Honoring Tom DeLay, the still-licensed former professional exterminator who traded in his spray can to become Republican Leader of the United States House of Representatives)

We have great respect for Mr. DeLays previous profession. However, serving the public requires a different mindset than that required to eradicate infesting bugs and vermin. But Mr. DeLay would just as soon exterminate Head Start as Head Lice (or their cousins), and therein lies the problem.

A study of U.S. senators' personal stock portfolios has found they outperformed the market by an average of 12 percent a year in the five years to 1998.
First-time senators did especially well, with their stocks outperforming by 20 percent a year on average. There was no difference in performance between Democrats and Republicans.
Corporate insiders (defined as senior executives) usually outperform by about 5 percent.
Most stocks bought by senators showed little movement before the purchase, but after purchase they outperformed the market by 28.6 percent on average the following calendar year.


Guantanomo prisoners who had never seen an "unveiled" woman before would be forced to watch as the hookers touched their own naked bodies. The men would return distraught. One said an American girl had smeared menstrual blood across his face in an act of humiliation.

The most important clue by far was the unexploded bomb found in a gym bag on one of the trains. Mr. Astarloa called its discovery ``a blessing'' because, he said, ``it is the only bag planted by the terrorists that allows us to investigate something that isn't just ashes.''

A cellphone found in the gym bag presumably led to the arrests. The bag also contained a detonator and about 20 pounds of explosives as well as shrapnel on one of the trains that the terrorists attacked, he said.

The unexploded bomb, which he said was believed to have been connected to an alarm clock function on the phone, failed to go off. Mr. Astarloa said that one hypothesis was that the phone had not been properly activated.

He said that ETA had detonated bombs using mobile phones but that typically the trigger had been a call to the phone, not an alarm. The phone was not a brand used by ETA in the past, he added.