Best Christmas Card of the Year December 21, 2005March 3, 2017 SO LET’S REVIEW From the House Judiciary Minority Staff: In brief, we have found that there is substantial evidence the President, the Vice President and other high ranking members of the Bush Administration misled Congress and the American people regarding the decision to go to war with Iraq; misstated and manipulated intelligence information regarding the justification for such war; countenanced torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and other legal violations in Iraq; and permitted inappropriate retaliation against critics of their Administration. Of course, this comes from the Democratic side of the aisle, just as calls for impeachment over President Clinton’s affair came from the Republican side. But that didn’t make the allegations about President Clinton any less true – though, arguably, they were somewhat less important. (One gauge of this: our allies, far from being outraged by President Clinton’s behavior, never quite got what the fuss was about, whereas the behavior of the current leadership has cost us the goodwill of much of the world.) LESBIAN TERRORISTS Back in the Seventies, someone made a cheap porn flick called ‘Help! Help! The Dykes Have My Daughter!’ Or maybe they were just planning to – I can’t remember. I think I was asked to invest. It was a joke of course (and I was way too prudish, and still am, you’ll be relieved to know, to have considered it). But it came to mind as I read this from the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network yesterday – which was apparently not a joke: WASHINGTON, DC – According to recent press reports, Pentagon officials have been spying on what they call ‘suspicious’ meetings by civilian groups, including student groups opposed to the military’s ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ ban on lesbian, gay and bisexual military personnel. The story, first reported by Lisa Myers and NBC News last week, noted that Pentagon investigators had records pertaining to April protests at the State University of New York at Albany and William Patterson College in New Jersey. A February protest at NYU was also listed, along with the law school’s LGBT advocacy group OUTlaw, which was classified as ‘possibly violent’ by the Pentagon. A UC-Santa Cruz ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ protest, which included a gay kiss-in, was labeled as a ‘credible threat’ of terrorism. NTMD SE: ‘I certainly can’t argue about the prospects for their current drug. But is NTMD working on some other drugs that could justify its current market cap?’ ☞ I don’t think so. Drugs take SO long to develop and approve that it’s sort of impossible that anything really significant could be secretly around the corner. And I’m not sure the company is riddled with future Nobel laureates. As I understand it, BiDil was not the result of brilliant researchers coming up with a new drug, it was the result of someone noticing the marketing opportunity in a 20-year-old study that showed no overall positive result from the combination of hyralazine and Isordil taken in tandem, but a positive result for blacks . . . and then doing a separate study to prove to the satisfaction of the FDA that this combo (which by then docs were widely prescribing generically) really did work. The scientific talent required here, I would say (as a layman), was modest. BEST CHRISTMAS CARD OF THE YEAR Click here. It is the best Christmas card of the year. (Of course, we still haven’t gotten yours.) And if Christmas is not your thing – humbug! – click here for a wonderfully patriotic card, here for a Mother’s Day card – it’s never too early to start planning for Mother’s Day – or here to get the big picture. (The big picture is that for $8, you can send cards like this all year without ever having to lift a finger, lick a stamp, or violate a copyright.) These cards are especially good if your computer is hooked in to decent speakers.