WHAT ME WORRY?
Michael Jackson walks, and do I worry? Actually I’m kinda glad. I spent too much of my youth listening for the ominous bellow "get the weirdo", so I could take to my heels to avoid a beating from the more conventional youth of my village. (Although much of my time, I had a dog with me large enough to deter the neighborhood Nazis.) Certainly the joy of persecuting the freak seemed to ooze from prosecutor Tom Sneddon each time he showed up on my TV, so, all in all, I’m kinda relieved that such sentiments didn’t apparently factor into the verdict.

Over the weekend I read the NY Times and once again realized it’s a tad scarey that, in all the mainstream media, one has to wait for Frank Rich to write what ought to be fundamentally obvious, viz, viz and viz... (on Deep Throat)

"The fundamental right of Americans, through our free press, to penetrate and criticize the workings of our government is under attack as never before" was how the former Nixon speech writer William Safire put it on this page almost nine months ago. The current administration, a second-term imperial presidency that outstrips Nixon's in hubris by the day, leads the attack, trying to intimidate and snuff out any Woodwards or Bernsteins that might challenge it, any media proprietor like Katharine Graham or editor like Ben Bradlee who might support them and any anonymous source like Deep Throat who might enable them to find what Carl Bernstein calls "the best obtainable version of the truth."

"The attacks continue to be so successful that even now, long after many news organizations, including The Times, have been found guilty of failing to puncture the administration's prewar W.M.D. hype, new details on that same story are still being ignored or left uninvestigated. The July 2002 "Downing Street memo," the minutes of a meeting in which Tony Blair and his advisers learned of a White House effort to fix "the intelligence and facts" to justify the war in Iraq, was published by The London Sunday Times on May 1. Yet in the 19 daily Scott McClellan briefings that followed, the memo was the subject of only 2 out of the approximately 940 questions asked by the White House press corps, according to Eric Boehlert of Salon.

"Though Nixon aspired to punish public broadcasting by cutting its funding, he never imagined that his apparatchiks could seize the top executive positions at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Nor did he come up with the brilliant ideas of putting journalists covertly on the administration payroll and of hiring an outside P.R. firm (Ketchum) to codify an enemies list by ranking news organizations and individual reporters on the basis of how favorably they cover a specific administration policy (No Child Left Behind). President Bush has even succeeded in emasculating the post-Watergate reform that was supposed to help curb Nixonian secrecy, the Presidential Records Act of 1978."

For the whole story...
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/12/opinion/12rich.html?th&emc=th

My eye was also drawn to the following...
"And in Tennessee, Dr. Daniel D. Roberts gave up his ordinary practice not long ago to handle a growing workload at 10 jails across the state, nearly a third of whose prisoners, he estimates, have ravaged teeth owing to methamphetamine."
Which kinda means that one in three people doing time in Tennessee are speedfreaks. A sobering thought and a noisy jailhouse.

The secret word is Lemmy