Last week the College Board announced that the SAT test will include an essay section at some point in the next few years.

I'd like to submit a question.

"Which of these acts is more dangerous to the future stability of the United States: Some nutball flying a plane into a really big building and killing a few thousand people or a passel of corporations flouting all sorts of laws and going bankrupt, stealing billions from stockholders and putting hundreds of thousands of people out of work?"

Alright, my question is a bit wordy and somewhat grammatically challenged. I think you get my point. I'm sure you know the correct answer.

Last week the Prez actually said these words:

"There is a higher calling than fudging the numbers..."

The man who bandied about such strong (loony, but strong) phrases as "dead or alive" and "axis of evil" when talking about international terrorists can only work himself up to "fudge" when it comes to homemade economic terrorism? There's something fishy here.

If you'll humor me for a moment, I'd like to make an confession. I actually thought that the Prez might say something rational, something with the touch of the common man when he spoke about the economic fallout from the collapses of Enron, Worldcom, Xerox, et. al. When he started his sentence about higher callings, I really thought he was going to end it with "than making as much money as humanly possible."

I'm such a dope.

The Prez claims to be a good Christian man. And while it's true that Jesus's comments on money have been generally misremembered, the Gospels do attribute "the love of money is the root of all evil" to a certain carpenter from Galilee.

In other words, Jesus never said making money is a sin in itself. But when you hurt other people in your quest for more and more money (and particularly when you intentionally hurt other people), well, you're getting pretty close to Dr. Evil territory.

A number of folks who generally vote Republican excoriated ex-Prez Clinton for his obvious failings. I think they went a bit far in their pursuit of the big guy's possible sins, but now it's time to pay the piper. Those who cast the first ten thousand stones ought not forget that "thou shall not steal" and "thou shall not commit adultery" are right there side-by-side in the ol' Ten Commandments. And it's no exaggeration to say that there are a number of ex-corporate types in the current administration (including the creepy veep himself) whose companies are under intense scrutiny--if not outright criminal investigation--for the way they ran their businesses back in the gay 90s.

Fudging the numbers? Try out-and-out stealing. It is pretty clear that Enron manipulated a number of markets (and not just the one for California electricity) so as to make money when there was no money to be made. Specifically, the traders often listed trades that didn't exist so as to present the illusion of an active market, to create paper revenues from commissions that would never be collected and to convince lots of people that Enron was a viable business. At Worldcom, it seems the folks simply couldn't figure out how to actually make money after various world governments told them they couldn't buy any more competitors. So they lied.

And I guess the Prez really can't come down hard on that. After all, he himself had to apologize to the Securities and Exchange Commission for some pseudo-insider trading of his own. No, his violations weren't egregious (he "forgot" to file some forms that he should have known about from his classes at Harvard Business School--the equivalent of a speeding ticket in business circles), but nonetheless he did break the law. And I guess he can't get down on people for trying to make a big pile of money from nothing. After all, he put relatively little cash into his purchase of the Texas Rangers and walked away with millions when he sold the team a few years down the line.

Even so, if you're the Prez and you're gonna try and talk the moral talk (like, say, calling other nations "evil") you've gotta walk the moral walk. And when people in your own country act in ways that seem, well, immoral, you have a duty to call them on it. It doesn't matter how many times these folks have slept in your house or how often you've puked at their birthday parties. Sometimes you just have to call a thief a thief.

No fudging allowed.

Jon Worley isn't a big fan of fudge in any form. He much prefers the sorbet served at Francesca's Dessert Cafe.