My First Crisis of Conscience

     It was 1968 and I was still in high school when I got my first job as an usher at the Warner Theater on Wilshire in Beverly Hills, a magnificent stage palace that had been converted to film, holding thousands of people, with an enormous lobby and balcony, ornate and baroque, the likes of which we'll never see again. We wore uniforms and snapped to attention with military precision. My duties consisted of tearing tickets before the film, ushering people to their seats, then standing inside with a flashlight during the film, prepared to pounce on anyone who dared light up a cigarette. I would walk down the aisle, aim my flashlight at them, disturbing all around, and say "please put that out." What power! Paid to be a jerk! Who'da thunk?
    I had to stand guard, a soldier on duty, inside the door of the auditorium, throughout the entire picture, ready to help, reserved seats all the way, examine each ticket, treating each patron like they had a box at the opera, an overture, the light from the crystal chandelier going down, special lights for the magnificent curtain going up and actually getting applause, the film beginning, one preview, no commercials, the film itself, escorting latecomers to their seats with my flashlight, long before those irritating strings of mini-lights that never go out at the fringes of rugs in multiplexes. The Warner Theater was more minimal than mini-mall, it was a guy with a flashlight, me, the terror of torches, illuminating the aisle for anyone on their way to the bathroom. 
    This necessitated my standing at attention throughout the film, my legs aching, following instructions not to lean, only falling against the door frame when I knew for certain the theater manager wasn't spying on me from the dark, which he did at least twice during each screening from the backstage area behind the screen where he could see all six doors, upstairs and down, a loyal usher standing at each one, opening the doors for customers and quickly shutting them to let less light in. 
    Oh, sure, he could see my body, but there was nothing he could do about my eyes. My eyes were mine and they couldn't help but wander to the screen when they tired of scanning the crowd for glowing cherries from the ends of Chesterfields. I got to see dozens of movies literally hundreds of times, studying them, learning their flaws and their moments of genius, moments I never wanted to see again vs. moments I'd never miss at each and every screening. Even if I was out in the lobby sweeping, I'd run inside to see the winter scenes in Zhivago, over and over, meeting Lara at the dam, Tom Courtney on the train to revolution, over and over, the final scene in The Subject was Roses where Martin Sheen breaks down and says, "I love you, Dad," truly great acting, watching it again and again, mindlessly examining his character arch, making the whole film come together, a single moment of clarity, over and over, Richard Burton walking down the street, his scarf flying in the breeze, at a bookstore, his scarf flying in the breeze, in the back of a limo with a beautiful horny teenager, his scarf still flying in the breeze, one of the funniest moments in Candy which I only noticed maybe the 15th time I saw it, teaching me that there were marvelous hidden things in films if you only bothered to really pay attention.
    I was enjoying the heck out of this job. Even watching the same movie over and over was preferable to most of what was on television because everything, absolutely everything on television, was interspersed with commercials. This was the era of broadcast TV, free for the asking from anyone rich enough to buy a television with rabbit ears, all content brought to you by advertising - absolutely every fucking fifteen minutes - no matter what they were showing, average sitcom, above average western, or serious classic, all were brought to you by somebody who thought they'd get your attention by INTERRUPTING WHAT YOU WERE WATCHING. I hated commercials and considered advertisers the lowest form of life, especially during broadcast movies which it seemed their quest to ruin.
   An article in the paper exclaimed that soon there was going to be "pay" TV which you'd pay for but which would have no commercials. There would still be free airwaves, but TV would be like a utility, a physical cable to your living room, offering potentially hundreds of channels, which sounded a hell of a lot better than 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, and 13, the only stations broadcasting at the time in Los Angeles. This sounded great. I couldn't wait for cable TV.
   Then I went to work. There was a poster outside the theater showing a crying child wearing a Dodgers cap, sitting in front of a television with a coin slot, a caption saying "Daddy says we can't watch baseball because he doesn't have a quarter for the TV." This was their warped version of what "pay" TV was going to look like. Underneath the graphic, the poster said something like Keep TV Free! Sign our petition to stop "Pay Television."
   I was flabbergasted. It was the worst ad I'd ever seen, total misinformation. There weren't going to be any coin slots in televisions. I knew that. Broadcast TV would still be free. Pay TV would only add to what we already had. How did I know? I read the goddam article. While getting into my usher's uniform in the men's locker, I told the other ushers how great pay TV was going to be, then headed towards my daily duties.
    After I swept the lobby, the manager assigned me to man the booth set up for people to sign the petition. It was suddenly my job to get patrons to sign something I was totally against. Everyone who stepped up to sign I wanted to smack and say "What the hell's the matter with you?" I didn't know what to do. The angel on my right shoulder told me to stick to my guns, to tell people the truth if they asked, to let them make up their own minds. The devil on my left shoulder told me to summon up my inner Sheen, become a great actor, just play a role, recite a script, be a commercial spokesman for a product I abhorred. "Do what you're told and keep your job," said the devil. "Don't be a paycheck whore," said the angel.
   It was that moment, seventeen years old, sitting behind that table, reading the petition, which was trying to pass a local ordinance banning cable television, that I realized for the first time in my life I had principles. I could not possibly try to convince people to sign such a thing. I could see the future. I wanted my MTV.
   After a few hours, the manager came up and saw that I hadn't gotten a single signature, despite the fact the film was sold out and thousands of people had passed the table. I was a failure at petitioning. He reassigned me to clean up a drink someone had spilt in the lobby, leaving a trail of brown stickiness all across the front of the theater. When I got back, I'd have to get at least 100 signatures or I'd be fired.
   I grabbed a bucket and mop. I cleaned the inside lobby, followed the trail to the outside lobby, cleaned it, then noticed the trail continued. I was in no hurry to get back. I cleaned the sidewalk in front of the theater, followed it around the corner, mopping all the way to the parking lot where I saw my car. Fuck it. I went home and watched television, cursing at the commercials. Without a job, I wouldn't even be able to afford pay TV if it actually ended up existing.
   Though I didn't know it at the time, movie theaters had lost a large percentage of their business when television showed up in the first place in the fifties, and they rightly feared that cable TV in the seventies would be the death knoll to grand palaces like the Warners, and it turned out they were right. After brief forays back to legitimate theater, with occasional rock concerts, the Warners was torn down years ago. Who knows? Maybe if I'd gathered enough signatures the Warner Theater would still be standing. A conscience can be complicated.

"Cowardice asks the question - is it safe? Expediency asks the question - is it politic? Vanity asks the question - is it popular? But conscience asks the question - is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular; but one must take it BECAUSE it is right."
- Dr. Martin Luther King -

Mr. Conspiracy Says...

Delaware was the first state in the union. Go to the Delaware Department of State: Division of Corporations and look up "United States of America, Inc." You will discover that the United States is a non-profit religious corporation. Remember that.

Does it make any difference if the American flag in your child's school has a yellow fringe or not? You bet it does. According to military law...

A military flag is a flag that resembles the regular flag of the United States, except that it has a Yellow Fringe border on three sides - Title 4 United States Code Chapter 1, Sections 1, 2, and 3; Executive Order No. 10834, August 21, 1959, 24 C.F.R. 6865. 

The Flag is trimmed on three sides with Fringe of Gold, 2 inches wide. Such flags are flown indoors, only in military courtrooms. The Gold Fringed Flag is not to be carried by anyone except units of the United States Army, and the United States Army division associations - United States Army Regulations, AR 840-10, 1 October 1979. 

Pursuant to the "Law of the Flag," a military flag does result in jurisdictional implications when flown - Ruhstrat v. People, 57 N.E. 41, 45, 185 Ill. 133, 49 LRA 181, 76 Am.

Which means when the rapture comes, they can shoot whatever school kids don't fly up into the sky.

Curiosity of the Week

     "At least 200 have been found, and extracted out of deep rock at the Wonderstone Silver Mine in South Africa, averaging 1-4 inches in diameter, and composed of a nickel-steel alloy that doesn't occur naturally.
    "Some have a thin shell about a quarter inch thick, when broken open are filled with a strange spongy material that disintegrates into dust upon contact with air...
   "The manufactured metallic spheroids have been mined out of a layer of pyrophyllite rock and geologically and by the various radio-isotope dating techniques are shown as being 2.8 - 3 billion years old, long before man..."
- 3-Billion Year Old Manufactured Spheroids? -

Calling all Editors

I'm available to cover the Spiritual Cinema Festival-at-Sea.

Guide to Mistaken Shootings in Iraq

March 4, 2005: American forces fire on a car carrying a freed Italian hostage as it approaches a checkpoint in Baghdad, killing an Italian intelligence officer and wounding three others, including the just-released journalist.

April 19, 2004: A correspondent and driver for the U.S.-funded television station Al Iraqiya are shot and killed by U.S. troops.

Sept. 12, 2003: U.S. forces kill eight Iraqi police and a Jordanian security guard in Fallouja. Nine are wounded.

Aug. 17, 2003: A Reuters cameraman is shot and killed while working near U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison on the outskirts of Baghdad.

April 8, 2003: A cameraman for the Spanish television network Telecinco and a Ukrainian TV cameraman for Reuters are killed when a U.S. tank fires at the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad.

April 6, 2003: A Kurdish translator for the BBC and 17 allied Kurdish fighters are killed in the U.S. bombing of a joint convoy of Kurds and U.S. Special Forces in northern Iraq.

March 31, 2003: American troops kill seven Iraqi women and children and wound two at a checkpoint near Najaf, in south-central Iraq, when their van carrying 13 people fails to stop as ordered.

Source: Associated Press through the LA times

Emboldened Shakespeare

Sonnet CXVIII

How oft, when thou, my music, music play'st,
Upon that blessed wood whose motion sounds
With thy sweet fingers, when thou gently sway'st
The wiry concord that mine ear confounds,
Do I envy those jacks that nimble leap
To kiss the tender inward of thy hand,
Whilst my poor lips, which should that harvest reap,
At the wood's boldness by thee blushing stand!
To be so tickled, they would change their state
And situation with those dancing chips,
O'er whom thy fingers walk with gentle gait,
Making dead wood more blest than living lips.
Since saucy jacks so happy are in this,
Give them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss.

And Hollywood Pokerfest is Urging a Crackdown on Illegal Gambling

The legal brothel industry in Australia is urging a crackdown on illegal sex.

Shockwave of the Week

The great Solomon Burke does None of Us Are Free.

Just to Confuse You

     "What we have discovered is that the model for Bush's accounts - the Federal Thrift Savings Plan for federal workers - actually paid securities firms a net total of only 16 cents for every $10,000 in workers accounts. The TSP had refused to make that information public - until now. It shows that fees actually being paid to Wall Street are hundreds of times smaller than some critics had assumed...
   "The 'windfall to Wall Street' argument rests on the idea that securities firms stand to reap hundreds of billions of dollars in fees from managing private Social Security accounts. What we present here is new evidence showing that's false.
-False Attacks Over "Windfalls" to Wall Street -

Stupid Answers of the Week

If you could put yourself in the IMDB as a character in any movie, what would it be?

A freshly blown-up Soldier shouting Noooooo or Waaaarrgh in the closing scenes of South Park, The Movie.
- Nick Kent - 

The guitar player in the house orchestra at Rick's in Casablanca, or one of the restaurant customers in the scene in the Godfather when Al Pacino shots the crooked police captain between the eyes.
- Kevin Wood -

    The stormtrooper in Star Wars Episode IV who hits his head on the door jam when entering the control room.
    Nope, wait, make that the Stormtrooper who makes fun of the one who hit his head.
    Nope, wait, make that the Stormtrooper who kicks Lucas's butt for creating Jar Jar.
- Locke Milholland -

I'd want to be Cary Grant, so Dare could see what "gay" REALLY means....
- Tim Omachi Gunma, Japan -

Third from center.
- james and katherine allard -

Hands down...Robert DeNiro's sidekick in Brazil. A fellow black market HVAC repairman who arrives and departs through second story acrobatics, just to repair your ducts and piss off central services. "Tired of ugly ducts?"
- Chris from Boca aka Palantir -

Rameses in The Ten Commandments
- Bill Moses -

Stupid Question of the Week

There are more than 130 e-mails in my "Answer These Immediately" folder. What excuse should I give the people I'm replying to months late?

a) my head was stuck in a mangle
b) my dick was stuck in my scanner
c) ?

Send your answers to stupidquestion@disinfotainmenttoday.com.

Quiz of the Week

To protect those most deserving of a second chance to get out of debt, Congress has added which one of the following provisions to the Bankruptcy Reform Bill?

A) Exemption for military personnel forced into bankruptcy by serving in Iraq.
B) Exemption for those forced into bankruptcy by job loss or medical crisis.
C) Exemption for those forced into bankruptcy after being taken aboard flying saucers for medical experiments.
D) Exemption for millionaires who have taken the precaution of hiding their assets in Asset Protection Trusts.

- Ironic Times -

Satan Doesn't Want You to Know

Here's the grand prize winner of the Greatest Grilled Cheese Sandwich in America and boy does it look good. 

Don't Take My Word For It

"An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't."
- Anatole France -

"It is foolish in the extreme not only to resort to force before necessity compels, but especially to madly create the conditions that will lead to this necessity."
- Benjamin Tucker -

    "The real question is: Would a link to a candidate's page be a problem? If someone sets up a home page and links to their favorite politician, is that a contribution? This is a big deal, if someone has already contributed the legal maximum, or if they're at the disclosure threshold and additional expenditures have to be disclosed under federal law. Certainly a lot of bloggers are very much out front. Do we give bloggers the press exemption?...
   "The FEC did an advisory opinion in the late 1990s (in the Leo Smith case) that I don't think we'd hold to today, saying that if you owned a computer, you'd have to calculate what percentage of the computer cost and electricity went to political advocacy.
    "It seems absurd, but that's what the commission did. And that's the direction Judge Kollar-Kotelly would have us move in."
- Declan McCullagh: The coming crackdown on blogging - Bradley Smith says that the freewheeling days of political blogging and online punditry are over. -

    "The companion of freed Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena on Saturday leveled serious accusations at US troops who fired at her convoy as it was nearing Baghdad airport, saying the shooting had been deliberate.
    "'The Americans and Italians knew about (her) car coming,' Pier Scolari said on leaving Rome's Celio military hospital where Sgrena is to undergo surgery following her return home. 'They were 700 meters (yards) from the airport, which means that they had passed all checkpoints.'
    "The shooting late Friday was witnessed by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's office which was on the phone with one of the secret service agents, said Scolari. 'Then the US military silenced the cellphones,' he charged.
    "'Giuliana had information, and the US military did not want her to survive,' he added."
- US attack against Italians in Baghdad was deliberate: companion -

    "Three weeks after the kidnapping of Giuliana Sgrena, the journalist with the Italian leftist daily Il Manifesto, the Italian Embassy in Baghdad advised all Italian journalists in Iraq to leave within 48 hours.
    "According to the Italian ANSA news agency, a tip-off from the Italian military secret service or Sismi, was behind the decision. Government officials here have denied a link between Sgrena's abduction and the call for the journalists' withdrawal. A few days earlier, in the only released video of Sgrena since her capture, she was shown pleading for her life and urging all journalists to leave Iraq...
   "The 'peace correspondent' as she is mostly referred to by her colleagues, Sgrena has been the quintessential anti-war activist, writer, and journalist throughout her long career. She was captured outside a mosque in Baghdad while waiting to interview Falluja refugees for a story on the impact of the raid on their lives. Like many female correspondents, Sgrena tended to focus on the effect of war on ordinary people rather than recount the battle stories."
- Samia Nkrumah: Shattered bridges. Is there more to the abduction of Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena than meets the eye? -

"U.S. Forces Accidentally Fire on Pope! Popemobile approached checkpoint at high rate of speed."
- Ironic Times -

    "The innocent Iraqi population is not using armored personal carriers nor do they use armored cars to help them protect themselves. More innocent Iraqi civilians are killed by your troops shooting at them than those killed by the criminal gangs. You probably know, Mr. President, that your trigger happy and nervous troops enjoy freedom from prosecution for these unlawful killings. From what I have witnessed those killers do not even stop to say sorry for their actions.
    "Allow me respectfully to remind you, Mr. President, that now more than 60% of the Iraqi working forces, in your liberated Iraq, are unemployed as compared to 30% before your liberation. It looks that your action has doubled the number of Iraqis liberated from earning a decent pay or a decent work."
- Ghazwan Al-Mukhtar: A Few Words From A "Liberated" Iraqi - We do not hate America for its freedom or democracy. We don't hate America. We hate the crimes, the destructions, and the devastation committed by America against the innocent people in our country -

"It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear."
- General Douglas MacArthur -

"As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless."
- Abraham Lincoln: Nov. 21, 1864 - (letter to Col. William F. Elkins) - 

"I have been an environmental advocate for twenty years, and I've been disciplined during that period about being nonpartisan in my approach to this issue. The worst thing that can happen to the environment is if it becomes the province of a single political party. Most of the environmental leaders in our country agree with me. Five years ago, if you asked the leaders of the major environmental groups in America, What's the gravest threat to the global environment?, they would have given you a range of answers: overpopulation, habitat destruction, global warming. Today, they will all tell you one thing: it's George W. Bush. This is the worst environmental president that we have ever had. You simply cannot speak honestly about the environment in any context today without speaking critically about this president. If you go to the Natural Resources Defense Council's web site you will see over 400 major environmental rollbacks that have been promoted by this administration over the last three and half years. It is a concerted, deliberate attempt to eviscerate thirty years of environmental law. It is a stealth attack, one that's been hidden from the public."
- Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: For the Sake of Our Children - We are living today in a science fiction nightmare, a world where, because somebody gave money to a politician, our children are brought into a world where the air is too poisonous for them to breathe -

"It's all right letting yourself go as long as you can let yourself back."
- Mick Jagger -

    "Pakistan: Hundreds of people were arbitrarily detained in the context of the US-led war on terror last year. Human rights abuses against women, children and religious minorities continued to be ignored by the government. There were severe restrictions on freedom of expression in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), particularly targeting musicians and artists.
    "Saudi Arabia: Hundreds of suspected religious activists, critics of the state and protesters were arrested or detained in 2004. Torture and ill-treatment remained rife, while at least 50 people were executed. Flogging and amputation continued to be imposed."
- Iain S. Bruce: Join the club: The top ten other regimes that imprison without trial -

"The public will believe anything, so long as it is not founded on truth."
- Edith Sitwell -

"Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers."
- T. S. Eliot -

    "'The principles of the Islamic Front contradict the confessions of the groups shown on TV. We prohibit targeting civilians, slaying hostages and spilling the blood of Iraqis whether civilians or members of police and national guard forces, under any pretext,' reads the statement, a copy of which was obtained by IOL.
    "The Front asked all its fighters to avoided fighting the occupiers inside the cities, for fear of jeopardizing the lives of civilians.
- Samir Haddad: Iraqi Resistance Distances Itself From Civilian Blood. The resistance faction called on its members to avoid cooperation, of any kind, with armed groups involved in killing Iraqis or civilians. -

"No one who cannot rejoice in the discovery of his own mistakes deserves to be called a scholar."
- Donald Foster -

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth."
- Umberto Eco -

    "Total deprivation of sleep, food and water, exposure to extreme heat and cold, up to 20 minutes in stress positions, up to 2 hours listening to white noise... plus any other interrogation technique deemed acceptable by the interrogation team' By any standards the waiver I signed for 'Guantanamo Guidebook' was special, and two weeks later when I was lying naked, shaved, shackled in a ball on the floor, alone with a hood over my head, listening to white noise with a cold fan at my back, I realized just how superficial the term 'informed consent' can be.
    "Two weeks earlier I had received an e-mail looking for students who would be willing to participate in a Channel Four documentary investigating US interrogation practices for Terror detainees held in Cuba. I was to be one of seven male volunteers from various backgrounds three Muslims: a father of two, a youth worker, and a recent graduate; plus Britain's fittest Fireman, a triathlete, Britain's Thai Kickboxing Champion and me, a plucky Oxford undergraduate finalist in philosophy and politics. The test was to see how we fared in a simulation of up to 60 hours under a team of retired US army interrogators, led by a founding member of Delta Force, who used the techniques officially sanctioned for Guantanamo detainees to extract information about us and make us confess to the scenarios we had acted out with the production company the week before. We were to withhold information and endure.
    "Why on earth would I, being of sound body and mind, sign that waiver and participate? The simple answer is that people should understand what interrogation really can entail this show needed to be made, someone had to be in it and it might as well be me."
- TORTURE: GUANTANAMO GUIDEBOOK - Article by "Prisoner 73" on his experience -

"Martha Stewart is getting out of prison so today the terror alert was raised from orange to pesto."
- David Letterman -

"During the second week of February, a completely unprecedented and unexplained heat wave struck Greenland. Already, melt off Greenland's glaciers has reached record proportions. Should this heat wave be a portent of a hot summer in the far north, the stage will be set for the unfolding of a serious climate catastrophe."
- Bizarre Greenland Winter Heat Wave -

    "I cannot imagine not being able to walk right in on any given Christian Sunday to Good Vibrations here in the City (or Toys in Babeland in Seattle or the Hustler store in LA or any number of other such clean 'n' decent 'n' prurient storefronts around the land) and stock up on sex lotions and potions and gadgets and gizmos on a whim, on a second date, on a weekend, before Valentine's Day, on Easter, on Christmas, just for the hell of it or because the SO winkingly suggested it or the giddy carnal urges demanded it or because I needed to buy sexy birthday gifts or just because my supplies were running low and I have yet to install that in-bedroom three-gallon Astroglide wall pump.
    "I cannot, in other words, imagine living in Alabama. Or Texas. Or Louisiana. Or Georgia. Or Tennessee. Or in any of the handful of terrified and morally convulsive states where they prohibit such activities, where the selling of 'genital stimulating devices' is outright illegal and deeply dreaded."
- Mark Morford: Sweet Home, Alabama Dildos - Yet another state gets to outlaw "genital stimulating devices," as God just rolls her eyes -

"We are a group of concerned students, faculty, staff and alumni of Rutgers University, along with residents of New Jersey, raising our voices together to declare that the ongoing oppression and occupation of the Palestinian people and their land shall not take place in our name, with our money, or with our implied support. Across the country and internationally, thousands of groups and individuals are calling for an end to the economic support of the State of Israel that enables it to continue its apartheid practices and brutal military occupation, in violation of human rights and international law. We join those people of conscience to call upon Rutgers University to remove its financial investments from Israeli corporations and corporations who do business with Israel, with a special emphasis on armaments firms and others who directly support Israels oppressive regime."
- Rutgers University Campaign for Divestment from Israeli Apartheid -

    "'The great motorcade,' wrote Canadian correspondent Don Murray, 'swept through the streets of the city The crowds but there were no crowds. George W. Bush's imperial procession through Europe took place in a hermetically sealed environment. In Brussels it was, at times, eerie. The procession containing the great, armour-plated limousine (flown in from Washington) rolled through streets denuded of human beings except for riot police. Whole areas of the Belgian capital were sealed off before the American president passed.'
   "Murray doesn't mention the 19 American escort vehicles in that procession with the President's car (known to insiders as 'the beast'), or the 200 secret service agents, or the 15 sniffer dogs, or the Blackhawk helicopter, or the 5 cooks, or the 50 White House aides, all of which added up to only part of the President's vast traveling entourage. Nor does he mention the huge press contingent tailing along inside the president's security 'bubble,' many of them evidently with their passports not in their own possession but in the hands of White House officials, or the more than 10,000 policemen and the various frogmen the Germans mustered for the President's brief visit to the depopulated German town of Mainz to shake hands with Prime Minister Gerhard Schroeder."
- Tom Engelhardt: Bush's Potemkin World -

"Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice."
- Baruch Spinoza -

"It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them."
- Agatha Christie -

"The early bird gets the worm; the second mouse gets the cheese."
- Steven Wright -

    "One of the main jobs at the Justice Department is enforcing the nation's civil rights laws. So when a nonprofit group was accused of employment discrimination last year in New York, the department moved swiftly to intervene but not on the side one might expect.
   "The Salvation Army was accused in a lawsuit of imposing a new religious litmus test on employees hired with millions of dollars in public funds.
   "When employees complained that they were being required to embrace Jesus Christ to keep their jobs, the Justice Department's civil rights division took the side of the Salvation Army."
- Richard B. Schmitt: Justice Unit Puts Its Focus on Faith -

    "Many of you are aware of the bankruptcy 'reform' bill now barreling through the Senate. This credit industry wish-list does nothing to address the causes of spiraling bankruptcy rates in America, like predatory lending practices, stagnant wages and a lack of health care. Instead, it cynically caricatures bankrupt families as 'deadbeats' who must be punished by higher costs and less protection from creditors–never mind the fact that about 96% of all bankruptcies are caused by medical emergencies, job loss, divorce or a death in the family.
   "The bill itself is bad enough. (More on specific provisions here, here and here.) But for my money, the most depressing aspect of this whole affair is how clearly it illustrates Senators’ slavish and cynical devotion to big donors. The credit and banking industries are among the nation’s largest campaign contributors – and it’s paying off."
- Bankruptcy “Reform” Act: Deforming the System -