Everybody’s all up in arms, the vice president won’t show us his papers, oh my God! He might be hiding something. Ya think? And still nobody talks about 9/11. “The tale of the document[s] begins in August 2001, when the Bush administration initiated a review of the previous executive order on classified materials signed by Bill Clinton in 1995,” Frank Rich wrote in yesterday’s New York Times. “The Clinton order had been acclaimed in its day as a victory for transparency because it mandated the automatic declassification of most government files after 25 years.

"It was predictable that the obsessively secretive Bush team would undermine the Clinton order… Every provision [in the revised Bush order] that gave powers to the president over classified documents was amended to give the identical powers to the vice president”—which Rich, the most straight-talking columnist in the mainstream press, suggests is related to the cover-up of false intelligence cooked up for the Iraq war. But what about 9/11?

The Bush administration consistently stonewalled its own 9/11 Commission on the release of documents related to 9/11. Indeed, it resisted even forming a body of inquiry into the biggest terrorist attack in history (it took 411 days, while LBJ established the Warren Commission 7 days after JFK's assassination) and did so only under extreme pressure from the victims' families. Practically no one in the media raised so much as an eyebrow at the time, and now it's oddly forgotten. As head of the commission, the president appointed Philip Zelikow, who, under his good friend Condoleeza Rice, authored the watershed document on the War on Terror. The 9/11 Family Steering Committee and 9-11 Citizens Watch demanded his resignation, crying conflict of interest.

Everyone should watch “9/11 Press For Truth,” a balanced documentary which goes into detail about the 9/11 cover-up and the Bush administration (see www.911pressfortruth.com). What are they hiding? And what could we learn about 9/11 from the Vice President's papers? A lot, is my guess.

I finally listened to Amy Winehouse. She’s o.k. I’d rather listen to the Shirelles or Sarah Vaughn. But my real question is, why's Jay-Z so excited about her? I sincerely doubt they’re listening to her up in the Marcy Projects, where he grew up. I doubt even he's listening to her, on all those yachts I see him chilling on with Beyonce. What's my point here? I don't know. Just bored with all the hype...

And on that note, I'll tell you what I did like: Ratatouille! Listen folks, I usually grit my teeth so hard through all those kids' movies they're practically shooting up through my skull. I'm not a drinker or a drug taker, much, but Shrek The Third made me long for a shot of smack. But here was Ratatouille, something so unexpectedly light and delicate, funny, warm, and truly beautiful to look at; dare I call it art? Or maybe just a nice diversion from the unpalatable stew we're cooking in.