Tilting at windmills.

• Author: Peters, Charles
• Position: Comments on the news

Ashcroft's Approval Rating * The Five-Star Loophole * Osama's Miniskirted Niece You Say Slovakia, I Say Slovenia * Useful Idiots and Stupid White Men * Jesus as a Lefty

OSAMA BIN LADEN'S NIECE, Waffa, is launching a pop singing career in London. According to London's Sunday Telegraph, she's become "a fixture on the London club scene after moving to the [city] six months ago" and "drinks alcohol, smokes cigarettes, and wears mini-skirts and designer clothes by Versace." This doesn't seem likely to enhance her uncles affection for the West.

WITH EVERYONE DISTRACTED for months by the Iraq war and its build up, I fear Wall Street and the business community may have been falling back into their bad habits. Remember how investment banking companies were supposed to stop pressuring their analysts to give favorable ratings to their clients' stocks? Well, here's what's happening: The stock analysts employed by the top investment banking firms, writes The Wall Street Journal's Randall Smith, "still consistently give higher ratings to stocks of their own banking clients." For example, at Goldman Sachs, 79 percent of the stocks with "outperform" ratings were those of clients.

As HealthSouth's stock was plunging last year, its most enthusiastic backer was UBS Warburg analyst Howard Capek, who refused to lower his rating below "buy." The investment banker for HealthSouth is--guess who?--UBS Warburg, of course.

As for the rights of shareholders, here's how, according to the Time's Floyd Norris, Verizon answered a shareholder who wanted the company to have competing candidates in corporate elections:

"If there were competing candidates, it would be difficult to predict which individuals would be elected."

In other words, are you crazy?! How could we be sure of winning and keeping control?! So much for the cause of corporate democracy.

EACH TIME I READ OF INNOCENT Iraqis being shot at checkpoints because they hadn't heeded orders to halt--one Marine said, "Everyone should understand `stop'"--I recalled a story I had read shortly before the war started. The military, it said, was continuing to enforce its policy of discharging known gays. Among those recently discharged, the article noted, were five fluent Arabic speakers.

ONE OF THE MOST DISTURBING aspects of the administration's march to war was the dubious intelligence used to justify it. The most conspicuous examples were the forged Niger documents cited by Bush to justify his assertion that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Africa and the aluminum tubes he kept insisting were being used for nuclear programs, even though the U.N. inspectors said there was no evidence the tubes were being used for anything but missile production. Earlier, the administration had tried desperately to inflate the thinnest evidence into a case that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were in cahoots. Remember that al Qaeda operative who was supposed to have met an Iraqi diplomat in Prague? And don't forget the other al Qaeda agent who was supposed to have been treated in a Baghdad hospital.

This kind of stretching reached the outer limits of absurdity when the Bush gang compiled a list of nations involved in the "coalition of the willing." Among the coalitions members with no troops and scarcely a dime to spare for a military adventure are Costa Rica, Palau, Iceland, the Marshall Islands, and Micronesia. The administration's list also included the Solomon Islands and Slovenia, even though neither had agreed. Slovenia apparently got on the list because the State Department confused it with Slovakia, which had agreed to join the coalition. After all, the first four letters of each are the same. Besides, one suspects some of the State Department officials compiling the list found the exercise so embarrassing they got a tad careless putting it together.

As WE WERE GOING TO WAR IN Iraq over the dedicated opposition of French diplomats and Franco-phobia was rearing its head across America, I happened to have lunch at Les Halles, a French restaurant in downtown Washington. As I was...