You've probably heard a lot of spooky tales about "the liberal media."

Ever since Vice President Spiro Agnew denounced news outlets that were offending the Nixon administration in the autumn of 1969, the specter has been much more often cited than sighted. "The liberal media" is largely an apparition -- but the epithet serves as an effective weapon, brandished against journalists who might confront social inequities and imbalances of power.

During the last few months, former CBS correspondent Bernard Goldberg's new book "Bias" has stoked the "liberal media" canard. His anecdote-filled book continues to benefit from enormous media exposure.

In interviews on major networks, Goldberg has emphasized his book's charge that American media outlets are typically in step with the biased practices he noticed at CBS News -- where "we pointedly identified conservatives as conservatives, for example, but for some crazy reason didn't bother to identify liberals as liberals."

But do facts support Goldberg's undocumented generalization? To find out, linguist Geoffrey Nunberg searched a database of 30 large

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?

Start with the diplomatic chessboard. Bush I put together a formidable coalition in 1990 after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. There's scant chance of Bush II matching that achievement. Among the European allies, only the U.K. has signified support, and it will be harder to enlist France, let alone Germany. In 1990, Arab nations mustered to the coalition, led by Saudi Arabia, which trembled at the prospect that after Kuwait, it might be next. The likelihood that Saudi Arabia or any other Arab territory would endorse an attack today, let alone allow its territory to be the springboard for a ground assault on Iraq is remote, as the visit of Vice President Richard

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.

Hovering somewhere between charity and a bribe, the tip is one of our most polymorphous social transactions. At its most crude, it can be a

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 -- 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."