Posted 9:23 AM by Gene

Well! Mr. Mark comes back rested and refreshed from his two-week break to do a cover on "The Greening of America," one of those placeholders to bide the time while we look for something heavy-duty to spin or sell. Meantime the TWXSTERS do something on Dubya's foreign policy, which we'd guess is about as we'd expect it. (Indeed it is: "a State Department official under President Clinton", "who commanded the U.S. Central Command from 1991 to '94", "a senior foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution", that sounds about right. Though I see we do quote someone from the AEI for balance. It's writing like this that gets us doing skimming like this.)

And there is a certain stenographic bone-headedness to stories like Mr. Mark's, as witness this graf:

Even Wal-Mart wants to help shape a sustainable future, and few companies are in a better position to do so. Just by wrapping four kinds of produce in a polymer derived from corn instead of oil, the company claims it can save the equivalent of 800,000 gallons of gasoline.

All well and good on the PR front, but how much gas do shoppers waste coming and going to the Wal-Marts mostly located near nothing -- especially when they'd save more money at Amazon.com?

And we just saw this: Dick Schick thought he could make up for The Selling of a Geisha by calling the THEME PARK of the CENTURY a "disaster." You know that line about stopped clocks, Dick.