The News
This is all you get today suckers. You had your dessert yesterday with all the celebrity fluff. Today you’ll have to put your dentures in and get ready to digest something. Today 3N is a bit pissed.

Truth Takes A Holiday
Many of you may have missed the picture of dozens of coffins draped in American flags and being loaded into the bay of a cargo jet bound for the States. Maybe you just weren’t paying attention and maybe not. The photo was banned by newspapers and magazines across the country, deemed either “insensitive” or “too upsetting” to publish. Rubbish.

The Seattle Times had the balls to put it on the front page of the Sunday edition—big, bold and above the fold, right where it should be, right in front of your eyes to feast upon over your morning (mourning?) coffee and Danish. If you haven’t seen it yet, check it out right now and get back to me. Find it here.

This is what war looks like, folks, and 3N was stunned by that photo. When is the last time we had to look at stacks of American bodies? It’s been a while, right? Maybe since Gulf War Vol. 1? And for what? The death toll now stands at 700-plus and is still going strong. And for what? Well, here’s what pissing 3N off today.

That photo has touched off a firestorm of controversy. Already banned by many if not most media outlets across the country, now the Bush administration has formally condemned it as well, saying it’s “insensitive to mourners and the victims’ families.” Rather cheeky coming from a president who has yet to attend the funeral services of even one slain soldier. Furthermore, the administration has reiterated its ban on journalists photographing the coffins of dead soldiers. That ban was originally instituted in 1991 during the first Gulf War.

Worse still, the woman who snapped the photo has since been dismissed by her employer. Tami Silicio, who worked for Maytag Aircraft, was given her walking papers yesterday for violating the ban and going against company regulations. So much for the truth, folks. To add insult to injury, Maytag went ahead and fired another staffer, David Landry, who recently married Silicio. The couple plans to leave Iraq immediately and return to the States. Landry told the Times in an e-mail that he was proud of what his wife did.

“It wasn’t my intent to lose my job or anything,” Silicio told the Times. “I have to admit I liked my job, I liked what I did.”

3N liked what she did, too. That photo captures in grim detail what’s really going on in Iraq. All those bodies, all those lives that won’t be lived. Families that will miss them and grieve for them. Memories lost with no opportunity to make more. Sons and daughters deprived of their mothers and fathers. Spouses left behind. Bright minds, funny minds. You all see where this is going and we’ll get off the soapbox now. But if this picture doesn’t hammer home the utter senselessness of it all then nothing will. Too bad many of you won’t get to see it. That would be bad. And insensitive. Let’s move on.

Losing Your Honor, Dignity and Integrity: Priceless
Let’s just get pissed some more.

Many of you probably weren’t aware of the rampant and vile looting that went on during the clearing of the debris we used to call the World Trade Center. Yes, many of New York’s finest, be they police or fireman, helped themselves to anything they could get their hands on from the pile. Remember, these weren’t just offices that were destroyed—there were stores and restaurants in the base of the towers and at its periphery.

Journalist William Langwiesche, in American Ground, has written the finest book to date on what he referred to as the “unbuilding” of the towers. In it he describes the types of things stolen from the site: seized cigarettes from U.S. Customs offices, watches from the Tourneau store, appliances, jeans from the Gap, computers, wine from the ruined Marriott hotel—the list goes on. This isn’t talked about much and maybe it shouldn’t be in light of all the good that went on at the site. Read the book. Anyway, today we have something new to add to the list: cars, and lots of them.

It appears that several of the cars owned by the Secret Service that were listed as “crushed” under the debris were actually simply stolen by the head of the agency’s motor poll, according to the New York Times.

William Bennette, 52, on Tuesday was arrested and charged with theft of government property. He faces up to 10 years in jail and a fine of $250,000. Among the vehicles recovered were a 2001 Chevy Impala Bennette gave his daughter, a 2001 Ford Taurus and 1998 Mercury Sable given to his mother, and a 1994 Plymouth Acclaim and 1994 Ford Taurus Bennette had sold to a local auto body shop. His net profit? A little over 10 grand. They ought to string the fucker up.

Predictably, Bennette had no comment and is currently hiding behind and speaking through his lawyer.

War is hell and life’s pretty damn ugly sometimes. And on that note, 3N is headed to the beach. You all ought to, too. We’ll be funny again tomorrow, promise.

The Filler
Let’s do some celebrity crap today, that’s always fun, right? OK, here goes.

Hack in the Saddle Again
The well has apparently run dry once again and Holly wood is reaching back into the past, into the vaults, looking for its next hit from a property that was really never very good to begin with. This time Tinsel Town execs have pinned their hopes on David Hasselhoff whose dream is to take “Knight Rider” to the big screen. Wait, it gets better.

“I don't want it to be a joke version like Starsky and Hutch,” Hasselhoff told the BBC. “I think 'Knight Rider' deserves a shot at something serious.” Yeah, it deserves to be shot all right.

Now that you’ve all stopped rolling your eyes we’ll go on to tell you that Hasselhoff plans to produce and star in the upcoming “film” but won’t play the lead role of Michael Knight (3N thought the car was the lead, but who are we to quibble). Hasselhoff instead will play a wizened mentor who will guide Knight (and Kitt the talking, crime-fighting car) down the perilous path of truth and justice. Lucky us, perennial crap weasel Ben Affleck is rumored to be in the running for the part of Michael Knight.

3N is, of course, predicting this unholy alliance will add up to box-office poison, but what do we know? We hear Hasselhoff is big in France. Stay tuned.

Looking for More D’Oh
In lighter news, many of you may have already heard, but the voice talents behind “The Simpsons” are griping about their pay, or lack of it.

Seems the show has earned the Fox network a tidy $2.5 billion over the past 15 years or so and now the stars want not only a raise, but also a piece of the pie. Word has it they’re looking to triple their annual salary, to $8 million between them, and get their share of the show’s profits. And if Ross and Rachael and the rest of the friends can make the cash grab, can you blame these guys? Well, maybe.

Now the folks at Fox had no comment other than they feel the actors’ (actors?) demands are “extravagantly high” and management does concede that it would be nearly impossible to find adequate replacements. But in their defense, the voice talents behind the show typically work just two days per episode and are paid $125,000 per show for their efforts. Not a bad payday for most of us (excluding the staff at 3N).

In the meantime, the show is scheduled to go on at least through the 2005 season, making it the longest-running prime-time series in the history of television, according to The New York Times. Next season will be cut from 22 episodes to 16, however, in an effort to cut costs. From there, nobody knows what will happen. Hell, maybe they’ll bring “Knight Rider” back. Stay tuned.

Trumped
NBC’s “The Apprentice” has come and gone but the show’s dictatorial host, Donald Trump, is still in the news, though not for the reasons he’d like. Seems The Donald is fairly adept at witty catchphrases and managing a small team of admirers, but he can’t seem to keep his own house in order.

Last year, Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts lost a whopping $87 million. The company’s stock trading at an all-time low—from more than $34 a share in 1996 to just $2.26 this week, according to USA Today. Two years ago the company was fined by the Securities and Exchange Commission for overstating its earnings and just last week Trump’s auditors warned that, with $1.8 billion in outstanding debt, the company could be facing bankruptcy. So what does all this mean and why should you care?

It means that if Trump doesn’t get his shit together, he could be fired. From his own company. And soon. Now we here at 3N are a kind lot, never wishing ill will on others, but this just makes us smile. Ever the captain of industry, what could possibly have gone for The Donald? Maybe it’s that fucking hair . . .

Rogue Tigger Paws Disney Visitors
Charges are pending against a Florida man who’s accused of groping several women while on the job at Disney World. Thirty-six-year-old Michael Chartrand plays the happy-go-lucky Tigger character from Winnie the Pooh. But while Pooh wants only his next honey fix, seems Tigger is a breast man.

Orlando police currently are investigating claims from 24 women Chartrand has allegedly groped and considers at least 13 of the charges credible, according to the Orlando Sentinel. Some of the women have the incidents on videotape and one even has a photograph of Tigger with his hands very clearly on her breasts. One of the victims told the Sentinel “Tigger was feeling my butt the entire time our pictures were being taken.” Another says Tigger had his paws on her breasts “in a cupped position” for a full minute while pictures were taken.

“Tigger is supposed to be really hyper and outgoing,” said co-worker Megan Long who plays Winnie the Pooh. “But he’s not supposed to be grabbing children.” No shit.

Chartrand had no comment and was released on $2,500 bail. Disney officials meanwhile say they are taking the matter very seriously and have suspended Chartrand indefinitely.

The “C” Word
Finally, news from the woman we all love to hate. Seems Courtney Love is crying to anyone who’ll listen, this time the editors atBlender, about her money woes. Love says she’s been swindled out of $40 million and is roughly $4 million in debt. Awwwwww.

Love says she only recently discovered she was paying her dog walker $100,000 a year and that someone put a new BMW on her credit card. Also, some mysterious stranger has been dipping into daughter Frances’ trust fund to the point where it’s almost completely empty. Wow, now who could that be? All this is in addition to charges of disorderly conduct and felony drug possession, and a recently released solo album that absolutely tanked.

“I’m covered with loser dust,” Love told Blender. Here’s a plea to the folks over at Blender; guys, if you ignore her, she just might go away.

The News
So there’s a lot going on today but the beach is calling so 3N will wrap for today with the promise of an all-news, no-filler edition tomorrow. Or the next day. Thanks for reading.

The Essay

Are We Being Played?
My friends and I continually marveled at how, during the Clinton era, we were supposed to be in the midst of a great economy. In the town I grew up in, the only influx of jobs we saw were the ones at the new mall. Despite our college degrees, the great economy left us un-phased. The shiny reports we kept hearing about the economy made us wonder why we were all barely surviving working two jobs.

Part of this, as it turns out, had to do with statistics. Nearly half of all poor American families lie above the official poverty line, according to John E. Schwarz, writing for the Atlantic Monthly. The reason for this is based on faulty statistics. The poverty line was intended as a barometer of the amount of money a family required to meet basic necessities. In 1955, the first year the poverty line calculations were made, the government based its figures on the amount of money a family would need to spend for food. Back then, the average family spent one third of its budget on food, whereas poorer families spent nearly half of their income on food. Statisticians then tripled that figure and then made adjustments to the poverty line based on inflation. The problem, however, as Schwarz argues, is that if we “reformulate the poverty line in the same way it was originally intended. . .the poverty line in 1994 should have been about $26,000—not $15,100.” Neither does the poverty line account for skyrocketing costs of housing ourselves (a particularly crushing expense in metropolitan America), nor does it account for the costs of childcare and transportation. Instead of measuring our basic needs, the poverty line currently measures only the economics for those living in utter penury.

No wonder we all puzzled at our poverty during the great economy. Now that the effects of a bad economy are making themselves felt across a wider demographic of America, those of us who were poor during the Clinton years have a bitter sense of vindication.

As reported here last week, Americans are becoming shorter, fatter and poorer. The correlation between the three may not be as preposterous as it first sounds. Too frazzled and overworked to cook, many of us exist on cheap “fast” food diets that may well account for the number of overweight Americans; while our shrinking height appears to some scientists to be the result of poor prenatal and early childhood diet.

Also reported last week: 63 percent of American corporations paid no taxes between 1996 and 2000, and that number is on the rise. Somewhat surprisingly, even Warren Buffet concurred that this tax situation was outrageous. “Tax breaks for corporations were a major part of the administrations’ 2002 and 2003 initiatives,” Buffet said. “If class warfare is being waged in America, my class is clearly winning.” The Guardian reports that while Enron reported profits of $2.3 billion on Wall Street, they reported a loss of $3 billion to the IRS. Any average American who so clearly violated the tax laws would be imprisoned. According to The Nation, under Bush’s administration, the IRS has preformed fewer corporate audits and prosecuted fewer corporate tax evaders than ever before.

Often these corporations (which, it should hardly need saying, have enormous bi-partisan influence) are the same ones that meet their bottom-dollar profit margin by downsizing employees, by moving to Mexico or setting up offshore headquarters and by cutting employee benefits. Observant 3N readers will remember that Costco stockholders recently were in a furor because employee benefits were cutting into their profit margin. Thankfully, Costco refused to cave.

Meanwhile, the average working class or middle class family is shouldering an enormous tax burden. And for the nation’s poorest families, Bush has proposed an increase in the hours worked by welfare recipients at the same time he has proposed freezing any child care assistance for the next five years. According to TomPaine.com “the president is raiding poverty programs for children and using that money to help pay for tax benefits for those who are at the very top of the income scale.”

Congress has refused to even vote on an increase in the minimum wage ($5.15 an hour, the rate established in 1997) and, as for those jobs which the Bush administration claims to have created, those are paying an average of $8,000 less, according to a speech recently made by Senator Edward Kennedy.

We have Right-to-Work states (yes, right to work for peanuts, right to work without health coverage, without labor insurance, without a break for as many hours as your employer sees fit) that have virtually stripped the worker of any and all rights. In short, we are living in one of the most worker-hostile environments since the days of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.

And, as if all this isn’t enough, Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan has recently suggested that the American government is too over-committed to provide Americans with social security. “You don’t have the resources to do it all,” Greenspan said. Do it all? Social Security accounts for 4 percent of the yearly budget—hardly a staggering figure and, given that the trust fund for social security, according to The Nation, will have a surplus of $1.8 trillion next year. Sure, the government has borrowed on this amount, but they are legally obliged to pay back the money, in the same manner that they are required to back government bonds.

The scandal (and, to some extent, the lie of government) is that if government were to tax the rich and corporations as it taxes the middle classes, we’d have money for all the social programs. We could bear witness to the fruits of our labors and improve the quality of life for children, the disabled, the elderly, for single families. We could provide health care at no cost to the uninsured—in short, we could go a long way to improving the quality of life for all Americans.

One of the problems, however, is that we give credence to the lie of the trickle down theory (it’s trickling, all right). The economic justification behind this notion is that if the tax rate is cut for corporations and the wealthy, they will invest more money in the economy and this, in turn, will create more jobs. But there are basically two economic theories: supply-side and starve-the-beast. Supply side argues that you can make tax cuts without affecting public spending, while starve-the-beast (a term coined by Reagan’s budget director David Stockman) advocates that tax cuts should be made precisely to force cuts in public spending. “The starve-the-beast doctrine is now firmly within the conservative mainstream,” said Paul Krugman, writing for The New York Times Magazine. “George W. Bush himself seemed to endorse the doctrine as the budget surplus evaporated: in August 2001 he called the disappearing surplus 'incredibly positive news' because it would put Congress in a 'fiscal straitjacket.’''

What makes this theory even creepier is that its proponents find all New Deal legislation, which includes social security, as the beast that must be starved. The goal of the “beasters” is to starve government of all public responsibilities. That’s great news for corporations and the 5 percent wealthiest Americans. But where exactly does it leave the rest of us? Krugman argues that by placing an excessive tax burden on the middle class and thereby enraging them, they will consent to the breaking of public programs.

Sound like we’re being played to you? --A.M. McNary