Global

AUSTIN, Texas -- Boy, we are marching backwards on the environment at a truly impressive pace. Between the Senate and the Bush administration, we are advancing to the rear, double time. The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, fuel efficiency standards, toxic waste -- this is literally sickening stuff.

Last week, the Senate voted 62 to 38 to postpone, yet again, increasing the fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks. According to he Sierra Club, the average fuel economy of cars sold last year was 20.4 miles per gallon, the lowest since 1980. The failed fuel efficiency proposal could have saved the country up to 1 million barrels of oil a day by 2016 -- as much as the United States currently imports from Iraq and Kuwait.

Saddam Hussein's regime is ordering thousands of small generators, which tells us that, for one, Saddam Hussein reckons that a U.S. attack may indeed be in the offing. When the bombing starts and the central generating stations get blown up all over again, there'll at least be some micro-generating capacity to keep a few lights on.

But just what is the likelihood of Bush cashing out his bluster about the Axis of Evil with an effort to finish off Saddam?

, Texas -- Gee, what a shame about Arthur Andersen. And it's going to make such a big mess, too. But wouldn't you like to hear the arguments being made in defense of Andersen put forward in a Texas courtroom, just to see what would happen?

"Your honor, members of the jury, it is true that my client Arthur Dwayne Andersen (it's practically mandatory to have the middle name Dwayne if you're going to prison in Texas) is guilty of theft by malpractice in this Enron deal. He cut a few corners and bent a few rules. And then he burned up all the office records to cover it up.

Tip-skimming has surfaced in Boston, and there can't be a tipper in America who, on hearing the news, doesn't exclaim, "The greedy bastards!" In a lawsuit filed March 7 in Suffolk Superior Court, five former servers from the venerable eatery Locke-Ober say the restaurant made them kick back the bulk of their tips to management. Then, when they made a fuss, they were fired. Suits are also being filed against three other restaurants by employees. The waiters allege that the restaurants are breaking state labor laws by grabbing their tips.

Skimming tips allows restaurant owners to pay managers less out of their own pockets because the tips make up the difference. And since waiters and kindred staff are paid subminimum wage, they thus get screwed twice. Greed isn't unique to Boston. This must be happening across the country. Soon we'll be asked to make it standard practice to tip a minimum of 30 percent: 15 percent for the workers, and 15 percent for the management.

What a sad day. I just wanted everyone to know that we are all fine. Many things happened this week. Earlier in the week we helped a Palestinian farmer harvest olives. His land is close to a settlement. (Peni Haifer) When we got there, the IDF came and said we had to leave. We told them that the farmer had gotten permission to harvest his olives from the cilvil adm, so after a while they decided we could stay. As they were leaving, settlers shot 10 rounds of amunition at us (over our heads to scare us) so the IDF came back and said they would stay until we were done. That was a good thing. We worked like a pack of horses!! The farmer said that most of his trees had been cut down by the IDF (500-1000 fruit and olive trees) two years ago. It seems the public is tired of hearing about the Palestinian farmers getting shot at, so sometimes IDF helps to protect them, but had we not been there, he would not have been able to get in his field.

In the aftermath of their high-profile failure to lure David Letterman, top executives at ABC are scrambling to repair the public-relations damage from the network's proclaimed eagerness to throw "Nightline" overboard. But the nation's TV viewers don't need to read the current wave of commentaries about the debacle to know that feverish pursuit of unlimited profits by media conglomerates is rapidly causing "TV journalism" to become oxymoronic.

With its suffocating pretensions and frequent idiocies, television has always cried out for sardonic mockery. At times, beginning with Mad Magazine's razor-sharp parodies a half-century ago, "the vast wasteland" has been appropriately skewered. But the day is fast approaching when satire of American TV will be impossible.

AUSTIN, Texas -- The Tonya Harding/Paula Jones match on "Celebrity Boxing" ... I have no idea how to finish that sentence. OK, it's a concept. Maybe it's camp. Or haute tacky. Sure, we could shoot whoever thought of it, but don't you get the creepy feeling it says something awful about the culture? I just can't figure out what. It's a "What is the world coming to?" moment.

The New York Times critic says this "is not a postmodern joke about Warholian fame," she thinks it's a cruelty joke. I suppose people have always paid to see freak shows. But I suspect even P.T. Barnum would have been taken aback by this. Once you start thinking about it, though, it has a perverse fascination. How about "Fantasy Celebrity Boxing" with Medea versus Lizzie Borden?

AUSTIN, Texas -- Thinking about nuclear weapons is sort of like looking directly at the sun: If you do it for more than a split second, you go blind. Or insane.

Our government is now contemplating such a ne plus ultra of idiocy that it's enough to make one yearn for the dear, departed days of MAD (mutual assured destruction). MAD was such a sane policy. Dr. Strangelove, report for duty immediately, the Bush administration needs YOU!

We are about to get a new nuclear weapons policy -- cute nukes. Teeny-tiny nukes. I was betting the Pentagon would name them "precision nukes," but I have once again underestimated our military's ability to obfuscate with mind-numbing language. The cute nukes are "offensive strike systems."

There's a piquant contrast in the press coverage across the decades of Billy Graham's various private dealings with Nixon, as displayed on the tapes gradually released from the National Archive or disclosed from Nixon's papers. I'll come shortly to the recent flap over Graham and Nixon's closet palaverings about the Jews, but first let's visit another interaction between the great evangelist and his commander in chief.

Though Britain has been blaring its support for America's "War on Terror," there is public disquiet in the United Kingdom at one aspect of the new era of freedom now prevailing in Afghanistan: the renewal of opium cultivation, banned with unprecedented and near total success by Mullah Omar in July of 2000. In order to receive U.S. aid, Hamid Karzai's coalition had to make a pro forma announcement in January that opium cultivation is still forbidden, but the extent of this renewed commitment to abstention from Afghanistan's prime cash crop was almost simultaneously displayed in the unceremonious ejection of Afghanistan's drug control agency from its offices in Kabul, with the drug czar's desk being kicked physically into the street.