WHO'S IN THE HOUSE?: According to a Center for Public Integrity report, the US Defense department have got so many contractors working for them in Iraq, they don't know how many there are. And, indeed, it's not really sure how many sub-contracted staff its got working anywhere else. All those guys holed up in the mountains railing against Big Government are really missing the point - the government's tiny, it's the big buy-in they need to watch.

 
FLORIDIANS! VOTE THIS YEAR TO SAVE YOURSELF: Can the message apparently coming from overlaying the maps of the 2004 hurricanes and 2000 elections really be true?

 
ARE YOU GOING TO TELL HIM, OR SHALL I?: In his latest bid to try and appeal to the BNP vote, Michael Howard seems to have made a small slip:

The former home secretary said his decision to lift checks for passengers leaving the UK for the EU was a mistake which had been compounded by New Labour's decision to scrap all embarkation controls in March 1998.

Erm... how do actually leave the UK by going to the EU? Or does he have some withdrawal plans he should perhaps mention?

 
BUSH'S AMERICA COULDN'T BE MORE KAFKAESQUE IF EVERYONE IN RHODE ISLAND WOKE UP AND HAD TURNED INTO BUGS: John Gilmore, Sun Microsystem's in-house billioaire, was refused entry onto a plane when he claimed that he had a right to fly without being searched. Now, leaving aside that dubious claim, he's brought a legal action which has thrown up a much more absurb idea: The Justice Department are fighting a court order which told them to reveal if there is or isn't a law stating airline passengers have to be searched. Of course, they're saying it would help terrorists (obviously they don't explain how knowing this would make a difference), but what absolute nonesense - what sort of democracy has laws that can't even be mentioned in open court?

Meanwhile, Cat Stevens becomes the latest "threat to national security" to be turned away from the US. His crime appears to be having publicly disagreed with George Bush.

Maybe all this is part of Bush's plan - if he can't bring Iraq up to the standards of American democracy, he'll reduce American democracy to the level of Saddam's. If we were Dan Rather, we'd be looking into preparing an asylum claim pretty quick.

 
NOW, THAT'S A CHALLENGE: Interesting: for a man who can't even sort out something as simple as making the railways work properly, isn't Blair setting himself rather too much of a challenge by deciding to make defeating evil an aim of his government? After all, evil has been around longer than the National Health Service, and he's not managed to get rid of that yet, either.

 
BUNCH OF HUNTS: And there we go again... more protesters invading the Commons, making not a jot of difference to their cause or case, but taking us another step closer to the time when Parliament is kept away from the people.

We're so tired of the hunting lobby: yes, we daresay it'll cost one or two jobs, but the closure of rural post offices caused the loss of hundreds more jobs than the end of ripping animals to pieces for fun ever will, and had a knock-on effect of creating real problems for people in the countryside. That, though, wasn't apparently worth a protest. The number of people with second homes, forcing young people out of the villages they've grown up in - again, real hardship, and a real threat to communities there. But not worth buying a ticket to London. Oh, no, it's the right to destroy animals which galvanises the landowners onto the street.

We're also amused by the inability of the Lets Slaughter Mammals brigade to get their stories straight - they try to claim that lots of folk from the towns enjoy hunting, while simultaneously arguing that people from the cities can't understand country ways.

Best of all, though, was this prime example of how they're fighting for tradition and their way of life:

Edward Trotter, 30, who lives in London but is moving to Edinburgh, said: "I haven't been hunting for quite a while, but I intend to keep going for the next five or ten years - or 50 years if I can help it."

So, hasn't been hunting for ages, moving from one city to another - what part of your traditional life are you fighting for there?

 
PROTESTING IS MORE FUN THAN PARENTING: Actually, it seems, Jason Hatch, the batman protest guy is so busy with his stunts, he can't actually make time for his own kids:

As Jason Hatch walked out of a police cell yesterday it was surprising, then, to find his current girlfriend complaining that his commitment to protesting for fathers' rights meant he had little time for their seven-month-old daughter - the youngest of his four children by three different women.
Gemma Polson, 27, suggested the strain on her relationship with Mr Hatch from his activities was so great that the couple had separated.
"We're not together anymore. It was all going too far," she said. "Fathers4Justice has taken over his life. He was seeing hardly anything of our daughter which was a bit rich when the whole point of his campaign was to allow dads to see more of their children. I'd just rather he saw more of Amelia."

 
SPOILING IT FOR EVERYONE ELSE: In America, Bush had to wait until someone killed 3,000 people before he had an excuse for chopping away people's rights. In the UK, all it's taking is a bunch of bozos dressed as superheroes. We're sure Fathers4Justice have their hearts in the right place, but their methods suck: nobody is discussing their grievances after the protest at Buckingham Palace; just jabbering away excitedly about how the people should be kept further away from the people who run the state. Who'd ever have guessed the greatest threat to civil rights in the UK would come from a fat bloke in a batman costume?

 
THE PRESIDENT USES TERROR AS AN EXCUSE TO THIN DOWN DEMOCRACY: This time, it's Putin rather than Bush, who - according to reports, is planning to use Beslan as an excuse to remove elected regional governors with Kremlin appointees. All in the name of the war on terror, of course.

 
CURIOUS: According to some reports, journalist Anna Politkovskaya was poisoned on her way to cover the Beslan slaughter. Viewed as being sympathetic to the Chechens, the reporter had acted as a negotiator during the Moscow theatre seige, and had apparently made her willingness to help in negotiations at the school seige known before drinking a cup of tea which made her unconscious.

 
MEANWHILE, BACK IN THE REAL WORLD: The BBC asks what should be done about all the kids with crabs and herpes and, you know, waterworks problems. Amongst the responses:

The abstinence message should be promoted among all those in secondary school and university. Abstinence is the only 100% effective solution against sexually transmitted infections.
Ray Flores, New York, USA

Nice one, Ray! Tell twenty-one year olds out of their heads on Babycham and Brandy cocktails to keep it in their pants. Let's pump money into that programme right away... no, actually, let's put all the health budget into promoting abstinence. We can then divert all the money being spent on transport into encouraging people to buy teleportation machines...

 
THE ARMY ARE AGAINST IRAQ, TOO: As the ramifications of the Iraq adventure continue to play out, Colonel Lew G Tyree, the top amry reserves spokesperson in West Virginia, has slammed the war as being a waste of human resources which hasn't worked:

“I feel we were not told the truth. I do not think we should be there. America is in more danger now because we are using up a tremendous amount of human resources, the soldiers. We tend to ignore that there are well over 1,000 dead and well over 7,000 injured. We use many of the soldiers time and time again. Where are the replacements going to come from? We’re getting re-enlistments, but not recruits. Where is the strength for defending this country in another arena?”

It's that last bit that should be most worrying for the White House: now that people have seen how the Commander-in-Chief is happy to lob men into harm's way on the slimest of pretexts, they're starting to get wary about signing up. What options does that leave Bush? Bringing back the draft?

 
MORE LABOR DAY: We hope our friends in America are enjoying the Labor Day holiday, and it might be a good time for them to think about this: the Bush administration are abolishing the rule that workers must earn time and a half for overtime work. When he announced this "initiative", Bush suggested that in return, workers would be get given time off in lieu instead (which is, of course, really handy - because you can so feed your family with an extra day off) but even that trade-off has been fixed: the legislation to abolish time and a half has been brought forward, but there's no word yet on making the time off in lieu a legally enshrined right.

 
REMAIN AFRAID, CITIZEN: We're far from certain why on earth - asked about the school attack in Russia - John Reid would start to mutter about how they'll be coming after us, as if Blair's managed to piss off the Chechens, too. Reid - minister for Casandraism - claims that he's had no doubts for "many years" that "they" (terrorists, of course) "will attempt to strike us here." If he's had this feeling for many years, how come the government he's in only started to protect themselves with big blocks around a couple of years ago? Meanwhile, the Tories - usually the first to complain at the costs involved in reshuffling government departments - are calling for A UK Department of Homeland Security - presumably so that in future the ''I is gonna chills your blood" statements can come from one single minister designated to keep the public in a state of compliant fear, rather than from a range of department heads.

 
HOW DO YOU PAY FOR THE RICH'S TAX CUTS?: You cane the poor instead. The Washington Post are reporting that senior citizens face a 17.5% increase in their Medicare premiums next year. And, in a piece of nasty news management, the Bush adminstration attempted to slip this out on a bank holiday weekend, at the end of a convention, with a hurricane heading for Florida and two hundred odd kids murdered in Russia. So, that's what happened to Jo Moore, then.