BuzzMachine

Homeland security, Israeli style
: A woman shopping in an Israeli grocery store shot a terrorist suicide bomber, averting disaster. From the Jerusalem Post:

At least one small explosion did take place, leaving one customer lightly wounded but causing no casualties, said Jerusalem Post reporter Margot Dudkevitch. Nails from one of the explosions littered the floor. Further tragedy was averted when a woman shopping in the packed supermarket apparently saw the terrorist trying to set off a second explosion and shot him twice in the head from close range.

Instapundit: Please don’t use this as another justification for gun-love. This is Israel.

Sticks ‘n’ stones
: The NY Times reports today on the new and redefined words and phrases that are front and center in our collective vocabulary after 9.11 — “9.11″ itself taking on a momentous new meaning. From the American Dialect Society comes a long list:

: 9/11 in all its forms

: ground zero

: burka, burka blue, women of cover

: theoterrorism (hadn’t heard that one but I like it)

: weaponize and weapons-grade

: homeland security

: debris surge, debris storm (I called it just The Cloud)

: shuicide bomber (a tasteless Leno)

: “so September 10″

: “Let’s roll!”

I would add:

: anthraxophobia

: jihad as an all-purpose adjective

: bin as an all-purpose prefix

: I know other bloggers would add Islamofascist and anti-idiotarian (not yet in common usage, I’d say)

: I hope my coinage, “he decade,” catches on

What else? Send nominees here.

After
: Here are, as Little Green Footballs aptly put it, the heartbreaking satellite images of the World Trade Center before and after. Credit: spaceimaging.com. [via Den Beste]

Speed
: The NY Times reveals more frightening data about the flights that hit the World Trade Center. The second jet, which hit the south tower, was traveling faster than the first jet and that is the latest theory on why that tower fell first even thought it was hit later (my unscientific opinion is also that the second jet hit lower and so there was greater weight atop the melting steel beams).

In any case, the statistics are harrowing. That second jet, the United plane, was traveling at an estimated 586 mps, 100 mph faster than the first jet. The Times says it “was moving so fast that it was at risk of breaking up in midair as it made a final turn toward the south tower, traveling at a speed far exceeding the 767-200 design limit for that altitude, a Boeing official said. ‘These guys exceeded even the emergency dive speed,’ said Liz Verdier, a Boeing spokeswoman. ‘It’s off the chart.’ ”

I have nightmares not just about what did happen that day but what could have happened.If these people had missed their target and slammed into the ground, the spread of damage would have been huge, the carnage even worse. If the Tower had toppled even sooner or in a different direction, more would have died. At the speed at which these evil lunatics were traveling, this and more could have happened. And so many millions of close calls (mine included) would not have been close calls.

A memorial
: It appears there may be an agreement on a temporary memorial to New York’s 9.11 victims. Says the NY Post:

temporary memorial park honoring the victims of Sept. 11 may include a glass structure etched with the names of everyone who perished, sources said yesterday.

Sources said the idea, still in the early stages, calls for a glass box or a small dome that would fit over sculptor Fritz Koenig’s “Sphere” – a massive bronze artwork recovered from the World Trade Center site.
The glass could be etched with the names of all the nearly 3,000 trade center victims.
The favored location is a small, triangular park known as “teardrop park” on Murray Street in Battery Park City, the sources said.
The idea surfaced as a separate proposal, a month-long “Towers of Light” tribute sponsored by the Municipal Arts Society, has made progress – but still hasn’t gotten City Hall approval.

I think this is a fitting beginning.

Blog wisdom
: Many have wisely linked to the National Post story on blogging quoting the wise Ken Layne. I want to quote him here too just because I agree with him so damned much, having learned the lesson about personality when I wrote newspaper and magazine columns and now that I am relearning it in blogging:

Layne hopes more newspaper columnists might learn something from bloggers’ attitudes. “U.S. papers are so damned dry,” he said. “I mean, who picks up the paper and says, ‘I wonder what the Pentagon reporter has to say this morning.’ The good bloggers are not much different from old-time newspaper columnists. They have a style, they have a personal connection with readers, they don’t seem like factory-made op-ed writers. Maybe newspapers will inject some of this first- person style into the news columns. What I hope news sites learn from blogs is that personality matters.”

: And, by the way, I forgot to congratulate Layne et al for being blog-cloned on Fox News, which is also wise to take notice of the power of blogs.

Lassie would be proud
: A British animal org is awarding two guidedogs who led their owners to safety on 9.11 a special medal.

Guts
: Ken Layne said it well today:

Today is a good day for bloggers to remember that there’s nothing to blog without guys like Pearl out there writing the stories and collecting the news.

Amen to that. It takes guys with guts to get the real facts so pundits can pundit and so we all can be informed.

I don’t have guts. When I was in San Francisco working on the Examiner as an editor and then a columnist, my paper broke the Jonestown story and we lost a friend there, killed in the line of duty. Around the same time, someone I knew was killed reporting in Africa and someone else who was injured while reporting. I decided then that I did not have the guts to be a hard, true reporter; I went into fluff, becoming a columnist and a TV critic and other essentially useless things.

I always remembered that I was not a real reporter and I hold real reporters in respect.

The next time you complain about the media and make fun of the media and whine about media bias and conspiracies, remember what the media really is at the source: guys with guts asking questions it takes guts to ask, guys like Daniel Pearl.

Memorial
: Beliefnet‘s memorial to Daniel Pearl. Says one mourner:

When I was a child, I watched the news and saw these incredibly brave human beings, with a microphone in one hand and the other hand on top of their helmet, trying to whisper there report without attracting the attention of any snipers that might be lurking. My father explained to me that they were War Correspondents. I was overawed. These people who risked there lives, going out there searching for truth and bringing it back to me through my TV set as I ate dinner. I knew that’s what I wanted to do with my life. Be brave enough to search out the truth, and tell the world.

Snobs to the left, please
: Ken Goldstein says what I was thinking: How ridiculous of the feds to eliminate VIP screening lines at the airport. I’m (thank God) not a frequent flier these days, so I wouldn’t benefit from them but I have to say that this should be the business of the airlines; they should be free to give extras to their best customers (as airlines do with quick lines through customs on overseas flights). How odd that the Bush administration would be so business-unfriendly. Are they trying to make us regret the federal takeover of airport security?

Blog withdrawl
: I was gone for two damned days because my damned ISP got hit with a damned denial-of-service attack and obviously didn’t know what the hell to do about it (do I sound mad?). So I was off the air for that long and I have to tell you that a forced silence is hell. Blogging is an addiction. Without it, I got grumpy. I got depressed. I lost my appetite. I was about ready to sign up for a 12-step program. But I’m back… tomorrow.

Me, muse
: I’m honored. Will Warren, poet laureate of Blogdom, was inspired by my declaration that we are in the He Decade. His verse, here.

I think I’ll vacation in Baghdad instead
: I’m not alone cancelling my vacation plans thanks to terrorism and recession (below). Via Holy Weblog comes word that Muslims aplenty are canceling their pilgrimages to Mecca.

Have you slapped a pacifist today?
: Via Relapsed Catholic in the Women’s Quarterly, the difficulty of being a pacifist:

Have you slapped a pacifist today? If not, get to it. Itís one thing to protest a war undertaken in some remote jungle you have to take a long flight to, and whose purposes may be a bit gauzy. Itís quite another when the enemy is dive-bombing New York and Washington. The fact that our enemies are determined to return the world to the seventh century and force our women to dress in sacks makes the anti-war position all the more controversial. There seems little choice but to douse these people with the hot oil of ridicule.

Welcome Instapunditters
: The post on the post-post-feminist He Decade below.

The hunker bunker
: Call me crazy but I just canceled our family’s spring vacation to DisneyWorld.

I simply don’t feel safe. It’s one matter for me to put myself at risk; I know I will end up flying for work again. But it’s quite another matter to put my family at risk.

I don’t feel safe in the air, because I don’t believe that much has changed at airports since Sept. 11. Gates are still guarded by too many uneducated and unprepared slugs. Bags aren’t inspected. Cockpit doors are flimsy. Terrorists are still at large.

Don’t try to give me a lecture about odds, how I’m more likely to be taken down by a tse-tse fly than a terrorist.

I was only a few hundred yards below two jets that hit two buildings, all full of lives that aren’t here any longer. Death was too close.

I used up my odds that day.

So I worry about flying and I even worry some about DisneyWorld. The terrorists scoped out the place and other key destinations; I haven’t heard much about increased security there (or Disney didn’t bother to tell me; they didn’t even bother to ask why I was canceling many thousands of dollars of business with them).

This is why I get so worked up over the lack of apparent action from Ridge and Ashcroft. This is real. It is changing the way we live.

This weekend, I took my kids to see the latest Disney movie (irony noted), Return to Neverland, a Peter Pan sequel that begins in a London suffering under the blitz. This, of course, was terror, constant terror, on a greater scale. The children in the movie — Wendy’s children — are growing up in war; they are facing transport to the country to keep them safe; they are giving up childish things and they are turning into adults long before their time.

I look down the row at my kids and realize that they, too, are growing up during war on their homefront. It’s a different war but it’s war nonetheless and it is changing their lives. It’s even robbing them of DisneyWorld.

I feared I was crazy worrying about flying on our vacation; I thought that perhaps it was just me; it was about being so close and not being able to get away from the event. But when the subject was finally broached, my wife agreed quickly. My parents were relieved. My eldest was wondering whether we’d go and understood why we aren’t.

So I canceled Disney. I called the airline but first went online to discover that they had canceled my flights, thanks to terror’s travel recession, so I got a full refund on my nonrefundable ticket. “Meant to be,” said my wife.

I made new reservations at an undisclosed location outside Washington; I’ll say hello to Cheney for you all as I hunker in my bunker this vacation.

Let us pray
: The late father Mychal Judge, chaplain to the FDNY, left behind this simple prayer, which he handed to people he met [via Holy Weblog and the Sacramento Bee]:

Lord, take me where you want me to go.

Let me meet who you want me to meet.

Tell me what you want me to say.

And keep me out of your way.

A million stories in the naked city
: The Observer has a wrenching piece following up on the lives of the people who Were There That Day. It’s awkward online; the story is about people in pictures we’ve all seen and they didn’t put those pictures online. Nonetheless, we know these people: the fireman climbing the stairs, the dust lady… Their nerves are still raw. A U.S. Marshal who helped rescue people:

My whole life has changed. There’s not a time I’m talking to someone, whether it’s talking about the disaster or talking about work, that I don’t see images in my mind. It’s a video that goes over and over in my brain. Especially working in the city, I can’t get away from it. East Side or West Side, I keep expecting to see the Towers, but they’re gone. I can still function, but it’s always there. Some days I don’t feel like getting out of bed. Everything reminds me of it. I don’t watch it on TV. What am I going to see? A building falling? I don’t need to see that on the screen because I was right at the bottom of it. A burning building? I saw it right in front of me. People jumping out? I was there when it happened. So what do I need to watch it on TV for?

The lady covered with dust, as so many of us were:

People call me the Dust Lady now. At Halloween a lady who lives in my apartment building covered herself in flour and went trick-or-treating as the Dust Lady. I don’t think they realise how much it hurts. I’m just tired of crying. My whole life has gone downhill since 9/11…. don’t have juice or milk in the refrigerator for my daughter. She’s eight years old and doesn’t want to be here with me anymore. She comes after school, but then she goes to her dad’s house. Sometimes I lay on the couch crying and she says, ‘Why are you crying so much?’.

The firefighter on the stairs:

People don’t realise that the plane hit at the worst possible time for the fire department. We change shifts at 9am, so there were two shifts of guys hanging around the firehouse, having coffee, talking. When something like that happens, everyone wants to help, so all the guys went to the Twin Towers. It’s our job, to help people and possibly put the fire out. That’s why we were in the stairwell. At one point, I felt like no firefighter should go up there. Not that I was afraid, just that it seemed a little crazy. It’s easy to say now, but you knew something wasn’t right.

The soul survivor from a firehouse helped start a website for his fallen brothers as he tries to recover.

A businessman who helped lead people to safety:

I’ve been given a mission from God. Now I feel like my life has a reason and I have to search until I’m sure what that reason is and carry out whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing. I thought for a while God brought me there because I was able to maintain my composure and lead everyone to the emergency exit. I wondered if one of the people in that office was going to turn out to be important, or maybe a very important person was going to be born from one those people. But now I believe there must be more. I don’t know what it is, but my feeling that there is something more for me to do sits very heavily with me now. If there’s one thing that’s changed about my life, it’s looking for that reason. My wife also believes I was saved for a reason and is keeping her eyes and ears open, searching for the reason.

Yes, the nerves are still raw, the dreams still stark, the questions still large. It was only yesterday.

Whom do you trust?
: The stock market will collapse if we cannot trust the valuations of companies because (a) auditors and accountants are so beholden to their clients across multiple lines of business that they cannot see straight and (b) analysts are also so weighed down with conflict — their companies trying to sell, sell, sell that which often should not be bought, bought bought — that they are suspect.

It’s just like the Olympics: the French judge can’t judge because of conflict of interest. It’s just like politics, where pols who get too much special-interest money are also smudged by conflict.

The solution is obvious: Independence. We must make those who judge and value companies independent of those companies. Auditors must not be allowed to sell other services to their clients; they should be replaced reguarly so that other auditors will check their work; they should be liable for their lies.

But what about the analysts who sold not only lying scumbag companies such as Enron but also pigs in pokes on the Internet? I’ve long said that analysts have far too much influence and power for the idiots they are; they buddy up to the companies they cover and readily swallow the financial spin that’s fed to them (I’ve worked around the PR people who do the feeding) and they are influenced by their own brokerage house’s need to sell, sell, sell. They are not to be trusted.

My humble solution: A news organization — Dow Jones, Thomson, the FT, Reuters — should buy the analyst operation of a leading brokerage house and operate it independently, without influence, trading purely on the value of its research and opinions. The brokerage house can buy the services of these independent analysts for their top clients; it will be more valuable to them (and brokers can save by not providing valuable analysis to cheap, discount customers like me). The news organization can sell these services to other brokerage houses and directly to consumers. The problem with news organizations’ financial reporting today is that it is too damned shallow; they, too, swallow the PR fed them by investor relations flacks and conmen and can’t afford to dig deeper. With the depth of a full team of analysts, they can deliver real value.

To see how it can work, look no farther than Chris Byron, now a columnist on the New York Post. He calls a spade full of bull a spade full of bull. In his latest column, he found that even Krispy Kreme dabbled in Enron-like off-the-books accounting and KK immediately reformed. He exposed Boston Market for the lumpy gravy it was long before the market realized it. He exposed lots of dot.con idiocy.

Imagine if you had a staff of similarly grumpy — and independent — analysts going after every industry and every major company, a hundred Chris Byrons calling the shots. I would pay for that. I’m not talking about mere blathering, like that on Motley Fool. I’m talking about real reporting.

We would finally have something to believe: We’d know that these reporter/analysts were digging on our behalf, to ferret out the lies and let us know what was true. That is how we would know the true value of the companies in which we are investing.

This, after all, is what journalism is all about, or what it is supposed to be about: Independent reporters finding the facts and asking the tough questions on our behalf, beholden to no one but us, trading only on their own credibility.

We need these standards now more than ever. We have to find this indepdent, smart, tough voice in financial reporting and analysis. The economy is now built on the stock market. Our 401Ks and pensions and insurance and much of the worth of every company and charity and even government is built on stock. If we cannot trust the value of that stock simply because auditors are crooked and analysts are biased, then we will watch the collapse of our very economy.

Soft money, soft spine
: For all the reasons above, Bush should not — cannot — veto campaign reform. Soft money breeds a conflict of interest. We, the people, are going to be far more demanding of all institutions — financial, governmental, media — to eliminate conflict of interest for while that conflict exists, trust, credibility, and value do not. The times demand higher standards.

There goes the neighborhood
: Ken Layne finds no connection between (a) the riot/assassination that killed a government minister at the airport in Kabul and (b) the soccer riot that broke out shortly thereafter. He’s right about this: It appears one is a political event, the other not. Nonetheless, I do see a tie: Afghanistaned is one f’d up country and it is going to be harder than we admit to drag them back to civilization. I won’t be vacationing there for a very long time.

Merchant of death
: The Times of London says bin Laden’s arms merchant has been revealed: a former Soviet air force office. A Times profile of him.

Next stop: Baghdad
: The Times says Bush is finalizing plans to topple Saddam Hussein:

If all goes well with President George W Bushís rapidly developing plan to overthrow Saddam Hussein, General Najib al-Salhi, a former chief of staff of the Iraqi 5th mechanised corps, might be back in Baghdad by the end of the year.

As one of the highest-ranking defectors from Saddamís elite Republican Guard and one of the founders of the Movement of Free Officers, a clandestine Iraqi opposition group, Najib believes the moment of reckoning has finally arrived for the tyrant he used to serve. ìThe Iraqi people are ready for action,î he said last week.

Drop that bone
: Ted Barlow said it before I did but I had the same reaction he did reading Andrew Sullivan today praising Colin Powell’s performance on MTV (echoing, by the way, the New York Times — “With Candor, Powell Charms Global MTV Audience”). Said Sullivan:

Contrast Bill Clinton’s excruciating dialogue with MTV viewers not so long ago with Colin Powell’s masterful, engaged colloquy. No boxers or briefs questions. No attempt to pander shamelessly for votes. Just a principled and effective defense of America’s role in the world to a global generation that desperately needs to hear it.

Said Barlow:

I think that Sullivan should retire the word “Clinton” from his vocabulary, because it does funny things to his head. Two thoughts:

1. Funny how Powell doesn’t “pander for votes,” considering he’s not running for anything, huh?

2. How the hell is Clinton supposed to be responsible for the GODDAMN QUESTIONS THAT SOMEBODY ELSE ASKS HIM? Tell you what. I’m going to write to Andrew Sullivan, call him a doodyhead, then criticize him for getting email that calls him a doodyhead.

Think, Sully, think.

Said me:

Right on. I don’t intend to start another whinefest about Sullivan whining about people. But why must he always measure his world from the perspective of what he doesn’t like about Bill Clinton or the liberal du jour? What’s wrong with simply praising Powell? This incessant nattering is shrill and tiresome.

Sex is good
: And Oliver Willis said this before I could, though I thought the same thing he did. Man, I’m slowing down with age (and work). Willis on Bill O’Reilly attacking HBO for sex:

Bill O’Reilly grills HBO’s chief for showing graphic television? Has O’Reilly called up Rupert Murdoch, the guy who signs his paychecks? Fox is the network that brought us When Animals Attack, World’s Wildest Police Videos, Married With Children, and The Chamber, among others. Most of those way before HBO had become recognized for it’s creative output. Fox was Fear Factor when Fear Factor was a pre-coital sperm! I personally have no problem with those programs, hell nobody loves trash tv more than I – but O’Reilly’s posturing seems more along the line of pot-kettle-black.

Amen. There’s nothing wrong with the sex or violence on HBO. The world the Sopranos depicts is ugly and violent. The women on Sex and the City are pretty and sexy. That’s OK. Life has these extremes.

How about you Libertarians out there rallying to the defense of free speech for HBO and its artists and audiece?

What would O’Reilly have us do: let some official commission rule on what HBO can and can’t say? I can’t imagine he’d really want that.

I’m offended by the culture of the offended trying to cut everything in life and art down to a least offensive denominator.

You don’t hear people — at least people this side of Nazi Germany — saying these things about books; they say this about TV because they have no repect for the medium or its mass audience; they have no respect for our own ability to judge what we want to watch and what we find offensive; we don’t need O’Reilly or anyone else judging that for us, thank you.

I used to attend a church in my area and was asked to give a class on TV since I was then the TV critic for TV Guide. In my spiel, I said that one of my favorite shows of all times was Cheers and I got attacked by a church lady and then another because Cheers offended them. Why, ladies? Well Cheers has sex.

Well so does life, you shriveled prunes — or life for most people. I left that church and I don’t want to start attending O’Reilly’s either.

Gold medal in cynicism
: The mistake is thinking that sports is any different from business or show business or politics or religion or the academe: Each is a terribly human instititution prone to all our human sins of greed, ego, corruption, and politics for politics’ sake.

Baseball is not the All-American pastime and its players are not heroes; it’s a business and its players are, well, players who, given too much money, too often get in trouble with drugs and gambling and sex. Hollywood is all about power politics (just watch HBO’s Project Greenlight to see atomic aholes in action). I’ve watched churches collapse under terroritorial wars. The academe is, of course, about kingdoms. And politics is all about, well, politics.

So it’s no surprise, sadly, that the Olympics and their sports are just as corrupt as any other human organization — moreso, actually, since they aren’t honest enough to just negotiate the money and power and fame (as sports and show business do); they have to act above it all — and then get sneaky about getting what really matters: money and turf.

As Today’s New York Post puts it: <"What you have to understand is that the foofs have fiefs that must be maintained. The people who govern international sports federations are charged with the protection of the integrity of the competition. But how they really see their function is protecting their lifestyles and turf."

The Globe & Mail says that the Canadian silver-skaters are likely to get gold medals and I say that’s great. But when it gets down to what really matters for them — their careers, their fame, their future — the truth is that they have already won. Jamie Sale is gorgeous and magnetic and David Pelletier is charming; the Russians are slightly freaky: she a kewpie, he’s goofy. The scandal is making the Canadians sympathetic and their agent says they are getting offers aplenty. They have star quality.

Meanwhile, NBC is making ratings off this.

It’s not about ideals, folks; hasn’t been for a century. It’s about money. That’s the gold that matters.

: Sale and Pelletier where just awarded gold medals. Some justice.

Face time
: Beliefnet complains about Greta Van Susteren’s facelift, arguing that we should live with the faces God gives us. Hooey. I didn’t live with the engorged thyroid lump God or fate gave me; I got rid of it. Greta got rid of the 10-gallon bags under her eyes because she’s on TV and wants to look better. And catch the irony: On the same Beliefnet page, there’s a big ad promising you’ll lose 10 pounds by March 18. But didn’t God give me those pounds?

: I don’t mean to be shallow and catty but, hey, I’m a cynic and I’m only talking about TV. Is anybody else slightly scared by the sight of Jim McKay on the Olympics? Some people get triple chins. He has triple jowels. As my colleage Peter put it, “He’s melting.”

The He Decade
: At his briefing yesterday, a reporter said she wanted to ask Donald Rumsfeld a question on a “touchy-feely” topic and he cut her off with laughter, looking at the general to his side, and saying, “You’ve come to the wrong guys.”

Note the trend:

The American flag is back. The military-industrial complex is back. And testosterone is back.

No more Me Decade. No more We Decade. No more Re Decade.

This is the He Decade.

7 chances
: PBS Frontline counts seven chances to catch the hijackers before they acted, but each was muffed. [via Metafilter]

Rules for safe flying
: 1. Do not rush the cockpit and stick your head into the door doing your imitation of Jack Nicholson doing his imitation of Johnny Carson. You will be hit on the head with an axe.

2. Do not get up to go to the bathroom in the last 30 minutes of your flight. You will go to jail. In either case, you will end up peeing in your pants.

3. Do not smoke crack and have repeated gay sex in the restroom. You will be sent back home.

Olympic ideal? Ha!
: Drugs. Bribery. Corruption.

Crazy after all these years
: A super Thomas Friedman column in today’s NY Times, as insightful as it is amusing. He writes from London that Europe can’t stand Bush’s Axis of Evil and he says the critics are right with various complaints. Nonetheless, Friedman is glad that Bush said it.

Because the critics are missing the larger point, which is this: Sept. 11 happened because America had lost its deterrent capability. We lost it because for 20 years we never retaliated against, or brought to justice, those who murdered Americans. From the first suicide bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in April 1983, to the bombing of the Marine barracks at the Beirut airport a few months later, to the T.W.A. hijacking, to the attack on U.S. troops at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, to the suicide bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa, to the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen, innocent Americans were killed and we did nothing.

So our enemies took us less and less seriously and became more and more emboldened. Indeed, they became so emboldened that a group of individuals ó think about that for a second: not a state but a group of individuals ó attacked America in its own backyard. Why not? The terrorists and the states that harbor them thought we were soft, and they were right. They thought that they could always “out-crazy” us, and they were right. They thought we would always listen to the Europeans and opt for “constructive engagement” with rogues, not a fist in the face, and they were right.

America’s enemies smelled weakness all over us, and we paid a huge price for that….

Friedman says it is time for us to restore our deterrence and one way to do that is to act not only big and powerful and angry but also a little crazy and unpredictable so the bad guys — the evil guys — actually fear what they unleash. His punchline:

No, the axis-of-evil idea isn’t thought through ó but that’s what I like about it. It says to these countries and their terrorist pals: “We know what you’re cooking in your bathtubs. We don’t know exactly what we’re going to do about it, but if you think we are going to just sit back and take another dose from you, you’re wrong. Meet Don Rumsfeld ó he’s even crazier than you are.”

Finding a good use for newspapers
: A French-Canadian reporter locks himself out of his hotel room — naked — while grabbing the morning paper. He finds his way to the lobby with sections of the paper covering his front and back. Hotel officials in Mormonville unamused; they call the cops; he’s evicted. (Via Romenesko)

Mouth, meet foot
: Ted Turner and AOL Time Warner backtrack from his remark about “brave” terrorists:

“What Ted Turner said in no way reflects AOL Time Warner’s view about this terrible tragedy,” spokesman Ed Adler said.

In a written statement Tuesday, Turner said his comments “were reported out of context, and I deeply regret any pain they may have caused. I abhor violence in any form and wholeheartedly support the campaign to free the world from the threat of terrorism.”

First Mom
: Laura Bush speaks to the SF Chronicle — or tries to — about John The Rat Traitor Superdoofus Walker Lindh. I can’t make much sense out of what she’s trying to say but I’m amused that they connect her problems with her kids to Lindh’s parents’ problem with theirs:

First lady Laura Bush said the “sad” journey of John Walker Lindh from Marin teenager to Taliban fighter provided both a cautionary tale and “a couple of lessons for parents” and others raising children.

“Certainly . . . make sure your children are mature before you allow them to do certain things,” said Bush, in an interview yesterday with The Chronicle, delivering her most detailed remarks to date on Lindh’s case. “In some ways, it’s sort of the extreme of what American parents want their children to do . . . travel the world.”

Saying the 20-year-old’s parents deserve sympathy, Bush said she believes Lindh’s parents, Frank Lindh and Marilyn Walker “feel terrible — no matter what their responsibility might have been to start with. They feel terrible now.”…

Saying she believes they are “certainly” deserving of sympathy now that their son faces multiple federal charges, Bush said parents must recognize the children’s level of maturity in allowing them the freedom to grow into adulthood.

“As all parents know, there’s a certain time when children are not going to do what their parents want them to,” said Bush, whose own teenagers’ foibles have been the subject of news coverage. “(They) get to a certain age where it doesn’t matter what you say to them.”

But parents fighting against inappropriate influences from the culture, media or television must “just continue to say . . . ‘these aren’t our values, ‘ ” she said.

Tourist meets terrorist
: A Guardian writer’s close encounter with the purported kidnapper of Daniel Pearl.