.. then why is he asking the Jewish community to help him rehabilitate himself? Why can't he be like everyone else and rehab without the help of a religious group that he doesn't belong to?

Kind of makes you wonder why Mel keeps dragging the Jews into his troubles.

He gets drunk -- he curses Jews.

He gets caught DUI -- he asks the cop "Are you Jewish"?

He's totally busted, he calls another cop "sugartits" -- he blames the Jews for all the wars in the world.

He gets thrown into rehab by his PR people -- he asks the Jews for their help.

Jews can't afford to be hang with Mel Gibson. He'll wear them out.

Comparing HW with W is like comparing herpes to genital warts. HW's hand was in plenty of nefarious deals in his lifetime, some above the table and more below the table. He was no moderate -- ask Willie Horton.

And the brutish Barbara Bush... first she lowers herself to smirkingly cursing Geraldine Ferraro on late night TV for our entertainment (remember Dubya's vow to restore dignity to the White House? Maybe he meant to obliterate traces of Mama's previous residence). The cold remarks about Katrina victims were revealing enough, but when she donated money to hurricane relief and demanded it be used to purchase computer software from her venereally-diseased, hooker-besotted son Neil she showed her true colors as a grasping, cynical boor who cares for nothing but the further enrichment and entitlement of her fetid brood.

But why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?

We've been through the history of Cheney and his hatred of diplomats and of the entire State Department. Since we knows he hates State and has installed his daughter Elizabeth as his spy and his mouthpiece on the Mideast, and since we know he -- and not Bush -- is running the show, then we know Cheney is the one who was behind putting both Colin Powell and Condaleeza Rice in charge of State. Since he hates and wants to marginalize State, doesn't it strike you as an more than just a coincidence that he has placed only African Americans in the position of being the head of the most marginalized part of the government? The Department of State is the one department that Cheney truly despises, the one he has continually humiliated and bullied throughout his tenure.

I don't think it's a coincidence at all.

has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with patents. Bush, the Corporate President, is doing exactly what his buddies want him to do. Keep the government from making discoveries that could result in precious patents that could be worth billions of dollars. The religious aspect being used by Bush is just another example of the cynical use of fundamentalism by corporate America. Religious fundamentalism always says 'no' to the federal government's involvement in anything (except that federal amendment against gay marriage, which was guaranteed to fail anyway). Christian fundamentalists are putty in the hands of the corporate raiders who are junking federal regulatory agencies and defunding federal research into everything that has to do with science.

Agnostics and atheists aren't the only ones who perceive religious fundamentalists as idiots. The corporate poohbahs also see the fundies for the idiots they are and they are harnassing the stubborn idiocy of religious fundamentalists for subversive reasons. These corporate greedmeisters are revolutionaries, just as sure as Abbie Hoffman and the SDS were revolutionaries. They seek to overthrow the US federal government as we know it. The difference is, these radical corporatists are achieving far greater success than the leftwing subversives of the 1960s; today's corporate subversives are doing it from inside the government.

Remember when Hillary Clinton talked about the vast rightwing conspiracy? She was right - it certainly exists. But nobody ever asked her and Bill "Why did you play right into their hands"? Because they did. If Bill Clinton had kept his dick in his pants, Al Gore would be in his second term right now. Imagine how different the world would be.

The NY Post was nearly hysterical reporting about the divorce-doctor engineered townhouse explosion because a "beautiful" Hunter College graduate was injured.

"Ravishing Beauty Ravaged By Blast" the headline read. Exquisite details were given of her injuries, there were interviews with the police who took her to the hospital, her "devastated parents" and her college professor. In later stories over the next few days, she was described in headlines as "Beauty Blown Away By Blast". The NY Daily News repeatedly referred to her as the "brainy beauty." Her injuries were not life-threatening. Most of the surgery she underwent after the incident was cosmetic.

There were pictures of her in both papers. I wouldn't say she was beautiful. She was adequately pretty in a pleasant, but nondescript way. You would think, by the way her story was breathlessly reported, that it was Princess Di in the Parisian traffic tunnel all over again.

There are women in NYC who are killed by out-of-control cabs, by exploding manhole covers, by electrified sidewalks after ice storms, by geriatric drivers who hit the gas instead of the brake ... there are all manner of women being accidentally killed and deliberately murdered every day. But if they're not young and pretty.. fahgeddabowit. It's a blurb on page 16, maybe a 10 second mention on the news as a still camera shows the corner the accident occured on without even a picture of the victim. But a young woman who appears hot to certain city editors gets full page spreads for days because her non-life threatening injuries may mar her fragile young beauty.

It's far better in NYC to be an injured beauty than a dead ugly duckling. And if you're an overweight black or Latina woman, you may not even get that 10 second mention on the news with that still shot of the last place you were seen alive.