AUSTIN -- A new wrinkle in the annals of corporate scandal -- Salomon Smith Barney, the stock brokerage/investment banking firm, allocated almost a million shares of hot IPO (initial public offerings) shares in 21 different companies to Bernard Ebbers, CEO of WorldCom, and that is just the tip of the Everest, according to reports in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. Salomon also gave IPO shares to about two dozen other top telecom executives.

According to the Journal, "the linking of investment-banking business to IPO allocations has been a controversial, yet pervasive, practice on Wall Street." The New York Times, not one to leap to a conclusion, reported, "At issue is whether Salomon handed out such allocations to ensure that companies like WorldCom continued to give the firm investment banking business." Surely not! No connection whatever. Motivated only by charity, these brokers.

Come on, get real. If this were a third-world country with CEO's getting IPO's in exchange for investment banking business, no one would have any trouble identifying it as a kickback.

George W. Bush, fresh off a brush-clearing operation at his Crawford, Texas, ranch, snubbed the Earth Summit in Johannesburg, Africa, for a trip to Oregon, where he vowed to fight future forest fires by taking a chainsaw to the nation's forests and the environmental laws that protect them.

In the name of fire prevention, Bush wants to OK the timber industry to log off more than 2.5 million acres of federal forest over the next 10 years. He wants it done quickly and without any interference from pesky statutes such as the Endangered Species Act. Bush called his plan "the Healthy Forests Initiative." But it's nothing more than a giveaway to big timber that comes at a high price to the taxpayer and forest ecosystems.

Bush's stump speech was a brazen bit of political opportunism, rivaled, perhaps, only by his call to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling as a way to help heal the nation after the attacks of September 11. That plan sputtered around for a while, but didn't go anywhere in the end. But count on it: This one will.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Here we are playing hawks and doves again on the matter on Iraq -- war or no war? -- with particularly peppy exchanges from our more excitable brethren on the right concerning "appeasement" and lack of patriotism on the part of anyone who isn't ready to nuke Baghdad now. Bubba and Joe Bob have a question: "Why don't we git Oh-sama Bin first?"

I bring this up because it seems to me what the right wing is fond of describing as "the media elites" are so absorbed in their own tong warfare, they quite forget the American people have a great deal of uncommon good sense. Does life in Washington, D.C., actually resemble an endless round of "Crossfire," or does it just seem that way from the boonies?

At last count, we were already involved in military actions in seven countries, counting Colombia, which is either a different set of terrorists or a civil war. Seems like that's a lot on our plate now. Under the new Bush doctrine of "unilaterally determined pre-emptive self-defense," we get to go around attacking anyone we want without provocation. Not so much as a "Remember the Maine!" or a Tonkin Gulf resolution.

Now that the deadline has passed for hundreds of top corporate executives to certify the truthfulness of their financial books, we may expect more honest accounting in the future. But what if the heads of major firms were compelled to engage in other types of candor?

Let's imagine that the CEO of a leading media conglomerate felt the need to come clean about the firm's overall activities. The public statement might go something like this:

While revenues are down in our broadcasting division, we've done our best to wring every last dollar out of the airwaves that the parent company has been able to hijack from the public. Fortunately, these days, the FCC -- we call it the "Federal Complicity Cabal" around the office -- is giving us just about everything we demand.

In some urban areas, we now own at least half a dozen radio stations, plus a couple of TV outlets. And the restrictions against also owning local newspapers are on their way out, too.

On television, we've been able to flood the market with more junky old shows than ever. The newer sitcoms and dramas continue to

Now that Henry Kissinger and Christopher Hitchens are both, at matching levels of pomposity and self-satisfaction, agreed on the desirability of sending in the bombers and finishing off Saddam, I suppose the Bush regime will conclude that the necessary national consensus for war has been achieved, despite the bleats of the military. All that remains to be done is to deploy Christiane Amanpour.

Was it Hitchens or Kissinger who wrote the following? "An opponent might argue that the inspections offer a better chance on containing the deadly weaponry, and also of observing the rights of sovereign states. Invasion might cause much death and destruction, and exert a destabilizing effect on the region in general. It might also trigger the use of the very weapons whose removal was its ostensible justification ... "

Hard to decide, isn't it? But you're right, Kissinger is simply incapable of expressing any disquiet on the imminence of death and destruction, whereas Hitchens raises the matter, if only to discount it as a matter of any serious consequence.