The BBC recently sent an e-mail to its correspondents, which instructed them that they are not to refer to Saddam Hussein as a "former dictator," but instead should call him "the deposed former president." Fortunately, the producers and editors at the BBC can only exercise this authority over their own journalists, so they cannot prohibit publications like this one from calling them a bunch of toffee-nosed gits.

U.S. District Judge and Clinton appointee Paul L. Friedman has granted the request of failed presidential assassin John Hinckley that he be allowed to leave the mental hospital for unsupervised visits with his parents. Of course, if they're unsupervised visits, then nobody really knows whether Hinckley's going to his parents' house, to the White House, or to a car parked within a block of Jodie Foster's front door.

According to an Associated Press report, the refrigerator in Saddam's bunker contained candy bars, hot dogs, and 7-Up. But wait a minute ... hot dogs are traditionally made primarily of pork. Of course, there are also beef franks. Can it be that the Butcher of Baghdad has been partaking of Hebrew Nationals?

Saddam Hussein has been captured by American soldiers from the 4^th Infantry Division, who pulled him out of a small, primitive bunker in a small town called al-Dawr, just outside his hometown of Tikrit. He was easily identifiable by his adherence to the Islamic terrorists' standard code of wily disguises (If you have a beard, shave it off; if you don't, grow one). The brutal former dictator surrendered without a fight, eschewing his glorious opportunity to martyr himself, despite having a pistol and two AK-47s at his disposal. The biggest remaining question, according to an unnamed intelligence official quoted by Time magazine, is, "Have we actually cut the head off the snake, or is he just an idiot hiding in a hole?" It is entirely plausible, however, that both are true.

While in custody, Saddam Hussein told interrogators that he has no weapons of mass destruction. Sure, it's an obvious lie, but at least it provided a ray of sunshine in what must otherwise have been the darkest day in the life of Mike Farrell.

The Supreme Court has voted 5-4 to uphold the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law's restrictions on ads critical of politicians within sixty days of a general election. The Court seems to have determined that the First Amendment, like the Second, confers rights upon the government, instead of the people. Rep. Marty Meehan (D, Mass.) called the ruling a "major victory for American democracy."

Nature magazine reports that a team of scientists has succeeded in using the embryonic stem cells of a mouse to create sperm cells, in research they hope can someday be used to treat sterility. The inferred human application of this experiment is clear from the "reproductive rights" the Supreme Court supposes we have. Killing already existing embryos in order to make sperm: this is what now passes for "progress" according to our esteemed "scientific community."

In an attempt to explain why people in a suburban community opposed the relocation of a methadone clinic in their neighborhood, Pittsburgh mayor Tom Murphy blamed racism -- a curious accusation, since by making it Murphy was himself translating drug addicts to mean blacks. Murphy proceeded to blame endemic racism for urban flight, claiming that acquaintances of his are afraid to visit him "because there are young black kids hanging out in the street." He added that, "If we don't confront that attitude, then we're never going to have a serious discussion about consolidation [between city and county governments]. Actually, it is he who is obstructing this consolidation, by self-servingly insulting the suburbanites whose help he badly needs for a city he's just declared to be under "distressed status." Mayor Murphy apparently cannot comprehend that people are fleeing Pittsburgh because of the high taxes, severe fiscal mismanagement, increasing violent crime and failing public schools over which he's presided. Therefore, it must be those people who are at fault. Obviously, this is a man with a bright future in the Democratic Party.

Democrat presidential candidate Joe Lieberman is proposing that producers of junk food be forced to warn the public that their snacks are not nutritious. "I'm not saying if you eat a jelly doughnut or have a high-sugar bottle of soda, you're going to get sick," he explained. "But if you have too many, it's going to affect your health." Naturally, he doesn't give people credit for knowing that already, so we must need federal control over Dolly Madison commercials. Surprisingly, this stand did not win him the endorsement of his former running mate, Al Gore.

The International Olympic Committee has announced that it is going to allow transsexuals to compete. "We will have no discrimination," said Patrick Schamasch, medical director of the IOC. No discrimination between men and women competing in the women's 100-meters, that is. Alas, the decision comes years too late to help the East German team.

The New Hampshire Supreme Court has ruled in a divorce case that a man cannot charge his wife with adultery if she has cheated on him with another woman, on the basis that the term "adultery" applies only to heterosexual intercourse. So, legally, gays and lesbians cannot be adulterers. But heaven help anyone who suggests that they cannot consecrate a marriage.

After British prime minister Tony Blair was released from being hospitalized with an irregular heartbeat, former president Bill Clinton claimed to have known about the P.M.'s condition years beforehand. Blair's spokesman said he was "slightly mystified by this story," since Blair was not himself aware of the problem before checking himself into the hospital a week earlier. It seems that Clinton felt his pain before even he did.

Columnist Bob Novak reports that Sen. Ted Kennedy (D, Mass.) twice recently voted the opposite of the way he intended, but changed his vote before the final tally. Kennedy had inadvertently voted in favor of the partial-birth abortion ban, and of the president's request to issue a grant to rebuild Iraq, but reversed each vote at the prodding of panicked fellow Democrats. The canvassing board will have a devil of a time interpreting his "intended vote" next November.

In a column slamming new California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger as a "serial groper," St. Petersburg Times columnist Mary Jo Melone argued against comparisons between Schwarzenegger and Bill Clinton by writing, "There was a difference, if not in their conduct then in their choices. Clinton's women wanted him." After being deluged with phone calls and e-mails reminding her of Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey and Paula Jones among others, Melone admitted she had "overlooked them."

USA Today reports that the U.S. has recovered documents in Tikrit that demonstrate that the Iraqi government harbored and made regular payments to 1993 World Trade Center bomber Abdul Rahman Yasin. No comment yet from the French, the Germans, or Howard Dean.

Sen. Ted Kennedy (D, Mass.) said in an AP interview that the war against Iraq was "a fraud made up in Texas to give Republicans a political boost." Mind you, the war could have given a lot of Democrats a political boost also, if only they'd been on our side.

A three-judge panel from the frequently overturned Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals suspended the California gubernatorial recall vote scheduled for Oct. 7^th, on the basis that the use of punch-card ballots in some districts. They supposedly based their decision on the "equal protection" argument advanced in the 2002 Bush v. Gore decision, but interpreted it in such a way that would have decided that case in Gore's favor. Handily, the postponement, if upheld, would delay the recall vote to the same day as the 2004 presidential primaries, when Democrat turnout would be highest.

In response to a National Review cover story that labeled Pennsylvania's Arlen Specter "The Worst Republican Senator," current and former Senate Republican leaders Bill Frist, Trent Lott, Bob Dole, and Howard Baker issued a press release saying that Specter is "a team player and one of the best Senators in promoting Republican values and policies." At least that goes a long way toward explaining the new prescription drug benefit, runaway education spending, failure to challenge the Democrats' filibuster of judicial appointees, etc.

Embattled California governor Gray Davis complained recently that "Republican ideology in Sacramento is that they would rather shoot their mother than raise any tax." Keep an eye out on future issues of the Los Angeles Times for the following poll question: Would you prefer government of California to (a) raise your taxes, or (b) shoot your mother?

Sadistic, slobbering, smut-peddling publisher, and therefore Democrat politician Larry Flynt started his campaign for governor of California by publicly praying for the death of talk show host Bill O'Reilly. The prayer, which he has posted on the internet, begins, "Dear (God/Allah/Buddha/other entity of your choice), we ask you to afflict Bill O'Reilly with a brain aneurysm that will lead to his slow and painful death." It becomes considerably less clever from there. No condemnations yet from the ACLU, People for the American Way, or Americans United for the Separation of Church and State.

Using the Supreme Court's recent Lawrence v. Texas decision as precedent, lawyer H. Louis Sirkin is arguing that his client, Shawn Jenkins, has a "due process right to privacy" which allows him to sell pornographic videos in his store, despite the fact that this violates Ohio's obscenity laws. If Mr. Sirkin wins his case, that would mean that the Court's concocted "right to privacy" now applies to the public display of pornography. Incredibly, there doesn't appear to be anything in the nebulous Lawrence decision that rules out that result.

An organization called the World Technology Network has given its 2003 World Technology Award for Ethics to Australian infanticide advocate Peter Singer. The Princeton professor, who chairs the Center for Human Values in that school's bioethics department, believes that parents should have a window of 28 days in which to have newborns put to sleep if they decide they don't like them. He is also an animal-rights activist who denounces "speciesism" and urges society to become tolerant of bestiality. The WTN calls Singer an "innovator."

The National Constitution Center opened in Philadelphia this Fourth of July. Featured in it is an exhibit called the "National Family Tree," a collection of one hundred Americans whom the center says are among the most important to our constitutional history. One of those included in the exhibit is drooling smut-peddling weasel and therefore Democratic Party activist Larry Flynt.

The Republicans won a 10-0 vote in the Senate Rules Committee that will send a bill to the floor that would forbid the filibustering of judicial nominees. All nine Democrats on the committee were absent for the vote. They must have heard about those free continental breakfasts at the Holiday Inn in Ardmore, Oklahoma.

The Supreme Court declined to resolve the legal status of affirmative action in a pair of rulings on the University of Michigan's race-conscious admissions policies. By a 6-3 vote, the Court struck down an undergraduate admissions rule that explicitly awarded additional points to members of minority groups, but Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy crossed over to form a 5-4 majority upholding that university's law school policy, which takes race into consideration in order to assure that minorities fill a quota of 10 percent of each class. Writing for the majority in the second case, O'Connor ruled that "diversity" qualifies as a "compelling state interest" for violating the Fourteenth Amendment's "equal protection" clause, by denying the plaintiff the protection of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act..

Executive editor Howell Raines and managing editor Gerald Boyd were forced to resign from the New York Times, in the wake of the scandal stemming from the plagiarism and fabrications of inexplicably embittered reporter Jayson Blair. In an interview following the departure of his former editors, Blair called the episode a "complicated human tragedy." Psst ... it's not that complicated, Jayson. You're a boob!

Iraqi doctors have revealed, to the surprise of nobody reasonable, that the infamous "baby parades" that purported to display Iraqi children starved to death by U.N. sanctions were phony, that the babies used had died of natural causes, and that many of them had been refrigerated for weeks beforehand. "We were not allowed to return the babies to their mothers for immediate burial, as is the Muslim tradition," Dr. Hussein al-Douri told the London Telegraph. "The mothers would be hysterical and sometimes threaten to kill us, but we knew that the real threat was from the government. ... All ten hospitals in Baghdad were involved in this and the quota was between 25 and 30 babies a month, which they would say had died in one day."

The May 20^th issue of The Hill reports that presumptive 2004 presidential candidate Dick Gephardt (D, Mo.) has missed 85 percent of congressional votes so far in 2003. He must be holding out for a free case of liquor from Willie Nelson.

A house panel has written a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson, asking why HHS is spending $137,000 in taxpayers' money to study the sexual habits of aging men, and furthermore, why it is using money for that project which had been allocated to the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Rep. Dave Weldon (R, Fla.) is outraged that the NICHD would reject his request to study potential relations between childhood vaccines and autism, when just last year it funded a study that paid women to watch pornographic movies. Some things never change, especially when Democrat administrations are followed by the appointment of "progressive" Republican cabinet appointees like Thompson.

Rap star Eminem has refused to give Weird Al Yankovic permission to shoot a video spoofing him. But then, what would be the point?

Sen. Robert Byrd (D, W.Va.) and others in his party have complained that President Bush's flight to the USS Abraham Lincoln for his postwar speech cost too much money. Black Republican activist and Gulf War veteran Kevin Martin argues that the former KKK recruiter is really mad that the historic speech took place on a carrier named after the Great Emancipator. If that sounds unlikely, then how much less likely is it that Byrd is just looking out for the taxpayers?

University of Miami assistant football coach Dan Werner was publicly accused by quarterback Derrick Crudup Jr. of making "racially insensitive remarks," which Crudup, who is black, said indicated a bias in favor of white quarterback Brock Berlin. As it turned out, those remarks made by Werner, the team's quarterbacks coach, were directed at himself. Crudup complained that he felt intimidated when Werner referred to himself as a "cracker" and a "redneck." The conflict was apparently resolved when both parties met with head coach Larry Coker, but just think what this new sensitivity could mean to public discourse. Jeff Foxworthy may have to change his routine to "You might be a rural person whose ethnicity is unimportant but who does not conform to the arbitrary standards of the hegemonic culture if ..."

Former president Bill Clinton tells the Washington Post that the United States will cease to be the world's leading superpower at some point in the next three decades, when it will be overtaken by either China or the European Union. Undoubtedly, he's figuring a successful Hillary for President campaign into the equation.

According to an AP report, the much anticipated protest of the Masters golf tournament at the Augusta National Golf Club produced seventeen members of Martha Burk's National Council of Women's Organizations. They were joined by about twenty picketers from Jesse Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, although Jackson himself uncharacteristically didn't bother to show up. And to think, it only took Burk ten months to organize it. Meanwhile, the tournament drew its third-best ratings ever for CBS. Future corporate sponsors ought to be quaking at the thought of an NCWO boycott.

CNN news director Eason Jordan reveals that his network has known about many of Saddam's atrocities since the first Gulf War, but claims that they were prevented from informing the world about them for fear of reprisals against journalists and their sources. This means that twelve years of reporting from Iraq by the network that calls itself "the most trusted name in news" have been distorted in such a way as to make Saddam's regime appear unrealistically civilized. CNN could have avoided the results it feared if it had pulled out of Baghdad altogether, but instead it opted to keep reporters there so that they could conceal the truth while appearing to repeatedly scoop its rivals. Keep this in mind the next time you see a news report from this "trusted" network's bureau in Havana.

Former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger tells Fox News that the New York Times approached him about writing an op-ed piece, but that he was told, "What we want is criticism of the administration." Surprisingly, the Times editors did not require him to condemn the Augusta National Golf Club as well.

Ed Gernon, producer of the CBS miniseries Hitler: The Rise of Evil, says the production is meant to serve Americans as a warning about the Bush administration. So President Bush is evil? That sort of judgmental language was thought to be verboten at CBS.

A veteran of treason through three wars, Peter Arnett has been fired by MSNBC for his pro-Saddam rant on government-controlled Iraqi television. He was hired almost immediately, however, by the Daily Mirror, a British tabloid which has acted as a propaganda organ for the Iraqi madman's regime. Coming soon, we can expect Arnett to divulge America's secret plan to send Amelia Earhart and D.B. Cooper on a commando raid to kill innocent Iraqi children.

Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls delivered an official response to President Bush's ultimatum to Saddam Hussein, warning that, "Those who decide that all peaceful means that international law makes available are exhausted assume a grave responsibility before God, their conscience and history." That's obviously more than the Vatican is willing to do itself.

"Anti-war" protesters in La Habra, CA have burned and shredded 87 American flags from a display memorializing the 9-11-01 terrorist attacks. Don't question their patriotism, though.

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan warns that any U.S. led attack on Iraq without the approval of the United Nations would be illegitimate. Of course, that's also what critics of President Bush say about his election, but the results counted anyway.

The New York Times reports that a group of wealthy liberals is going to try to produce a radio network to compete with Rush Limbaugh. Clinton-Gore donors Sheldon and Anita Drobny are said to be negotiating with alleged satirist Al Franken to anchor the network, despite the meager sales of Franken's book about Limbaugh, compared to the books Limbaugh has written himself. In a preemptive attempt to explain why a show by Franken would fail, agent Henry Reisch said, "I think the audience isn't there for a liberal Rush, because I think liberals don't want to hear that kind of demagoguery." Heavens, no. The party that accuses its opponents of trying to starve schoolchildren, bring back slavery and destroy the planet would never stoop to that.

Life Issues Institute president Dr. John C. Willke is warning pro-lifers to be wary of Bush chief counsel Alberto Gonzales. Twice, Dr. Willke has gotten the opportunity to ask Judge Gonzales direct questions about how he might rule on abortion-related cases, and he reports that the answers contradicted what most conservatives have been led to believe about the former Texas state Chief Justice. On one occasion, Willke asked, "Would you say that, regarding Roe v. Wade, stare decisis [Lat. "to stand by that which is decided"] would be governing here?" Gonzales answered "yes." A couple months later, Willke got a chance to pose the question a different way: "Many of us feel that the Constitution does not speak to permissive abortion. Would you comment?" Gonzales' answer: "The Constitution is what the Supreme Court says it is." Speculation is that President Bush intends to appoint a Hispanic to the Supreme Court. In light of these remarks from Judge Gonzales, it's plain to see why the Democrats want to narrow the field by filibustering the appointment of Miguel Estrada to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

Iraq has been found to possess ballistic missiles whose range exceeds the limits set by U.N. Resolution 1441. While Prime Ministers Tony Blair of Great Britain and John Howard of Australia were quick to cite the missilies as yet another "material breach," the German government insisted that they were not the "smoking gun" that would be necessary to justify going to war -- although it's doubtful they'll change their minds, even once the missiles are smoking.

National Council of Women's Organizations president Martha Burk took time out from harassing the Augusta National Golf Club to complain that professional women's basketball players are underpaid. In doing so, however, she overlooked a far more pressing issue: the discriminatory WNBA has no male members. Let the boycotts commence.

Magicians Penn & Teller performed a sacrilegious "comedy sketch" at a roast for a fellow magician called Amazing Jonathan, in which they mocked the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. According to Las Vegas Review columnist Norm Clarke, a midget, dressed as an angel, "performed a simulated sex act on the near-naked Teller," who was portraying Christ. Amazing Jonathan later ridiculed those who walked out on the skit as "gospel magicians" (whatever in blazes that means), and defended it by imbecilically explaining, "I know that Penn is a practicing atheist, and I agree with him that Christianity can be dangerous. Look at the Trade Center." Amazing indeed. At no time did anyone even see his brain leave his head.

Almon Glenn Braswell, who was pardoned by Bill Clinton early in 2001, has been arrested on charges of income tax evasion. Braswell had paid Clinton's brother-in-law, Hugh Rodham, $200,000 to secure the pardon. Rodham claimed at the time the payment was discovered that he was returning the payment, as if that were relevant, after the pardon had already been issued. Now it is Braswell who may have to return a payment -- the payment of his debt to society, that is. The Clinton Legacy continues ...

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