Two researchers at University College Hospitals, London, have found no correlation between penis size and shoe size. But they're not done:

"There are suggestions from the literature that hand span, finger lengths or nose size...may be predictive," according to Shah.
"I have some ideas that I am currently putting together as a research proposal," the researcher added. "There must be some part of the body that is predictive of penile length...the search continues."

Who says that socialized medicine stifles research?

Except that he's being criticized for trying to protect the privacy rights of citizens. But since these citizens are gun owners, Slate's Dahlia Lithwick feels their privacy rights shouldn't be protected:

For instance, last fall, Ashcroft blocked the FBI from using gun purchase records gathered under the auspices of the federal Brady Act to determine if any of the 1,200 suspected terrorists detained after Sept. 11 had purchased a gun. This is the man who didn't hesitate to lock these same people up for months without charges, insisting that looking into their gun records violated their privacy.

Maybe Ashcroft is just, you know, concerned about civil liberties? Ever think of that? Sheesh.

Eugene Volokh has a typically erudite legal criticism of the article.

My trivial layman's contribution to this discussion is this: Isn't this an example of the power of the executive branch, which is balanced in our system of government by the legislative and judicial branches? How else can the executive disagree with the legislature? We don't have a parliamentary system, where the government is the legislature; the executive is allowed to disagree, and there must be some mechanism for doing so.

Finally, and a little facetiously, I ask you: is anyone really claiming that Ashcroft, by all accounts a competent attorney with political ambitions, is actually making deliberately unconstitutional policy on subjects that are laid out clearly in the Bill of Rights?

Wait... don't answer that.

Helsingin Sanomat, Finland's major daily newspaper, has these two articles up on it's English-language edition.

First, from an article titled The power of the American far right:

The increased influence of the far right ... [has] consequences such as ... the concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people ....

Second, from an article titled Farms show better financial results - wealth unevenly distributed:

The distribution of the wealth was quite uneven. The top ten percent of farms had a financial result of at least EUR 34,200, accounting for more than a third of all agricultural income in Finland.

Funny how that works. Wealth is unevenly distributed in Finland's agricultural sector -- with better performing farms earning more income. (Helsingin Sanomat headline: Dog Bites Man, Film at 11.)

But when the same thing happens in the U.S. -- when some people who earn money spend it and others keep and invest it, and thus "concentrate" wealth, it's by the action of "the US far right wing ... lurking behind the shoulder of President George W. Bush".

Really.

(I've been over wealth-distribution rhetoric once before.)

Update: Yet a third article covers this ground in a slightly different way. Finland's majority party's policies (Social Democratic Party, SDP), are contrasted to those in neighboring Sweden:

Instead of wealth distribution, the SDP is focusing on a policy of growth.

Wealth distribution on the brain! A wealth distribution trifecta! Let me see if I have this straight. It's a vast right-wing conspiracy when it happens in the U.S.; it's vaguely regrettable when it happens to farmers; it's sound public policy to avoid it when grubbing for votes. What is it? Weath redistribution!