sense of passing time. When I arrived in California the sign on McDonalds proclaimed that 4 billion hamburgers had been served to customers. Now the self-same sign proclaims that 99 billion have been devoured. A fat lot of good that will do us.

ow true it is. There's a cartoon in the Christian Science Monitor that shows a couple on a couch watching the TV news. He says "want to watch the left-wing media or the right-wing media? She replies, "remember when it was just 'the news."

ne of the most maddening ordeals of our life, it would appear, comes with a call to customer service, only to be greeted by that obnoxious recording, usually a phony, cheerful, female voice ,telling us that our call is important to the individual, company, government office etc.. I don't think our call is important to the recipient and I do not think they give a hoot as to how long we must wait. Every few seconds they usually reinforce their request by informing us that the calls are taken strictly in the order in which they are received. I don't believe any of it. Do yo?  Recommended reading for any who share my conviction is a book titled "Please stay on the line", subtitled "Your call is (Not that) important to us." Worth reading, the book, by Emily Yellin", a Memphis based journalist, strives to "seek out the humanity and reason behind the customer service experiences that many people find to be "inhuman and nonsensical". Amen.

t has taken a long while, but now Congress has a sudden interest in Mexico's war on drug-traffickers.The drug cartels are becoming more and more murderous. Their killings, in the many thousands, have brought to the fore a bold new war on the drug cartels lead by the courageous new president, Felipe Calderon. If it should be necessary for an incentive for us to act now, a couple of recent developments might be sufficiently persuasive: the cartels have rapidly spread into hundreds of US cities and have shifted some of their business to human trafficking ( smuggling Mexicans into this country in frequently in abusive ways) This month alone, federal agents arrested over 700 alleged members of Mexico's Sinaloa cartel, operating in this country and they seized $59 million in criminal proceeds. We need to offer help to President Calderon to succeed on many fronts.

o the ire of the radio blowhards of the right, President Barak Obama has taken a new tone in his approach to Teheran; offering a fresh start in relations between the two countries. It is a clear departure from the bellicosity of the Bush administration, a clear departure from the animosity of the past thirty years since the Islamic Revolution.Yes, they appear to have mastered the process of manufacturing nuclear weapons, but the answer to our concern about the weapons of mass destruction will not be resolved by bloodshed ...it will take the likes of the Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, to take the correct diplomatic approach to make advances with Iran.

ccording to Senate investigators the claim has been made that Americans who hide assets in offshore bank accounts are failing to pay some $100 billion a year in taxes. Our government needs more tools to crack down on such international tax evasion. Sen. Max Baucus, the Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, is considering legislation that would require banks to inform the I.R.S. when their clients wire money abroad. Sen. Carl Levin has introduced a bill that would, in part, allow the United States to bar banks in this country that refused to cooperate with American tax authorities. Sounds fair enough to me. The climate is right for some international accord in that area.

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