Would someone please just send a case of viagra and a truck full of hookers over to all of these guys' houses so they can work out whatever issues they have without killing millions of people.

The large and energetic crowds that followed Dr. Dean, and the meticulousness of his schedule and stage-managed events, prove he remains a phenomenon.

But the presidential-style trip could increase the risk of Dr. Dean peaking too early — and revealed other potential pitfalls. Holding oceans of blue Dean placards at every stop were nearly all white hands, a homogeneity the campaign tried to counter with a rainbow of supporters on stage, which only drew more attention to the lack of diversity in the audience. The feisty crowds were filled with Birkenstock liberals whose loudest ovations always followed Dr. Dean's antiwar riff — there were few union members, African-Americans, or immigrants.

It remains unclear how such untraditional rallies will translate into the nuts-and-bolts of nominations like endorsements, voter registration, fund-raising and debates. The campaign also may have trouble keeping people interested and preventing its events in coming weeks from seeming mundane.

"We have momentum," Dr. Dean said. "Keeping it is going to be a struggle."

As many as seven of the 11 Democrats who killed congressional redistricting by fleeing the state had planned on attending a hearing today on their lawsuit in federal court.

But Democratic consultant Harold Cook said the group cancelled the trip after the Democrats obtained "credible evidence" that Gov. Rick Perry intended on calling another special session and "deputized officials" would try to detain the senators.

Cook did not say what the evidence was, but said a Republican senator advised his Democratic colleague not to return to Texas today.

"They haven't come this far just to get caught," Cook said.

The senators were expected to board a private jet about 5:30 a.m. this morning, but they cancelled the flight after a late-night meeting that ended shortly before midnight.

"I know of nothing like that," Perry spokeswoman Kathy Walt said this morning of the scenario laid out by the Democrats.

"The Governor has made no secret of the fact that he will call a third special session at the appropriate time."

THAT'S $5 TRILLION, PEOPLE

MEDIA STRICKEN YET AGAIN WITH ACUTE AMNESIA

Nine Army linguists, including six trained to speak Arabic, have been dismissed from the military because they are gay.

The soldiers' dismissals come at a time when the military is facing a critical shortage of translators and interpreters for the war on terrorism.

Seven of the soldiers were discharged after telling superiors they are gay, and the two others got in trouble when they were caught together after curfew, said Steve Ralls, spokesman for the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, a group that defends homosexuals in the military.

Six were specializing in Arabic, two were studying Korean and one was studying Mandarin Chinese. All were at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, the military's primary language training center.

The government has aggressively recruited Arabic speakers since the Sept. 11 attacks.

``We face a drastic shortage of linguists, and the direct impact of Arabic speakers is a particular problem,'' said Donald R. Hamilton, who documented the need for more linguists in a report to Congress as part of the National Commission on Terrorism.

One of the discharged linguists said the military's policy on gays is hurting its cause.

``It's not a gay-rights issue. I'm arguing military proficiency issues - they're throwing out good, quality people,'' said Alastair Gamble, a former Army specialist.

Harvey Perritt, spokesman for the Army Training and Doctrine Command at Fort Monroe in Tidewater, Va., confirmed the dismissals occurred between October 2001 and September 2002, but declined to comment further on the cases.

He said 516 linguists enrolled in the Arabic course this year at the Monterey institute and 365 graduated.

TREASON IN THE WHITE HOUSE?

Wilson was asked whether he trusted the FBI to investigate the case. He started by saying that he had to speak hypothetically, since whether a crime was committed or not depended on his wife's status, about which he will not comment. He then explained the process, and expressed confidence that the career-service folks would play it straight, especially since a number of Members of Congerss, including not only Schumer and Durbin but also Henry Waxman and Hillary Clinton, were actively interested in the case and had promised him to keep the pressure on.

"I have confidence at the professional level that whatever they think is doable will be done." He acknowledged some uncertainty about whether public discussion might inhibit the investigation rather than forwarding it.

Then he opened up:

At the end of the day, it's of keen interest to me to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs. And trust me, when I use that name, I measure my words.

Josh Marshall had already noted his belief that Wilson had a suspect in mind. But having someone in mind is one thing, and making what is virtually a public accusation of a an aggravated felony is something else. If Wilson doesn't have the goods, he risks being personally discredited in a way that's very hard to recover from.

Now that Rove has been accused, it's for him to respond. It's a simple yes or no: Did he talk to Novak about Plame, or instruct anyone else to do so? I hope that some credentially journalists will be asking him that question.

THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT

Some people are listening: Goldberg has been flogging his book all summer, jousting with Bill O'Reilly and Tim Russert, doing panels and store appearances, and most recently condensing the book's thesis for the Nation. "Dispatches From the Culture Wars" is being read with interest by those in what turns out to be a vast academic and nonprofit community dedicated to researching young people's voting habits. Most of those experts disagree with Goldberg about the importance of Gore and Lieberman's stances on pop culture in the 2000 race -- few young people paid attention to that debate, they say.

But most of them do agree with Goldberg that the Democrats made a shameful showing, considering their platform is in line with most young people's beliefs about such issues as environmental protection, gay rights, affirmative action, gun control and the role of government. In 1992, Bill Clinton was credited with energizing young voters by appearing on the Arsenio Hall show and MTV (where he would return in 1996 to answer the infamous "boxers or briefs" question), and of the demographic groups that voted him into office, Clinton did best with voters under 30.

But by 2000 young people were off the Democrats' radar screen. Hans Riemer, Washington director of Rock the Vote, a group dedicated to registering young voters, recalls, "I was lobbying the Gore campaign to take young voters seriously, and the word I was getting was that their focus groups told them to give up on it. They felt it was an unreachable bloc and they weren't going to focus on it. And in the meantime, the Democrats' overall strategy for young people had changed. [Instead of] talking to them, they were talking to their parents. So when they talked about education, it wasn't about your debt or your opportunities but wanting to give tax breaks to your parents so they can afford your education."

If politics is a marketplace of ideas, Goldberg's observations are startlingly true: At a time when everyone else is spending billions on 18-to-24-year-olds to persuade them to buy their sneakers-soda-cigarettes-hair gel, the Democrats seem not to covet the young people's brand loyalty. And they may be ignoring the franchise at their own peril: Last spring, Harvard University's Institute of Politics released a survey suggesting that college students are a potential political powerhouse that could conceivably swing the next presidential election. Although the study noted that only 32 percent of 18 to 24-year-olds vote (young people have been voting less and less since they got the vote in 1972), 86 percent of their college-age respondents said they would definitely or probably vote in 2004.

It's not that young people don't want to vote, it's that they're not properly engaged by the candidates and parties, says Institute director Dan Glickman. "I recall that one of the students called the last election the 'Lipitor election,' because everything voters were hearing was about prescription drugs for older people," says Glickman. "Politicians tend to believe that whereas you can really hone in your message for older people, with young people you're dealing with an unpredictable group of people who can turn on you." The result, student leaders say, is a vicious demographic tautology in which politicians ignore young voters, who respond by not voting, thus justifying politicians' decision to ignore them.

What has become tragically clear is that the United States has no strong plan for turning Iraq over to the Iraqi people and is quickly losing even its ability to maintain order. The administration is stumbling through the dark, hoping by luck to find the lighted path to peace and stability.

Despite the best hopes for an Iraqi democracy, the Iraqi people and the world see only the worst fears of occupation. Instead of inspiring steps toward self-government, we witness hit-and-run murders of U.S. soldiers, terrorist attacks and sabotage. Our military action in Iraq has forged a caldron of contempt for America, a dangerous brew that may poison the efforts of peace throughout the Middle East and result in the rapid invigoration of worldwide terrorism.

The president's stubborn insistence that much of the world be shut out of real participation in the rebuilding effort in Iraq is obviously costing lives. In addition, it is costing the United States credibility in Iraq and around the globe. We promised to improve the quality of life, yet so far we have failed to deliver. As a result, increasing numbers of Iraqis see the United States only as occupier, not liberator.

Instead of giving the young people of Iraq a reason to turn away from the violence of terrorism, we have, through failures and unkept promises, fed the seeds of discontent. The inability of the United States to secure the peace in Iraq virtually guarantees al Qaeda a fertile field of new recruits.

While U.S. forces hunted for weapons of mass destruction, Iraqis say, criminals made off with bombs, explosives and sophisticated weapons like rocket-propelled grenade launchers.

"Anyone with any military experience could have taken these munitions and made them into bombs," Nour said. "Leaving them there was a major mistake by the American Army."

U.S. Army Col. Guy Shields said that American soldiers had been continually disposing of old Iraqi munitions but that the task sometimes seemed never- ending.

Immediately after 9/11 there was a great national outpouring of sympathy for New York, and a natural inclination to provide generous help. President Bush quickly promised $20 billion, and everyone expected the federal government to assume the burden of additional security. Yet hard-line Republicans never wanted to help the stricken city. Indeed, according to an article by Michael Tomasky in New York magazine, Senators Phil Gramm and Don Nickles attempted to slash aid to New York within hours of Mr. Bush's promise.

Matters were patched up sufficiently so Mr. Bush could make his triumphant appearance at ground zero the next day. But then the backtracking began. By February 2002, only a fraction of the promised funds had been allocated — and Mitch Daniels, the White House budget director, accused New York's lawmakers of playing "money-grubbing games."

Why this stinginess? A source told Mr. Tomasky that "Gramm just doesn't like spending money. And Nickles . . . he's just anti-New York." That sums it up: even after 9/11, hard-line conservatives opposed any spending, no matter how justified, that wasn't on weapons or farm subsidies, while some people from America's "red states" just hate big-city folk.

What does all this have to do with toxic dust? Think how much harder it would have been to stiff New York if the public had understood the extent to which Lower Manhattan had become a hazardous waste site. I can't prove that was what administration officials were thinking, but otherwise their efforts to play down the risks seem incomprehensible.

HERE IS a prediction: Soon, maybe by the time you read this, the Bush administration will argue that the Great Blackout of '03 demonstrates the need for more energy deregulation and privatization, a beloved administration theme.
We can already hear the first bleats of this contention from certain sectors.

Why is this foreseeable? Because it follows a pattern of behavior by the Bush White House to use crisis and panic to promote predetermined actions no matter the threat, situation or need.

A familiar example: During the 2000 campaign, the economy seemed to be humming and everyone forecast years of budget surpluses. George W. Bush touted his massive tax cut as a return of that surplus to its rightful owner, the American taxpayer. Never mind that his cuts went mostly to the rich and that government programs generally help the average Joe.

After the inauguration, the economy sank fast and the surplus disappeared. Sept. 11 hurt the economy more, and soon we were back to deficits. But then, in the midst of economic anxiety, the tax cut and all future tax cuts were recast as the best and only solution to our financial woes - just you wait! And now, despite obvious failure, the White House continues to push tax cuts.

Example two: The invasion of Iraq was also predictable the moment Mr. Bush took office. Many commentators have noted, though neither frequently nor stridently enough, the influence of a group of neoconservatives under the rubric the Project for the New American Century. In 1998, they called on President Bill Clinton to invade Iraq in order to frighten the Middle East and the world into a new era of peace and democracy.

The group is no conspiracy hatched in obscurity, but a collection of prominent ideologues with a Web site. Among them: Vice President Dick Cheney and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. Well, so what?

Sept. 11 provided a unique opportunity for this group to accomplish its goal. We knew then as we know now that Iraq had no connection to the 9/11 terrorists, but the strike on American soil and subsequent alarm offered a convenient opening for the Project for the New American Century's invasion scenario.

As backup, we heard that Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction threatened us imminently.

The fact is that Mr. Hussein's overthrow has indeed frightened our enemies, but Iran and North Korea have consequently accelerated their nuclear weapons programs - the precise opposite of the theoretical outcome.

Need some more examples?

THE CRAZIES TAKE OVER ANOTHER WING OF THE ASYLUM

A top State Department expert on North Korea has resigned under pressure, just days before the start of six-nation talks in China aimed at compelling the North to abandon its nuclear weapons program.

The State Department confirmed the departure of Jack Pritchard, the special envoy for negotiations with North Korea, but denied that he had been forced out. Mr. Pritchard's departure signals disarray in the administration's posture toward that country, experts outside the State Department said. It comes at a critical moment as the United States attempts to rally North Korea's neighbors to persuade the country to drop its efforts to reprocess spent fuel rods for weapons.

Mr. Pritchard's resignation on Friday points to a division in the administration over how best to handle the isolated, unpredictable and highly militarized government of Kim Jong Il nearly eight months after the North expelled foreign inspectors, the experts said.

Mr. Pritchard, who has had long experience in talks with the North, including a stint on President Clinton's National Security Council, is identified with a more conciliatory stance toward Pyongyang. He long advocated a carrot-and-stick approach, with incentives to North Korea for good behavior.

But a more confrontational position, favored at the White House and expressed by John R. Bolton, the under secretary for arms control at the State Department, gained ground in recent weeks, and at least one Republican senator complained to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell about Mr. Pritchard's approach.

Senator Jon Kyl, an Arizona Republican who is chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, sent a letter to Mr. Powell last week complaining about "mixed messages" coming out of the administration regarding a fierce July 31 speech by Mr. Bolton.

In a speech entitled "A Dictatorship at the Crossroads," Mr. Bolton denounced the North Korean leader, saying, "To give in to his extortionist demands would only encourage him and, perhaps more ominously, other would-be tyrants around the world."

North Korea denounced the speech, called Mr. Bolton "scum" and said he would be barred from taking part in the talks. Meanwhile, some State Department officials complained that the speech had complicated their efforts to revive negotiations.

According to Senator Kyl's letter, Mr. Pritchard recently told a top North Korean envoy at the United Nations that Mr. Bolton's remarks were only "personal" views.

Mr. Pritchard did not respond to an interview request at his office today. But spokesmen for the White House and the State Department backed up Mr. Bolton, saying he spoke for the administration.

IRONY IS ALIVE AND WELL

The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said it was impossible to tell how much energy companies or industry groups may have influenced the task force’s 2001 report because the administration withheld important records.

“The extent to which submissions from any of these stakeholders were solicited, influenced policy deliberations or were incorporated into the final report is not something that we can determine based on the limited information at our disposal,” the GAO said.

Administration officials did not account for much of the money spent on the task force and could not remember whether anyone took official notes during the 10 Cabinet-level meetings the group held in 2001, the investigators said.

The report came more than eight months after a federal judge rejected the GAO’s demand that the administration turn over task force records.

Cheney spokeswoman Jennifer Millerwise advised critics to put the dispute behind them. “Now that the courts have dismissed the GAO lawsuit and GAO has issued its final report, we hope that everyone will focus as strongly as the administration has on meeting America’s energy needs,” she said.

Instead, the GAO report provoked a new round of complaints from Democrats in Congress.

“This report is a sad chronicle of the efforts of the office of the vice president to hide its activities from the American people,” said Michigan Rep. John Dingell, the senior Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

I guess the lights never went back on at the Times. That's the only acceptable explanation for the loving Lewinsky The Paper of Record gave to the power industry on the front page of its Sunday edition.

Over 20-some column inches, we are told that "experts say" that the reason the lights went out over one fourth our continent ten days ago was that the electric industry, most particularly, transmission lines, "remained regulated." The answer to our woes, the Times informs us, is more deregulation -- except for the visionary rules contained in the President's energy bill. In the editorial posing as a news story, the Times lectures us that the president's proposals would have been law, and saved us from the power outage, "but politics have stymied their progress."

Later in the article, the stymiers of progress are named: those evil small-minded "consumer groups."

So who are these "experts" who revealed The Truth to the The Times? The authors quote seven in the article, beginning with David Owen, the industry's chief lobbyist. That paid shill is followed by James Hoecker, identified by his former title only, as a "independent" regulator. Just from the article, you'd think the poor guy is unemployed these days. In fact, he's walked comfortably through the revolving door and onto the industry payroll. His law firm represents, among others, First Energy, the characters who started the black-out rolling. I guess that fact was not "fit to print" in The Times.

My favorite is the Times giving us the expert advice of the "director of Transmission for the National Grid Transco which owns and runs the grid in England and Wales." This Brit says Americans should pay more money to grid operators. What he doesn't say -- and the Times is happy to keep his secret -- is that his corporation owns Niagara-Mohawk Power Corporation, the company that spread the power outage into New York. Undoubtedly, NiMo's failure to react to the emergency resulted from the corporation's eliminating 800 workers in New York over the past two years and radically cutting investment in the grid system it operates in the USA.

The parade of industry retainers, payrollers and lobbyists lecturing us stumbles on through the Times' inside pages. Unnamed "industry analysts" telling us "consumers will have to foot the bill" to fix the system. As an analyst of the industry for decades -- and on no one's payroll except the United Nations -- I can tell you that you HAVE paid the bill already for a good system. But power pirates such as the National Grid of England have run off with the booty.

I admit, there's one "expert" cited who is not receiving an industry paycheck. The article is capped by the finger-wagging counsel of the Chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Chairman Pat Wood III concludes the article with his admonition that deregulation must be accelerated. Wood is, after all, the man in charge of our nation's power system. His qualifications for the job? His appointment was secretly proposed by Ken Lay.

If the Times wants to publish corpornography on its front page, hey, it's a free country. At least they did it with the lights off.

Bush's energy deregulation makes America vulnerable for two reasons. First, the United States' transmission system was designed to accommodate local electricity markets. Under deregulation, however, companies trade electricity and move power over much longer distances and wider areas. This freewheeling approach to sending power strains a transmission system designed to serve local utilities.

Second, deregulation leads to inadequate investment in infrastructure. Deregulation at the state level means that utilities are no longer required to reinvest ratepayer money back into the transmission system, as this orderly planning has been replaced with reliance on "the market." But the market has been unwilling to make the necessary investments in transmission.

In particular, the market has not functioned properly since lawmakers punched loopholes in the federal law intended to protect electricity consumers. Now, the Public Utility Holding Company Act(PUHCA) faces the likelihood of full repeal by Republicans in Congress. PUHCA regulates giant energy companies by requiring them to disclose crucial financial details and limiting the types of non-electricity investments they may make. If PUHCA is repealed, a wave of mergers will likely result, leaving a handful of companies (like Southern Co., ExxonMobil and FirstEnergy) in control of our electricity -- with no effective regulators looking over their shoulders.

All this talk about civilization, totalitarianism, fascism and terror is just preventing us from looking at what's happening and recognizing what our own interests are. They also make it possible for some people to convince themselves that it's not a screw-up that we've turned Iraq into a terrorist magnet. After all we're at war with 'the terrorists' and it makes sense that 'the terrorists' would attack us anyway, if only in a new venue. And we always knew it would be a long fight, a long twilight struggle, and yada, yada, yada and the rest of it. Same with the mumbo-jumbo about totalitarianism.

Look at the difference thus far between Afghanistan and Iraq. In the first place, we drained the swamp. In the second, we've made the swamp.

It's really that simple.

Admittedly, that's an odd development from an administration so generally inimical to wetlands. But, you know, ironies abound.

Bear in mind that the author of these words is a fairly convinced Wilsonian, a strong supporter of our interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, someone who's convinced that our values cannot be divorced from our national security interests, a believer in the power for good of American military might, and someone who thinks progressives who recoil at this administration's excesses should avoid the safe-harbor of foreign policy Realism (creeping Scowcroftism).

But the White House is being run by men and women who've already made a lot of really stupid mistakes that are going to cost a lot of American lives, money and credibility. And now they're trying to hide from accountability in their own idiot abstractions.

Crystle said the reason he's running for office is simple: He can't sleep watching people around him lose their jobs, their health care and then their homes.

America's trade and economic policies are "killing the middle class, and I won't sit for it," said Crystle, who wants to put the 73-year-old Specter out to pasture.

"Arlen and this administration gave tax cuts to the wealthy," he said, "when they should have been investing in education and training grants for laid-off workers."

While Specter's political career was launched by his claim (while working for the Warren Commission as a prosecutor) that a single bullet killed President Kennedy and wounded Texas Gov. John Connally in four places, Crystle's career has taken even more turns than Specter's magic bullet.

During his meandering career, Crystle has held a variety of jobs in food service, publishing and entertainment, including working as a cook, janitor, proofreader and sound engineer. His work as a songwriter and musician resulted in a record deal with a small label, but he didn't last long in the music industry because, according to Crystle, it creates negative ambition and "can turn you into a mean person."

In 1994, he began teaching himself computer programming and launched a computer company that would evolve into business software company ChiliSoft.

If President Bush suffers because it turns out he took the country to war on false pretenses, he might look back on stories by Walter Pincus for drawing first blood.

On March 16, the eve of war, Pincus wrote in the Post that “U.S. intelligence agencies have been unable to give Congress or the Pentagon specific information” about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

At the time, the Bush White House was telling the world that America had to invade Iraq to root out weapons of mass destruction. Pincus quoted sources saying that there was “a lack of hard evidence.” And they also said the White House had “exaggerated intelligence” to back up its drive toward war.

Pincus was uniquely positioned to delve into the intricacies of the weapons question. At 70, he had been reporting on national security for 25 years at the Post. Along the way he had cultivated sources in Congress, the CIA, the Pentagon, and the scientific community. For decades, he has been close to chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix.

Yet the Post buried Pincus’s March 16 story on page A17. It took help from Bob Woodward to get the story published at all.

“His support gave the editors the guts to run it,” says Pincus. “They think I am a crusader and get on kicks.”

Woodward, working the same sources for his forthcoming book on the war, put his name at the bottom of the March 16 story.

Pincus had been writing about the buildup to theinvasion for months, along with Post writers Dana Priest, Karen DeYoung, Barton Gellman, and others who gathered at “war meetings” every day. But according to reporters, editors continually underplayed Pincus’s scoops and discounted their stories that ran counter to Bush’s call to arms. None of which deterred him, especially after he dissected Secretary of State Colin Powell’s February 5 speech to the United Nations.

“I suddenly realized everything he said was inferential,” says Pincus. As he did with stories about the neutron bomb in the 1970s and the Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s, Pincus burrowed deep and wrote often.

“When I get hold of one of these things, I stay on it,” he says. “The American public doesn’t pay attention to one or two stories.”

Pincus’s byline has appeared on nearly 100 stories since the invasion on March 19. He never stopped writing about the missing weapons of mass destruction.

“He’s like a 28-year-old dogging the story,” says Woodward. “At the same time, he’s not overreaching.”

In June Pincus sunk his teeth deeper into the emerging story of the nuclear material that Iraq was supposed to have sought from Niger to make nuclear bombs. US officials repeated the claim as fact and talked ominously of mushroom clouds. President Bush mentioned “significant quantities of uranium“ in his State of the Union speech.

Other reporters questioned the nuclear transfer, including Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker, David Sanger in the New York Times, and Joby Warrick, Priest, and DeYoung with Pincus at the Post. Pincus pursued it day after day. He says he had to fight to get it on the front page.

“The best way to get a memo to the President is the front page of the Post,” he says.

Finally, at the end of May, Pincus broke onto the front page with a story about the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. He stayed there as his stories—some with other reporters—put pressure on the White House to admit that the President’s 16-word sentence about uranium going to Iraq was not credible.

Pincus eventually prevailed within his own newspaper, but why did a veteran reporter have to bow and scrape to get his stories noticed and then printed?

“It was ridiculous. Many of the stories were buried,” says Priest, also a star on the national-security beat. “Editors continually undervalued what he does.”

What Pincus did was help put the Post in front of the biggest story of the day. Managing editor Steve Coll says of Pincus: “We were proud of his coverage before the war, and we’re proud of it now, and we’ve tried to give it prominent display throughout.”

Says Woodward: “Editors would be kidding themselves if they discounted him.”

Coronary heart disease is the biggest killer in the US, but not in France. Yet the French smoke Gitanes, breakfast on buttery brioche, lunch and dine off confit of duck, sausage, fat goose livers and camembert. They drink wine, round off their meals with cognac, and while away the afternoon with strong coffee and mouthwatering pastries.

Researchers have offered a confusing range of speculation over the years. There might be something specially healthy about goose fat, one group argued. Alcohol, olive oil and salad were all important in a heart-smart diet, said another. Red wine itself might explain the difference, said a third.

So scientists from Philadelphia and the French research agency CRNS in Paris teamed up to compare servings in comparable dining places in the two cities.

They report in the September issue of Psychological Science that they combed restaurant guides, sampled soft drinks and other purchases in supermarkets, and sat down at 11 pairs of eateries to weigh the portions dished up.

Mean portion size across all Paris establishments was 277g (9.8oz), compared with an average in Philadelphia of 346g (12.2oz) - about 25% more. Only in the Hard Rock Cafe chain did the Parisian portions match the US ones.

Philadelphia's Chinese restaurants served 72% more than the Parisian ones. A supermarket soft drink in the US was 52% larger, a hotdog 63% larger, a carton of yoghurt 82% larger.

The lesson is that though the French diet was rich in fat, overall, the Americans consumed more calories. Over the years, this would lead to substantial differences in weight.

TOP 10 LINES FROM ANIMAL HOUSE

1) "You fucked up. You trusted me."
2) "Eric Stratton, rush chairman. Damned glad to meet you."
3) "Mine's bigger. My cucumber, I mean."
4) "That's funny. I have a husband named Dean Wormer."
5) "See if you can guess what I am now. [pause] A zit! Get it?"
6) "Greg, honey, does it always take this long?"
7) "Get Neidermeyer to do it. He's a nasty little shit."
8) "She was going to make me a pot."
9) "Mind if we dance with your dates?"
10) "To-GAH! To-GAH!"

Yet these eyewitnesses have provided me with a troubling tale. On April 8, they say, the buildings were occupied by soldiers from the Army's Third Infantry Division. For two weeks, the Iraqi scientists and administrators showed up for work but, according to several I have spoken to, no one from the coalition interviewed them or tried to take control of the archive.

Rather, these staff members have told me, after occupying the facility for two weeks, the American soldiers simply withdrew. Soon after, looters entered the facility and ransacked it. Overnight, every computer was stolen, disks and video records were destroyed, and the carefully organized documents were ripped from their binders and either burned or scattered about. According to the former brigadier general, who went back to the building after the mob had gone, some Iraqi scientists did their best to recover and reconstitute what they could, but for the vast majority of the archive the damage was irreversible.

MY MOM HATES BUSH MORE THAN YOUR MOM

BLOGGERS, START YOUR ENGINES

Bill Simon Jr., one of the best-known Republicans in the recall election for California governor, dropped out of the race today, saying that the defeat of Gov. Gray Davis was more important than his personal ambitions.

Mr. Simon had come under intense pressure from fellow Republicans in recent days to withdraw from the contest to avoid splintering the Republican vote.

[…]

… on Friday, the Lincoln Club of Orange County, a group of wealthy conservative Republicans, unanimously endorsed Mr. Schwarzenegger and urged Mr. Simon, Senator McClintock and Mr. Ueberroth to step aside. Also on Friday, the Republican leader of the State Senate, Jim Brulte, warned that there were too many Republicans in the race and that some would have to drop out to avoid handing victory to Mr. Davis or Mr. Bustamante.

We had a little dust up, if you recall, during the last election when the Democrats put the heat on Bob Torricelli to resign 36 days before the election so that they could replace him on the ballot with someone who could win. The Republicans went into their patented phony ape-shit mode, screaming about the rule-‘o-law-blah-blah-blah, sore-loserman, blah, blah blah.

The reasons as to why this action was so outrageous numbered in the hundreds.

Sullivan said that the health of the body politic required that Torricelli should have been forced to stay on the ballot so he could be ritually humiliated.

George Will fulminated that “election laws are supposed to be exacting so they can prevent just such last-minute frenzies by people frightened of losing. Yet today Democrats are asserting this principle: Anytime--even just 36 days before an election--a party has discouraging polls about a candidate, that party can replace him.”

Jonathan Last boldly asserted that “the Democrats haven't just become Nixon, they've become the exaggerated liberal nightmare version of Nixon: Today Democrats are what they believe Nixon was.”

But, despite their varying objections, there was one overriding matter of principle that every last Republican agreed upon, --- a matter so serious and of such fundamental importance to our system that any legalistic hairsplitting or judicial interpretations of it are, by their very nature, antithetical to the practice of democracy.

This principle is not, you understand, that old liberal claptrap about “counting all the votes” or “whoever wins the most votes wins” or even something silly like “short of incapacity or corruption, office holders who have been certified in a legal election should be allowed to serve their entire term.” These are nice concepts but they don’t carry any serious philosophical weight.

No, Republicans hold that the single most important principle upon which our electoral system rests is the sanctity of the arbitrary deadline which under no circumstances shall ever be overruled, even if it conflicts with another arbitrary deadline, is incomprehensibly vague or was instituted by the legislature for purely administrative purposes that had no bearing on anyone but a couple of election workers in outlying suburbs (if anyone can even remember why it was instituted in the first place.)

I was a few hundred yards up on Liberty Street when the Two Tower of the World Trade Center blew. I put my nose inside my shirt and ran through smoke that turned day into night. In the smoke were computers, asbestos, pulverized glass, human bodies, lead. I got on another street and one tower blew up. Again, the air was black with a pulverized 110-story building.

I did not feel well for two months. I never said anything because I was too embarrassed. A couple of thousand had died. So many others were scorched and broken and maimed. I had no right to open my mouth, I thought. Besides, from the first day, the government's Environmental Protection Agency had announced that air was remarkably clean. Work on. Breathe on. You're fine.

They lied. They lied because the administration did not want people not going to work. They lied the first week and they lied the week after that and they have lied every day of the past two years to the people of this city.

Christine Whitman was the EPA head until recently. I wasn't disturbed that her education was a jump horse school, but I thought she was better than standing up and doing what she was told by George W. Bush's White House, telling lies to a public who had to breathe this air. Turns out she isn't much of a human being.

The EPA has just admitted that they lied for all this time.

Now what are we supposed to do? By now I feel better physically because I have adjusted to feeling lousy. I'm not going near a doctor. Once I read what was in that air, and in it for all those days I spent around there, I didn't want to know anything more. Don't scare me. My friend Dan Collins, whose office is on Broadway, only yards up from the site, said he has not taken a good breath for two years. "They tell me it's good and I know it's bad," he said.

Well, welcome to the cuckoo's nest, mate, otherwise known as the United States. In this country, vacations are not only microscopic; they're also shrinking faster than revenues on a corporate restatement. A survey by Internet travel company Expedia.com has found that Americans will be taking 10 percent less vacation time this year – too much work to get away, said respondents. This continues a trend that has seen the standard U.S. vacation, as measured by the travel industry, buzzsawed down to a long weekend.

Some 13 percent of companies now provide no paid leave, up from 5 percent five years ago, according to the Alexandria-based Society for Human Resource Management. In Washington state, a whopping 17 percent of workers get no paid leave. Vacations are going the way of real bakeries and drive-in theaters, fast becoming a quaint remnant of those pre-downsized days when we didn't have to keep the CEO in art collections and mansions. The result is unrelieved stress, burnout, absenteeism, rising medical costs, diminished productivity, and the extinguishing of time for life and family.

Caught in a vise-grip of spiraling work hours and shrinking vacations, employees across the country hardly have a chance to catch their breath or enjoy the fruits of their labor. These are people like Nancy Jones, a nurse in Southern California, who last year put in a vacation request in January to attend her son's wedding in July. "They kept giving me the runaround," she recalled. "They tell you they don't know if you can have the time, because they expect to be busy. It happens all the time." After her manager ignored numerous requests, she wound up having to corner the director of the company, just days before the wedding, to get the time off.

"It's already time to think beyond this year and next about how to take down long-term deficits that could become disastrous," said Allen Sinai, president of Decision Economics Inc., who has strongly supported the president's tax cuts. "It would be good for the economy for the administration to at least signal they will do something."

The Congressional Budget Office will release new budget forecasts Tuesday that will put next year's red ink near $500 billion. Sinai's own forecast put the figure even higher, as high as $535 billion. Absent any serious change in policy, private sector economists say deficits will remain in that range through the decade, then escalate sharply with the retirement of the baby-boom generation.

"I see absolutely nothing that's going to bring the deficit back to balance in the foreseeable future," said David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor's.

Bush's response Friday was that Wall Street and others should put such concerns on hold until after the economic recovery begins to produce jobs.

"Those who are worried about the deficit must first worry, I hope would worry first, about people being able to find work, like in Washington state," Bush said to reporters near Seattle. "I am more concerned about somebody finding a job than I am about numbers on paper."

Soon enough, a senior Pentagon official joins the round. I cherish the opportunity to ask him a couple of — admittedly critical and inquisitive — questions.

Puzzled, he replies: “Why are you asking all these questions? Aren’t journalists just supposed to report the facts?”

Welcome to the modern world of Washington media. And if you believe that the attitude of this Bush official is not characteristic of his administration’s handling of the media, then you are in for a real surprise.

For what is truly shocking about the state of the U.S. media today is that, to an amazing extent, the belief to restrict themselves to the facts — as they are provided by the government — is willingly accepted by the mainstream U.S. media.

So far, so good — or bad. But your faith in the independence of the U.S. media really takes a hard hit when, on another occasion, you sit next to a prominent White House correspondent who is answering a call on his cell phone. A senior White House official is on the line, as he is happy to indicate.

Predictably enough, the policymaker was keen on re-spinning the next day's front-page story — but was doing so in all too transparent a manner.

The shock came upon getting the paper in question the next morning — and seeing how this well-respected reporter had fallen for the spin. Lock, stock and barrel.

That’s when you begin to wonder whether the political reporters of major U.S. papers really see it as their job to provide truly independent news and analysis — or are all eager to act as undercover government spokesmen.

Increasingly, it looks as though they are all too pliable in order to preserve top-level access.

Too harsh a judgment? Hardly. After all, one needs to factor in that many U.S. journalists’ self-perception of their professional courage is sky-high.

But instead of printing all the news that's fit to print, they waffle on printing news that would give those in power the fits.

What gives me further reason to pause is to hear our real White House correspondent — the one who let himself be spun like wool — intone in a panel discussion the next day about the importance of the independent media as the "fourth estate."

Roxanne Jekot, a 51-year-old computer program developer from Cumming, said she and a few expert friends could crack Georgia's $54 million touch-screen voting system in a matter of minutes.

Bring it on, said state election officials.

"If something can beat the machine, we need to know that," said Brit Williams, a retired Kennesaw State University professor who helped design the state's touch-screen security system. He put the odds of corrupting the software undetected at 1 billion to one.

The dare was made and accepted at the first of a series of seminars at Kennesaw State sponsored by Secretary of State Cathy Cox to defuse questions about the vulnerability of the statewide system she installed last year.

Jekot said she could be ready as soon as next week. She said all she wants to do is point out weaknesses so that they can be fixed -- and declares she can put an unauthorized vote anywhere she wants.

Election officials promised to provide a voting machine, and a computer server into which votes from the machine are fed.

The November 2002 vote in Georgia went smoothly. But with a federally imposed deadline to revamp the voting systems in all other states now approaching, concern over the corruptibility of computer-based voting has spread across the nation.

Last month, an associate professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University released a study billed as the first independent review of electronic voting. It found the Diebold Election Systems used by Georgia to be vulnerable to tampering by unscrupulous voters, poll workers and software developers.