The bird of paradise alights only on the hand that does not grasp. - John Berry

"I have read not only the first PATRIOT Act but also the second one, which has not yet been totally made public nor approved by Congress and to which there is already great resistance. An American citizen can be fingered as a terrorist, and with what proof? No proof. All you need is the word of the attorney general or maybe the president himself. You can then be locked up without access to a lawyer, and then tried by military tribunal and even executed. Or, in a brand-new wrinkle, you can be exiled, stripped of your citizenship and packed off to another place not even organized as a country — like Tierra del Fuego or some rock in the Pacific. All of this is in the USA PATRIOT Act. The Founding Fathers would have found this to be despotism in spades. And they would have hanged anybody who tried to get this through the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Hanged."

- Gore Vidal chats with LA Weekly about the constitution, treason, the Founding Fathers, capital punishment, and why we must put a stop to electronic voting.

"Black girls and white girls just don't mix / Because black girls are dumb and white girls are good chicks / White girls are good, I like white girls / I like white girls all over the world / White girls are fine and they blow my mind / And that's why I'm here now, telling you this rhyme / 'Cause black girls, I really don't like."

- That retard Eminem should never have taped himself "freestyling" back in 1993. That way, the hysterical goofballs at The Source hip-hop magazine couldn't call a press conference to accuse the vanilla vocalist of being a racist.

Oh, here's another nice story! - The Washington Post recently revealed that the CIA has been turning over Terror War prisoners to the intelligence services of countries that have no problem ignoring human rights, so that they may be tortured to extract information from them. The unprecedented turnover programme, obscurely referred to as "extraordinary rendition," was allegedly conceived at the topmost levels of official power. There are, of course, no plans to review its constitutionality.

What could be worse than being accused of sexually assaulting a 12 year old boy? How about if the alleged victim was suffering from terminal cancer at the time? That's right, folks... the latest scuttlebutt out of Neverland is that Michael Jackson has been using the Make-A-Wish Foundation as his own personal dating service. Jackson also reaps another, more insidious benefit from trawling childhood cancer wards. We've all heard the expression about how "dead men tell no tales." In the same sinister vein, dead children file no charges. Nor do they launch lawsuits, or try to blackmail you out of all that Beatles money.

Sure, J-Lo may require her coffee to be stirred counter-clockwise, and Van Halen may insist that concert venues provide bowls of M&M candies with the brown ones sifted out, but with the demands he's place on England for his historic state visit, Preznit Dubya puts both those primadonas to shame. Here's just a partial list of what had to go down before the paranoid Preznit would agree to set foot in the land of tea and crumpets:

First and foremost among the Secret Service's preparatory demands was that a "sterile zone" be established along the entirety of the Preznit's motorcade route. From the moment his armoured convoy leaves the airport until the day it brings him back there, Dubya's eyes will be spared the sight of protesters, who will be herded into a British version of our own First Amendment Zones, even though the Brits don't even have a First Amendment. How's that for irony!?

Advance teams have been collecting data on thousands of British citizens, many of whom haven't even the slightest chance of crossing Dubya's path. 14,000 police officers will be on duty for the duration of his visit. 250 heavily armed Secret Service agents - including 50 strategically stationed rooftop snipers - will fly in with the Preznit, and be posted throughout London.

A further 300 members of England's special forces and intelligence services have been called home from Mid-east hotspots to help the S.S. scour crowds for potential bomb- tossers. And, in an unprecedented move, Israel has allegedly assigned 8 top Mossad anti-terror agents as consultants to the entire operation.

Other indulgences bordering on the Caligulesque include paying to transport and equip a team of American chefs to cook all the Preznit's favorite foods (chili, bacon cheeseburgers), bringing along a 20-member medical team - including a specialist in gunshot wounds, and another who specializes in bio-terror - as well as a fully-equipped mobile operating room that will travel with the Preznit wherever he goes.

And those are just the demands the UK agreed to! Here are a few of the requests made by the USG that were so outrageous, even a lap-dog like Tony "Phone me" Blair refused to consent:

There will be no Blackhawk helicopters escorts, no diplomatic immunity for American agents who accidentally kill people they think might be "going for a weapon" or something, no shutting down London's vital Tube network for two days, and no being allowed to bring "battlefield weaponry" along with the Preznit, for potential use against "violent protesters." Oh, and sorry, Laura, but there'll be no sniffing of Prince Charles's britches allowed.

When all is said and done, the Brits will have spilled $8 million on this little get together, and the Americans, $30 million. Here's a a novel idea. Next time these towering co-conquerors want to hobnob, the governments of both countries could save a lot of money and bother if they'd only just fly to the middle of nowhere and meet in secluded shame, like the did when they flew to the Azores Islands before officially launching their unnecessary, illegal attack on Iraq