Free Republic

Cash-strapped inmates can now use bank cards to come up with bail money to get out of the Androscoggin County Jail. The jail is believed to be the first in the state to have an automated teller machine inside its walls. Inmates who have debit or credit cards can get the cash they need to bail themselves out of jail. Capt. John Lebel, the jail administrator, said the ATM is particularly helpful for people arrested for nonviolent offenses. For instance, people charged with driving without a license are often assessed a $50 bail. When added to a bail commissioner's $40...

<p>It brightens everyone's day just a little when reporters catch Morgan Stanley's Phil Purcell saying something stupid in a speech.</p> <p>When Citigroup's Sandy Weill is compelled to agree that he will never again speak to his firm's equity analysts without a lawyer on hand -- well, that adds a little skip to your step, doesn't it?</p>

<p>The Convention on the Future of Europe faces a seemingly tight June 20 deadline to hand the member states a draft. But the final document will be thrashed out over many more months after that.</p> <p>The extra time might clarify just what Valery Giscard d'Estaing and fellow framers plan to foist on the future Europe of 25 states and nearly 400 million people. No simple answer exists today. The European Commission and Parliament say the current proposals fail to give enough powers to Brussels. British euroskeptics call Giscard's dream a "blueprint for tyranny" by a "European superstate" run out of Brussels. The small EU members see a Franco-British ploy to reinforce national sovereignty, kill off any budding "superstate" and weaken their own influence.</p>

<p>There's a growing apprehension that fundamentalist Islam is on the rise in postwar Iraq. It seems that not a day goes by without some publication featuring a photo, meant to be ominous, of Shiite Muslims celebrating a pilgrimage to the shrines of Najaf or Karbala, or of Sunni Muslims praying fervently at mosques in Baghdad or Mosul. As law and order continue to deteriorate, it's also been easy enough to find a mullah here or an imam there angrily denouncing the United States in the name of Allah. But while these stories make good copy, they distort what is going on, and add one more level to the layer cake of misunderstanding that most Americans, and yes, Europeans, have about the role of Islam not just in Iraq but in the Middle East as a whole.</p>

<p>It's no surprise that Republicans in Congress aren't eager to renew the ban on certain semiautomatic firearms due to expire next year. What's more interesting is why Democrats aren't raising much of a fuss about it.</p> <p>Our suspicion is that the left has learned the hard way that gun control is a political loser. The first signs came in 1994, after Bill Clinton successfully urged the Democrat-controlled House and Senate to pass legislation outlawing 19 types of "assault" weapons. In November of that year, several Democrats who had supported the ban, including then-House Speaker Tom Foley of Washington, were voted out of office in the Republican sweep. Mr. Clinton later said crossing gun owners cost his party more than 20 seats. In 1995, the House voted to repeal the ban, which wouldn't even have passed without a sunset provision, but the effort died in the Senate.</p>

<p>Is that Andrew Jackson on the twenty -- or Lord Byron?</p> <p>We're talking about the portrait on the Bureau of Engraving and Printing's new $20 bill. With his upswept hair and chiseled countenance, our seventh president has always been one of the more rakish portraits adorning the paper currency he so abhorred. But the "enhanced" Jackson image and the jettisoning of the splendidly antiquated oval frame lend the new Jackson a decidedly romantic aura.</p>

<p>Heard the one about the motorist lost in upstate New York? He pulls into a gas station and asks the attendant, "How do you get to Cooperstown?"</p> <p>"Hit 500 homers," the pump jockey said, not missing a beat.</p> <p>It's one of baseball's most sacred numbers and, for the moment at least, it's a sure ticket to the Hall of Fame. But now that Sammy Sosa and Rafael Palmiero have joined the 500-homer club, let's take a closer look at who else is aiming for it.</p>

<p>After Sept. 11, the risk of a further spread of weapons of mass destruction is seen in a new light. There is a fear that terrorist groups or reckless states might launch attacks with such weapons. The United States and its allies have now shown their readiness to deal with the risk through armed action in the case of Iraq. A horribly brutal regime has been eliminated and can no longer reactivate a weapons program -- if there still was one. How are other suspicious cases to be tackled?</p>

<p>The biggest problem with the U.S. economy right now is that it is so utterly boring.</p> <p>Animal spirits? Yeah, if the animal is a tree sloth. Nothing out there moves. The stock market is said to be in its "trading range." So are the New York Mets. You begin to feel like the fat, sweaty guy that Orson Welles played in some desolate border town, suit soaked through, mopping off the intense heat in a day going nowhere. We gotta get out of this place.</p>

<p>A few times in my 12 years writing this column, I've stumbled on a topic so unsettling to readers that it demanded a follow-up. Last month was one of those times, when my story on the problems of dual-income, no-sex marriages drew a torrent of e-mail that read as if I'd jabbed an open wound.</p>

<p>David Wiskus gives new meaning to the term "working lunch." The Denver tech-support worker installed a program on his Handspring Visor hand-held that allowed him to manipulate the screen on his office computer from a booth at a local diner.</p>

<p>With bond prices on a tear and yields down to their lowest level since 1958, the scuttlebutt was everywhere: Bill Gross is behind the run-up.</p> <p>Just as stock investors try to find out which stocks Warren Buffett is buying in a stock-market rally, bond traders try to divine the moves of the king of the bond market as prices head skyward. As chief investment officer of Pacific Investment Management Co., or Pimco, Mr. Gross manages $345 billion in bonds -- enough to skew the market.</p>

<p>Last month, Merrill Lynch & Co. hosted three days of meetings for hedge-fund managers and potential investors at the posh Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach, Fla., and picked up the tab for all attendees. The event was part of the matchmaking service that securities firms provide to hedge funds. They do so in the hope that in return for an introduction to potential investors, the hedge funds will give them the first call when it comes to the lucrative business of financing their trading positions and lending them securities, among other services.</p>

<p>In one of the most controversial cases of the year, the nine U.S. Supreme Court justices are expected soon to decide the fate of racial preferences in college admissions. As it happens, a majority of the justices are already familiar with another type of admissions preference.</p>

Florida Governor Jeb Bush ordered his state's lawyers to seek to have a guardian for the six-month old unborn child of a mentally disabled woman who was raped. According to Fox News the 22-year-old woman has no family, is too disabled to speak and cannot help police find who raped and impregnated her. Moreover, identification of her attacker has been stymied because she is unable to consent to a DNA test. "Given the facts of this case, it is entirely appropriate that an advocate be appointed to represent the unborn child's best interests in all decisions," Bush said Tuesday in...

On a flower-decked stage at a Rome university, an all-star cast of Vatican officials opened what promises to be this year's most important ecclesial production: the 25th anniversary of Pope John Paul II's election. The anniversary doesn't come around until mid-October, but by early May the speeches were already flowing and the analyses taking shape. The confab at Lateran University was the first of many conferences, seminars, round tables and book presentations that will commemorate the event. The pope, who's never made a big deal of personal anniversaries, is planning to upstage himself by beatifying Mother Teresa Oct. 19. That's...

Acts of violence and destruction committed by kids are all too familiar stories. It's the behavior of some of the adults involved in some recent stories that raises the more troubling questions. Two Weston teens apparently thought it would be amusing to paint ``School Shooting 5/12'' on a high school wall, frightening their classmates into staying home on Monday. Six pre-pubescent Chelsea kids thought nothing of trespassing on private property and using 23 rental vehicles as their personal amusement park bumper cars. And an 11-year-old Wakefield Little League player beat and spat on a young fan of a rival team....

There were boy and girl scouts, talk about the U.S. dollar epitomizing the American dream, and Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan complaining that he did not get a free sample. All said, the unveiling of the new $20 bill on Tuesday in Moscow and around the world was as colorful as the banknote itself. The revamped bill -- which shines peach, green, blue and yellow, depending on the light -- will not go into circulation until October. But the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve on Tuesday kicked off a public education campaign that is to cover every corner of the...

<p>Forget stocks and bonds. Today, the craze is for gold, hedge funds, real estate and other alternative investments. My contention: Putting a little money into such investments is probably a smart idea. But there's no need to venture beyond the comforting world of mutual funds.</p>

<p>Last Friday marked the two-year anniversary of President Bush's nominations of Miguel Estrada and Priscilla Owen as federal appellate judges. The nominations, supported by a majority of senators, are being filibustered to death by a posse of Senate Democrats. Tom Daschle, the Senate minority leader who has previously attacked filibusters as unconstitutional, is spearheading the effort. He growls that the current disruption is but a preview of what's to come.</p>