I see that I'm damn near legendary now; and since I died long ago, that's safe for all concerned.

The other day, with calendars showing January 2002, a radio was having its usual effect -- until suddenly my eyelids popped open. A young fella named Ken Burns was talking about me. I listened attentively in case I might, at last, learn the meaning of my glorious and wretched life.

Weighing me on literary scales, his thumb was heavy on the glory side. I will not object, though I might quibble a tad.

On the program (NPR's "Morning Edition"), filmmaker Burns brought me into the present. "Of all the historical characters that I've tried to size up over the last 25 years," he said, "Twain is the only person that I think you could drop down into today and within about 15 minutes everybody would want him. He'd be on your show. He'd be on all the cable channels."

Well, that depends. The man's own film briefly describes what happened when I wrote an extended attack on King Leopold's murderous plunder in the Congo: "No American publisher dared print it."

In this time of national crisis, amid calls for sacrifice, I’m truly troubled by some of the choices of the Republican party leadership. Here’s their idea of an economic stimulus package:

$1.4 billion for IBM
$833 million for General Motors
$671 million for General Electric
$572 million for Chevron Texaco
$254 million for Enron

This is war profiteering, and it’s simply wrong. Yet the House has just approved it, on a virtual party line vote, ending the recent spirit of bipartisan cooperation in Congress.

While our nation was reeling from the Anthrax threat, the House voted to repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax on corporations. This law normally requires hugely profitable companies to pay at least some tax, no matter how many loopholes they can find. Its repeal would allow many companies to pay zero U.S. income tax in perpetuity - a loss of more than $12 billion in revenue next year alone.

The repeal is retroactive, so companies would get rebates of all the Alternative Minimum Tax they’ve paid for the last 15 years. The numbers above are a sampling of these rebates.

According to a recent DEA ruling, hemp foods will fall under the category of a Schedule I narcotic after a grace period ending on February 6th, 2002. By that time all retailers and manufacturers are to have disposed of any of their remaining supplies of hemp foods, and already any further manufacture of these products is to have ceased.

This ruling has come about as the DEA is trying to “clarify” the federal language regarding marijuana. Prior to this ruling, there was no official distinction between marijuana and hemp. Now that the DEA has taken care of this little snafu, in typical fashion, what we have left is the endangerment of the fledgling, yet flourishing, hemp industry here in the United States.

The U.S. government, the only government of an industrialized nation to have a ban on the production of industrial hemp, banned marijuana in 1937. However, to this day there are many Americans who do not realize that hemp, the very useful and now THC-free part of the cannabis sativa plant, played a large part in the colonists’ successful boycott of British goods, an act that made a successful American Revolution a reality.

If terrorists turn a US nuclear plant into a radioactive holocaust, the House of Representatives wants you to pay for it. But the Senate can still say otherwise.

The House voted November 28 in virtual secret to shield new reactor builders from normal insurance liability, even if they lack safety domes to contain radioactive releases.

Only a handful of Representatives were present for the vote. Led by Texas Republican Joe Barton and Michigan Democrat John Dingell, HR 2983 sailed through under a “suspension of rules,” traditionally used for unanimous resolutions to rename government buildings, proclaim heroes and commemorate holidays. Facing a barrage of grassroots opposition, a very cynical nuke caucus used the loophole to avoid full debate and hide their votes on the free insurance ride for a new generation of reactors.

Barton received more than $131,590 in utility contributions leading up to the 2000 election. Dingell got $109,679. Dingell is also related by marriage to major partners in Detroit Edison, which built the Fermi nuclear plant at Monroe Michigan. Fermi Unit I, a breeder reactor, nearly exploded in 1966.

In America’s war on terrorism, the first U.S. casualty was the First Amendment. The military, the Bush administration and the media itself have squelched important information about the war in Afghanistan since it began on September 11.

Asked at a press conference whether he would lie to the media about the war, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld repeated this statement by Winston Churchill about misleading information disseminated before and during the D-Day invasion: “Sometimes the truth is so precious it must be accompanied by a bodyguard of lies.”
Unfortunately, Rumsfeld has been the major source of information about the war as reporters’ access to the battlefield has been extremely limited. “They plan to fight the war and then tell the press and the public how it turned out afterwards,” CNN correspondent Jamie McIntyre complained. Others wonder, though, if the American press would tell the full story of the war even if it were free to do so.