If you have never lived in Houston, you may not have heard of Marvin Zindler, who is something of an institution down here. He is, however, known to millions of folks around the world for the character based upon him (Melvin P. Thorpe) in "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas".

Zindler has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer which has spread to his liver.

Legendary Houston newsman Marvin Zindler is suffering from inoperable pancreatic cancer.

Zindler, who turns 86 on Aug. 10, said in a report filed for Channel 13's 6 p.m. newscast Thursday that he has pancreatic cancer that has spread to his liver.

"I don't want anybody to feel sorry for me because I'm almost 86 years old," said Zindler, who looked wan and tired in the report.

Despite the news, the consumer affairs reporter — who has worked for KTRK for 35 years and has a lifetime contract with the station — said he planned on filing reports as usual, beginning Friday with his weekly "rat and roach" restaurant report.

Rest assured that there are many prayers for him this evening -- though at 86 the prognosis is clearly not good.

They really don't make them like Marvin any more. For a couple of tastes of Zindler's style, you can look his restaurant report and his trademark sign-off. They are not to be missed!

I love the fact that a number of rockers are questioning the integrity of Al Gwhore's Live Earth concerts. They include the hottest new group in the UK, who really hit the nail on the head.

Rock group Arctic Monkeys have become the latest music industry stars to question whether the performers taking part in Live Earth on Saturday are suitable climate change activists.

"It's a bit patronising for us 21 year olds to try to start to change the world," said Arctic Monkeys drummer Matt Helders, explaining why the group is not on the bill at any of Al Gore's charity concerts.

"Especially when we're using enough power for 10 houses just for (stage) lighting. It'd be a bit hypocritical," he told AFP in an interview before a concert in Paris.

Bass player Nick O'Malley chimes in: "And we're always jetting off on aeroplanes!"

I wonder -- how will those rockers (and much of the audience) get to the venues of Sydney, Tokyo, Shanghai, Hamburg, London, Johannesburg and New York? I suspect via environmentally unfriendly aircraft!

Perhaps Al Gwhore will be there selling carbon offsets indulgences to those hypocrites who actually have a conscience. I've even got a song for him to sing as he tries to scam people into believing that a cash donation will make up for their environmental sins.

"Another penny in the coffer rings,
Excess carbon to heaven springs!"

Maybe that little ditty will inspire some latter-day Luthers to upset the so-called consensus of the cult of global warming.

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Seems to me that Gov. Spitzer may be guilty of an impeachable offense -- but that he is also following his traditional pattern of using the powers of his office to settle personal political scores.

Gov. Spitzer targeted state Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno for an unprecedented State Police surveillance program that led to allegations Bruno improperly used a state helicopter for political purposes, an investigation by The Post has found.

No other state official, including Spitzer and Lt. Gov. David Paterson, was singled out for the type of detailed record-keeping the State Police maintained on Bruno, the state's most powerful Republican, official records show.

Part of the Spitzer administration's justification for homing in on Bruno - the governor's leading political adversary - is a claim that state Conservative Party leader Michael Long raised objections to Bruno's use of the State Police.

Spitzer spokesman Darren Dopp told The Post that the records on Bruno began to be assembled because "there was an incident late last year in which Mike Long called to complain about Joe bringing armed troopers to [Long's] fund-raising event.

"Long thought it was highly inappropriate, and it probably was. Recalling that incident, the [State Police] made some changes . . . and, yes, [started] keeping basic records, i.e. logs," Dopp said.

But Long insisted yesterday that he never complained about Bruno and the State Police, and that no such incident had occurred.

"That is a baldfaced lie," said Long, who has been at odds with Bruno in recent years.

"I never made a complaint to the State Police or the governor's office, and if Bruno had shown up with armed troopers I probably wouldn't have thought anything of it."

A senior state official familiar with the surveillance program told The Post that he believed the governor and his aides had sought to "set up" Bruno by having the State Police keep track of his travels.

"Why else would they do it if not to set up Bruno - by getting on him something they thought was incriminating - when they weren't doing it to anyone else?" said the official.

Bruno himself said "it appears" Spitzer and his staff used the State Police to try to obtain negative information on him in an effort to "set up an officeholder" with whom the governor disagrees.

"I would like not to believe that the governor and the people who work for him would purposely set up an officeholder of the opposing party, but it certainly appears that way," said Bruno.

Spitzer ran on a platform of "clean government" -- but it looks like he may be the dirtiest one of all. Let's hope that the state legislature takes its duty seriously and removes him immediately.

This sounds like an overwhelmingly positive development to me.

The number of legal immigrants seeking to become United States citizens is surging, officials say, prompted by imminent increases in fees to process naturalization applications, citizenship drives across the country and new feelings of insecurity among immigrants.

That fourth word makes all the difference in my book -- and I salute them as they receive the most exalted rank that any human being can ever hold: AMERICAN CITIZEN.

Just a little factoid to pull out next time that you hear open border advocates lament the "inhumane" policies of the United States in deporting border-jumping immigration criminals.

Those who enter Mexico illegally have committed a criminal offense, and under 1974 law are subject to two to five years in prison. This law is being revisited by federal legislators who don't want to be hypocritical in their objection to criminalizing immigration in this country.

The number of illegal immigrants detained in Mexico nearly doubled from 2002 to more than 240,000 last year. They came from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

For over 30 years, the Mexican government has been complaining about "harsh" US immigration policies while enforcing laws much more draconian than anything envisioned by th American government or the American people. The belated concern about hypocrisy rings quite hollow.

"Salus Populi Suprema Lex Esto" -- Juvenal

For those unfamiliar with Latin, that translates as "The will of the people is the highest law."

Today, columnist David Broder presents a different point of view, one which might well be summed up as "Screw the people!"

Let a reporter who is not running for anything suggest that exactly the opposite may be true: A particularly virulent strain of populism has made official Washington altogether too responsive to public opinion.

From Aristotle to Edmund Burke, philosophers have written of the healthy tension that normally exists between the understanding and strategies of leaders and the sentiments and opinions of their people.

In today's Washington, a badly weakened president and a dangerously compliant congressional leadership are no match for the power of public opinion -- magnified and sometimes exaggerated by modern communications and interest group pressure.

Now I'll agree with the notion that unfettered democracy is a bad thing -- hence my support of and near idolatry towards a Constitution that does place limits on what government can do, no matter what the majority wants. That is an essential feature of our system. And from time to time it might be necessary for the people and their representatives to hold their noses and acquiesce to unpopular legislation or policies that produce a substantive benefit to the nation as a whole.

However, Broder's gripe is that the Senate and House are unwilling to shove a bad immigration bill down the throats of an American people who are screaming their opposition. He defines listening to the collective wisdom of the American people as "failure", and ignoring our voices as "leadership".

I'm sorry, but his position is akin to claiming that a rapist might be justified in continuing his forcible violation of a screaming, struggling woman on the grounds that there might be a higher good that comes out of the assault, and that the victim is somehow obliged to lay back and enjoy it. Knowing that Broder is a decent man, I am sure he would never advocate such a thing if the victim were his granddaughter -- and he should be ashamed to advocate it when the victim would be the American people.

Does the WaPo profile of Jonathan Edwards' hairstylist reveal a possible violation of federal campaign finance law?

Torrenueva provided his first five haircuts for Edwards in late 2003 and early 2004 free of charge. "I was just doing it because I'm a Democrat," he said.

That the Post is doing a profile of the candidate's hairstylist is a sign on how non-substantive a candidate Edwards really is. But consider the implications of that little excerpt above.

Wasn't Edwards a presidential candidate at the time? Would they constitute in-kind contributions? Were these contributions properly reported on his FEC disclosures? Is Torrenueva incorporated for business purposes, and if he is do those haircuts constitute illegal corporate contributions to the Edwards campaign? And if Torrenueva also gave cash to the campaign, did the combined total value of the haircuts and cash exceed the legal limit for campaign contributions?

I don't always agree with George Will, but I have always admired his ability to get to the heart of a matter and present a solid intellectual defense of his position.

His latest column does a fantastic job of explaining why the four judge plurality in last week's school desegregation cases were absolutely correct -- and traces the history of the court's meander away from the color-blind promise of Brown v. Board of Education before the Roberts court shifted back to the true promise of that seminal decision on civil rights and equal protection of the law.

The court ruled 5 to 4 that Seattle, which never had school segregation, and Louisville, which did but seven years ago completed judicially mandated remedial measures, must stop using race in assigning children to schools to produce particular racial ratios in enrollments. How did we get from this: "Distinctions by race are so evil, so arbitrary and invidious that a state bound to defend the equal protection of the laws must not invoke them in any public sphere" (the NAACP's brief, written by Thurgood Marshall, in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education desegregation case), to this: local public education establishments routinely taking cognizance of race in assigning children to schools?

In 1978, in the Bakke case concerning racial preferences in a medical school's admissions, Justice Lewis Powell wrote that institutions of higher education have a First Amendment right -- academic freedom -- to use race as one"plus" factor when shaping their student bodies to achieve viewpoint diversity. Thus was born the "educational benefits" exception to the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection of the laws. But that hardly justifies assigning 6-year-olds to this or that school solely because of their races.

Twenty-five years after Bakke, in 2003, the court approved the University of Michigan law school's use of race in admissions, because that use supposedly involves a "highly individualized, holistic review" of applicants. The court simultaneously disallowed Michigan's undergraduate admissions plan that automatically granted preferences based solely on race -- as Seattle has done in high schools and Louisville has done in kindergarten through grade 12.

Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas joined Chief Justice John Roberts's opinion for the court, in which Roberts said: "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." Anthony Kennedy, although agreeing that Seattle and Louisville's practices are unconstitutional, chastised Roberts for an "all-too-unyielding" opposition to race-based programs. Yet, when dissenting in the law school case, Kennedy said: "Preferment by race, when resorted to by the state, can be the most divisive of all policies, containing within it the potential to destroy confidence in the Constitution and in the idea of equality."

Let us hope that we see the courts of the United States hew to the promise made by the Fourteenth Amendment and affirmed by the unanimous decision of the justices in Brown. And may the nation embrace the philosophical and constitutional position advanced by Marshall.

It looks like a lot of defendants, including this terrorist, are going to try to use the President's commutation of Scooter Libby's sentence as justification for lowering their own.

An alleged Hamas operative is likely to be among the first criminal defendants to try to capitalize on President Bush's commutation of the 2 1/2 year prison sentence imposed on a former White House aide, I. Lewis Libby Jr., for obstructing a CIA leak investigation. Mohammed Salah, 57, is scheduled to be sentenced by a federal judge in Chicago next week on one count of obstruction of justice. In February, a jury convicted Salah and a co-defendant, Abdelhaleem Ashqar, of obstruction, but acquitted the pair of a far more serious charge of racketeering conspiracy in support of Hamas's terrorist campaigns in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank.

"What the president said about Mr. Libby applies in spades to the case of Mohammed Salah," Salah's defense attorney, Michael Deutsch, told The New York Sun yesterday. "We'll definitely be bringing it up to the judge. … It's going to be a real test, a first early test of whether we're a nation of laws or a nation of men."

Here's the problem with the argument advanced by the terrorist scumbag and his paid mouthpiece -- decisions in clemency cases are NOT a legal precedent, and DO NOT have the force of law. Indeed, a case of executive clemency is an action based upon the individual case and circumstance, not a general rule. It is an act of mercy in directed at correcting an individual injustice or recognizing individual merit.

However, there is one aspect of this case that troubles me -- and which troubles me every time it is used in justifying a sentence for someone convicted of a crime.

Despite Salah's acquittal on the racketeering charge, which could have carried a life sentence, prosecutors have asked Judge Amy St. Eve to find that the evidence presented at trial proved Salah was part of a terrorist conspiracy. "The jury did not find beyond a reasonable doubt that defendant Salah committed racketeering conspiracy. The standard at sentencing, however, is not proof beyond a reasonable doubt," the prosecution wrote in a recent court filing.

Prosecutors have also asked the judge to consider a series of alleged offenses from the 1990s that Salah was never charged with, including bank fraud and perjury on behalf of a Hamas leader then facing deportation, Mousa abu Marzook. "To sentence Mr. Salah on the basis of non-relevant, stale, and acquitted conduct would most assuredly result in an unreasonable sentence and promote disrespect for the law," Mr. Deutsch said in papers filed with the court.

It strikes me that if the prosecution wants to have someone sentenced based upon criminal conduct, they should have to prove that conduct in court and get a conviction, not come back after obtaining a conviction on some other offense, even a related one, and demand that the sentence be based upon a crime with which that individual was never accused, against which he was never permitted to defend himself, and of which he had never been convicted. That strikes me as loading the dice too much in favor of the prosecution when the Bill of Rights makes it clear that an individual should not be punished for a crime of which he was not convicted.

When the white or the wealthy win, it is "Justice Denied" according to this editorial.

In the 1960s, Chief Justice Earl Warren presided over a Supreme Court that interpreted the Constitution in ways that protected the powerless — racial and religious minorities, consumers, students and criminal defendants. At the end of its first full term, Chief Justice John Roberts’s court is emerging as the Warren court’s mirror image. Time and again the court has ruled, almost always 5-4, in favor of corporations and powerful interests while slamming the courthouse door on individuals and ideals that truly need the court’s shelter.

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It has been decades since the most privileged members of society — corporations, the wealthy, white people who want to attend school with other whites — have had such a successful Supreme Court term. Society’s have-nots were not the only losers. The basic ideals of American justice lost as well.

And when it comes right down to it, the decision cited -- some which I agree with, others which I do not -- don't really matter. What has the NY Times angry is that "corporations, the wealthy, [and] white people" won in them. Never mind that those decisions all had solid legal and/or Constituitonal reasoning to support them -- the NY Times does not like who won, so they cannot be legitimate. Indeed, it would appear that the editors believe that Lady Justice should rip off her blindfold and put her thumb on the scale to ensure that "corporations, the wealthy, [and] white people" even if the law and the Constitution are on their side.

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