Shameless Dean, 'Wes' Side Stories, Nickel & Diming Presidents

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 8, 2003

* Insider Michelle Malkin notes reports from the liberal San Francisco Chronicle that the chief suspect in bombings of biotech plants in California is a "clean-cut, soft-spoken, 25-year-old Sonoma County man who was trying to invent a vegan marshmallow."

* Disgusted at left-wing efforts to smear Ronald Reagan, Rep. Mark Souder (R-Ind.) is proposing to replace Franklin Roosevelt's image on the dime with one of Reagan.

* Perhaps it was poetic justice when partisan Democrat Clark Clifford had to plead stupidity after being caught up in the Robert Altman banking scandal. It was Clifford who called Ronald Reagan an "amiable dunce."

* Porn has gone so completely to the Internet that pornographers Al Goldstein of Screw magazine and Bob Guccione of Penthouse have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

* Beermakers are accusing Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform of lobbying for higher taxes on them to help the distilled-spirits industry. Norquist says he's innocent and that U.S. Senate lobbying disclosure reports are wrong. The National Beer Wholesalers Association has dropped its decadelong support of Norquist, according to insiders at The Hill newspaper.

* In 1862 there were 450 registered houses of ill repute in Washington. "Today no one knows how many there are," says an insider at the Round Robin Bar near the White House, "except maybe Bill Clinton."

* The bottom 50 percent of taxpayers pay only 3 percent of U.S. income taxes, leaving the top 50 percent to pay the other 97 percent.

* Gallup says Americans now think Republicans in Congress do a better job by a ratio of 51 to 45 percent. Is it a matter of buying votes? Discretionary federal spending increased by 12.5 percent in the last fiscal year and 27 percent over the last two years.

* After that master of understatement, Adlai Stevenson, was muscled aside for the Democratic nomination for president by Jack Kennedy, Stevenson said: "That young man! He never says 'please.'"

* The high-protein, low-carbohydrate Atkins diet has taken America by storm, with the result that bread bakers are panicking and have called a Bread Summit to try to resist as ably as the tobacco industry did those many years. The average per-person consumption of bread in the U.S. has been about 54 pounds per year. No more: Some 32 million Americans are estimated to be on the diet, which bakers and pasta makers assure is nutritionally incomplete.

* And, finally, this word of uplift. The International Mass Retail Association wants you to know that it objects strenuously to the administration's decision "to place temporary restraints on imports of brassieres ... from China."