SCRAPBOOK

...TURNER STRIKES AGAIN Just when THE SCRAPBOOK vows never again to bait Jane Fonda, she has to go and give another speech...

...MRS...

...The other month she decried child "starvation" in northern Georgia before the United Nations...

...But the designers couldn't figure out whether the statue should depict a man or a woman...

...Why does Fonda think—just to cite one example—the late Mother Teresa went to Calcutta...

...They don't care about children that are not white, middle-class Christians...

...But here is echt Ginsburg: "Let's all grow up and get real...

...The central feature, as David Brooks reported in April, was to be a huge statue of a person sitting in the middle of the dome, through which 3,500 visitors could walk each hour, learning about human anatomy...

...The claim that Christians seek to "eliminate" dark-skinned children verges on what, in other circles, is known as blood libel...

...Like a skunk, [Starr] is rearing up and proving resoundingly that he is not the spiritual leader of what he calls 'the Temple of Truth.' He doesn't even deserve admission to that sacred shrine...

...Now, pointing out that Jane Fonda is a noxious dimbulb is like pointing out that Albany is the capital of New York...

...Still, Fonda is taken semi-seriously in public life...

...The Academy will then transfer the state's per-pupil expenditure to any public school or pay the same amount to any private school...

...One torso will be muscular and male and the other torso will have enormous breasts (in proportion to her 300-foot height) and be female...

...The Agriculture Department notes that salsa, which will serve as a substitute for vegetables like spinach and peas, can be counted only if at least one-eighth of a cup is included with each lunch...

...At this writing, Time has published only an acknowledgment that doubts were raised about the story and has promised to "keep reporting this story...

...For those who are tracking the moral climate in the nation's capital, the National Press Club that welcomed Fonda's hate speech is indeed the very same club that worked itself into a hissy fit over the bona fides of Internet gossip Matt Drudge only a couple of weeks before...

...Well, the philosophy of prime minister Tony Blair is that you should try to please everyone, so the Brits have designed a statue that would be a Siamese twin, half man, half woman...

...At the National Press Club last week, she denounced "abstinence-only" programs (efforts to encourage teenagers to refrain altogether from sex...

...To work on her tan...

...military raid in Laos, Operation Tailwind, involved a deadly nerve-gas attack on civilians— continues to unravel...

...LET THEM EAT SALSA Those with long memories will recall the uproar that followed the Reagan administration's 1981 attempt to declare ketchup a vegetable for purposes of the federal school-lunch program...

...Last time we looked, it was conservative Christians, not Fonda, picketing the nation's abortion clinics...

...Indeed, Democrats still joke about it...

...So The Scrapbook was amused to read last week in a Senate budget document that the Clinton administration has approved salsa—yes, salsa—as a vegetable for the school-lunch program...

...Or maybe they're just bringing back ketchup in multicultural disguise...

...EDUCATION GUARANTEED While all charter schools make academic promises, the Academy of the Pacific Rim, a Boston charter, may be the first to put a guarantee in writing...

...The context is unimportant since the letter doesn't make any sense...

...On the other hand, in view of the embarrassing "scoop" that has transformed the debut of NewsStand: CNN & Time from journalistic triumph into corporate calamity, The Scrapbook can well understand why CNN executives might lack confidence in the investigative skills of their own employees...

...The guarantee requires that parents sign a weekly progress report and that students attend tutoring sessions if they are falling behind...

...Moreover, CNN ignored expert scientific testimony it had gathered confirming that soldiers' accounts of Operation Tailwind accurately described the symptoms produced by tear gas, but were utterly inconsistent with any use of nerve gas...

...When House Republicans proposed modifying the lunch program in 1995, House Democratic leader Richard Gephardt declared, "We're back to counting ketchup as a vegetable...

...The initial plans called for a 75-foot baby that would crawl toward the hermaphrodite, but the baby has been scrapped, no doubt scared off by the genetic mutation that would be its parent...

...Eliminated...

...And she meant the American state where hubby Ted Turner's CNN is headquartered, not the former Soviet republic...

...Van Buskirk told Felten that the two men didn't meet until years after the war, at a prison where Van Buskirk was ministering and giving a talk on his army experience...

...Don't you just hate it when skunks rear up and prove they are not spiritual leaders...

...It's another good idea the teachers unions will no doubt want to kill...

...As far as they're concerned, others can be eliminated...

...Yet no service, save perhaps health care, matters as much to a person's livelihood as the education they receive...

...As Eric Felten reported in these pages last week, CNN's key eyewitness, Robert Van Buskirk, recovered his memory of the nerve gas under the expert questioning of CNN, while his 1983 memoir told only of the use of tear gas...

...Could this be an Al Gore strategy to woo Hispanic voters...

...The school's director, Stacey Boyd, points out that there are guarantees for "mufflers, power tools, automobiles, airline services, and dozens of other products and services in America...

...And no, you don't get any chips with that salsa...

...THE NEW EUROPE The Millennium Dome that Britain is constructing to celebrate the year 2000 is intended as a big World's-Fair-type space, dripping with uplifting sentimentality...

...Cathey is also a Baptist minister in North Carolina...

...According to the Times of London, the creature will have only one pair of legs and no pubic features, but it will have two torsos...

...The "Learning Guarantee" instituted by the school this spring says that students who have attended the school for four years will pass a statewide assessment test given in the 10th grade...

...If these conditions are met and a student fails the test, he is free to attend any other school of his choice...

...Meanwhile, Rowan Scarborough of the Washington Times reported on Friday that another of CNN's on-camera sources for the story, retired sergeant James Cathey, was not a participant in Operation Tailwind as claimed but instead was serving as an air-traffic-control supervisor in South Vietnam at the time of the operation...

...Asked why conservative Christians disagree with her, she said, "They don't care about children that don't look like them...

...This is the end of civilization as we know it...

...Conservative Christians have long been in the forefront of, for example, Third World charity...

...The latest William H. Ginsburg foray into the realm of the bizarre is a letter in the June 24 Los Angeles Times...

...Located in Boston's Hyde Park, the academy "combines the respect for education and discipline found in the East with the emphasis on individuality and diversity found in the West...

...There have been no apologies yet from Ted Turner's media empire for its irresponsible smear...

...GINSBURGIANA Old soldiers fade away, but Monica Lewinsky's old lawyer is just getting nuttier...

...Last week's performance, though, was outstanding in its vileness...

...Cathey, as it happens, is a friend of Van Buskirk's...

...CNN, for its part, has taken the curious step of hiring famed First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams to conduct an investigation of its story—curious because no one has suggested suing CNN, which is the usual reason for hiring a lawyer...