AUSTIN, Texas -- As our coaches used to say, "OK, people, settle down and listen up." We have been enjoying a lovely little spate of French-bashing here lately. Jonah Goldberg of The National Review, who admits that French-bashing is "shtick" -- as it is to many American comedians -- has popularized the phrase "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" to describe the French. It gets a lot less attractive than that.

George Will saw fit to include in his latest Newsweek column this joke: "How many Frenchmen does it take to defend Paris? No one knows, it's never been tried." That was certainly amusing. One million, four hundred thousand French soldiers were killed during World War I. As a result, there weren't many Frenchmen left to fight in World War II. Nevertheless, 100,000 French soldiers lost their lives trying to stop Hitler.

On behalf of every one of those 100,000 men, I would like to thank Mr. Will for his clever joke. They were out-manned, out-gunned, out-generaled and, above all, out-tanked. They got slaughtered, but they stood and they fought. Ha-ha, how funny. In the few places where they had tanks, they held splendidly.

The Columbus anti-war demonstrations had an excellent turnout this weekend. Photographs from the February 15th march and rally can be found at cpanews.org/peace/peace.html.

Columbus Rally and March

Columbus County Rally and March

Additionally, the Coshocton County Coalition for Peace and Social Justice held a peace rally and march on Feb.15, 2003. This was the first anti-war demonstration held in Coshocton. Three guest speakers and two coalition speakers addressed the demonstrators, who numbered about 40. The crowd consisted of college students from Muskingum College, local residents young and old, as well as some clergy and other professionals. General speaking topics addressed non-violent opposition to war, the just war theory, misinformation disseminated by the administration to fuel war fever, and the call to activism on peace and social justice issues.

AUSTIN, Texas -- "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." -- Dwight David Eisenhower, April 16, 1953.

The news is not good. Osama bin Laden wants us to invade Iraq. We're at orange on the alert code. The economy is tanking. We're spending $1.08 billion a day on the military.

The president wants a $674 billion tax cut. In the first year, 50 percent of that tax cut would go the richest 1 percent of Americans and three-quarters of it would go to the richest 5 percent. In the years beyond that, the concentration at the top actually gets worse, according to citizens for Tax Justice. To pay for that, he wants to raise the rent on subsidized housing for the poorest people in the country and break up Head Start, sending it down to the states, where governments are frantically cutting everything they can. Money to pay for everything from cleaning up Superfund sites to leaving no child behind is being slashed to pay for this obscene tax cut.

AUSTIN, Texas -- And another thing CEOs should probably avoid ... Sprint Corp. has just fired its two top executives for (I love this part) a conflict of interest. It seems these worthy gentlemen felt perfectly entitled to pay zero taxes on more than $100 million in stock-option gains. Isn't that special? But that's not why they were fired.

They were fired because Sprint's accounting firm Ernst & Young set up these lucrative tax shelters. After the IRS disallowed the shelters, the execs were at war with their own company's auditors. Not nice.

It gets better. In return for giving the two execs what turned out to be very bad advice, Ernst & Young got $6 million -- paid by Sprint. Now the execs owe the taxes and penalties, but they no longer have the money, since Sprint's stock price hit the skids in the general implosion of telecommunications. Plus, they are no longer employed

Pretty big mess, and it's happening all over.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Normally, I don't bother to follow the doings of the far right. Having lived in Texas all these years, I figure I don't have much to learn on that score. But I was much struck by a report in Salon, the online magazine, on the recent conference of the Conservative Political Action Committee.

It sounded no more than usually loony to me -- equating Islam with fascism and terrorism, attacks on feminazis, the dread environmentalists, family planning, Harry Potter and other menaces to civilization. No crazier than the John Birch Society or the militia movement I've known all these years. But reporter Michelle Goldberg noted one striking difference: The conference was attended by people in power. Vice President Dick Cheney gave the keynote speech, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao spoke, as did House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, Senate Whip Mitch McConnell, Republican National Committee Chair Marc Racicot, etc.