Flying fickle finger of fate. (don't get me started).

The other day I was talking to John Ashcroft. Well, I was talking; he was listening. My girlfriend tells me not to flatter myself, but I swear, sometimes I hear clicks on our phone line. You just know that someday it will be revealed that J. Edgar Ashcroft often enjoyed a good three-way. Anyway, I was telling my friend about an incident at the National Lesbian Health Conference. While attending in Washington, D.C., two lesbians were standing in their hotel room window watching the world go by. Suddenly the Bush presidential motorcade roared by. Back from a run? Off to the ranch? Late for a war?

The two women were perhaps still miffed that the Bush administration's Department of Health and Human Services had slashed $75,000 in conference funding just three months prior to the event. For whatever reason--and there are so many to chose from--they flipped the bird in the direction of the tinted windows of the Bushmobile.

Fifteen minutes later there was a knock on their door. Two burly Secret Service men entered and began questioning them. Shockingly unaware of the universal meaning of the flipped bird, the agents asked, "What did you mean by the gesture?" After the SS men left murmuring into their wristicuffs, the D.C. Metro police arrived to question the two women. After those uniforms left, hotel security showed up.

The night I thought I heard clicks on my phone, my friend and I were wondering how the suits located the digit dykes so quickly. Do they really think there's a lesbian mafia? Where did they place the surveillance cameras? Wasn't there a chance the midi die-finger gesture was just a friendly reminder from two health-conscious lesbians to schedule another executive colonoscopy? How far did Cher turn back time? Pre-feminism? Pre-Magnon? Pre-preemptive?

There are so many bird-flipping opportunities. Donald Rumsfeld, secretary of Offense, has let lapse the charter of the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services. The respected volunteer agency, founded in 1951, had been instrumental in promoting gender integration in the military and recently in promulgating the enlightened notion that lesbian baiting is harmful to all women and to troop morale in general. While the group has been rechartered, the word is that Rummy has limited its focus to recruitment, retention, and family issues. One House Armed Services Committee member has objected to equal opportunity for women in the military by saying, "I don't think that the hand that rocks the cradle should be shooting at the heads of the enemy." I don't think the hand that flips the bird to this guy should be slapped.

You'd never know it from the sports pages, but this is the 30th anniversary of Title IX, the law requiring colleges that receive federal funds to grant equal resources to male and female athletics. With women's enrollment on the rise, schools are scrambling to comply not by increasing women's programs but by slashing men's programs like wrestling (not men's football or basketball, you unpatriotic dummy). George W. Bush, Texas Ranger and Longhorn, has vowed to look into the law and to adopt a "reasonable approach" to enforcement. Preparations are under way for a preemptive strike on the University of Connecticut women's athletic department.

At a recent United Nations conference on children, the United States made a big axis of itself and joined with Iran, Libya, Pakistan, Sudan, and the Vatican to oppose any language in support of the use of condoms in stopping the spread of AIDS. As the deputy secretary of HHS told a congressional caucus, "We need to have very strong messages for young people, and that is the message of abstinence until marriage, that the only safe sex is no sex and a mutually monogamous relationship." There was no message for gay young people. The sound you hear is a bird flipping.

When asked during one of his many fund-raising junkets--I mean, policy speeches--where Laura was, George quipped that she was home getting the house ready for company, sweeping off the porch. Everybody laughed. Maybe because they knew it wasn't true. They all knew she makes Condoleezza do the sweeping.

I've got to start wearing mittens.