Just enough time to wing a few odds ones into the stream. No connections, just highlights.

Can't Do That

That's what the court is going to tell a veteran Palm Beach County prosecutor who was arrested yesterday after the cops caught him sending a live Internet feed exposing himself to what he thought was an underage girl. Only problem was, it wasn't a girl at all, it was an Orlando television station doing an undercover expose of the kiddie-molester scene. Oops. Ira Karmelin inna heap o' trouble.

Can't Do That 2

That's what the anti-abortion crowd wants the law to say to women who seek to determine the course of their lives. Stories on this are breaking out all over the place, and I hope the consensus is strong enough to preserve Roe vs. Wade through yet another round of challenges. If you have time, check out Mark Morford's spirited commentary at the S.F. Chronicle. He says that "Women will always control their own reproduction," because they own that choice.

And certainly, the choice does not belong to Bible-waving antisex "pro-family" clusters of self-righteous, two-minute-missionary-position Christians living in Colorado Springs or Kentucky or Washington, D.C. Is this clear?

Can't Do That 3

In this case, what they said is that you can't buy non-alcoholic beer without showing ID. That's silly enough, but why did they want to card Don Meyer at all, since he's 76 years old?

"I tell you, I was really ticked off by this little-by-little chipping away at your rights," the World War II veteran said.

In Hot Water

That would be an 82-year-old Virginia man who was the victim of a home-invasion robbery on Monday. Arne Kristo made the mistake of falling for the old "My car broke down can I use your phone" gambit and the punk was in.

Once inside, he bound the man and forced him into the trunk of the car in an adjacent garage. The robber loaded items from the house into the car, and poured boiling water on Kristo after asking for information the bound man was unable to give.

Enter the Dragon

What do you make of this headline: Hunters Claim to Find 4-Winged Dinosaur.

The 128-million-year-old animal—called Microraptor gui, in honor of Chinese paleontologist Gu Zhiwei—was about two-and-a-half feet long and had two sets of feathered wings, with one set on its forelimbs and the other on its hind legs.

The Stigmata of Failure

Flunk out of high school in York, Pa., now and you'll get an un-diploma. The idea here is that you don't leave school empty-handed.

The undiploma informs students about what they stand to lose by not finishing their education and says the recipient has decided to drop out "with the full understanding that he/she may lose up to $420,000 in earnings during his/her lifetime" by working in low-wage jobs or being unemployed.

Our Busy Courts

You'd figure the halls of justice were jam-packed with cases involving important issues like who goes to jail, stuff like that. In this story, Judge Judith Barzilay has had to rule on the momentous question of whether or not the X-Men are human. She said, "No."

I mean look at 'em—a buncha damned comic-book freaks is what they are!

3:12:13 PM       

Now that we're three weeks into 2003 we can definitely see some trends taking shape. You're going to want to take a good look at your resume because other people will be sifting through it like bean counters on acid. Take extra care online since The Man has suddenly discovered that the Net works both ways. And watch what you say anywhere—people are taking to covertly recording their conversations. Because the game is called "Gotcha," and you want to be the guy saying it, not the one backpeddaling furiously with red cheeks and wild eyes looking for the Exit sign that suddenly doesn't exist.

So What Did He Mean?

Our lead hitter this morning is Donald Rumsfeld, who stepped in it a couple of weeks ago when he made some careless remarks about the draft at a press conference.

Oh, you betcha he's apologizing now, but the man's primary job is to motivate the troops, and no one can explain why he took a senseless lunge at the conscripted troops of the Vietnam era:

"If you think back to when we had the draft, people were brought in, they were paid some fraction of what they could make in the civilian manpower market because they were without choices," Rumsfeld said.

It varied from time to time, but there were all kinds of exemptions. And what was left was sucked into the intake, trained for a period of months, and then went out, adding no value, no advantage, really, to the United States armed services over any sustained period of time, because the churning that took place, it took enormous amount of effort in terms of training, and then they were gone."

Nabster

That would be the RIAA, the winners in a major ruling yesterday by a federal judge who says that Verizon must turn over the identity of a customer accused of downloading "more than 600 songs" in an hour last summer. Verizon has been putting up a good fight to protect the anonymity of the user in question, and we're sorry to see they lost here, because the ugly ramifications of this ruling go far beyond swapping a few MP3s.

U.S. District Judge John D. Bates ruled that a copyright holder can force an Internet service provider to disclose the names of customers accused of piracy without having to file individual lawsuits against alleged violators.

"Anyone can claim to be a copyright holder, and anyone can use this process to obtain your identity, whether you've infringed a copyright or not," said Sarah B. Deutsch, Verizon's associate general counsel. "This case will have a chilling effect on private communications, such as e-mail, surfing the Internet or the sending of files between private parties."

The Wages of Evil

Ever wonder how much money the mob actually makes? According to testimony in the trial of Peter Gotti going on right now in federal court, not that much.

Joseph "Little Joe" Defede—testifying at the racketeering trial of Peter Gotti—said he earned only $1,014,000 as boss of the Luchese crime family from 1994 to 1998.

The Price of Hyperbole

That's what the editors of the student newsletter at H.D. Woodson High School in Northeast Washington discovered after they ran a lead story last week on the subject of bullying. Being creative types, they decided a fictionalized article written by an 11th grader would make a good point. The first-person monologue about "getting even" ran alongside a cartoon of a girl in a padded cell, the idea being that she cracked under the strain of harrassment.

"When I finally decide to make my move, they'll wish they'd left me alone," the article says. "Their mothers will cry for years and years when they see what I have done. When I'm done with this place, there will be miles and miles of yellow tape and hallways filled with tears."

Men Kissing Men

Turns out that Richard Nixon didn't like it all that much. We discover this thanks to a story in today's Chicago Trib about the White House Tapes, all 3,700 hours of which are being released in stages by the National Archives. Here's an excerpt from a 1971 Oval Office conversation between then-President Nixon and H.R. Haldeman, who chat about Leonard Bernstein and Time magazine's coverage of the Kennedy Center opening and party:

"The magazine makes the point of showing Joan Kennedy with a slit up to the top of her thighs," Haldeman says. "But they also have a whole strip of pictures of Bernstein kissing everybody he could find and, ah, he's kissing a lot of men on the mouth, you know, including the big black guy. I think it's Alvin Ailey, the head of the dance troupe. And, you know, men kissing men is not...in that world but it is done."

"It is done," says Nixon. "You know the Jews do that."

"But not on the mouth!" shoots back Haldeman.

"He did?" asks Nixon.

"Cheek to cheek, yeah, both cheeks," informs Haldeman.

"Kissing on the mouth?!" asks Nixon.

"Yeah, right head on," says Haldeman.

"Ah, absolutely sickening," responds Nixon.

Haldeman agrees, "It's kind of revolting! Men kissing men on the cheek is a pretty accepted thing."

"Oh, sure," says Nixon.

"The Jews do it all the time. Jews," says Haldeman.

"Jews, all the black guys..." responds Nixon.

"Jewish sons always greet their fathers with a kiss. At any age," opines Haldeman.

Nixon, who has traveled the world as senator, vice president and president, observes, "Latin Americans, of course, have the 'Abrazo,' which is basically a cheek rubbing."

"Yeah, but they don't kiss kiss!" claims Haldeman. "They don't put their lips to the cheek. But the French do.

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