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(Porn star Alexia Moore performs on stage ... ... and hurries out of court Friday night.) (Louis Posner) Teams of vice cops swooped down and busted a posh midtown strip club that catered to stockbrokers and bankers - and featured porn stars who charged $5,000 for private trysts. Prominent tax lawyer Louis Posner; his wife, Betty; and 19 others were arrested on a variety of prostitution and money-laundering charges at The Hot Lap Dance Club, which the couple ran out of a velvet-heavy loft, police said. Cops said Posner raked in $1 million over the last 10 months from the...

U.S. Representative Harold Ford, Jr. (center) tours the Behlen plant in Huntingdon Thursday. At left is plant manager Stuart Daffron and at left is employee Jeremy Willis. U.S. Representative Harold Ford Jr. (D-Memphis) made a stop in Huntingdon Thursday to gather support in his bid for the U.S. Senate. Ford, 35, currently represents the Ninth Congressional District after being elected in 1996 to the seat. He is a candidate for the 2006 U.S. Senate seat that is being vacated by U.S. Sen. Bill Frist, a Republican, who plans on running for the presidency in 2008. He’s been billed as an...

President Bush was very wise to make his Iraqi speech this week. He and his advisors are following the same public opinion polls we all are. Polls show that support for the war among Americans has been falling. Time has now become an enemy, almost as threatening as the insurgents, to the President's ability to achieve a victory. Our nation does not have much patience for fighting wars that are not discernibly winnable in a relatively short period of time. With congressional elections next year, anti-war sentiment could easily be expressed by voters -- resulting in the erosion of the...

Hormonal changes may actually alter the chemical balance in the brain and trigger some of the mood swings associated with a woman's monthly menstrual cycle, according to a new study. The study suggests that cells in a brain region called the hippocampus generate different types of receptors for the brain chemical GABA during various phases of the menstrual cycle. These changes may affect a woman's susceptibility to anxiety, depression, and seizures. Both estrogen and progesterone have effects on nerve cell activation, but the mechanism behind changes in seizure activity and increased anxiety are unknown, write the researchers. They say their...

Critics of the Bush Administration are divided between those who tend to view Republicans as part of an ultra-secret, ultra-capable military-industrial cabal who control the world and everything in it, and those who view the President as a moron and his advisers as ideologues who are leading us over a cliff. While I don’t presume to know for a fact which school of thought is correct, they can’t both be right. The Republicans-as-evil-geniuses point of view is exemplified by the “No Blood for Oil” argument. The Republicans-as-fools point of view is exemplified by the “quagmire” or “No End in Sight”...

Is there any more glaring public display of folly possible than the "No Blood For Oil" bumper sticker I recently spotted on the back of an SUV? The closest thing to that level of irony was a "Buy American" bumper sticker I saw years ago on a VW Beetle -- a German car manufactured in Mexico. The humor was intentional in that case, however. (Thanks, Dr. G, wherever you are.) Frankly, unless you live in a hand-built log cabin eating only what you grow and wearing clothes you weave yourself out of the hemp you don't smoke, you're as sticky...

COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - A European Union (news - web sites) commissioner said on Friday he believed the United States aimed to take control of Iraq (news - web sites)'s oil and was 'on its way to becoming a member of OPEC (news - web sites).' Poul Nielson, EU Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid, was speaking after the United States and Britain introduced a U.N. draft resolution that would phase out an existing oil-for-food humanitarian program for Iraq. 'They (the United States) will appropriate the oil,' he told Danish public service DR radio news on return from a three-day trip...

Canadian Alliance foreign affairs critic Stockwell Day yesterday questioned whether Jean Chrétien's family associations had any bearing on the government's decision to stay out of the recent war against Iraq. "I do not fault the prime minister's ties with his nephew (Raymond) our ambassador to France," Mr. Day said in the Commons, "or with Paul Desmarais Sr., who is the largest individual shareholder of France's largest corporation, TotalFinaElf, which has billions of dollars of contracts with Saddam's former regime." Mr. Chrétien's only daughter, France, is married to André Desmarais, son of the controlling shareholder of Montreal-based Power Corp., one of...

This war may not be about oil in the first place, but to argue that the United States is committing more than 300,000 armed men and women to the single area of the world sitting atop two-thirds of the global oil reserves without having oil on its mind is a bit of a stretch.

<p>I KNOW the saying dictates that to the victor go the spoils. But there are serious questions emerging over the process by which US companies are hired to put out oil fires, build roads and bridges, restart oil production, and do whatever is necessary to ''reconstruct'' Iraq after allied forces deconstruct it. Some answers need to come from Vice President Dick Cheney, a major architect of the war with Iraq, according to many newspapers and columnists around the country. That's the same Dick Cheney who was, until 2 1/2 years ago, chief executive officer of Halliburton Co., a Houston-based oil field services firm that takes in nearly $20 billion annually.</p>

It should be the duty of a country as powerful as the United States to be a leader that helps developing countries fairly and ethically. It should not be isolated when it comes to making decisions that will largely affect the rest of the world. The United States lacks a reputation of good diplomacy, which puts it in a precarious position. Any possibilities that America could take on characteristics of a team player in the United Nations have been officially choked to death. In minutes, President Bush smothered all of President Clinton's efforts toward turning America into a world...

Before the fighting started, one of the fears expressed by critics of the war to liberate Iraq was the prospect of terrorist attacks that al-Qaeda and other jihadist organizations might launch against Americans at home and abroad. A war on Iraq would distract us from the war on terror. The Democratic Party, which did not want to go to war against Iraq in 1991 or 2003, made this its principal point of criticism of administration policy. It was the pre-war theme of Democrats like Joe Biden, ranking member on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, Tom Daschle, Senate minority leader, Ted...

After dropping off Mrs. DFU at the airport for a visit with our lonely daughter on Whidbey Island (her husband is on the USS THEODORE ROOSEVELT), I stopped by the mini mart at the Texaco gas station to get a cup of coffee. I was wearing a sweatshirt with an eagle and the words "God Bless America" as well as my Roosevelt ball cap. The nitwit young kid at the register informed that there was a demonstration on Indian Hill Blvd. yesterday of about 200 anti-war goofballs (my word). He approved and for some reason thought I would want to...

“There is a simple way to take the true measure of a country----think about how many people want to get in…..and how many people want to get out.” Prime Minister Tony Blair The “No blood for oil” cabal continues to sound off. For the benefit of those who don’t yet view the USA as a greasy, petrol-craving villain, and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as the newly compliant, “Give peace a chance” regime, a few questions please: If you folks are right, and this war with Iraq is truly all about oil, why didn’t the first Bush imperialist order the seizure of...

'No Blood for Oil'. This is the slogan under which many protesters all over the world have marched against a possible or probable war against Iraq. It begs the question whether oil really does play such an important role as they are suggesting. It is true that oil analysts keep a close watch on the world energy markets and Iraq's place in it, if only because Iraq, with its proven oil reserves of 112 billion barrels (11% of proven world oil reserves), ranks second after Saudi Arabia. Further exploration could increase this figure to 300 billion. But its current production...

Inconvenient Facts Your January 24 edition hit a milestone in missing some inconvenient facts. “No Blood for Oil” should go on to say that no U.S. oil company can do business with Iraq by law. However, two opponents to any war, Russia and France, have multi-billion dollar oil contracts with Iraq. No wonder they support Mr. Edel’s opposition to war. Two other opponents also have enormous economic interests in Iraq: China, who supplied Iraq with a military upgrade linking anti-aircraft batteries with a cutting edge fiber optic system, in addition to additional military hardware in the multi-million dollar range, and...