As part of his anti-smoking campaign, Clinton recommended that teenagers quit the habit. Asked if he would set a good example by giving up his occasional cigar, the president followed a high moral tone set by predecessors including Bush and Nixon: He weaseled: No, he said, Cigars and pipes were not found by the FDA to be part of this. And hid: I try to set a good example, he added earnestly, I try never to do it where people see.

Meanwhile Fidel Castro, who actually did kick his stogie habit, is being promoted by an internet home page as the next president of the U.S. According to the home page hackers, he's just what Americans want: He is the ultimate Washington outsider and the only person who has proven able to take on the political establishment and win.

INVESTING IN AMERICA'S FUTURE

After riots shook the private immigration detention center run by Esmor Correctional Services, the INS made a shocking discovery: The private prison corporation was cutting costs to increase profits. Devastated to learn that the facility was not being run by kindhearted humanitarians devoted to the good of the prisoners, the INS severed its contract with Esmor, but only with that facility. The move may also have been precipitated by a well-publicized investigation which documented a pattern of abuses including the fact that Esmor neglected to train its guards, some of whom beat prisoners and put them in leg irons. Other guards had been a tad overzealous in following management's spirit of private enterprise. Guards were arrested for taking bribes and others who were perhaps simply networking for new business were indicted for conspiring to smuggle undocumented aliens into the U.S.

J. Michael Quinlan, an executive at the rival Corrections Corporation of America explained that his was a new industry and some people have gotten into it for the wrong reasons. Another entrepreneur in the $250 million-a- year industry was clear about the right reasons. It is the only real estate investment where you're guaranteed 100% occupancy, at least.

INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS

During the 1950s, the Atomic Energy Commission ran a network of operatives in the U.S. and a half dozen other countries. Their mission: bodysnatching. Often concentrating in urban areas among poor populations, they collected tissue and bone samples from corpses to determine the effects of fallout from nuclear testing. The families of the up to 1,500 targets which included infants were never notified. Nor were any of the perpetrators prosecuted.

THE MIND OF A QUAYLE, THE VISION OF A NEWT

On July 18, Newt Gingrich gave a major speech to the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Wash-ington to lay out his vision for U.S. foreign policy. What followed was contradictory, pretentious, pathologically inarticulate, shallow, pathetically grandiose, but most of all, bizarre. Following are some excerpts. If you figure out what the hell Mr. Two-heartbeats-from-the-presidency is talking about, you might consider a career as a mind reader, or a nice long rest at your local home for the sanity challenged.

That Vision Thing: In order for [my] vision to work both here at home and abroad, we have to launch a genuine dialogue. That dialogue has to involve conversation and conversation on a grand scale.

Huh? And our cultural institutions, from our daily news media to our so-called area experts I mean, we say we have a problem with China. Let's go talk to three experts on China. Well, what if part of the problem with China, in fact relates to some- thing which is happening with Islam, and what if that relates to something which is happening to the price of oil, and what if that relates to. And now you go to an expert, who tells you, with great wisdom and profundity, exactly what they know about the part of the equation that doesn't matter. And we're a little bit like somebody trying to deal with quadratic equations using the best arithmetic we've ever learned. And this is a systems problem. It's a cultural problem that requires a lot of very deep rethinking. Now the American challenge in leading the world is compounded by our Constitution. I frankly have found myself having to rethink a great deal in the last five or six months, because we've never had a Speaker of the House on Larry King on the scale and with the impact that I'm on there.

Let's Rename it the Department of Imperialism: ... [Y]ou do not need today's defense budget to defend the United States. You need today's defense budget to lead the world. If you're prepared to give up leading the world, we can have a much smaller defense system. Then we just have to balance off all of our former allies, watch them as they devour the various continents and try to stand aloof. ... But until somebody is prepared to say, you need a big defense system in the United States because we're going to lead the planet, there is no other good justification for this scale defense system.

He Already Said It's Not About Defense: The purpose of a military is to impose your will by violence if necessary, by guile and stealth if possible. The purpose of your military is never sit around and be a political tool to be manipulated by diplomats in totally unmilitary matters.

Roll Over deTocqueville [Americans] are a romantic and often dangerous people who are sometimes confused but have an enormous reservoir of energy and drive. And we've been that kind of a people for almost 400 years, and we're not likely to change dramatically. And so when we get excited, we rush around with more energy than any other people on the planet, and when we are not excited we all go to the lake. And so it gets very difficult if you're a diplomat trying to understand us, because you just figure out the rushing- around stage, and we quit and go off to the lake.

Commies Under the Bed Meet Barbarians at the Gate: ... Now when the entire world's honor is ruined because a group of barbarians and people who deliberately, willfully violate the law, turn stand down the forces of peace and civilization in order to kill and rape, are barbarians. They behave like barbarians, and we ought to decide whether or not we're prepared to tolerate the steady increase in barbarism.

Capitalist Battle Whine: Now my last point would be this. We need a series of large projects. You don't hold together the free people of the planet by small things. Let's get another 30,000 cars in this year. That's not exactly a noble battle cry.

Bambi Never Fawned This Hard: After the speech, the moderator gave new meaning to the phrase giant sucking sound, praising this dangerous loopiness : I just want to say this is an extraordinary exposition in grand strategy, your ability to draw on history, your sense of the future.

ON THE JOB TRAINING

I'm an expert in brainwashing, because I brainwashed people for 21 years. I was a drill instructor. I trained people to go to a foreign country and kill people they had never met if that's not brain- washing, I don't know what is, boasted Mac McCarty, right-wing gun radical who met with accused Oklahoma City bomber Timothy Mc- Veigh and befriended Mike Fortier, also indicted for the attack. For McVeigh, the army's brainwashing obviously took. In a hideous war crime during the Gulf War, his division buried thousands of Iraqi soldiers alive in trenches. The Washington Post described McVeigh as having nailed a distant Iraqi soldier, hit him right in the head with an explosive shell. He had been trained by his government to kill at a distance, and came back from the war with a pile of medals. The four-minute fuse on the Oklahoma bomb allowed those who set it enough time to reach a highway on-ramp before it blew.

PRESSING THE PRESS

Now just suppose you are an executive at a corporation with a penchant for degrading the environment, spilling toxics, or covering up disease and death linked with your less than pristine policies. What's the first thing you do? No, no, silly, not control the damage your corporation is unleashing, order damage control from your public relations firm. According to an article by Joel Bleifuss in PR Watch, worried PR flacks should begin by investigating the report- ers who might be assigned to cover the mess. Former Wall Street Journal reporter Dean Rotbart has compiled dossiers on about 6,000 reporters who cover an environment-al beat. If you subscribe to his $395- a-year service, which gather[s] information on key journalists, you can be prepared not only to defuse an emergency, but to suck up; to uncover a reporter's vulnerabilities, establish rapport with chit chat about spouses, alma maters, and hobbies; and develop co-op techniques. If at any point you get a call from a journalist you don't know, Rotbart advises, call up and we'll fax you that bio within an hour. In addition to age, interests, and names of those up the hierarchy to whom the journalist reports, the service promises we'll tell you what [the journalists] want from you and what strategies you can employ with them to generate more positive stories and better manage potentially negative situations.

In the competitive spirit that made America great, CAQ offers a similar service. Write the name of a PR hack representing a major corporation on the back of a $20 bill, and send it to us. We'll immediately write back informing you of how to get the flack to do your bidding no matter how sleazy and degrading, how unethical and odious. Oh well, we'll tell you now: Offer them money.

WHY I LOVE VERMONT

Reason#53: The food left over from the gala banquet for the 1995 Governors' Conference held in Burlington was donated to the local food bank. Special guests at the food redistribution center that night were the demonstrators who had spent the day castigating the governors for the Contract on America and targeting Pennsylvania governor Thomas Ridge for his signature on Mumia Abu Jamal's death warrant. Bon Appetit.

Reason #54: After a Vermont man was held up at gunpoint in his house for the pound of marijuana he had grown, he went to the cops. Crazy you say. Not exactly. When he testified in court against the robber, the grower was asked if he grew the pot. A drug dealer, perhaps, but not a liar, he allowed that he did. The verdict? The robber got 20 years, the farmer was let off. CovertAction Quarterly has won numerous awards for investigative journalism. It is read around the world by investigative reporters, activists, scholars, intelligence buffs, news junkies, and anyone who wants to know the news and analysis behind the soundbites and headlines. Recommended by Noam Chomsky; targeted by the CIA.

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