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Bollettino Without a certain sordidness in his surroundings he was never quite comfortable, never quite himself -- Arthur Symons My fate The August Contemporary Review comes loaded with a nice little essay entitled "The vanishing man of letters" by Richard Whittington-Egan. A name like that seems to go with the topic, doesn't it? The essay is full of little anecdotes about my predecessors in the line of turning a little learning into quick copy -- the milquetoast reviewers, essayists, and tepid novelists that drenched innumerable reviews and weeklies and monthlies with the ink of their deadline enthusiasms; who suffered in bed-sits, endured impossible infatuations, and died drowned, or by their own hands, or rusticated into fabulous antiquity. There's nothing worse than a peculiar kind of disease that strikes the well read -- a certain chronic bookishness. It slowly supplants the very soul, making every word ring with tinny tintinabulations of reference.

Bollettino Life under W. A couple of weeks ago, the NYT reported that the nation's criminal CEO's and their multimillion dollar minions were really, really going to be prosecuted soon. Some day. As in, the forces of goodness are closing in. Well, we knew it was a crock. Most Valuable fraudster Richard Scrushy, late of HealthSouth, was the man named as most likely to face a trial. Since then, though, Scrushy has shown with what contempt he takes the feeble efforts of the underfunded, bad faith Feds. The NYT reports, today, that his attorney told a House Panel to take this subpoena to testify and shove it. Meanwhile... "Meanwhile in Alabama, where Mr. Scrushy lives and HealthSouth has its headquarters, Mr. Scrushy is maintaining a high profile. Last month alone, he bought a $3 million yachting marina on the Alabama Gulf Coast; joined with Donald Watkins, one of his lawyers, to buy a Cessna jet; and sponsored a powerboat race in the Gulf, placing second pi

Bollettino Combinations So, on the same day that the Administration claimed that Iraq cannot raise and utilize its own army, or elect its own government, or make any decision not subject to the veto of a man who by all accounts lives in a well guarded, English speaking bubble, Mr. Bremer, the Adminstration "haled" the complete overhaul of the Iraqi economy. It is as if an American occupier were to hale some American Council's decision to nationalize all American industries. A bit of a change, eh? Contradiction has become Bush's daily bread; his substitute for the politics of joy. Now, however, he is starting to choke on it. The plan, apparently, is to make Iraq into a sort of Cato Institute wet dream. This has, of course, been in the works since before the war. But the question, to LI's mind, is not whether the plan is a good one or a bad one -- we think that it is inevitable that the state dominated economy of Iraq is in line for a hit. Tha't re

And he spake a parable unto them, saying, The ground of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully: And he thought within himself, saying, What shall I do, because I have no room where to bestow my fruits? And he said, This will I do: I will pull down my barns, and build greater; and there will I bestow all my fruits and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and� be merry. But God said unto him, Thou� fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided? � Luke Imagine ten archers, shooting at a target a mile wide and a mile high at a distance of three feet. And imagine them all missing. It would be easy to infer that they were all blind. That�s the feeling LI sometimes gets with the ten Democratic presidential candidates. Here we have a presidency that has utterly failed. One that has amassed a five hundred billion dolla