Boy, the courts have been busy lately. With revenue growing by 9% annually, litigation is one of the few industries not puking thousands of workers onto the pavement these days. Lawyers, unfortunately, have ample means for creating their own work, whether they’re suing fifth-graders for sexual harassment or McDonald’s for serving hamburgers. Imagine what your health insurance premiums would cost if doctors could spread germs on purpose. According to the Manhattan Institute, tort settlements (and this excludes tobacco) cost the economy $200 billion, or 2% of GDP each year. The lawyers cut? $40 billion. The fact that judges and most politicians are lawyers once removed only exacerbates the situation.

Take the California recall; first it’s on, then it’s off, now it’s on again and at each turn some shyster is retiling his bathroom. And no sooner did an Oklahoma judge rule that the FTC had no authority to enforce the do-not-call list, Congress tweaked legislation to satisfy the courts finding. In a rare display of efficacy, the House and Senate acted with lightning speed and near unanimity. And for good reason. There are 166 million residential phone numbers in the United States and nearly a third are inscribed on the no-call registry. This means the voting public has overwhelmingly demonstrated its views on the issue of telemarketing. The ink was barely dry in Washington when a second judge, unmoved by the wants of the polity, blocked the list on the grounds that the no-call rule violates the First Amendment. U.S. District Judge Edward Nottingham called the list “a government restriction on lawful and truthful free speech.” I guess Ed never invested in precious metals or Florida timeshares.

The old joke about hurricanes and white-trash divorces making trailer-park residents homeless was turned on its ear this week. Where Isabel barely left a scratch on Wall Street, defaults on mobile-home loans forced the Federal Home Loan Bank of New York to suspend dividend payments. At the same time, mortgage giant Freddie Mac faces an SEC fraud investigation after three years and $4.5 billion of distorted earnings. Unlike Tyco or Worldcom, who created profits out of thin air, Freddie manufactured losses to cover up the fact that things were too good. Is this what the federal government had in mind when it chartered the financial institution in 1970?

The feds, if not myopic, are magnificently inept. This White House, in particular, has a gift for transforming middling success into abject failure. Take Afghanistan: one Islamic chaplain and pair of translators and are in custody after prisoners in Guantanamo Bay turned them from Pentagon employees into Al-Qaeda recruits. The quagmire of Iraq speaks for itself, but has become a more egregious example given the surreptitious disclosure that the wife of diplomat Joseph Wilson was working undercover for the CIA as an expert in weapons of mass destruction.

The administration, apparently, sought to disgrace Wilson because he publicly challenged the President’s exaggerated claims of Saddam’s weapons capabilities. No uranium from Africa, no WMD’s at the ready, no truth in the State of the Union address. Given Valerie Plame’s resumé, one would conclude that Wilson’s case has been fortified, not degraded. But that’s just the way these bunglers work. The Justice Department, eschewing a special prosecutor, is investigating the leak, pouring over phone logs and email files. The White House wants anyone with pertinent information to step forward or at least to have the decency to commit suicide.

Members of the Christian right are in a panic over the pending battle for legalization of same-sex marriages. Massachusetts may be the first state to sanction gay matrimony, but only because they’re still trying to erase the dark legacy of stoning heretics. The issue has become such a lightning rod that even liberal politicians are treading lightly by supporting civil unions while defining “marriage” as exclusive to one man and (save Utah) one woman. Protests outside Harvey Milk High School evince the paranoia is running a bit too thick and complaints that Madonna’s French kiss with Britney Spears went beyond the customary raunch of MTV are totally misplaced. The two divas weren’t promoting some “homosexual agenda”. They were promoting their really sucky albums.

If the Holy Cross is a diminished beacon of moral authority, the archdiocese of Boston didn’t exactly restore divine luminescence when it paid $85 million to settle 560 lawsuits claiming sexual abuse at the hands of Catholic Priests. Archbishop Sean O’Malley said while the settlement in no way repairs damage done to the victims, at $150,000 per, it isn’t exactly peanuts. Only three months earlier 243 Louisville parishioners were appeased to the tune of $25 million. The abacus reveals that Boston’s priests paid half again more for their exploits than did their southern brethren. With the CPI barely exhibiting a pulse at 0.2% and the Fed all in a dither about deflation, it’s good to know that getting off is getting more expensive. Nonetheless, with exclusive call girls going for a thousand bucks a throw, these figures do seem rather excessive. Unless you’re Kobe Bryant. After buying his wife a $4 million diamond, he offered a $5 million payoff to his alleged victim. I’ll bet that didn’t go over too well with the Mrs. While the Lakers are in a position to void his contract, his legal bills are mounting and his endorsements are fading fast. The record, though, goes to the White House where George Bush and Dick Cheney spent $87 billion (nearly half of Richard Grasso’s salary) soiling themselves.

Though Donald Rumsfield is in Baghdad peddling the concept that everything is swell, no one’s buying. The irrefutable notion that we’re running out of soldiers faster than the Iraqis are running out of bullets has the administration proposing significant U.N. assistance. European leaders complained Bush’s plan doesn’t relinquish U.S. military command, and that it needs “further, very serious work.” A quick resolution is probably at hand, allowed one diplomat, but we want to see the President lick our boots.

He may well have to now that Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas has resigned, turning the roadmap to peace into the greatest disappointment since Caddyshack II. To celebrate the rekindling of hostilities, the Israelis razed several West Bank apartment buildings, killing Hamas explosives expert Mohammed Hanbali. Apparently, Hanabli was some magician with the dynamite because a couple of days after his death, two of his devices were detonated in Israel, killing over a dozen people. According to Hamas, the back-to-back suicide bombings against Israelis were a “natural reaction” but said they remained committed to a six-week-old truce. By this they mean Palestinians get to kill innocent civilians and then yell “truce!” This fresh cycle of reprisals and counter reprisals compelled Ariel Sharon to cut short a state visit to India so he could personally orchestrate more carnage. That two tuxedo wedding doesn’t seem so bad after all.

Down in Birmingham, church and state have been formally separated.. The Ten Commandments no longer preside over the Alabama state courthouse and neither does Chief Justice Roy Moore, for that matter. Moore was suspended after claiming he was exempt from the mandate of the U.S. Supreme Court because he answered only to God. This attitude, according to the state Judicial Inquiry Commission, is dangerous. It certainly didn’t help Terrence Cottrell, an eight-year-old Milwaukee boy who suffocated during an exorcism. The child had been wrapped in sheets while Pastor Ray Hemphill sat on his chest and shouted at demons. Now facing felony charges, the minister offered that although Terrence had died, the evil spirits causing his autism were successfully driven out.

Aside from the Taliban, who else on our planet is convinced they are following orders from Heaven? Are pedophilic priests listening to God while they molest young boys? Church doctrine holds that only clergy can call upstairs. Given last week’s brutal prison murder of John Geoghan, I’ll bet the four remaining collared sex-offenders in the Massachusetts correctional system have the speed dial to the Holy Father on overdrive. One last chat before they’re stomped to death.

The Angel of Death has Federal agents familiar with last year’s D.C. sniper attacks on the road in an effort to solve a new case. Over the course of several days, three West Virginians were gunned down outside convenience stores. Ballistic tests confirm all three were felled by the same .22 caliber rifle. Authorities are fielding hundreds of calls and sorting through numerous tips. Detectives recently abandoned the theory that the killings were drug related, and are now following up on leads involving microwave burritos and Big Gulp sodas. A composite sketch issued by police depicts the assailant as a heavyset Caucasian with a mullet and facial hair driving a full-sized pickup. With this information in hand, investigators are narrowing their search and focusing their resources. According to Kanawha County Sheriff Dave Tucker, at least 37 people throughout the state fail to match this description.

The EPA is doing its level best to choke out those of us who manage to dodge the spectral scythe. The agency just reversed a 25-year ban on the sale of PCB-contaminated properties. Polychlorinated biphenyls are known carcinogens and environmental groups are worried that the problem will be hidden under new development before it’s cleaned up. Not quite satisfied with its handiwork, the Feds also gutted the Clean Air Act, allowing industrial facilities to make repairs and upgrades without installing pollution control equipment. Fortunately, EPA didn’t need any scientific data to determine if relaxed emission standards would adversely affect our health. The decision was made by Dick Cheney’s White House Energy Task Force, which, according to the Government Accounting Office, “met with, solicited information from, or received information and advice from nonfederal energy stakeholders, principally petroleum, coal, nuclear, natural gas, and electricity industry representatives and lobbyists.”

To her credit, Christine Todd Whitman abdicated her throne at the EPA before these latest debacles, but she didn’t get out unscathed. During her reign, Whitman asserted the air around Ground Zero was safe before conclusive testing. Rescue workers who continue to suffer health problems blame the EPA for not warning them of the dangers. “We didn’t want to scare people,” Whitman quipped. To make sure, her proclamations were screened by James Conaughton, a former asbestos industry flunky and heavily altered by the White House prior to public dissemination. Conflict of interest charges dogged Whitman as her husband had links with Travelers Insurance parent Citigroup. Her all clear signal saved the insurer millions in remediation costs. If only Whitman hadn’t been exonerated by the government, now that would be a breath of fresh air.

With interest rates so low, Mr. And Mrs. Average American have been buying houses and cars they really can’t afford. While this habit continues to prop up a stumbling economy, there are other considerations. The flip side of this silver dollar is investors looking for income have dredged the barrel of suitability looking for meaningful returns. Imagine arrogant New Yorkers eating dog shit in Central Park and calling it truffles. Everyone had been selling paper, even Enron look-alike Calpine, which fed $2 billion of junk into our collective pie hole. Slowly, though, we’ve become satiated. American Airlines inability to peddle $250 million of convertible bonds marked a turning point.

Though airline stocks have handily outperformed the S&P 500 since spring, business is downright atrocious. Just as passenger yields were just beginning to recover from 9/11, the SARS virus broke loose, making travel to Asia riskier than patronizing a Lagos whorehouse with a broken condom dispenser. Combine empty seats with sky-high fuel prices and you’ve got an industry bleeding red ink. The not-so-friendly skies of rival UAL’s bankruptcy proceedings didn’t help the AMR deal either, as regulators forced United to disclose the true (and staggering) amount of its pension shortfall. With this revelation in hand, even the collection of village idiots known as Wall Street analysts could pencil out the massive deficits being hidden by other carriers.

Now that investors have become discerning, or at least dyspeptic, rates are beginning to back up. Despite the Federal Reserve keeping a foot on short-term rates, the ten-year treasury yield has jumped 125 basis points recently. Mortgages are a full percent more expensive. But why?

There are three main reasons that long-term rates are heading north: First, the federal government must issue piles of debt to pay for Operation Iraqi Freedom (known outside the White House as The Great Halliburton Harvest) and those recent tax cuts for the rich in order to cover the largest budget deficit in history. Second, as all your neighbors were refinancing their houses again, holders of those mortgages (pension funds and insurance companies with long-term liabilities) purchased long-term bonds to offset assets coming back too soon. Now that the refi game is over, these long-term bonds are no longer needed to match up against future claims and are being dumped back onto the market. Lastly, fixed income traders who own mortgage-backed securities hedge their positions by shorting treasury bonds of equal duration. When mortgages are no longer refinanced, but paid off over the full loan term, traders need to cover their short positions and resell further out on the yield curve. When the big players sell at the same time, prices fall and yields rise.

Gulping this down, it’s hard to imagine the economy recovering as interest rates (and oil prices) go up. The poison in the digestif is floating mortgages – free to climb with interest rates after a few years of a fixed teaser rate. This rate adjustment will probably take effect as the economy keels over and the pink slip arrives in the mail. Their monthly nut will grow precisely when Mr. And Mrs. You-Know-Who can least afford it. Put it all together and you have the recipe for a truffle sandwich.

In our last missive, we touched on your prostate, not with our hands and all, but figuratively. Scientific studies show that frequency of sex is negatively correlated to the risk of developing prostate cancer. One piece of supporting evidence is that, statistically, Catholic priests are 30% more likely to suffer the disease. The other 70%, presumably, are like Paul Shanley, accused of 10 counts of child rape.

Last week Gene Robinson was confirmed as bishop of New Hampshire, becoming the first openly gay Episcopal prelate. The Anglican Communion has threatened to sever ties with the American branch of the church. Irrespective of the outcome, I still consider the vicar a man of God, regardless of who he’s having sex with. As long as it’s a grown-up.

Speaking of adult sex acts, The Ben Affleck / Jennifer Lopez cinematic clown rape known as “Gigli” opened to wretched reviews and puny box office receipts. Perhaps “Bonnie and Clyde” would be a better title as the two stars swiped $25 million for a movie that couldn’t support William Bennett’s gambling habit. In a shocking development, insiders report that the moral compass has swung towards Hollywood. Since the heist, feelings of guilt have beset the couple; Ben had his back shorn by a Vancouver stripper and J Lo traded her engagement ring for a Vera Wang hair shit fashioned from her fiance’s clippings. For his penance, Ben must read Hillary Clinton’s “Living History” and forgo wearing Gwynneth Paltrow’s underwear until vows are formally exchanged.

In other entertainment news, the California recall election is taking shape.. Voters must choose among “Different Strokes” Gary Coleman, “Hustler” publisher Larry Flynt, porn stars, buxom billboard icons, stand-up comedians and of course the Terminator. Arnold Schwarzenegger is the only candidate with true star power; commentator Arianna Huffington waited in her car for an hour outside the recorder’s office so she could arrive along side Arnold’s Hummer. Unlike 2002 loser Bill Simon, Schwarzenegger has had some political success, shepherding proposition 49, which establishes after school programs. It seems that afternoons are when kids get into trouble with drugs, sex and various forms of thuggery. Arnold wants to keep children off the streets and in rec centers where they can play sports and watch the horrifically violent imagery in his movies, which any school counselor will tell you, no doubt, contributes to our culture of violence and crime.

With 135 names certified on the ballot, the election is beginning to resemble the Democratic presidential contest. One name absent from the roll call is L.A. photographer John Rutter who was caught trying to peddle snapshots of Cameron Diaz’s little corn tits for $3.3 million. He has been arrested on charges of extortion, forgery and excessive valuation.

In a Kafkaesque development, the Game Show Network is producing a reality show featuring five of the gubernatorial candidates. A live-audience quiz will be followed by a boogie board slalom race through the California aqueduct with $21,200 on the line. “This is a rare case art imitating life imitating art,” said one television executive, boasting that the show could be like “Bum Fights” without the vomit-encrusted sweaters. Yum.