Joan (in trench coat): Last night we said a great many things. You said I was to do the thinking for both of us. Well, I've done a lot of it since then, and it all adds up to one thing: you're getting on that plane with Hillary where you belong.

Sidney (wiping away a tear): But, Joan, no, I... I...

Joan: Now, you've got to listen to me! You have any idea what you'd have to look forward to if you stayed here? Nine chances out of ten, we'd both wind up in a concentration camp.

Sidney: You're saying this only to make me go.

Joan: I'm saying it because it's true. Inside of us, we both know you belong with Hillary. You're part of her work, the thing that keeps her going. If that plane leaves the ground and you're not with her, you'll regret it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.

Sidney: But what about us? When I said I would never leave you?

Joan: And you never will. But I've got a job to do, too. Where I'm going, you can't follow. What I've got to do, you can't be any part of. Sidney, I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you'll understand that. Now, now... Here's looking at you kid.

What in the hell?!?!

For a mag that's supposed to be so hip, this was too much information of the wrong kind. Eeeeeeyeech!

And Joan, you broke my heart, you really did!

Agghh! I may never look at any of you the same way again. I may go off on a spiritual quest to deepest Africa, like Conrad's Kurtz, just to wash this article out of my head.

Anderson Cooper? Really?!?

Less than 24 hours ago, "Cordilia" wrote:

"I liked the way Guiliani has handled the Kerik scandal."

And I responded, presciently:

"The "Kerik scandal" hasn't even begun yet. Kerik is going to hang around Giuliani's neck like the albatross."

And sure 'nuf, by gawd, I must have been getting backscatter from the "hell hath no fury" death rays of Judith Regan, Kerik's "Catherine The Great."

Now the game is afoot, as the Bard might have said. I predict that Giuliani has been given the poison pill. It will take a few months for it to work through his system, but he will fold like a Walmart lawn chair and will not be the Republican nominee.

What do Kerik and Giuliani have in common with gerbels?

Libido.

"A Brooklyn, N.Y., teenager apparently armed only with a hairbrush who died in a hail of 20 police bullets Monday night is heard screaming "I got a gun and I'm gonna shoot you," on a 911 recording released this afternoon by the New York Police Department.

Khiel Coppin repeatedly threatened to "do something bad" and was talking about suicide yesterday morning, prompting his mother to call an interfaith crisis center for assistance, according to a press conference by NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly. He added that Coppin had previously been hospitalized at Kings County Hospital psychiatric ward and was taking anti-psychotic drugs."

Note to moms out there with mentally ill children: You call 911 and your son or daughter is dead meat. GUARANTEED.

Twenty, count 'em, 20 bullets. Now the old Army combat pistol course says "three to the center of body mass and one to the face or head." That's usually enough to do it. But apparently in cop school, they must teach "Empty your weapon into the kid, then stop and reload, and repeat. Just in case."

Hard to tell if New York's finest adopted this protocol under Bernie Kerik's superb leadership. But I know Rudi would approve. He'd probably want to be paged night or day so that he could come down and pump a few slugs into the corpse for the news media.

You mean Joseph Goebbels, Propaganda Minister? Seems like he would be a good fit indeed in Giuliani's cabinet. I see you swallowed the whole wienerschnitzel already.

When Paul Bremer was Viceroy of Iraq he needed a little "walkin' around money." So Rummy went to the Treasury Secretary next door to the White House and they told the mint to stop what they were doing and start making $8 billion dollars in crisp $100 bills.

Oh, and uh, we need all that loot put on wooden pallets and shrink-wrapped in plastic. And so the mint made $8 billion in Ben Franklins and put the loot on pallets.

But there was a problem. Turns out $8 billion dollars in $100 bills is a lot of damned paper and ink and the mint quickly had to put in an emergency order for more paper and ink.

By the time they were done each pallet weighed in at a half a ton. They had lots of pallets. The pallets got shipped to Andrews AFB outside D.C. and were loaded into the belly of our biggest cargo aircraft, the C5A and sent to Baghdad.

The C5A dropped its ramp and a bunch of trucks pulled up and drove away without so much as a signed receipt. The GAO is still trying to find out where that money went. It simply disappeared.

I'll tell ya, sometimes you just have to laugh. It's all you can do.

Mussolini made the trains run on time too.