Parable No. 1: The Propane Valve Crisis

In California and other states across this great nation, we have been confronting deadlines on new propane bottle valves. I speak of the mostly 5-gallon propane gas bottles soon to be seen in trailer parks, on RV's, Webber BBQ's, boats, back porches and street kitchens. You name it, and there's probably a 5-gallon propane bottle around somewhere.

I recently came across a vivid illustration of the passion aroused by this crisis in Butte County, in the Chico area of Northern California. The local propane distributor told my host, Jeff Howell, that he 'd been physically attacked twice in the past four weeks by angered denizens of trailer parks.

Why was he attacked?

The answer can be traced to the run-up in propane gas prices in recent years, which has prompted more and more small stores like 7/11 to sell propane. The inexperienced propane dispenser simply fills the bottle till clouds of propane inform the dispenser that it's time to stop. The overfilled propane bottle is taken to the back porch, where, perhaps, it

Right in the wake of House Majority leader Dick Armey's explicit call for two million Palestinians to be booted out of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and Gaza as well, came yet one more of those earnest articles accusing a vague entity called "the left" of anti-Semitism. This one was in Salon, by a man called Dennis Fox, identified as an associate professor of legal studies and psychology at the University of Illinois. Salon titled Fox's contribution, "The shame of the pro-Palestinian left: Ignorance and anti-Semitism are undercutting the moral legitimacy of Israel's critics."

Over the past 20 years, I've learned there's a quick way of figuring just how badly Israel is behaving. There's a brisk uptick in the number of articles here by Jews accusing the left of anti-Semitism. These articles adopt varying strategies, but the most obvious one is that nowhere in them is there much sign that the author feels it necessary to concede that Israel is a racist state whose obvious and provable intent is to continue to steal Palestinian land, oppress Palestinians, herd them into smaller and smaller enclaves, and in all likelihood ultimately drive them

EL PASO, Texas -- This is one of those stories, like drought, that happens quietly over a long period, so no one quite notices how horrible it is ... except those directly affected. Those who pay attention to the Texas-Mexican border have known for years now about the murder of women in Juarez.

Mexican and American feminists have tried to draw attention to what at first seemed just an extraordinary case, or series of cases. There was one arrest that looked good (and a bunch of cases of guys who confessed after the cops beat the crap out of them -- this has now become a standard claim), and for a time it seemed the police might have the right guy in custody. But the killing continued.

The newspaper Norte of Juarez bannered the story again last week under the headline, "State Justice Fails." Above it on the front page were the numbers: "More than 250 women murdered, 19 arrests, no one sentenced." The bodies of 274 women who fit the pattern have been found since 1993.

The state police claim only 76 are the victims of serial killers and that they have solved one-third of those cases. It's hard to find anyone

A basic principle of democracy is that every person's vote should have equal weight. So we might expect some public discourse about the fact that the U.S. Senate is fundamentally undemocratic. But it's a complete non-issue among politicians and journalists alike.

One of the key roles of news media should be to raise important questions that powerful people in government don't want to ask -- or answer. However, while thousands of reporters and pundits stay busy with all kinds of stories about politics, they keep detouring around a central tilt of the national legislature's upper chamber.

Like the "purloined letter" openly displayed in a famous tale by Edgar Allan Poe, the Senate's huge structural flaw is right in front of us all the time -- but we don't see it as anything more than an eternal legacy of the nation's political heritage.

The past has ways of enduring. Today, in the 100-member Senate, cattle may be more equitably represented than people.

For instance, Montana -- with a total of 902,195 residents, according to the 2000 census -- has a pair of U.S. senators. So does

AUSTIN, Texas -- In 1901, a Henry T. Finch, writing in The Independent, reported: "Women's participation in political life would involve the domestic calamity of a deserted home and the loss of the womanly qualities for which refined men adore women and marry them. ... Doctors tell us, too, that thousands of children would be harmed or killed before birth by the injurious effect of untimely political excitement on their mothers."

I'm trying to imagine an Al Gore speech that would provoke "untimely political excitement."

Actually, what I'm trying to do is remind y'all of the fine American tradition of everybody and his hamster feeling free to make vast, sweeping prescriptions for the entire female gender. We have just been through a modest little media orgy over both Karen Hughes' decision to resign from the White House and Sylvia Hewlett's book pointing out that it gets harder to have babies as we get older.

Everybody gets to have an opinion about Karen Hughes' resignation, as though we were somehow entitled to sit in judgment of her. Feminists supposedly feel (although I haven't been able to find one who