Quick Hits

They actually expect me to work where I'm working today, so let me link to a few things to keep things running smoothly.

• Ever think you'd see the day when polar bears were an endangered species? Ever think you'd see it this quickly? The pace of global warming is really frightening. I remember reading these stories about polar bears drowning and what-not, but I had no idea they'd be endangered so fast.

• Steve Jobs should go to jail if this is true. We're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars in theft. And anyone with Apple stock, I'd take it out, you're going to see something in the WorldCom/Enron range before too long if these allegations hold up.

• Pure class: Rudy Guiliani is recruiting 9-11 families to help with his Presidential campaign. Are they going to testify to how shrewd it was to put the emergency response center in the World Trade Center complex after it had already been bombed in 1993, or are they going to swell with pride about how Rudy let thousands of cleanup workers get sick and die by not properly outfitting them to do their work in the toxic aftermath? And, exactly how exploitative is it to RECRUIT 9-11 families to your team?

• You know, I made the mistake of getting slightly hopeful about the Israeli-Palestinian situation, and then I read news of more Israeli settlements being added to the West Bank. If it's still a land grab, there's no hope for peace. Oh yeah, and rockets are firing back and forth again.

• Interesting story from the Times a few days back about how porkbarrel spending and "bringing home the bacon" didn't exactly lead some Congressmen to victory in 2006. Pork and corruption are becoming more and more intertwined, and frequently these vanity projects reward construction and big-money interests in the district, not the constituents. I don't think we'll see these projects totally go away just because of the PR value, but maybe that value is overrated.

• I'm glad Hamid Karzai denounced Pakistan's mining of the border with Afghanistan. The whole world should be up in arms. Pakistan is militarizing the border, and assaulting anyone poking around there.

New York Times correspondent Carlotta Gall tells ABC News she was assaulted by plain-clothed government security agents while reporting in Quetta, a Pakistani city near the Afghan frontier where NATO suspects the Taliban hides its shadow government.

Akhtar Soomro, a freelance Pakistani photographer working with Gall, was detained for five-and-a-half hours. According to Gall, the agents broke down the door to her hotel room, after she refused to let them enter, and began to seize her notebooks and laptop. When she tried to stop them, she says one of the men punched her twice in the face and head.

"I fell backwards onto a coffee table smashing the crockery," she recalled in a written account of the incident. "I have heavy bruising on my arms, on my temple and my cheekbone, and swelling on my left eye and a sprained knee."

Pakistan is one of the most brutal places for journalists in the world, and now it'll be just as brutal for refugees. I like to mention at these points that they're our ally.

• Gale Norton steps out of her position as the Secretary of the Interior, and into a job as an attorney for Royal Dutch Shell. Sounds like a nice fit.

• Marty Peretz is a moron, suggesting that Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi is a pussy for opposing the death penalty, then claiming he opposes the death penalty TOO, but just not for people like Saddan Hussein. Moral relativism, I believe we've found your poster boy! For the record, I think making Saddam a martyr is stupid, and videotaping it is ghoulish.