by JAMES TARANTO
Tuesday, July 31, 2001 2:19 P.M. EDT

'Bill Clinton, Slave Master'
The prince of perjury gets a "jazzy hero's welcome" as he moves into his new Harlem office, New York's Daily News reports. A crowd chants "We want Bill!" as "a who's who of New York's black politicians" welcome the ex-president. Not everyone's happy, though. The New York Post reports that "dozens" of protesters from the New Black Panther Party and some tenants groups carried signs saying "Bill Clinton, slave master" and "Where's Monica?"

Jimmy Carter's 'Clarification'
The marquess of malaise, who last week blasted President Bush, issues a statement "clarifying" his remarks:

I have the greatest personal respect for President George W. Bush, and also understand the difficulties and challenges of a new president who is struggling to prevail in dealing with a divided Congress and with a wide array of foreign leaders. I know that he is dedicated to protecting America's best interests and our nation's moral values. Soon after his inauguration, I went to Washington to offer my services in any way that would be helpful to him. President Bush and I have always had a good personal relationship, and I wish him well.

Conspiracy of Silence
The Weekly Standard's Andrew Ferguson examines the claim of Surgeon General David Satcher, a Clinton holdover, that "we have created an environment where there's almost a conspiracy of silence when it comes to sexuality":

it is difficult to imagine how a statement could be more untrue. Americans started talking about sex pretty much constantly about 40 years ago and have yet to pause to take a breath. I wonder how many reporters at Dr. Satcher's press conference wanted gently to take him by the arm and walk him to the nearest cineplex for a screening of any movie rated beyond PG-13, or sit him down for a night of watching reruns of Friends or Will & Grace, or hand him a "literary" novel by John Irving or a "trashy" novel by Jackie Collins or any women's magazine at all, or let him flip through an issue of Maxim or Esquire, or, for that matter, make him squirm with a couple of long passages from the Starr Report. If this is a conspiracy of silence, it is absolutely deafening.

Cold Comfort
The Washington Post reports that the FBI has concluded that Otis "OC" Thomas was telling the truth when he said he was lying when he said his daughter, then 18, had an affair with Rep. Gary Condit. We've said it before: This is by far the most bizarre subplot in the whole Condit story. What made the Modesto minister's story seem plausible in the absence of corroboration from the daughter (who Thomas said was "in hiding") was that Thomas said he had told Chandra Levy's mother, Susan, of the putative affair in April, before Chandra disappeared, which would seem to eliminate attention-seeking as a motive for the fabrication.

Both Thomas and Mrs. Levy still say they had the April conversation; Mrs. Levy, in fact, still believes Thomas's affair story, saying, "I still don't know why OC would lie about something like that." And OC's explanation? After Mrs. Levy told him her daughter was having an affair with an older man, he tells the Post, "I just figured I would try to comfort her a bit. I just dug a hole I could not get out of. I can't really explain something like that." So we're supposed to imagine that the conversation went something like this:

Mrs. Levy: My daughter is having an affair with an older man.
Thomas: I can relate. My daughter had an affair with Gary Condit.
Mrs. Levy: Thanks. That makes me feel comfortable.

Much about the Chandra Levy case remains shrouded in mystery, but this much we can conclude with crystal clarity: People are strange.

Condit Gets Physical
Condit gets into a shoving match with an Associated Press photographer who "accidentally collided" with him while staking out the congressman's Washington apartment. The Associated Press reports that a Condit aide has filed a complaint with police about the freelance photographer, Stephen Boitano. John Hall, AP's Washington photo honcho, tells the wire service: "Stephen was taking pictures outside the congressman's apartment Monday afternoon when the two men brushed arms in a narrow space between cars--it was totally inadvertent." Condit "then pushed at Boitano before leaving in the car," according to Hall.

'Fox News Channeling'
They must have read our mind--or perhaps they just read our column. Writers for The Nation, the Washington Post (second item) and the New York Times (link requires registration) all follow our lead in criticizing the Fox News Channel for giving free airtime to charlatans who call themselves "psychics." And cheers to Andrew Sullivan, who writes, addressing Fox's worst offender: "Open message to Paula Zahn: please don't invite me on your show again. I'm getting these psychic signals from somewhere that your journalistic standards are for sale."

The Post's Howard Kurtz reports on a Fox executive's pathetic attempt to justify his network's practices:

Bill Shine, executive producer of prime-time programming, says psychics are "part of the story" because the Levy family has consulted some. "We've just put them on to get another opinion, another side of the story," he says, adding that other guests have criticized psychics as not credible.

Shine concedes he's worried about Fox's image and "that's why we don't go overboard with it." What a relief.

Here's the good news, though: As far as we can tell, Fox hasn't put a "psychic" on the air since July 23, more than a week ago (and the day we first raised the issue). We hope this means the network--which, apart from this "psychic" stupidity, we rather like--has cleaned up its act.

Next project: getting the New York Times (link requires registration) to stop running puff pieces on "psychics."

Rossotti in the Stocks
Democrats and the press have been pounding Bush aide Karl Rove and Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill over possible conflicts of interest stemming from their private stock holdings. Why, wonders John Berlau in National Review Online, hasn't there been a peep over the between $8 million and $40 million in stock that Charles Rossotti, the Clinton appointee who still heads the Internal Revenue Service, holds in American Management Systems, which has millions of dollars in contracts with the IRS?

Davis Aide in the Stocks
A spokesman for California Gov. Gray Davis, Steve Maviglio, bought stock in an energy company in his private retirement account shortly before praising the company to the press, the Sacramento Bee reports. Secretary of State Bill Jones, a Republican who hopes to challenge Davis for governor next year, said Monday that Maviglio should be fired. Jones is asking the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate Davis administration consultants and staff for possible insider trading. The stock has declined in price since Maviglio bought it. He explains that it "looked like a good investment."

Boston Tea Party
A group of "small-government activists" in Massachusetts will file papers today for a ballot referendum to abolish the state's income tax. "If the attorney general approves the language and if the petitioners collect the necessary signatures, the measure will be on the state ballot in 2002," Jeff Jacoby writes in the Boston Globe. He adds:

Deleting the income tax from the state's fiscal calculations would not roll us back to the 19th century. It would roll us back to 1991. Do the math: Subtract $9 billion of income tax revenues from this year's $22 billion budget and you are left with $13 billion. That was roughly the size of the state's budget (in unadjusted dollars) when Michael Dukakis left office. Many things have been said of Dukakis, but no one ever accused him of cutting government to the bone. At $13 billion, state government was big, powerful, intrusive, and top-heavy. Restored to $13 billion, it would still be far from Spartan.

Maryland Takes On Indian Names
The Maryland Board of Education voted recently to urge schools to drop nicknames for their sports teams like Warriors, Indians, Braves and Redskins. The decision is encountering some resistance from the schools themselves, the Baltimore Sun reports. "Our mascot is a warrior chieftain. Kids look up to it in pride," said Richard Holly, a computer and business teacher who has taught at Havre de Grace High School for 33 years. "I don't see any need to change it."

We can't wait till this movement spreads to Illinois (whose name comes from the Algonquin word illini, which means "warrior men"), Indiana ("land of the Indians") and the 27 other states, by our count, whose names have their origins in native languages.

Our Kind of Wetland
Tulsa, Okla.'s KOTV reports that a chemistry professor at the Univeristy of Tulsa proposes using stale beer "to clean the contaminated waters of Tar Creek, one of the worst Superfund sites in the country." Prof. Tom Harris "said a wetlands treated with beer would be more effective in removing zinc and lead from runoff water than an untreated wetlands."

Flaming Pop-Tarts--II
Dozens of readers wrote us yesterday about our homage to Dave Barry, who not only wrote a 1993 column about a previous lawsuit involving flaming Pop-Tarts but also pioneered the gag of saying that such-and-such "would make a great name for a band." It turns out there's a whole Web subculture devoted to flaming Pop-Tarts, inspired by Barry's column. It includes some of America's finest institutions of higher education (Texas A&M, University of Michigan, University of Idaho) as well as at least one unaffiliated scholar, Ross Nelson. There's also a site called the Twinkies Project, which chronicles experiments conducted at Houston's Rice University on cream-filled Hostess cakes.

You Don't Say
A groundbreaking new study from Georgia State University finds that "involuntary celibacy" can be depressing. Sociologists Denise Donnelly and Elisabeth Burgess interviewed 82 people "who desire sexual intimacy but for various reasons do without it" and were astonished to discover that many "were dissatisfied, frustrated or angry if they hadn't had sex in the past six months," the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.

Protecting Pigeons
We're all for police cracking down on "quality of life" crimes, but lately New York's finest have gone a bit too far. Sunday's Daily News reported that cops issued a $50 citation after Harry Branch-Shaw urinated in a park. If Harry were a bum or a drunk we'd cheer, but he's all of three years old.

Chris Daniels, meanwhile, was nearly pooped upon by a pigeon. But did this winged rat get a citation for publicly relieving itself? No. Instead a cop handed Daniels a ticket for "disorderly behavior" after he retaliated by pelting a pigeon with a pebble. "How would you like it if someone threw a rock at you?" Daniels quotes the bike-riding cop as saying. "They're living creatures, too."

One thing isn't clear from the Daily News's account: Did the cop actually witness the "crime," or was Daniels ratted out by a stool pigeon?

(Ira Stoll helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to C.E. Dobkin, Russ Smith, Mike Paranzino, Rosslyn Smith and Neal Boortz. If you have a tip, e-mail us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)

Today on OpinionJournal:

• Dorothy Rabinowitz: In New York's mayoral race, the best man will probably lose.
• Tom Bray: The New York Times' CAFE crusade.
• Vermont Royster celebrates 50 years of wedded bliss.