CNN is reporting that the US is detaining about 50 Cubans at Guantanamo Bay.  It seems these individuals have, at various times, attempted to migrate to the US, but US authorities intercepted them at sea.

Ordinarily, US authorities would simply have repatriated these individuals to Cuba, under the US's sensitively-named "wet foot-dry foot" policy.  So what are they doing at Gitmo?

Well, I don't live in Chicago - haven't been there in several years, actually, except to change planes at Ohare.  As a result, I haven't been up on what looks like a stylish bit of guerrilla politics - Chicago's ban on foie gras, due to take effect on August 22.

Now, I like good food, and I like foie gras (though Ms GR likes it more).  But producing the stuff (in the traditional way, anyway) requires a rather gruesome force-feeding of the geese whose then overstuffed livers become the delicacy.  While it surprised me to see it, it turns out that animal-rights advocates persuaded the Chicago city council to approve the ban.  Speaking entirely for myself, this is a sacrifice I'm willing to make for the greater good.

More on what I like about this story below the fold:

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Now comes the time to look back on the Lamont victory last night, and ahead to the irritation of needing to continue to deal with Joe "How Can I Miss You if you Won't Go Away" Lieberman.  As I do, it occurs to me that Lieberman's signal failure in the campaign was that he didn't take the right play out of his own playbook.

Remember 2000, when Joe managed to keep his name on the ballot twice by standing both for VP and re-election to his Senate seat?  Remember how he could've given the Repubs immediate control of the Senate had he won both (since his Senate replacement would likely have been a Republican - not to mention the perils of giving Joe the casting vote as VP)?  

I'm an immoderate consumer of crossword puzzles and word games.  I particularly like the cryptic puzzle in the Financial Times.  Cryptics make use of both straight definitions and wordplay.  Part of the game is to figure out which part of the clue is the definition, and which part the wordplay.  

Imagine my pleasure a few weeks ago in seeing a cryptic puzzle on the Sunday puzzle page in the New York Times.  Happily solving, I came to the last "Across" clue, which ran like this:

City paper monkeys write randomly (3,4,5)

It's Friday, so it figures to be time for another installment of my occasional (very occasional) series on figures of speech and other linguistic mischief.  Let me install my headphones - ah, there we are - and away we go...

During the first American effort to throw off the yoke of monarchy, Ben Franklin famously said,

We must all hang together, or we shall surely all hang separately.

Franklin's utterance was a classic example of antanaclasis, a figure of speech using the same word in two different senses.  It's a sort of pun, but much, much more.  It depends not on words of similar sounds, but on alternate meanings for the same word.  So follow me below the fold -- it's a little tight there, you'll have to fold yourself up a bit to get there -- for more.

A couple of weeks ago I posted a Friday word game over at dKos.  The subject then was mondegreens, those songs where you hear the lyrics wrong for months and years at a time.  You know, like the refrain in Creedence's "Bad Moon Rising," "There's a bathroom on the right."  Well, we had a bit of fun over there, but I'm thinking this kind of splashing around is better suited to the friendly confines of the Frog Pond.  So here goes.

I stole today's title, of course, from Kermit, patron saint of the Frog Pond.  (I've often said that plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery.)  It's also an example of chiasmus, the subject of today's game.  Chiasmus is a type of play on words in which you repeat a phrase, reversing two words (or two phrases, or even two letters) the second time around, for impact or comic effect.  

Sometimes the best lessons are from ordinary life. Last night, as on many other evenings, I found myself called upon to give a dramatic reading of Dr. Seuss's Green Eggs and Ham to my six-year-old daughter.  We sat, as we have many evenings before, cozily snuggling and enjoying the calculated silliness of Dr. Seuss's verse -- half nonsense, half sly reading primer.  As I read, I also thought of the many diaries that have appeared here in the past two weeks or so.  I've had many reactions to them, but the one it seemed most worth sharing, as best I can, is my reaction as a father of two young girls, ages eight and six.  The upwelling of emotion I felt, thinking of my daughter and her big sister, and the world whose dangers I hope they need to learn about only gradually, seemed worth writing down.

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."  -  Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There

Humpty Dumpty is the ideal mascot for the Looking-Glass world of Bush Administration regulatory policy.  Remember those fabulous '80s?  Even in the Reagan Administration the Justice Department had an active Antitrust Division.  On January 1, 1984, under a consent decree settling a long-running antitrust suit, AT&T voluntarily divested itself of its local telephone service business, spinning off seven regional Bell Operating Companies, or "Baby Bells."  Now, like the killer cyborg in Terminator 2, the spawn of the old AT&T are gathering themselves back up and reconstituting a new, Texas-based, AT&T.  And it looks like all the king's horses and all the king's men are ready to help.

President Bush made a surprise appearance this morning at the ceremonial swearing-in of Ben Bernanke, the new Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve.  Also in attendance were Bernanke's predecessors, Alan Greenspan and Paul Volcker.  In their years as Fed Chairs, Mr. Greenspan and Mr. Volcker both developed formidable political prowess to complement their economic policy skills.  By the end of his tenure, Mr. Greenspan was basically a politician that wore an economist costume to work every morning.  Mr. Bernanke has limited political experience, unless you count success in academia (and that may in fact count).  But based on Mr. Bernanke's remarks this morning, he seems to be off to a good start.  My take is that in about a four-minute talk, he sliced up Mr. Bush this morning with a knife so sharp the pieces didn't begin to fall off until he was back in his limo.

Around here, and everywhere else that politics is the main talk, all eyes were on the Senate today, of course.  Enough said about that, in this diary anyway.  In the real world, meanwhile, most everybody's attention focused on two news stories, more horrible than usual, from Iraq, along with Al Zawahiri's demonstration that even hardened terrorists can act like fifth-grade bullies when suitably provoked.  But you knew all that.  

So who could blame anybody for not noticing today's economic data?  They were really all over the place, painting a pretty confusing picture.  Let's take a look.

Economic news is important both in its own right, and in how it shapes the terms of political debate.  That's especially true now, when the news seems to be pointing in both directions at the same time.  To oversimplify, if you're a professional owner, things are ok, but if you work for a living, well, not so much.  One example is the news from Ford, which Man Eegee diaried earlier.  Let's see what else we can find.

The US stock market did a header on Friday, falling about -2% for the day, reflecting anxiety over corporate earnings (Citigroup, Intel, General Electric, DuPont, Alcoa, Tyco, Yahoo, Motorola, and IBM all reported disappointing earnings), worries about both Iraq and Iran -- especially Iran -- the bin Laden tape, and big trouble on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.  So what might be moving the market and telling us about the economy this week?

A new chapter in the erosion of American workers' pension benefits opened today, as Northwest Airlines Corporation's 5000 pilots voluntarily approved a freeze on their defined benefit pension plan, and its replacement with a defined contribution plan.  An overwhelming 82% of the pilots casting ballots voted to approve the freeze.  Both Northwest and the pilots' union had recommended this step.

What's going on here?

The past couple of years have seen an accelerating trend away from traditional, defined benefit pension plans for American workers.  The trend is away from fixed retirement benefits, paid over a retiree's lifetime, to a less certain world in which we all have to rely on our own savings -- 401(k)s, IRAs, and other savings.  In the On-your-Ownership society, individuals rather than corporations or government take all the investment risk, and all the risk of outliving our savings.  Today, IBM laid another brick in this wall.

As his trial on charges of fraud and conspiracy in Enron's collapse approaches, Enron founder and ex-CEO Ken Lay has taken the unusual step of going public with his protestations of innocence.  In a speech before 500 business and academic leaders at the Houston Forum, Mr. Lay proclaimed his innocence, and asked former Enron employees to come forward and testify on his behalf.

More astonishing than Mr. Lay's temerity was the reason he gave to explain why no one had come forth to date.  As the AP reports:  

He accused the government of bullying potential witnesses who could help him and promised to testify in his own defense.

"Truth is a great rock," he said, quoting Winston Churchill. "Whether it will continue to be submerged by a wave -- a wave of terror by the Enron Task Force -- will be determined by former Enron employees."

What, if anything, is this man thinking?