business sector, because we have excellent corporate governance.

4. We may have a stock bubble, but we don't have a real estate bubble.

I've now had to strike the first three items off my list, and I'm getting worried about the fourth.

More and more people are using the B-word about the housing market. A recent analysis by Dean Baker, of the Center for Economic Policy Research, makes a particularly compelling case for a housing bubble. House prices have run well ahead of rents, suggesting that people are now buying houses for speculation rather than merely for shelter. And the explanations one hears for those high prices sound more and more like the rationalizations one heard for Nasdaq 5,000.

I was a senior (excuse me, fourth year student) at UVa when we had the last stock market collapse in 1987. I remember many people unable to find jobs that took advantage of their education and skills throughout the late 80s and early 90s. It took us well into the Clinton administration to really recover from the collapse of the Reagan bubble. I am afraid that it could be a long time before we recover from the collapse of the Clinton Bubble. President Hoover, er, Bush isn't helping.

The transformation of Arianna Huffington from Gingrich-apologist to Bush Basher has been a thing wondrous to behold:

Salon.com News | Wacko in Waco "We heard a lot of really challenging ideas today," Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill intoned after the forum. And his idea of a challenging idea? "We had several people in my session tell us that not only should we make the tax cuts permanent, but we ought to accelerate the ones that are delayed." And there was no need to pass the hat at this gathering of the faithful. The CEO congregants crowding the front pews had already given, and given, and given.

Maybe we can spread this kind of stability all over the world.

Independent Argument Kabul is alive with the kind of rumours that can never be substantiated but that stick in the mind, just as the dust of Kandahar stays in the throat and on the lips of all who go there. "The British forces were right to leave," a British humanitarian worker announced over dinner in Kabul one night. "They realised that the Americans had no real interest in returning this country to law and order. They knew that the Americans were going to fail. So they got out as soon as they could. The Americans say they want peace and stability. So why don't they let Isaf (the international force in Kabul) move into the other big cities of Afghanistan? Why do they let their friendly warlords persecute the rest of the country?"

Far more disturbing are persistent reports from northern Afghanistan of the massacre of thousands of Pashtuns after the slaughter at General Dostum's Qal-i-Jangi fort last November These mass murders, according to a humanitarian worker I have known for two decades – he played a brave role in preventing killings in Lebanon in 1982 – went on into December with the full knowledge of the Americans. But the US did nothing about it, any more than they did about the 600 Pakistani prisoners at Shirbagan, some of whom are still dying of starvation and ill-treatment at the hands of their Northern Alliance captors.

"There are mass graves all across the north, and the Americans, who know about this, have said nothing," my old friend said. "The British intelligence people knew this, too. And the British have said nothing."

I'm not an economic historian, but I play one on TV

Doesn't this remind you of another President? I think his name was Hoover.

In S.D., Bush Faces Test of Fiscal Responsibility (washingtonpost.com) "I am determined to fund the great priorities of our government while exercising the spending restraint that will return America to the path of a balanced budget as soon as possible," Bush said.

His policy of fiscal restraint sure worked, didn't it.

Dirty Dealings? Bush Is Shocked ... Shocked! Companies like WorldCom and Enron were not a natural manifestation of the free-market capitalism celebrated by the likes of Adam Smith. The corporate manipulators of the market that we are now seeing were precisely the enemy of the "invisible hand" celebrated in Smith's economics classic, "The Wealth of Nations"; they betrayed the solid post-Great Depression regulatory foundation designed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to prevent large corporations from subverting the integrity of the free market.

The fervent deregulators of the last two decades were not interested in a truly free market in which profit is dictated by consumers choosing what they want to buy. On the contrary, although government interference in the economy was corporate America's most convenient scapegoat for its failures, this was also exactly what it wanted. Regulations that suited its purposes were just fine. Corporate America was very much against government action to protect the environment, consumers, the poor or even shareholders trying to read annual reports, but it had no compunction about buying legislative loopholes that the clumsiest of con artists could jump through.

NYPress - The Gist - Michelangelo Signorile - Vol. 15, Iss. 33

NYPress - The Gist - Michelangelo Signorile - Vol. 15, Iss. 33 you can rest assured that if this were the Clinton administration in office rather than the W administration, the blaring attack headlines would be nonstop and tv news would be on the administration’s butt like there was no tomorrow. If Clinton and Gore were in the White House right now and were involved in the same corporate scandals, two independent investigations–one for Harken, one for Halliburton–would be under way. There would be congressional hearings about why we’ve failed to meet the primary mission in Afghanistan, why we didn’t get the leader of Al Qaeda and the leader of the Taliban, which would shift the entire debate on the effectiveness of the "war on terror." And there would be another investigation into why the administration was asleep at the switch from the get-go, as Time magazine’s cover story last week showed, stalling the previous administration’s antiterrorism activities.

All this talk of an invasion of Iraq, meanwhile, would be laughed off as yet another ploy to change the subject from the president’s own personal problems. And if the vice president went underground just as he was being investigated for corporate misconduct he’d be flushed out pronto by reporters. When our leaders are making "rare public appearances," you better believe it’s time for relentless questions.

I don't know anything about this -- I just like the phrase "fungus-based."U.S. Decried on Fungus-Based Meat (washingtonpost.com)
U.S. Decried on Fungus-Based Meat

Sorry I haven't posted lately. On Saturday I had an exam/interview for the designer's union, United Scenic Artists. I'm also about to open Ionesco Stoppard Pinter with Longacre Lea productions. It will be an outstanding show. Come see it if you are in Washington, DC.

Bush's Health

It's fine that the Prez is in good shape. But does anyone remember the last President we had who was noted for his incredibly low heart rate and excellent health. His name was Jimmy Carter.

Doctors: Bush in Stellar Health (washingtonpost.com) President Bush's rigorous fitness regimen is paying off: His cardiovascular fitness is better than 95 percent of men aged 35 to 39.

The 56-year-old president underwent his second annual medical exam on Tuesday, a battery of tests that led doctors to declare him "fit for duty."

Bush runs about three miles, four times a week. He also works out with free weights and a stationary exercise machine. He sometimes clears his schedule midday for an exercise session.

The results were evident in the numbers Bush's doctors released Tuesday.

The president's resting heart rate is 44, according to a statement issued by Bush's doctors on Air Force One as the president flew to Texas

A damn good question...

Eschaton While I'm all for recognizing that the Saudi government is 'bad people,' what is with this recurring theme of oil field seizure...

I couldn't agree more.

This is a very important story.

Salon.com News | Sex-slave whistle-blowers vindicated Two employees of DynCorp, the government contracting powerhouse, have won legal victories after charging that the $2 billion-a-year firm fired them when they complained that co-workers were involved in a Bosnia sex-slave trade.
The court actions -- one in the United Kingdom, the other in Fort Worth, Texas -- suggest that the company did not move aggressively enough when reports of sexual misconduct among its employees began to emerge in 1999. The tribunal in the U.K. found that DynCorp employee Kathryn Bolkovac "acted reasonably," but that the company did not.

Female suicide bombers

I was prepared to find this article by Andrea Dworkin (linked by the incomparable Arts & Letters Daily to be either misguided or risible. But she actually makes a lot of sense. She explores what Palestinian women get out of martyrdom -- an identity that transcends their gender.

Feminista! v5n1 - The Women Suicide Bombers Rather than face an ignominious death, the young women wrapped themselves with explosives and committed a glorious suicide, one that would raise them up into the elite of martyrdom. Now one sees the same happening with exemplary young women, whose motives have to do with trying to scale the heights of a woman-hating society. How does one rise up in a land where women are lower than the animals? If one does what the men do, does one get a measure of the respect the community gives the men?

At last, someone is talking about the real enemies of peace and freedom.

Briefing Depicted Saudis as Enemies (washingtonpost.com) A briefing given last month to a top Pentagon advisory board described Saudi Arabia as an enemy of the United States, and recommended that U.S. officials give it an ultimatum to stop backing terrorism or face seizure of its oil fields and its financial assets invested in the United States.
"The Saudis are active at every level of the terror chain, from planners to financiers, from cadre to foot-soldier, from ideologist to cheerleader," stated the explosive briefing. It was presented on July 10 to the Defense Policy Board, a group of prominent intellectuals and former senior officials that advises the Pentagon on defense policy.
"Saudi Arabia supports our enemies and attacks our allies," said the briefing prepared by Laurent Murawiec, a Rand Corp. analyst. A talking point attached to the last of 24 briefing slides went even further, describing Saudi Arabia as "the kernel of evil, the prime mover, the most dangerous opponent" in the Middle East.

Read this study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research: the subject -- is the rising housing market a bubble that will soon burst?

Good news re. abortion

Decision Allows Woman's Abortion A judge on Monday overturned an unusual decision that temporarily barred a woman from having an abortion.

The judge dissolved the temporary injunction forbidding Tanya Meyers, from ending her pregnancy. He also dismissed the lawsuit filed by her ex-boyfriend, John Stachokus, who had sought to force her to carry her pregnancy to term.

A woman's right to have an abortion ``is not subject to being vetoed by a woman's husband or partner,'' Common Pleas Judge Michael Conahan said in his decision Monday, one week after another judge ordered the injunction. ``Neither an ex-boyfriend nor a fetus has standing to interfere with a woman's choice to terminate her pregnancy.''

It only costs $10,000 to get eight Playboy Playmates to come to Washington for a night. I can't afford that, but I could chip on with some friends.

I need to use the word feckless more.

1. Lacking purpose or vitality; feeble or ineffective.
2. Careless and irresponsible.

Whoopee!!

Yahoo! News - Dow Falls Triple-Digits Again

Maryland's Governor takes on Bush's anti-environment plan.

'Clear Skies'? Not From Bush Clear Skies'? Not From Bush

To the Editor:

Perhaps it was fitting that it was a Code Red air-quality day in Maryland when I read about President Bush's plans to clear the way for corporate polluters to continue their destructive practices ("Bush Energy Proposal Seeks to `Clear Skies' by 2018," news article, July 30).

In the wake of corporate accounting scandals that have cost working families their life savings, Mr. Bush is offering an industry-friendly emissions plan that can cost families their health. This proposal affords the dirtiest power plant polluters the opportunity to avoid reducing their filthy emissions simply by purchasing credits from cleaner power plants. Thus they can avoid the cost of updating their plants with the most effective pollution control technology.

While Mr. Bush may believe in a "market-based system that guarantees results," the majority of Americans have seen too often that the results are guaranteed not to be good for them.
PARRIS N. GLENDENING
Governor
Annapolis, Md., Aug. 1, 2002

A totally unrelated thought.

I have a couple of friends named April. If my name was April, my email adress would be cruelestmonth@whatever.com. I guess then it's a good thing my name isn't April. (Although I am known as Irene occasionally).

Philadelphia Inquirer | 08/04/2002 | Daughter of Biden is arrested

Senator Joe Biden's 21-year-old daughter was .arrested for obstructing a police officer. I don't care, but Inopticed that her name is Ashley Blazer Biden. Ashley Blazer? Could she have a trendier name? And I was feeling all warm and fuzzy about Joe.

I think it's actually involuntary servitude.

Pa. Judge Bars Woman From Having Abortion (washingtonpost.com)Abortion rights advocates are urging courts to immediately overturn a judge's decision to temporarily bar a woman from ending her pregnancy.

The order came in a lawsuit filed by John Stachokus, who wants former girlfriend Tanya Meyers to carry her pregnancy to term. Stachokus says he is willing to take full or partial custody of the child and says in his suit that Meyers is being pressured by her mother to have the procedure.

I will be teaching at the University of Maryland this year. Unless I have to be the Redskin's quarterback.

It just gets better.

NY Daily News - Home Harken Energy Corp. set up an offshore subsidiary in the Cayman Islands tax haven while President Bush sat on Harken's board of directors in 1989, the Daily News has learned.

The revelation comes as Republican lawmakers are roundly criticizing the practice of U.S. companies setting up offshore subsidiaries, usually to skirt American disclosure laws or corporate income taxes on foreign income.

Even White House spokesman Ari Fleischer condemned the tactic yesterday, saying, "The President is concerned about corporations in America who take advantage, set up operations outside of America, in an effort to lower their taxes."