Supreme Court Watch: Yesterday the Supreme upheld a decision by the Supreme Court of Connecticut that will allow the City of New London, Conn. to condemn a residential area for private development.

This clears the way for anyone with power to condemn your home under the rule of "economic development." All that's needed is for some government agency to be bought off by the developer. Then your home, your farm, your favorite piece of nature can be condemned and turned into a giant strip mall or WallyWorld, the life expectancy of which is ten years, afterwhich that property can decay into one ugly, rat infested mess of scrap metal. (See Linda Greenhouse's article in the NYTimes.)

Please note, this is not about your government tearing down crack houses so that your neighborhood is safe for your kids to go to school. It's about whichever scam artist developer can buy off the right politician.

Chaney Defines "Glib": Dick "I'll paint the truth with any color I want" Chaney told the world that the insurgents in Iraq were in their "last throes." Meanwhile Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top military man in Iraq reports that the insurgency is just as strong now as it was six months ago, with foreign fighters streaming into the country.

At what point will an American administration declare victory and fly out the last troups from the roof tops of Saigon (oops!) Bagdad? Will it be three years from now, just before W. leaves office? Or four years, once a new administration is sitting in the Oval Office?

By the way, Dick Chaney ducked military service in the sixties because he "had better things to do." So is the welcome mat still out at the local VFW and American Legion watering holes?

According to Gen. Abizaid, Afghans and Iraqis are concerned that the American public is growing weary of the war and will lose interest (pull out). Americans, these folks recall, only had staying power in Vietnam for a mere ten years and this war is likely to last at least thirty.

Pentagon in Violation of Federal Law: Pentagon officials admitted recently that they have been violating federal privacy rights of your children. The Pentagon, along with a private contractor, has been compiling a secret database of Social Security nuymbers, prade-point averages, e-mail addresses and phone numbers for all young people between the ages of 16 and 25. Currently, the list has more than 30 million names in it.

Military recruiters can thus contact your children in high school, without your being aware of it, and tell them all kinds of nonsense in order to get them to join up. Military recruiters, of course, are those people in uniform who get to live like civilians, at about double the pay of other military folk of the same rank, and thus avoid combat or other forms of hardship duty.

The Pentagon is doing its very best to avoid the necessity of starting up the draft again, while fighting what is increasingly a highly unpopular war. Young Americans across the nation are starting to wake up to the realization that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are not video games where, once you "die," you simply start the game over again.

There is a price to be paid for having a president, the only president in many decades, who actively wanted to lead this nation to war and was willing to trump up fake charges to do so. Increasingly, young Americans are beginning to realize that the cost is being paid by them, not that fellow who has trouble walking in his cowboy boots in the white house.

The database, created in 2002, before the invasion of Iraq, was required by federal law to be revealed to U.S. citizens before it was created, not three years afterwards. At the very least, someone should be hauled into court for this.

Job Market Improves: If you live in India. IBM plans to layoff some 13,000 workers in the U.S. and Europe and replace them with 14,000 workers—for much less pay—in India, where slavery is still widely accepted. Currently there are at least 27,000,000 people living in slavery throughout the world.

By the way, the bottom line is looking up for IBM, at least if you are one of those few executives who made the decision to outsource jobs to India. Those IBM executives are the same ones who benefitted most from the Bush tax cuts. Maybe those 13,000 newly jobless can find jobs working part-time at WallyWorld, no benies of course.