by JAMES TARANTO
Tuesday, July 24, 2001 1:53 P.M. EDT

Clothe-Minded
Last week Rep. J.C. Watts, an Oklahoma Republican, remarked that President Bush's faith-based initiative aims to "feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, and clothe the naked." But Carolyn Hawkins, spokesman for the American Association for Nude Recreation, tells United Press International (sixth item) that, in UPI's words, "some of the naked are not seeking clothes."

That's not all. Salon reports (full article requires subscription) that some of the hungry are not seeking food. And we noted last December that some of the homeless are not seeking shelter. Most bizarre, some taxpayers are not seeking a rebate. Go figure.

Star Pupils
Washington state's Higher Education Coordinating Board has accredited the Kepler College of Astrological Arts and Sciences, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports. "Tuition is $5,000 a year. The course of study includes the history of astrology in the first year, a second year that includes examining 'how modern thinking and modern myths shape society's current beliefs about astrology,' and third and fourth years that include 'astrology, psychology and the counseling arts.' "

Enid Newberg, Kepler's president, tells the paper: "The students are going to be challenged." We can scarcely disagree.

Fox Airs Bogus Murder Allegation
Maybe those astrology graduates can go to work for Roger Ailes's Fox News Channel. Last night, after we criticized Fox for giving free airtime to "psychics," we tuned in to "The Edge With Paula Zahn." A transcript of the show isn't available on Fox's Web site, but we found it through Dow Jones Interactive. Zahn recycled some old clips of Fox interviews with "psychics," including "spiritual medium" James Van Praagh's explanation of what he thinks happened to Chandra Levy:

She's dead. And she was strangled. Four of us ["psychics"] came up with that, as well, that she was strangled. The night that she disappeared was the night that this happened. And I think that she was called up by someone she knew in the office or the staff and came out to a car. And then I think that she believed she was going to Condit's--his office. And I don't think that she made it there.

Van Praagh is accusing Gary Condit of, at the very least, being an accessory to murder. His only basis for making this charge is the "information" he supposedly is able to divine by using his "psychic powers." We're hard-pressed to think of a more outrageous example of journalistic irresponsibility than Fox's airing this junk.

Not a Suspect
In a Los Angeles Times op-ed, Joseph McNamara, a former police chief of San Jose, Calif., and Kansas City, Mo., defends D.C. police chief Charles Ramsey for not declaring Condit a suspect:

If he had named Condit as a suspect, it is likely that Condit's lawyers would have reflexively invoked his constitutional rights to remain silent and to be free from warrantless police searches--the same constitutional rights that we all possess. The congressman, however, would have paid a political price by being named as a suspect. Hence, the ironic possibility exists that Condit, far from being favored because he is a congressman, actually waived his rights to try to keep his job by avoiding being named as a suspect. As a result, D.C. Police got a chance to look at evidence that would have been shielded from them.

Minor Discrepancy
A week ago yesterday, ABC's "Good Morning America" aired a segment on Gary Condit's hired polygraph test, which police rejected. Here's an interesting bit of the transcript of Pierre Thomas's report (which isn't available on ABC's Web site):

THOMAS: One expert polygrapher is also highly skeptical.

PAUL MINOR (former FBI polygraph coordinator): The best of all worlds would have been for the examiner himself to be fully briefed from the defense side and to be fully briefed by a represent--a representative of the investigative agency.

If you have any doubt that Minor knows of what he speaks, read this passage from an Oct. 14, 1991 article by Michael Isikoff, then of the Washington Post, about Anita Hill's accusations against Clarence Thomas:

[Hill lawyer Charles] Ogletree said he first contacted Charles Ruff, a former U.S. attorney and a member of the Watergate special prosecution team, about giving a [polygraph] test to Hill.

Ruff, a recent president of the District of Columbia Bar Association, immediately had someone in mind: Paul Minor. From 1978 to 1987, Minor headed the FBI's polygraph program and had trained hundreds of agents. He is now a private consultant.

"This is a man who would call them as he saw them," Ruff told Ogletree.

Minor yesterday said Hill responded "no" to each question. "Deception was not shown to any relevant question," he said.

Hmm, sound familiar?

Lost in Space
A July 19 NASA press release brings this news: "Chandra Detects Halo of Hot Gas Around Milky Way-Like Galaxy."

Franken-What?
National Review's Jonah Goldberg raises a telling question about the debate over embryonic stem-cell research: Where's the Luddite left? The people who oppose any research into genetically modified food, Goldberg notes, are strangely silent in the stem-cell debate:

Isn't there some room for a little gotcha journalism here? After all, Time, Newsweek, and the rest have lavished attention on the bogus scare scenarios of the anti-biotech hordes. Couldn't someone ask these guys why "playing God" with rhubarb is evil but playing God with humans doesn't seem to bother them at all? I guess not. That gag order apparently includes the media too.

Economics Lesson
The Harvard Crimson has editorialized in favor of campus activists' misguided efforts to for the university to pay its employees a "living wage." (Our Brendan Miniter wrote about the protests last spring.) But the campus paper is more sensible in the way it conducts its own business, and that's drawn the fire of its political allies.

The Boston Globe reports that the Crimson plans to employ Cambodians at 40 cents an hour to type articles from back issues into the Crimson archives. The Cambodians are working for a nonprofit that is paying more than the prevailing wage in Cambodia and that is also providing English lessons and paying for the employees' medical care. Predictably enough, Harvard's privileged activists are outraged. The Globe quotes Melissa Byrne of United Students Against Sweatshops, who calls it "morally reprehensible" to have the typing done in Cambodia. The Globe itself accuses the Crimson of "exploiting low-wage, Third World workers as a source of cheap labor"--never mind that 40 cents an hour is a living wage in Cambodia.

The workers themselves see things differently. "My life was hopeless before this opportunity," Eng Naleak tells the Associated Press. Nelak, 20, types 30 words a minute in English despite having been born with only two fingers and a thumb on each hand. "Disabled persons in Cambodia are never given priority for jobs," she tells the AP. Khive Rotha, 21, another typist, says conditions at the project's three-story villa in Phnom Penh are "much better" than those at the garment factory where she worked for 18 months at half the pay. "I've always wanted to use English and computers to earn a living, so this is a big success for me and my family."

Life for Gay
Ronald Gay, who opened fire in a Roanoke, Va., gay bar last September, killing one person and wounding six, is sentenced to four consecutive life terms. As the Associated Press reported the week after the shooting, Gay "told investigators he committed the crime because he was tired of being teased about his last name." Andrew Sullivan points out that Gay "was prosecuted in a conservative state under existing laws, just as Matthew Shepard's murderers were. More evidence of the complete pointlessness of hate crimes laws--except to further balkanize this country."

McCain's Betrayal
Georgette Mosbacher, who raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for John McCain's presidential campaign, now says she feels "betrayed" by the Arizona senator and would never back him again, the New York Post reports. "I think John doesn't appear to be making any effort to work with the president. On the contrary," Mosbacher told the Post. "I feel at the very least the obligation of every Republican is to give the president the benefit of the doubt and try to work with him. I don't think he did that."

Where's Gore?
The New York Post's Neal Travis, citing "political tea leaf readers" (gosh, we hope he doesn't mean that literally), speculates that Al and Tipper Gore's absence from Katharine Graham's funeral yesterday is a sign that Gore isn't going to run for president in 2004.

Sax Scandal?
Bill Clinton is hanging out at a hotel bar in Manhattan, where he plays the saxophone, Liz Smith reports. His group included "an attractive woman said to be on his legal team." Good thing he still has that legal team.

Jesse Jackson vs. the Black Caucus
Jesse Jackson is accusing the state of Mississippi of racism in connection with the purchase of land for a Nissan plant. But Mark Chaney writes in the Daily Mississippian (the student paper at the University of Mississippi): "The truth about the Nissan plant is the state paid an average price of $18,531 an acre for the land. The 12 tracts belonging to black owners were purchased for $24,500 an acre, well above the average. How can any intelligent person argue that the black landowners were taken advantage of?" Says Chaney: "Even the Black Caucus of the Mississippi Legislature has come out to refute the baseless accusations."

Meanwhile, the Rainbow/PUSH Web site announces that the Senate majority leader, Tom Daschle, will be the keynote speaker at an upcoming Jackson-led conference in Chicago.

Hawaii's Competition
On Friday we pegged Hawaii as the nation's looniest state. The folks in Oregon apparently are determined to give the Aloha State some competition. Derry Jackson, a member of the Portland School Board, has been going around making anti-Semitic (or is it antiblack?) remarks to reporters. "I do not see the Jews struggling to get over the achievement gap. I do not see the Jews struggling to feed their families. . . . In fact, I see the Jews running everything. They're four of them on the board. This is a group that came into this country equal to, if not less than, African Americans. And today they run the country." That's what he said to the Oregonian--then "repeated his remarks in another interview."

Portland's mayor, Vera Katz, tells the Associated Press she's reserving judgment on Jackson's remarks, saying she wants him to "look me straight in the eyes" and repeat them before she makes up her mind.

It gets nuttier. The AP also reports that Oregon's Democratic Party is calling on Congress to launch an impeachment investigation into not one but five Supreme Court justices--Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O'Connor, William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas--for voting to stop Florida's dodgy presidential recounts.

Dispatches From the Porn Belt
Never fear, though, Hawaii (Gore by 18.33%)--you're still the looniest. Hawaii's Legislature approved a bill to raise the age of sexual consent--to 16 from 14. And the governor vetoed the bill! (The Legislature did, however, override the veto.)

In Montgomery County, Md. (Gore by 29%), the Washington Post reports that "a high school sociology text discusses 'tearoom trade,' a euphemism for anonymous sexual encounters in men's rooms."

The Deseret News reports that Laurie Sartorio, a 45-year-old Salt Lake City woman, has been charged with "lewdness, a Class B misdemeanor, and lewdness involving a child, a Class A misdemeanor," after allegedly mooning a group of neighbors:

According to a Salt Lake City police report, a woman was walking her two dogs July 12 on Foothill Drive. The woman began cursing at the dogs as she crossed the street in front of a house where some people, including a 2-year-old girl, were standing.

When the woman noticed the group looking at her, she asked them, in a profanity-laced epithet, what they were looking at and if they wanted to take a picture, the report states. The woman then made an obscene hand gesture towards the group, according to the report. . . .

After walking north about 50 feet, the woman pulled down her shorts, turned around and lifted up her shirt. The woman wasn't wearing underwear, the report states. The woman walked another 20 feet and flashed the group again, the report states. One witness heard the woman say "woo-hoo" as she exposed herself, according to the report.

Now, we know what you're thinking: Utah (Bush by 40.49%) is about as far from the Porn Belt as you can get. Well, yes. But consider what Sartorio does for a living. She is a federal prosecutor. She "has worked as an assistant U.S. attorney in the office's criminal division since August 1995"--which would make her a Clinton administration appointee.

Zero Tolerance Goes Postal
The Sheboygan, Wis., postmaster, Frances Bayne, "was put on three weeks administrative leave for making an inappropriate comment about postal clerks," the Sheboygan Press reports. "Bayne was reviewing performance figures for postal clerks and remarked to a supervisor, 'For the amount of work that the clerks have done, they should be shot,' " according to Dennis Trudeau, head of the local postal workers union branch. "Such comments violate Postal Services zero-tolerance policy on violence in the workplace, according to Trudeau."

Pullum Back
Kevin Jerome Pullum, who escaped from jail by showing a fake ID with a picture of Eddie Murphy, is back behind bars, Reuters reports. "An eagle-eyed police officer, tipped off by local homeless people, spotted Pullum despite the fact that he had shaved his head, his goatee and his eyebrows in a bid to disguise himself. Police said he was nervous and produced another fake ID. 'Every time we put a picture near him, he ducked his head. He wouldn't make eye contact. . . . He became extremely nervous,' Officer Lee Perry told reporters."

Litigious Parents of Dumb Kids
Yesterday we noted the case of Kevin Mackie, the 19-year-old Canadian man whose parents are trying to cash in on his self-inflicted death. Mackie was crushed by a Coke machine when he tipped it over during a drunken attempt to steal a drink, and his parents are suing. Now we hear of a similar case in Florida, where 18-year-old Matthew Kamier, a University of Florida student, died last year after taking OxyContin, a powerful painkiller.

Kaminer had gotten the drug from his friend Nareem Diamond Lakhani, who in turn had gotten it from Ying Che Lo, a pharmacy major, who had stolen 126 of the pills from the Eckerd drugstore where he worked. Lakhani and Lo both went to jail, and now their parents are suing--the drugstore and Purdue Pharma, which makes the drug!

One thing is clear: There's no shortage of competition for the Darwin Awards.

(Ira Stoll helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Tom Stanton, C.E. Dobkin, James Lucier, Kathy Shaidle, Kevin Liss, Doug McLaren, M. Reboulet, Mike Paranzino, Brian O'Donnell, Matt Coldwell and Eric Hansen. If you have a tip, e-mail us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)

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