Why, exactly, is it legal for a state employee--the UW's new football coach, Rick Neuheisel--to be paid the staggering sum of a million dollars a year, plus perks, all paid from, essentially, a slush fund comprised of department revenues and donations from corporations and other "boosters"? Can you imagine the outcry if someone in Fish & Wildlife tried to pay his salary that way? Or the governor? Of course, poor Gary Locke never quarterbacked UCLA in the Rose Bowl...--Geov Parrish

And then there's Secretary of State Ralph Munro, who should have gotten a lot more attention--of the negative kind--for his amazing proposal this month to ban the hiring for state jobs of people who use tobacco products. Granted, smoking is obnoxious. But--here we go again--can you imagine the outcry if it were the Craswell crowd, in office, demanding that the state not hire gays? Or anyone whose relationship with a live-in partner wasn't consecrated by God? Munro's idea--all for the benefit of "the kids," of course--is just as offensive, putting the state in the business of punishing people for legal behavior in their private lives. It's easy to get away with suggesting it, because smokers are such social pariahs these days. But it's a bad idea and a nasty precedent.--G.P.

Now that I'm (sort of) in the mainstream media (hack, cough), I've had further confirmation of something that, as an activist, I always suspected: if you're going to have a small, pathetic demonstration, don't invite the media. It just confirms that you're isolated and not worth their time, and they'll never come again. Wait until you have a story they can use, or find a different way to present it that makes it more usable. Twenty people at the Federal Building don't cut it.--G.P.

A United Nations report released Jan. 7 (and ignored by our local papers) filled in some of the details on damage caused by the U.S. bombing of Iraq in December. U.S. media, of course, was all agog at the unleashed firepower in heavily populated areas across Iraq, but conspicuously avoided reporting on the logical outcome of such a campaign: casualties. From a Boston Globe article: "U.S. and British air raids last month flattened an agricultural school, damaged at least a dozen other schools and hospitals, and knocked out water supplies for 300,000 people in Baghdad..." The raids also destroyed a warehouse in Tikrit with 2,600 tons of rice, a notable blow in a famine-stricken country.

All in all, the report lends that much more credence to concerns that the U.S.-led attacks were targeting not military installations, as the Pentagon claimed, but facilities critical to the survival of Iraq's civilian population--a direct violation (let's say it again) of international law, the Geneva convention, U.S. law, and any conceivable measure of human decency. U.S. policy towards Iraq--the hope that by killing enough civilians, Saddam Hussein will somehow quit--is simply genocidal, and the obliviousness of the American public to the war crimes being committed in our name is truly frightening.--G.P.

Remember Cassini? The interplanetary probe that drew massive international protest leading up to its Oct. 1997 launch, because of the 72 pounds of plutonium on board, was, according to NASA, totally safe. Nothing could go wrong. Bzzt. NASA scientists last week were trying to figure out why Cassini, now somewhere near Venus, dropped into "safe" mode and shut down non-critical activity. The spectre of things going wrong that the ground team can't figure out isn't very comforting, given that Cassini is coming back, due for an August 1999 fly-by that will use the Earth's gravity to slingshot Cassini toward Saturn. Critics have long pointed toward the fly-by as an extremely risky maneuver, citing the possibility of an off-course Cassini veering into the upper atmorsphere and subsequently releasing its deadly plutonium payload into the atmosphere during burnup--with possibly catastrophic consequences for life on the planet. Cassini's not off course, but it's also not behaving according to plan. My, my.--G.P.

There's another bizarre twist to the ongoing Olympics scandal (which, by the way, hasn't been covered much in the local newspapers; the P-I, for example, has been running an occasional story on the back page of the Sports Section). A couple of weeks ago, we reported that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Salt Lake City Organizing Committee (SLOC) were in trouble with the Justice Department because of allegations of bribery and fraud surrounding the effort to get Salt Lake City chosen as the host city for the 2002 Olympic games. Well, now the FBI is investigating, the head of SLOC has resigned, corporate sponsors of the 2002 games are withholding payments, IOC members are being expelled ... and charges have surfaced that SLOC credit cards were used to pay for sexual favors for IOC members. Is this why Paul Schell, Jan Drago, and the local business community wanted Seattle to jump into the Olympic bid process--to boost the local sex tourism industry? More importantly, where was Mark Sidran when we really needed him?--Maria Tomchick