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Commentary: Joe Bob's Week in Review

By JOE BOB BRIGGS
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Donald Parfit, a forklift operator at a London publishing plant, stole pages from the new Harry Potter book, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," and tried to sell them to The Sun tabloid for $38,000 in advance of the book's June 21 release date.

But the Sun reported him to police, leading to the question: what's happening to our modern tabloids? After all, Parfit the perp pilfered pulp from the plant so the purloined Potter could be properly published.

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President John F. Kennedy had a year-long affair with a 19-year-old White House intern named Marion (Mimi) Fahnestock, who was invited to White House pool parties, flown on Air Force jets to resorts and summit meetings, and sent to meet the president in far-flung places. That's according to a new Kennedy biography by Robert Dallek and an investigation by the New York Daily News, which tracked Mimi down and found her working at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York.

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"It's all true," she told the paper. "I am the Mimi." History teaches us many lessons. This woman kept her secret for 41 years and never would have told it at all if she hadn't been smoked out. Intern companions were TREATED better in the 1960s (how many exotic trips did Monica get?) and they had more class. And thanks to Kenneth Starr, we already KNOW the sex was better.

Charles A. Moose, police chief of Montgomery County in

Maryland, is suing the county ethics commission for the right to work on a book or a screenplay about last fall's sniper investigation. His tentative title is "Moose and Squirrel."

The Robert E. Lee Council of the Boy Scouts of America in

Richmond, Va., will not be using the Confederate general's name anymore. The executive board voted to drop the name from its title, apparently making some people happy and some people unhappy. Of all the Confederates you could choose, Robert E. Lee would tend to be the one that both Union and Confederate citizens admired, so apparently they found out he slept with his intern.

Wal-Mart dumped Kathie Lee Gifford's clothing label, the

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K.L.C. Collection, citing poor sales. At one time Kathie Lee earned $20 million a year from the Wal-Mart deal, but then she had to close down several adorable sweatshops.

Howard Carmack, better known as the notorious Buffalo

Spammer, was arrested in New York and charged with six counts of forgery, criminal possession of a forgery device, falsifying business records and identity theft. Carmack is accused of sending 825 million spam e-mails during the past year, most of them advertising sexual stimulants, bulk e-mail lists, and, most ironic of all, anti-spam programs. He allegedly used the identities of various Buffalo residents to evade detection, and he was finally nailed by the FBI's Cyber Task Force and New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who hopes to send him a message soon: "You've Got Jail."

More than 50 Democrats from the Texas legislature holed up at a Holiday Inn in Ardmore, Okla., so the House wouldn't have a quorum and they couldn't be forced to accept a new Republican redistricting plan. Angry Republicans displayed the faces of the absentee lawmakers on milk cartons and called their actions childish and cowardly. The Democrats -- many of whom qualify for the Senior Citizens Special at the Denny's next door to the

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Holiday Inn -- replied, "Nyah nyah nyah."

Debate on the tax cut, the biggest legislation of the

Congressional term, had to be delayed for two days when

Republicans put the wrong number on the bill. Well, it's not like the bill is about numbers or anything.

More than 13,000 high school seniors failed the Florida

Comprehensive Assessment Test, making them ineligible to graduate, causing politicians and religious leaders to call for reform ... of the test. Their reasoning is that, if the test were easier, more students would graduate. These are apparently civic leaders who would have failed the test in 1963.

England admitted that 22,000 brains had been removed from bodies between 1970 to 1999 without relatives' permission, and that anyone who was autopsied during those years could possibly have had his gray matter removed. Medical schools said they needed the brains for research projects, including one project that revealed that the brain sometimes fails to transmit the message "You can't do that!"

A burglar climbed up on a scaffold outside the

Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, broke through a double reinforced glass window, snatched a 16th-century gold sculpture by Benvenuto Cellini, set off an alarm, but managed to escape -- because the guard thought it was a false alarm and didn't check the room. Museum director Wilfried Seipel told The New York Times the theft was "done in an extremely professional way," even though climbing up on a scaffold, smashing a window and grabbing a piece of gold without disabling the alarm and then running like hell is basically the way they do it in the Brooklyn projects.

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Warren Buffett, the Oracle of Omaha, the most successful investor in the world, gave a long interview to Dominic Lawson of The New York Sun in which he warned that the nation's banks are engaging in Enron-type speculation that could lead to major collapses and a Depression. "It could get back to the days when you had runs on banks," he said, "when the good banks got pulled down by the bad banks." Fortunately, Buffett's own house, which he purchased for $31,500 in 1958, is paid for.

The economy of Toronto was battered by the SARS scare, which caused meetings to be canceled, conventions to be postponed, and leisure travel to be avoided, which caused airline fares and hotel rates to be drastically lowered, which caused tourists to flock there in droves.

The Federal Trade Commission released a study concluding that two-thirds of spam e-mails are false, and 96 percent contain false information. The shocking news came just as we were about to earn $50,000 a week at home while awaiting our $20 million from the former vice-president of Nigeria, which is money we needed for our upcoming marriage to a supermodel, following the purchase of magic pills that would enlarge parts of our anatomy.

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Marcy Lafferty Shatner sued ex-husband William Shatner for violating the horse-semen clause of their divorce agreement. The ex claims that she has the right to breed a mare once a year to one of Shatner's American saddlebred stallions in Kentucky. But in March she found out that she wouldn't be allowed to take her horse to the stud farm, but would be given frozen semen instead. This is "unacceptable," she says. Half the fun is watching them rare back and get busy.

The Rand Corp. announced that there are 400,000 frozen human embryos in American fertility clinics, more than double the highest previous estimate, and most of the couples who own them STILL can't make up their minds.

The Fenghua Yuan Drive-In Movie Theater outside Beijing is doing record business due to fear of SARS in indoor moviehouses. Now, if we can only get them to show "Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens," capitalism will be firmly established once and for all behind the Bamboo Curtain.

Scenes from our secure republic:

A Continental Airlines charter jet decided to fly low over

lower Manhattan so that the military personnel aboard could get a better view of the Statue of Liberty. By the time it had flown down the Hudson River, circled the Statue of Liberty twice, headed up the East River and crossed Midtown Manhattan from east to west, people were fleeing the skyscraper canyons. When it landed at Liberty International Airport in Newark, where one of the Sept. 11 planes had taken off, the New York City Council announced free Valiums for the rest of the day.

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(Bob Briggs writes several columns for UPI. Contact him at [email protected] or through his Web site, joebobbriggs.com)

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