drat fink

the day after

tom tomorrow blogs

killing me softly

killing the buddha

noho star

"Now, Cafeteria, which has a restaurant on Seventh Avenue, plans to open an 11,000- square-foot, 24-hour restaurant that will stretch along Lafayette from Great Jones to Bond Street, engulfing the Jones Diner site.

Community Board 2 on Thursday denied Cafeteria's request for the variance it needs to build its three-story, $4 million restaurant, unless the Jones Diner can be incorporated into the design. The Board of Standards and Appeals will consider the request."

gaza stripped

"scenes from the palestinian uprising"

puddup

pud

somatime

"huxleyville station"

rainbow connection

"Marijuana Advocates Tom Crosslin and Rollie Rohm Sensed the Government Was Out To Get Them. And Then They Were Dead. Was Rainbow Farm Another Waco?"

pro tournament

"Blogger has revolutionised personal websites. Now, its only member of staff tells Neil McIntosh it's time to take blogging to the next stage"

shredding units

"Wait a minute. Shredco? What is this, the Jetsons? Anyway, it's true: Upon further investigation, there really is a Shredco. Its motto, as currently rendered on the firm's site, is: "You threw it away ... or so you thought. Now you're being sued. Don't just throw it away ... Destroy it!"

harken, i hear footsteps

"German financial giant Deutschebank and the terrorist attacks of September 11 - including previously documented links to insider trading based upon events of 9/11 - no press agency or government entity is questioning why certain banking institutions in Kuwait and Bahrain with deep financial ties to the Bush family have been overlooked in the President's supervision of a so-called "worldwide crackdown on terrorist financing." Reuters reported on 11-7-2001 that the Treasury Department added 61 additional people and organizations to the President's original Executive Order of September 23 -- including banks in Somalia and Nassau, The Bahamas. But mysteriously, no banks in Bahrain, Kuwait, or Saudi Arabia were named in either the original order or its expansion."

tete a tete

"I'm disappointed that, after all that build-up, you don't have a detailed long-run plan for fighting terrorism, but I'm happy to see you embracing my hobbyhorse, "world governance." The first time I heard you do this was while you and I were debating in early 2001 in New York. At the time I wasn't sure whether you meant it or were just staging a pre-emptive strike, trying to keep me from lecturing you about the need for an enforceable biological weapons convention. (Only a year earlier, I had used you as a classic example of a world-governance skeptic.) But I'm starting to think you may be serious. Your sentence about patriotism becoming "obsolete" was dreamier than even I normally get!"

drive thru arrest

another bush family drug related arrest. its a shame. her insurance must not have covered mental illness. why else would she be buying zanax with a fake scripts. just another cause (and an apt one) for the bushies to rally behind.

orange man group

"Then I saw The Picture. You know, the one that appears to have been taken on the set of a gay male heavy S&M training film or a Robert Mapplethorpe photograph. About eight or nine submissives are shown kneeling, their knees grounded into the gravel, their legs crossed and shackled under them, their arms manacled in front, their hands bizarrely mittened. They are blindfolded with black, high-tech-looking goggles, earplugged (or are those earphones?) and practically gagged with surgical masks and electrical tape, their day-glo orange outfits blowing in the Cuba Libré breeze, revealing sections of their naked flesh. One of the Orange Men appears to be losing his pants. Obviously, he can't pull them up."

hide and go seek

"WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush personally asked Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle Tuesday to limit the congressional investigation into the events of September 11, congressional and White House sources told CNN."

range life

"It was as if he had turned his back on his Texas fetish and made room in his heart for us. George W. Bush had a last laugh of sorts vis-à-vis the snarky Manhattan types, were anyone inclined to laugh: Not only did this city—perhaps even its liberals—join the rest of the nation in branding this man a hero; now even his staged histrionics have been adjudged the mark of a wise and brave statesman. Since Sept. 11, New York has been loving George W. Bush. But that brings me, in a roundabout way, to my question: Can this marriage be saved?"

al for one

"By my count, the 36 days following the Nov. 7, 2000, presidential election generated not less than 36 books and one Ph.D. dissertation, plus countless articles and essays. To examine and understand the historic Florida vote count, however, no reasonable person is going to read all this material, excepting perhaps another Ph.D. dissertator. Nonetheless, being an election junkie, I was sufficiently interested to read almost half of them."

khan newman

hamid and his capes are the talk of the town. talking points considers poll tested presidentially proffered nicknames for the raffish one. dratfink has adopted 'Karsai' as an eponymous teeth-gritting epithet.

all the way to the bank

"The President of the U.S. is a very popular guy and he simply slayed the VIPs at the Alfalfa Dinner the other night, hosted by the famous Washington, D.C., club. These worthies included the cream of U.S. commerce, industry, politics and anyone else you can think of who counts.

The prez said he had good news and bad news from Saddam Hussein. "The good news is he is willing to let us inspect his biological and chemical warfare installations. The bad news is that he insists Arthur Andersen do the inspection!" . . . Speaking of Congressman John Dingell of Michigan, who was stopped by security at Reagan Airport and made to remove most of his clothes, the prez noted Dingell hadn't taken everything off. "Thank God," said George W. "that it wasn't Bob Dole!"

At one point someone said during the program: "Ladies and Gentlemen, I'd like to introduce President Bush, former President Bush and former President Dick Cheney." This got a big laugh."

business as usual

talking points wonders why the florida pension fund invested heavily in enron once it was already tanking.

toy guitar gods

pretty amazing White Stripes legomation video

a conservative viewpoint

"The Enron executives, who professed a love of free market capitalism, kept their love pure by never applying it. They are the enemies of the free market. If, as you say, the Republicans decide that their real allies in this are the plutocrats, then they are going to destroy themselves. But if they decide their real duty is to protect free competition, then they have a big progressive-conservative agenda ahead of them, which will be widely popular and could recast domestic politics."

of fiction

"Deceit as a way of life is ubiquitous. Animals hide, mimic, change color, play dead to avoid predators; people disguise themselves, hallucinate, dream, forget and lie to avoid reality, but unlike animals they also lie to themselves. That writers are liars is a commonplace, but the truly achieved writers (or artists) are the ones one who deceive themselves so well that they can pursue a lie that becomes true in spite of its implacable falsity: Picasso's revisionist version of the human face; Joyce's belief in the incomprehensible dream language in "Finnegans Wake" and so on."

face dances

"Daniel was having so much fun," partygoer John Gillman said.

"We all thought he loved being in that gal's chest.

"Who could have known that when he was waving his hands around, he was signaling for help?"

casting call

"Our special issue is dedicated to trying to make sense of modern celebrity, of its oddities and pleasures. Whether we like it or not (and we often do), nothing much now happens without celebrity's imprint."

end run

"Enron is not a political scandal in the sense of gotcha-gotcha-now-resign. But it has exposed the administration's sleazy corporatism and underlined its relative indifference to the market principles that form the Republican Party's more attractive side. The folks at the White House tolerate the free-trade efforts of the trade czar, Bob Zoellick, but they don't really like him. They hired a free marketeer to run the office overseeing regulation, but they won't necessarily back him up. Their agriculture secretary says the right things on market-distorting farm subsidies, but they don't have the stomach to fight Congress on this issue. They won't even stand up for school vouchers, despite Bush's emphasis on education. What the White House team really cares about is cutting taxes, which has less to do with market principle than with rewarding backers."

captain cursory

i guess this is whitman as zeldman

inaccurate claims syndicate

"The current debate over economic policy has provided rich opportunities for one of the most disingenuous and confusing aspects of spin: abusing statistics. From misstating facts to spinning half-truths into an allegedly complete story, politicians and pundits of all ideological stripes are making deceptive and inaccurate claims based on numerical data."

nevermind the bollards

"Architects in Washington, D.C., are trying to find ways to make the buildings and monuments safer for visitors while also protecting their aesthetic beauty. Alex Van Oss reports on Weekend All Things Considered. Jan. 27, 2002."

woodward's history

"10 DAYS IN SEPTEMBER: Inside the War Cabinet" (part 2 in a series)

justice blind, not naked

"W A S H I N G T O N, Jan. 25 — About three weeks ago, I received a tip. The attorney general was fed up with having his picture taken during events in the Great Hall in front of semi-nude statues."

station breaks

"Using a process called "microediting," the length of movies, programs, or anything on television can be cut down without chopping entire scenes. It works by eliminating duplicate frames of video, actually creating time where it did not exist before. The process lets TV stations use the time saved to run more ads."

box din

"It was a mistake--and a beaut--in Matt Bivens's piece "The Enron Box" where he confused the Houston Astros and the Texas Rangers. It is hereby duly acknowledged and regretted. But what really astonished us..." (sidebar to rewritten article)

hammett time

"Samuel Dashiell Hammett was born in rural Maryland in 1894. As a boy he wanted to read all the books in the Baltimore public library, but he had to quit high school at the age of fourteen to help out with the shaky family finances. (His father, whom he didn't like, was a spendthrift, drinker, sharp dresser, and womanizer; but unlike Hammett, who resembled him in all these respects, he was mean and stingy.) At twenty-one, Hammett got a job as a Pinkerton's detective agency operative, which he left in 1918 to join the army. He suffered the first of many severe respiratory illnesses then. During one recuperation he married a nurse he met at the infirmary; then he signed on at Pinkerton's once more, but his health broke down. It was then that he began writing crime stories for the pulps."

city zen

npr report on anime Metropolis.

read my book

the funniest presidential photo-op prop since buddy the dog. heres the wire story.

moldy oldies

df is behind the indie curve these days. he might have had to buy the moldy peaches by now and the new cornelius.

pick me

ye olde bloggies

gravastarved

"New Theories Dispute the Existence of Black Holes"

need we say more?

"Enron for Dummies"

plastic surgery

"Part One: The rise and fall of Plastic.com "

bertram rustles

bert has had a busy year. now hes at sundance.

stroke me, stroke me

hillary clinton gets one/two stroke pieces in the major dailies this week. coincidence?

white out

"What's it like to change your race? Here, Daniel de Gannes, a black hairdresser, reflects on swapping his skin colour - and marching with the National Front as a white man - for a BBC documentary on how race affects our feelings and attitudes."

krug errant

"You might think that the shock of the Enron scandal — and it is shocking, even to us hardened cynics — would make some conservatives reconsider their beliefs. But the die- hards prefer to sling muck at liberals, hoping it will stick.
Sorry, guys; I'm clean. The muck stops here."

also known as

"Following in 71 Clinton’s Footsteps, Aka is A-O.K."

a taxing situation

"If the politics of the issue no longer crudely favors Republicans, it may be for a straightforward reason: Democrats have changed. Well into the 1980s, it was not a grotesque distortion to accuse the party of wanting to "tax and spend." Many Democrats frankly advocated higher taxes to pay for a substantially larger federal government than most Republicans wanted. But during the Clinton years, Democrats shifted to become the party of fiscal responsibility. Today, the essential difference between Democrats and Republicans on fiscal matters lies not in how big the federal government should be—the 2002 budget bills Bush signed increased spending 13 percent and early indications are that his 2003 budget will ask for more huge increases. The main difference is that Democrats want to pay for all the government they want, while Republicans don't."

you spin me round

"The political equivalent of Ken Lay would be a politician who insisted he was going to win the election even though all the polls showed him heading for near-certain defeat. In the political world, though, spin is not merely tolerated: It is required. It is regarded as a basic test of competence."

now its my turn

no speeka da langwidge

splitter

"A fresh outbreak of fighting between Northern Alliance factions highlights the continued ineffectiveness of Afghanistan's central government. Warlords who have a stake in the government are only behaving long enough to receive international aid while those outside the government are motivated to cause its collapse."

moana lisa

"American soldiers in the Philippines will be encouraged to go on tours of museums instead of touring local brothels."

no kidding

"The Langley Schools Music Project is a 60-voice chorus of rural school children from western Canada, untrained but captivated by melodic magic, singing tunes by the Beach Boys, Paul McCartney, David Bowie, The Bay City Rollers, and others (in 1976). The students accompany themselves with the shimmering gamelan chimes of Orff percussion, and elemental rock trimmings arranged by their itinerant music teacher, Hans.Fenger."

finders fee

yahoo premium $earch

waite is on

"I can recognise the conditions that prisoners are being kept in at the US camp at Guantanamo Bay because I have been there. Not to Cuba's Camp X-Ray, but to the darkened cell in Beirut that I occupied for five years. I was chained to a wall by my hands and feet; beaten on the soles of my feet with cable; denied all my human rights, and contact with my family for five years, and given no access to the outside world. Because I was kept in very similar conditions, I am appalled at the way we - countries that call ourselves civilised - are treating these captives. Is this justice or revenge?"

national pasttime

"It seems the Nation won't let the facts interfere with a Bush-bashing opportunity. The Wall Street Journal noted in its "Best of the Web" column Friday that a Matt Bivens story in the Nation, "The Enron Box," began with a howler: "When George W. Bush co-owned the Houston Astros and construction began on a new stadium, Kenneth Lay agreed to spend $100 million over thirty years for rights to name the park after Enron." As the Journal noted, "it was the Texas Rangers, not the Astros, that Bush co-owned." Strike One.

The Nation was quick to "fix" this on their website. By late Friday, they had come up with this solution: "When George W. Bush co-owned the Texas Rangers and construction began on a new stadium, Kenneth Lay agreed to spend $100 million over thirty years for rights to name the park after Enron."

Problem is, the Texas Rangers play at The Ballpark in Arlington. Enron Field is where the Houston Astros play, more than 200 miles away. Strike Two.

The Scrapbook is beginning to think the Nation folks need to get out more. They don't know Texas; they don't know baseball. The only ERA they've heard of is probably the Equal Rights Amendment. So to prevent further embarrassment, we are happy to clue them in: Texas has not one, but two major league baseball teams, the Rangers and the Astros. The Rangers play in the American League; the Astros in the National League.

And what does Bush's onetime ownership of the Rangers have to do with the Astros' Enron Field? Absolutely nothing. Strike Three."

phone spam

"Responding to industry criticism that the commission's proposal to create a national do-not-call registry was an attempt to limit the right of free speech, the director of the FTC's Consumer Protection Bureau said it was an attempt to protect another key American right -- the right to privacy."

hop to it

morning
movable
backwash
swsx
r blood
wsj blog

you know the drill

"The collapse of Enron has swiftly morphed into a go-to-jail financial scandal, laden with the heavy breathing of political fixers, but Enron makes visible a more profound scandal--the failure of market orthodoxy itself. Enron, accompanied by a supporting cast from banking, accounting and Washington politics, is a virtual piñata of corrupt practices and betrayed obligations to investors, taxpayers and voters. But these matters ought not to surprise anyone, because they have been familiar, recurring outrages during the recent reign of high-flying Wall Street. This time, the distinctive scale may make it harder to brush them aside. "There are many more Enrons out there," a well-placed Washington lawyer confided. He knows because he has represented a couple of them."

brain scans

"the secret life of the brain" on pbs

master crassman

"After Mr. Bush spoke, the White House corrected the president on the timing of his mother-in-law's investment. Mrs. Welch bought 200 shares of Enron on Sept. 21, 1999, for $40.90 a share, the White House said, for a total investment of $8,180. She sold her holdings on Dec. 4, two days after the company declared bankruptcy, for 42 cents a share, meaning her investment had plummeted to $84."

bite me

all day ive ran across this bogus mike tyson fight story. there is almost no "big fight" anymore where there isnt some blowup at a press conference to ensure that every news organization will run a story on the scuffle. the ploy is so pathetic and yet news organization keep covering it as if it were real. at least two local news stations actually led with the story. it would be a shame if there was something actually important to cover.

chelsea girl

"Side by side they sat, a publicist's wildest fantasy. There was Gwyneth Paltrow, a pipe-cleaner in a halter neck. There was Madonna, betraying a touch of the Joan Crawfords in limousine-black shades and Dracula-white concealer - the look of a woman who refers to herself in the third person. But it was the final member of the improbable trinity who harnessed the most attention. No sooner had the shock of seeing Chelsea Clinton out of context subsided, than the impact of how she looked delivered another power surge."

web slinger

"Just a further note here. I gather from Joshua Micah Marshall's Talking Points Memo that Andrew Sullivan (whose website is too mean-spirited to read) now thinks that I misled my readers by not saying that I was on a paid advisory board. As Marshall points out, it's hard to imagine that anyone really thought that a corporate advisory board carried no honorarium. Only someone completely out of touch with the real world thinks that people donate their time and expertise gratis to highly profitable corporations - which was what everyone at the time thought Enron was."

on daschle

"In the wake of Daschle's January 4 speech, pundits have initiated new attacks that personalize the issue of taxes and economic policy around Daschle and his opposition to the President, often in the form of catchphrases. This strategy - endorsed by pollster Frank Luntz in a December memo to Republicans - capitalizes on the increasing antipathy of the Republican base to Daschle. As with the phrase "Clintonization", the resulting jargon attempts to embed vague associations into a term to trigger hostile reactions."

not it

"Millions of superstitious readers -- and many athletes -- believe that an appearance on Sports Illustrated’s cover is the kiss of death. But is there really such a thing as the SI Jinx?"

access bush

just saw bush nephew billy bush as a correspondent on access hollywood.

copychatter

"At the time, Lawrence Lessig was a law professor at Harvard, where he'd earned a reputation as the most important thinker on intellectual property in the Internet era. Lessig was so outraged by the Bono Act that he helped orchestrate a lawsuit—ultimately unsuccessful—challenging its constitutionality. Now Lessig has published a book, "The Future of Ideas," which serves as a bleak summa of his thoughts on intellectual property. For Lessig (who's now at Stanford), the Bono Act was not just another instance of fat-cat favoritism but part of a disastrous trend toward what might be called property-rights fundamentalism. In his view, this trend is threatening to destroy the Internet and plunge us into a cultural dark age."

manga manga

"After a decade or two as an underground phenomenon in the United States — where legions of obsessive fans exchange fuzzy videotapes or, more commonly now, trade bootlegged movie files over the Internet — anime is slowly emerging into the light of day. Hayao Miyazaki's "Princess Mononoke" was released by Miramax in 1999 in a dubbed version, featuring the voices of Claire Danes, Gillian Anderson and Minnie Driver; Katsuhiro Otomo's 1988 "Akira" opened theatrically last year in a digitally restored edition (and is now available on DVD); last summer Columbia Pictures released "The Spirits Within," an elaborate computer- animated episode of the long-running "Final Fantasy" series; and opening on Friday is "Metropolis," a fascinating blend of computer and traditional hand-drawn animation directed by Rintaro and based on a 1949 comic book written by Osamu Tezuka."

hoarse and buggy

"The story behind the immobile Boeing jet offers a tantalizing glimpse of modern spycraft. A Chinese source, with close ties to China's military intelligence services, said members of the Third Department of the General Staff Department of the People's Liberation Army discovered the devices. The Third Department deals in signals intelligence."

survey says...

"Rove's remarks are the first time an administration official has said the GOP will use the war as a partisan issue. Until now, Bush has stressed that the fight against terrorism is a bipartisan and unifying issue for the country."

courage of your convictions

"The word "rollback" tested badly in focus groups and polls, she said, with 64 percent in one recent national survey she conducted opposing a "rollback" of tax cuts. In the same poll, however, 74 percent approved of "temporarily postponing" tax cuts, while the words "pause," "postpone" and "take another look at" also polled well."

everybodys doing it

"The Washington wisdom that Enron has no legs — that it's not a political scandal, merely a financial one — is based on the premise that the Bush administration didn't ride to Ken Lay's rescue once disaster struck. But what about the favors performed for Enron before the meltdown? That's as political as you can get, particularly since, unlike Whitewater, this scandal implicates both parties and the corrupt campaign finance system that makes them look like interchangeable vending machines for their often overlapping patrons."

enron kitsch

how many dissertations will be written about the ebay effect? if its in the news look for someone to be cashing on the farside. who at enron would have thought that hocking their ethics guidebook would end up as their ad hoc pension plan?

groundswell

"In his strongest comments about the game returning to Washington after a 30-year absence, Selig would not speculate on which team would move here. He ruled out a team arriving this season but would not comment about 2003."

babylon and on

"This self-effacing approach, his advisers say, reflects Mr. Bloomberg’s natural reluctance to dominate the stage in the manner of predecessors like Rudolph Giuliani and Ed Koch, as well as the simple calculation that this style will earn him favorable comparisons to Mr. Giuliani, who ran City Hall as if it were an Egyptian temple, with himself in the role of King Tut."

now and then

tonight is the premiere of 'now'. its bill moyers new weekly broadcast of news and opinion on pbs.

unbearable fruits

"The idea that certain fixed laws should apply even amid the violence and anarchy of war isn't new. The saying may have it that all's fair in war, but restrictions on battlefield conduct have always been recognized. The Hebrew Bible forbade soldiers from, among other things, destroying fruit-bearing trees in hostile lands, and chivalric codes existed in the Middle Ages. It was the Dutch philosopher Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), however, who came to be seen as the Solon of today's laws of war. His influential 1625 work On the Laws of War and Peace argued that there exist natural laws, independent of any individual state's legal system, that are apparent to human reason and should prevail even during hostilities."

serious defects

"I became directly involved with Arafat in the late 1960s, in the days when he was being financed and manipulated by the KGB. In the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel humiliated two of the Soviet Union's Arab client states, Egypt and Syria. A couple of months later, the head of Soviet foreign intelligence, Gen. Alexander Sakharovsky, landed in Bucharest. According to him, the Kremlin had charged the KGB to "repair the prestige" of "our Arab friends" by helping them organize terrorist operations that would humiliate Israel. The main KGB asset in this joint venture was a "devoted Marxist-Leninist"--Yasser Arafat, co-founder of Fatah, the Palestinian military force."

yahweh or the highway

"For decades, scholars have tried to penetrate the Bible's story about Israelite monotheism. According to traditional interpretations of the Bible, monotheism was part of Israel's original covenant with Yahweh on Mount Sinai, and the idolatry subsequently criticized by the prophets was due to Israel's backsliding from its own heritage and history with Yahweh. However, scholars have long noted that beneath this presentation lies a number of questions. Why do the Ten Commandments command that there should be no other gods "before Me" (the Lord), if there are no other gods as claimed by other biblical texts? Why should the Israelites sing at the crossing of the Red Sea that "there is no god like You, O Lord?" (Exodus 15:11). Such passages suggest that Israelites knew about other gods and did not simply reject them. It seems that Israelites may have known of other deities and perhaps various passages suggest that behind the Bible's broader picture of monotheism was a spectrum of polytheisms that centered on the worship of Yahweh as the pantheon's greatest figure."

game theory

"This is not necessarily the Great Game, Part 2. The incentives for American cooperation with Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and the other regional powers far outweigh the incentives for confrontation. A great deal of 20th century Mideast conflict can be explained by American-Soviet rivalry — another great game that brought much misery. There is no need to repeat that in Central Asia and every reason not to. To move away from gamesmanship and toward cooperation, Russia might begin by reconsidering its close relations with its regional customers, Saddam Hussein and the Iranian military. And the United States should use great discretion in establishing its bases in Central Asian nations like Kyrgyzstan. Better to build more joint pipelines and fewer military bases."

folkswagon

"Coming at the end of a dismal year for the United States in general and for its largest city in particular, the opening of Tod Williams and Billie Tsien's American Folk Art Museum in New York was a thoroughly uplifting event. The reasons for these good tidings stand quite apart from the timely re-affirmation of American culture at its best. Since the terrorist attacks, the worsening economy and the sharp drop in travel have precipitated a disastrous decline in museum revenues, especially in New York, where several institutions have recently sacked workers and canceled exhibitions. The hardest hit has been the over-reaching Guggenheim, and it is safe to say that Thomas Krens's grandiose scheme for a Frank Gehry building in lower Manhattan, an enterprise dependent on a great deal of municipal funding that now must be allocated elsewhere, is a titanium-armored dinosaur doomed to extinction."

sunshine laws

"Offshore accounts. IBCs. Walking trusts. Financial institutions have plenty of names for the places where the wealthy now hide their money from the IRS. They just don't call it cheating."

name of the rose

finally.

man of the year

"Everyone knows that Rudy Giuliani went out on top, ending his operatic eight-year reign over New York City as the Person of the Year. But hardly anyone noticed that he left behind a parting gift. On his last day in office, Rudy signed an agreement to proceed with the largest corporate subsidy in New York history: up to $1.1 billion in cash and tax breaks for the New York Stock Exchange. Even when the deal was announced three years earlier, it committed money the city didn't really have to a new trading floor the exchange didn't really need in order to generate a new skyscraper no one really wanted in response to a flee-the-city threat no one really believed. And that was before the city began to hemorrhage cash, skyscrapers began to look like targets, and flee-the-city threats began to feel like municipal treason."

i did not have financial relations with that company

"Until a few weeks ago, Enron Corp. ranked among the biggest contributors to lawmakers and campaign committees of both parties. But now that the Houston-based firm is considered politically radioactive, members of Congress and party officials are devising ways to give away hundreds of thousands of dollars in Enron donations to distance themselves from the company's woes."

auditory nerve

"I know how tough a task this is. When I was chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, we put into place a number of reforms to improve audits and minimize conflicts of interest. But we were largely unsuccessful in persuading accounting firms to separate their auditing businesses from their consulting businesses and in convincing the auditing profession to do a better job of policing itself. Congress and federal regulators should use this scandal to demand some long overdue changes."

nothing to sneeze at

Study Suggests Booze Boosts Allergic Reactions

blackhawk downs

"But now certain members of the MoMA brass — Glenn Lowry, the Modern's director, and Mary Lea Bandy, head of the Department of Film and Media — have shut down the Stills Archive. They are burying the collection in a patch of earth 2-1/2 hours by car from Manhattan: in Hamlin, Pa., where the Museum stores its films. With this one ill-considered stroke, a significant portion of our collective cultural memory was just struck with amnesia. The decision echoes the final words in "Kane," when the cynical butler snaps, to a workman holding an old sled, "Throw that junk." And Rosebud goes into the fire."

hoop dreams

"The featured celebrities usually aren't much older than Lebron, but they are a heck of a lot wealthier. At least until March 23, 2003, the day after Lebron James presumably wins his fourth state high school championship, the day he can declare for the NBA Draft, the day the floodgates of wealth can open, the day the lines of credit can be established, the day corporate America can start showering millions on a family that will finally be able to go from nothing to everything quicker than a crossover"

manila wafers

there was a report on hotline this morning linking to a spanish newspaper which said three american special ops had been killed in the philippines but by the time i tried to find it it was gone. hotline has erased the link and i havent seen anything else about it although i havent looked very hard yet. this links to a time report on our latest engagement in the philippines.

tax relief

"Kennedy said taxpayers earning less than $130,000 would not be affected by the delayed income tax cuts he proposes and that higher-income people "will still be receiving billions of dollars in new tax breaks" even if Congress enacted his proposal.

"Future additional tax breaks for the wealthy do not deserve a higher priority than strengthening education, or covering prescription drugs under Medicare, or protecting Social Security, or meeting other urgent national priorities," Kennedy said."

unlevining

"WASHINGTON -- An influential senator, dissatisfied with Saudi Arabia's response to the war on terrorism, said the Pentagon should consider shifting U.S. forces from Saudi territory to another Persian Gulf country where they would be more welcome."

tron and on

"Although "Tron" holds historic landmark status as the first film to present a computer-generated, three-dimensional universe in which the action unfolds, it never quite garnered the same degree of critical support as did "Blade Runner," another '80s film that charted a futuristic cultural shift. But "Tron" launched a number of computer games and, most important, unleashed a new visual aesthetic -- one with major techno-whoa! appeal."

down with the king

"L A U D E R H I L L, Fla., Jan. 16 — A plaque intended to honor deep-voiced actor James Earl Jones at this city's Martin Luther King Jr. celebration instead had this extremely incorrect message: "Thank you James Earl Ray for keeping the dream alive."

night moves

"The foreigner coming to these shores is more impressed at first by our sky-scrapers. They are new to him. He has not done anything of the sort since he built the tower of Babel. The foreigner is shocked by them. In the daylight they are ugly. They are—well, too chimneyfied and too snaggy—like a mouth that needs attention from a dentist; like a cemetery that is all monuments and no gravestones. But at night, seen from the river where they are columns towering against the sky, all sparkling with light, they are fairylike; they are beauty more satisfactory to the soul than anything man has dreamed of since the Arabian nights."

end game

""By mutual consent," writes the family. Attached to a high-profile person, this simple phrase signals a sea change in the matter of double suicides, even as the current administration in Washington struggles to hold back the tide."

andersen's windows

"4. Compassion for over-worked, grunt congressional staffers who will be running the investigation. "

more toys

"Whether all the necessary pieces will ever fall into place is an open debate, but that crucial first step -- technology that lets you search video -- has just been developed and is now being marketed by a United Kingdom-based firm called Dremedia. Founded by Matthew Karas, who previously headed up the interactive TV unit at the BBC, Dremedia has software that combines speech recognition, image analysis, speech-to-text transcription, and the ability to organize so-called unstructured data. In essence, Dremedia's software can analyze video footage -- either raw or edited -- and not only identify nearly every word spoken but also differentiate between speakers and even understand when a scene changes."

about the edges

"UNTIL very recently, ministers would not discuss reforming Britain's hard-line anti-drug policies. No matter that Britain's record was among the worst in Europe in terms of users of hard drugs and deaths from overdoses. To be seen to be tough was a political imperative. But things are changing."

friends in deed

"On the face of it, the sudden political storm over Enron is puzzling. After all, the Bush administration didn't save the company from bankruptcy. But then why did the administration dissemble so long about its contacts with Enron? Why did George W. Bush make the absurd claim that Enron's C.E.O., Kenneth Lay, opposed him in his first run for governor, and that the two men got to know each other only after that race? And why does the press act as if there may be a major scandal brewing?

Because the administration fears, and the press suspects, that the latest revelations in the Enron affair will raise the lid on crony capitalism, American style."

geek out

"The most notable characteristic of the One Ring is that it turns its wearer invisible. In scientific terms, this means one of two things: either the wearer's index of refraction is reduced to that of air—which is unlikely without major changes in atomic structure—or else light waves are simply diverted around him. (I would say "him or her," except that the historical record shows all bearers of the One Ring to be male.) In fact, NASA and the U.S. Air Force have already experimented with "video camouflage" which places cameras on one side of an object and video screens on the other side. The object "disappears" before our very eyes, like the alien trophy-hunter in Predator, and with the hoped-for advent of projective holography, this technology can only improve."

burns doubt

"With something like 70 hours worth of fantastically successful documentary film footage under his belt, Ken Burns is an industry onto himself. No matter the subject, we know that with Burns, we're in for hours of sleepy guitar noodling, smoothed-over narration, and slow pans over sepia-toned photographs. And no matter what the sepia tones show, we know the subject's bound to be America in all its epic grandeur—flush with the glory of a few Great Men (and, to a lesser extent, great women) and shamed by its treatment of black folk (and, to a lesser extent, Native Americans)."

five easy pieces

who wrote the bible in 1 2 3 4 5 easy lessons.

home plate

"The home media server will manage television programming, delivered by cable, satellite or the Internet; and music, delivered by the Net or transferred from CDs into the server's hard drive. The server also might handle more computer-like functions, such as electronic mail, instant messaging and Web browsing, as well as entertainment services such as online video games."

midrift

"In what follows I lay out a new alternative. It seeks to achieve a separation of the two peoples, but not through unilateral action. Rather, it proposes that the United States use the UN Security Council to achieve a kind of coordinated separation, but one in which the Council will not take no for an answer. In this, it represents a radical departure from previous US policies. But the proposal is far from radical in its objectives. It leaves for later the issues of Jerusalem and refugees; instead, it focuses on the issues of territory, statehood and settlements. Here it seeks to be decisive, to achieve an end to the territorial dimension of the conflict through the emergence of a Palestinian state living at peace with Israel. The territorial specifics are little different from what Clinton proposed and what is now an international consensus: the near complete withdrawal of Israel from the occupied territories."

phasers on stunted

"Enterprise, which debuted this fall on UPN as the newest entry in the Star Trek franchise, has a fundamentally different vision. Its crew copes with bleeding-edge technologies: they don’t trust the transporter not to scramble their molecular data, the torpedoes miss their targets, the shields are on the fritz and the computers make crappy food. Starfleet is now a paternalistic bureaucracy. In short, the message is, we have seen the future and it doesn’t work."

gasaholic

"The reason is both simple and complex: oil. Washington is determined to dominate the world's richest new source of oil, Central Asia's Caspian Basin, over which sit the former Soviet states of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgystan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan. Well before Sept. 11, the US already had special forces operating in Kyrgystan and Uzbekistan. Last spring, Osama bin Laden advised the unworldly Taliban regime to turn down a low bid from the US oil firm Unocal to build a pipeline to export Central Asian oil - awarding it instead to a rival Argentine firm. The US cut off discreet financial aid to Taliban and began updating contingency plans to invade Afghanistan and install a compliant regime. Events of Sept. 11 facilitated this decision."

presidential chew toy

"My mother always said, 'When you're eating pretzels, chew before you swallow,"' Bush said. "Always listen to your mother."

energy concerns

enron weekend round-up

smog dogs

"Virginia environmental officials have hired a contractor to place two teams of technicians at different sites in Northern Virginia and Richmond beginning in March for a nine-month $300,000 pilot program. The teams, from Connecticut-based Environmental Systems Products, will set up at on-ramps and other high-traffic areas. They like to call their device the "AccuScan Remote Vehicle Emissions Testing System," though some in the industry prefer the term "smog dog." The system shoots an invisible beam of light through a car's exhaust plume to measure a range of pollutants, and a video camera records license plate numbers. Computers in a van parked nearby crunch the emissions data."

rascal racicot

"The political reforms passed after Watergate had two somewhat paradoxical consequences. On the positive side, outright, cash-in-a-bag corruption became quite rare in Washington. On the negative side, sleaze got much more inventive. The fruits of this trend included such instruments of dubious virtue and technical legality as corporate soft money, "honoraria" for speech-making, campaign contribution "bundling," insider stock deals for members of Congress, and ever more blatant forms of influence-peddling."

df tribune

The Future of bin Ladenism
Pipeline Politics
Carlyle's Way
Bush Family Value$
Bad Intelligence Causing Pentagon-CIA Rift
A Creeping Collapse in Credibility at the White House

band on the run

"There, boasted a flurry of HBO press releases, several dozen construction workers had labored mightily to build an 80-square-foot high-definition movie screen, a viewing tent, and a reception area that could accommodate up to 1,000 guests, "as well as lounge and bar space." The occasion for all this was not so much the annual D-day commemoration, which was squeezed in after lunch, but an event that had for all intents and purposes replaced it: the star-studded premiere of Band of Brothers--a $125-million television miniseries produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, based on the book by Stephen E. Ambrose, telling the true-life story of Easy Company, and appearing on a TV screen near you in early September."

clear channel

"The United States is more likely to suffer a nuclear, chemical or biological attack from terrorists using ships, trucks or airplanes than one by a foreign country using long-range missiles, according to a new U.S. intelligence estimate."

df gazette

Saudi Arabia's anti-American fiction
Arms Buildup Enriches Firm Staffed by Big Guns
Is George W. Bush God’s President?
The Nixon Story You Never Heard

the wright approach

"It's true that, with victory coming sooner than just about anyone (including Krauthammer) predicted, street demonstrations died young. Regimes weren't toppled. But my main concern was never about regimes being toppled. My concern was—and is—about what may be the scariest trend in the world: Thanks to technological evolution, man-in-the-street rage, even if it doesn't assume regime-toppling form, is increasingly lethal. Very small groups of people—including groups of one—can take a real toll on the national psyche."

memo to tyndall

"But agree or disagree with Mr. Sullivan, it’s hard to deny that he is the surprising new media/political development of the post–Sept. 11 period. A media/political development because he’s gone beyond his influential print platforms, The Times of London and The Times of New York. What gives him an edge in impact and reach over Mr. Hitchens (and just about everyone else) is the way he’s turned his political Web site (Web zine, Web log, online diary—whatever you want to call andrewsullivan.com) into a powerful weapon of nonstop, 24/7, omnipresent total-surveillance panoptican punditry. Using his political Web zine (a form pioneered by Mickey Kaus in his witty Kausfiles.com), he’s done more than just frame the debate; he’s dominated it, smothered it with an overwhelming energy and forcefulness that allows him to riddle his opponents with ceaseless real-time hectoring and invective and polemic."

infinity in sound

esquivel's space has popped...2...3...cha cha cha

occidents will happen

"In 1942, not long after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a group of Japanese philosophers got together in Kyoto to discuss Japan's role in the world. The project of this ultra-nationalist gathering was, as they put it, to find a way to "overcome modern civilization." Since modern civilization was another term for Western civilization, the conference might just as well have been entitled "Overcoming the West." In a complete reversal of the late-nineteenth-century goal of "leaving Asia and joining the West," Japan was now fighting a "holy war" to liberate Asia from the West and purify Asian minds of Western ideas. Part of the holy war was, as it were, an exercise in philosophical cleansing."

tell us what you really think

"Disgruntled has-beens everywhere have a new hero and role model: Bernard Goldberg, the one-time CBS News correspondent and full-time addlepated windbag who is trying to make a second career out of trashing his former employer. Goldberg has picked this moment in time to haul out the old canard about the media being "liberal" and the news being slanted leftward."

test your metal

Airport security strips Dingell as Congressman's metal hip sets off alarms at National Airport

cuba libre

yes , lets bring hundreds of terrorists as close to america as possible and then warehouse them on an island we consider (occasionally) hostile. wait, a couple of thousand foot soldiers backed by the cia. is this whole operation just another bay of pigs?

fuel on the hill

U.S. Ends Car Plan on Gas Efficiency; Looks to Fuel Cells

up your bloomers

"One of Mayor Bloomberg's first moves was the announcement that he's dismantling Rudy's decency commission, something we think bodes extremely well for New York nightlife. Celebrate by supporting these exuberant examples of show-and-tell (some of which might even pass for art)."

puddle jumpers

slate reaches out across the atlantic sea for a fresh stale perspective.

air forced chic

"She was a champion triathlete. She had a master's degree in public policy from Harvard, and she'd been a White House Fellows finalist. She had patrolled the no-fly zone over Iraq and would later direct search-and-rescue missions inside Afghanistan.

She was quite a success story for the modern military, which had worked hard to knock down barriers to female achievement.

Then she landed at Prince Sultan Air Force Base in Saudi Arabia in November of 2000."

keyed up

Former conservative presidential candidate Alan Keyes will join MSNBC's primetime lineup as host of a live one-hour commentary show.

unhappy meal

wendys owner dave thomas has "bought the franchise."

sweet ambrosia

one of americas foremost mythmakers is caught with his quill in someone elses inkwell. and not just once. and the weekly standard blew the whistle on one of their own. bless their hearts. i wonder what they are saying about enron?

wake up calling

Why militant Islamicists in Central Asia aren't going to go away.

frahm game

art frahm: the effect of celery on loose elastic

jeep ad with deer

saw a strange commercial yesterday for some jeep product. a jeep is festooned with what we assume are two deer taken down by a hunter. as the jeep winds its way through the woods, other hunters crane their necks in awe at the vehicle and its bloody haul. but once out of view of the hunters the driver gets out of the car and unties the deer and releases them. he hadnt killed them, he was trying to save them. i guess in this fantastic world the hunters dont move and the deer will understand not to go back into the woods. very odd, even stranger that it was aired during a football game. isnt that the last refuge for redmeat eaters? next youll be telling me that having cheerleaders is sexist. here is where you cant see it.

in it to win it

Is There an Islamic Problem?
Beyond Jihad Vs. McWorld
the making of a hawk
Listening to Our Inner Ashcroft
Will the New World Order Rest Solely on American Might?

eminence gris

the ny times moves ahead with its new building project on 8th avenue.

prow voyager

Freedom Ship today exists only on paper. But some 3,000 families and businesses have already signed on to live and work on it. When it does launch, in 2006, this leviathan of comfortable living will travel a lazy circuit around the world every two years.

pot shots

Illegal or not, domestic pot cultivation has made marijuana America's No. 1 cash crop, and proof is beginning to show in Washington.
Unprecedented fund raising and increasing national support for marijuana-policy reform has led the Washington-based Marijuana Policy Project to increase its full-time staff from five to 11 in just three months.
The project credits several unnamed "major donors" for doubling the project's budget from $500,000 in 2001 to more than $1 million this year. Now, organizations seeking to change state and federal marijuana laws — articulating tactics and strategies to regulate marijuana similarly to alcohol — will be eligible for first-of-a-kind grants of up to $50,000 each under a new program administered by the project.
We also see where longtime political strategist Billy Rogers, former fund-raising director for former Texas Gov. Ann Richards, has become the pot project's new director of state policies. In 1998, Mr. Rogers served as campaign manager for Texas Democratic gubernatorial nominee Garry Mauro, and prior to that helped launch and served as editor in chief of the Moscow Guardian, the first English-language magazine in Russia.

gnomenclature

gnome liberation society

youre gonna make it after all

(enough bubbly for me. those folks at canada dry have that carbonation thing down to a science.) ok. im really committed to this new year thing. ive taken everything down off the fridge that was held up by magnets. i might even get rid of some of the magnets. frayed looking magnets just wont do in 2002. you can see i mean business. so look out world, here i come! (wait? whats that? theres a gidget marathon on tv? ummm, world? ill have to get back to you. i really like that episode where shes a flying nun...)