Suppose there's a Mafia Don.  Not a benign and pro-American Marlon Brando Godfather, but a ruthless brutal gangster who hates America and holds a bottomless grudge against her. Let's suppose this Mafioso has amassed an enormous personal fortune of ill-gotten gains.  Stashed away in hidden bank accounts and assets all over the world, his net worth exceeds 20 billion dollars - billion with a ‘b'. But say that's just his personal stash.  Say the total amount of money his gang has accumulated is 300 billion - almost a third of a trillion dollars in cash.  Say he controls it. Let's finally suppose that this centibillionaire anti-American gangster has an arsenal of several thousand nuclear bombs, most of them in the nose cones of intercontinental missiles aimed at us. If there were such a man, shouldn't we be a bit more worried about him than a bankrupt midget in Persia without a single real nuke to his name? For there is indeed such a man.  His name is Vladimir Putin, President of Russia.

Scooter Libby must feel as if he were a character in a Seinfeld episode written by Franz Kafka. Seinfeld was the fabulously successful  1990s sitcom "about nothing."  In Kafka's novels, his protagonists are trapped in situations that are incomprehensibly complex, bizarre, or illogical. The fate of Mr. Libby, who used to be chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, is now in the hands of the jury.  He is charged by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald with having lied about something that isn't a crime, because his memory of an event differs from that of journalists, whose memories also are faulty. Cross examination revealed that virtually every prosecution witness has serious memory problems.  But only Mr. Libby's memory is on trial.

The only TV news I watch is Fox.  CBS has that blonde airhead, ABC/NBC have nonentities, and CNN is the English translation of Al Jazeera.  But lately I can't even watch Fox, for the only news it seems to cover is the ersatz drama about a bimbo with giant mariachis. No doubt that giant mariachis are among the most wondrous creations in the known universe - but endless discussion of the deceased possessor of two of them is not news.  At least, not any longer.  Shouting, "Enough already!", I either click the off button on the remote, or go in search of a CSI rerun or John Wayne movie. Pretty soon, of course, viewers will get bored with the Anna Nicole story and move on to some other silliness.  So let's do a thought experiment.  Suppose, just suppose, that Fox doesn't let up, keeps featuring the story, dissecting every detail, comes up with new revelations, month after month after month after month. Now suppose all other news outlets do the same.  For months, stretching on into the interminable future.  Would you go (a) out of your mind, or (b) no longer pay attention to nor have any interest in the news altogether? Welcome to the Anna Nicole Presidential Campaign - with no giant mariachis.

There is so much wonderful nervousness in Tehran right now. Ayatollah Khamenei probably knows he's going to die without any of the great victories he has pursued:  Lebanese democracy has not yielded, there is no Islamic Republic in Iraq, and Israel is still there. Indeed, our recent adjustment to his agents' behavior in Iraq - arrests of Iranians, exposure of their weapons supply - must send chills through his malignant body, since it shatters the great lie in which he and his followers had so passionately believed: that America has no stomach for war, and will break and run when attacked systematically. Other wonderful news is that physical attacks against the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij-the prime instruments of repression-are taking place all over Iran.  See Jack Wheeler's Pelosi's Primrose Path for details. All this adds to the intensity of the War of  Persian Succession, the fierce power struggle within the regime for the succession to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.  The political war between the two men who fancy themselves the logical tyrants of the Islamic Republic-Rafsanjani and Ahmadi-Nezhad-is heating up by the hour.

The streets are frozen solid here in Washington, its dangerous to even walk to the Metro much less drive around, and I am having so much fun.  It's a tossup over what's more hilarious, the global warming freaks in Congress having to cancel a hearing about how we're all going to fry because of snow blizzards and freezing rain, or the talking news heads endlessly blathering about Anna Nicole. Most fun of all though is how GW is leading Pelosi Galore right down Primrose Lane - right this way, Nancy. First he gets her to waste enormous amounts of time in full public view trying to get an impossibly stupid "non-binding" resolution devoid of meaning that has outraged her radical left hate-America base - because they want her to spend her time on defunding the war. Now that she's making an empty fool of herself to normal voters and infuriating her most fervent supporters at the same time, Bush gets her into a frothing tizzy over Iran.  "The President has no authority to go into Iran," she hyperventilates, thinking that GW is about to land the Marines at Bandar Abbas, seize the Iranian oil fields, bomb the nuke facilities into radioactive rubble, and plunge the world into genocidal chaos. The lady is being played like a Stradivarius, and she doesn't even know it.  She's oblivious!  This is a thing of sheer beauty.  It can snow and freeze all it wants.  I'm enjoying the view.

In this occasional series on science, which started a year ago (2/06) with The Search for Dark Matter, I discussed Einstein's concept of special relativity last August in A Personal Journey Through Relativity.  Jack Wheeler provided an engaging account of it two years ago (2/05) in Aristotle, Einstein, and Ayn Rand. Einstein though did not have a Theory of Relativity  -- ‘a' as in one.  He had two.  His Special Theory is about the relativity of time.  His General Theory is about the relativity of gravity.  The puzzles and paradoxes of the first pale in comparison to those of the second. So much so that most anyone can visualize clocks telling time at different rates and astronauts coming back from another galaxy much younger than the people they left on earth.  The math and explanations may be hard but one can at least visualize the effects of special relativity. It seems well-nigh impossible to visualize gravity not as a force but as a manifestation of curved space.