Officials at Georgia's Kennesaw State University pulled a course on "The Culture of Nazi Germany" from its fall catalog out of fear that it would give the university an anti-Semitic image. Students were set to examine the question of why the totalitarian regime arose, and whether it could happen again, especially in Germany. But even with the best intentions, said Jay Kaiman, Southeast regional director for the Anti-Defamation League, professors can end up lending credence to the Nazi culture.

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Songwriter Denise Rich, whose fugitive ex-husband was pardoned by President Clinton, quoted in Vibe magazine:

I really believe that inside me there is just this big black person that keeps trying to get out. There is so much soul in R&B, and soul for me is just the most important thing. And I relate to people who have a lot of it.

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The Washington Post, May 31, 2001:

Citizens for Tax Justice ... reported that almost half of those Americans in the bottom 60 percent of income earners—more than 32 million individuals and families—will receive no rebates [under the new tax bill]....

Michele Davis, a Treasury Department spokeswoman, said: "We have a single statistic: One hundred percent of the people with income tax liability will receive a rebate."

[CTJ director Robert] McIntyre said "that is a fair statement."

[Ed.: Following the bill's passage, a coalition of more than 500 organizations called Fair Taxes for All charged that the tax cut was not just unwise but immoral. Many organized an appeal to direct rebate checks their way, so that they could more effectively address various progressive concerns, among which to expose the immorality of the tax cut. Seemingly, these groups should be asking the public to send rebate checks back to the government, where the money presumably belongs. (A little-known fact: if you send the IRS extra money, hey, they'll take it!) Simply put, these groups are either greedy and have no standing to criticize the vice in others as they benefit from the tax cut they deplore, or implicitly acknowledge that they are more effective than the government at addressing their agenda items, thereby validating a non-coerced free-market approach in that arena.]

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Several congressmen have written to President Bush, and the Rev. Al Sharpton was jailed, protesting against the Navy's use of Vieques, an island off the coast of Puerto Rico, for bombing and shelling practice. One of 56 Defense Department live-fire ranges, the Navy reported to President Clinton in 1999 that for a number of reasons, Vieques is unique and vital to national defense. Protesters allege that the shelling causes health problems to people living about nine miles away: everything from cancer to a kind of "vibroacoustic disease" caused by the noise of the shelling. A 31-year-old man even complained that the shelling was causing his hair to fall out, "little by little."

Environmental attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed that "Vieques has the highest rate of infant mortality and cancer in Puerto Rico." But the Puerto Rico Health Department noted that the statistics this claim was based on simply left out the years 1996 through 1998, which if counted in would have shown a lower rate of infant mortality than on the mainland. Also, the alarming claim about cancer rates was taken from a data set that showed, largely due the small population of Vieques, the cancer mortality rate fluctuated dramatically, alternately higher and lower than that of the mainland. Activists merely picked the year that best served their cause. The overall rate is actually much lower than that of many major U.S. cities.

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In London, actress Bethany Halliday sued the D'Oyly Carte opera company after she was turned down for a role as one of Major-General Stanley's virginal daughters in Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance. Ms. Halliday originally landed the role, but producers rejected her after they learned she was in the early stages of pregnancy. By the end of the show's run, they argued, her condition would have become very obvious and driven the audience to distraction. The daughters, dressed in tight Victorian corsets, are supposed to have been raised in such delicacy and seclusion that they scream every time they see a man.

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Class-action lawsuit, anyone? The New York Times reports that a group of personal injury lawyers had identified a pattern of failure of Firestone ATX tires on Ford Explorer sport utility vehicles as far back as 1996. However, they did not disclose the problem to government safety regulators for four years, out of concern that future lawsuits might be compromised if subsequent investigation revealed there was no problem with the tires. Of the 203 reported deaths attributed to tire failure, 190 occurred after 1996.

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Three telephone line workers claim they are being discriminated against by Ameritech because of its policy prohibiting eyebrow rods and other body-piercing jewelry they regard as essential to their right to free expression. The company responds that body jewelry represents a safety hazard because it obstructs vision and conducts electricity. OSHA rules call for technicians who work near power lines to remove anything that conducts electricity, including wedding rings.

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An unexpected environmental triumph at the hands of the Giant Pharmaceutical Industry, reported in the Wall Street Journal, April 25, 2001:

A recent report prepared by the Canadian government by a panel of marine experts points to another unexpected cause of the decline [in seal hunting off the coast of Newfoundland]. In the past, hunters benefited from a market for seal penises, which some Asians believe to be an aphrodisiac. The report cites "the increased use of Viagra as a substitute for seal penises."

Sales are "way down" from a few years ago, says Sang-Jo Chung, who runs an herbal-remedies shop in Toronto's Korean district. Mr. Chung points to a leathery 10-inch seal penis on display in the glass case, which he says has been sitting unsold for more than four months.

A few years ago, Mr. Chung says he would sell 20 or so penises a year, and he has had to lower the price to about $70 down from more than $103. "I think it's Viagra," he says.

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19-year-old Lance Buchi of Utah sued the Interior Department and the National Park Service for severe injuries he received in Yellowstone National Park when he and two friends made a nighttime jump into a 178-degree thermal pool, mistaking it for a stream. One of the friends died from her injuries.

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The European Union is recommending that Ireland abandon its reckless fiscal policy of low taxation, arguing that it violates the Stability and Growth Pact it agreed to in joining the multinational governing body. The EU argues that Ireland encourages capital and labor flight from countries with higher taxes—a practice referred to as "tax poaching."

Ireland cut taxes in 1986 as a supply-side response to a massive and intractable government budget crisis, and has been cutting them aggressively ever since. Since 1995, Ireland's growth rate has been 9.4 percent, compared to the EU's modest 2.6 percent, and compared to its own abysmal rate of less than half a percent prior to the policy change. Government revenues from personal income taxes have increased fivefold over fifteen years. Revenues from its capital gains tax, Europe's lowest, have increased sixfold between 1993 and 1998.

[Ed.: For a strange expression of pan-European aspirations, see captaineuro.com. Or perhaps it's just a joke.]

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Writing in the New York Times, David Cole and John Lamberth argue that, "even on its own terms, racial profiling doesn't work." As proof they note that "73 percent of those stopped and searched on a [Maryland] section of Interstate 95 were black, yet state police reported that equal percentages of the whites and blacks who were searched, statewide, had drugs or other contraband."

[Ed.: In the wake of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September, polls by Gallup and Zogby found that African Americans are more likely than other racial groups to favor profiling and stringent airport security checks for Arabs and Arab-Americans.]

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The Department of Housing and Urban Development approved an "alternative wellness" therapy program, contracted through the National Institute for Medical Options, targeting public housing residents who suffer from disorders ranging from glandular imbalances to drug addiction. Treatment involved using gemstones, incantations, "goddess typing," and "applied kinesiology," in which a practitioner feels a person's glands to identify one of 14 personality types. The New York Post reports that the program's expenses totaled $860,000 over a three-year period, including $3,174 for incense packs, $6,255 for aroma kits, $3,240 for color charts, $6,270 for gem bags, and $624 for nutrition kits that included candy bars and Jim Beam whiskey. HUD's Michelle Lusson gave the Post an example of how such treatment worked: "If you have a thyroid disease or an obesity problem, you don't wear red around your neck. All other colors are fine. Certain colors aggravate certain energy systems in the body that have an impact on the glands, like red on the thyroid."

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Ian Frazer empathizes in Mother Jones, May/June 2001:

I am a few years younger, but I belong to the same generation as W. Bush and Quayle. I know how many classes we skipped, how much we partied, how much TV we watched. I have a generational sense of the vacancy in their state because I share it. I myself don't know what I am doing a good forty percent of the time. I am now the kind of white-haired, thick-waisted, superficially presentable male who people give responsibility to and ask directions of on the street. And often I'm just making it up. The situation is one I've become quite familiar with—I'm asked a question, no answer presents itself in my brain, and I begin to answer anyway. My mouth moves and words come out, propelled perhaps by pure syntax or by momentum of language, while I watch from a distance, as curious as anybody to hear what I'm going to say. And somehow words do emerge, and my listeners somehow accept them as an answer representing thought and knowledge, and I alone, apparently, know that no thought or knowledge was involved.

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Twenty five years after identifying Lyme disease, a tick-borne bacterial infection characterized by a widely varying set of symptoms, Dr. Allen Steere of the New England Medical Center is regularly being stalked and has received numerous death threats from people who say they suffer from a chronic form of the disease that he and most medical authorities do not believe exists. A coalition of patient advocacy groups and anti-establishment physicians (communicating mainly via the Internet) insists that the disease is real and that it represents an especially virulent form of the previously identified bacterial strain, causing joint pain, chronic fatigue, suicidal depression, paralysis, and even death.

Steere has criticized some practititioners' willingness to prescribe unnecessary long-term intravenous antibiotics, which leads to liver problems, severe infections, immune suppression, and the emergence of resistant bacterial strains. Steere has also taken insurance companies to task for recognizing the bogus disease rather than pay for more expensive psychiatric treatment of psychosomatic disorders.

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The University of Illinois now offers an undergraduate course on "Oprah Winfrey, the Tycoon," the purpose of which is "to critically examine and analyze Winfrey's activities in the building of her entertainment empire within the context of the impact of a multiplicity of societal, cultural, and economic factors in the post-modern information age propelled by a new technology in the New Economy of Global Capitalism."

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Rather than allow a chapter of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes to meet on one of its campuses, California's Saddleback Valley Unified School District banned all non-curriculum student clubs.

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In California, about 10,000 firms filed applications to be spared from the rolling blackouts that are anticipated during the summer. Among them, an upscale Beverly Hills restaurant estimates that "26 to 100" of its patrons are likely to die of food poisoning. A Santa Ana catering firm estimated it would be serving last meals to anywhere from 100 to 1,000 people. More than 300 companies' estimates of death tolls topped 1,000, and hundreds more claimed they might cause at least one person to die. Companies seeking exemptions include dental offices, cemeteries, churches, beauty salons, hotels, night clubs, law firms and at least one dance studio. Several veterinary clinics, claiming patients could die on the operating table, took advantage of the fact that the exemption request form did not specify human fatalities.

Included in the list of 9,239 businesses were: 7 Lakes Country Club, A Better You Plastic Surgery Medical Group, All Eyez On Me Hair Studio, Amity Pen Co., Anheuser-Busch Sales of San Diego, Anytime Towing, Baseline Whatta Steak, Baskin-Robbins, Beverly Hills Liquor & Deli, Big Burrito Kingdom, Boom Boom Room, Burger King, Busy Bee Quality Cleaners, Caruthers Raisin Packing Co., Cash It Here, Church of Scientology Mission of San Francisco, City of Beverly Hills, College Soap Opera 24 Hour Laundry & Deli, Critters of the Cinema, Crumbs of Paris, Crusty Tart Bakery, Crystal Magic, Doty Donuts, El Taco Loco, Enanto Drive-in Liquor, Expert Nails, Fantastic Burgers, Five Cities Swim Club, Gardana Bowling Center, Genzyme Genetics, Gucci America Inc., Happy Teriyaki and Sandwiches, House of Blues, Imagymnation Gymnastics Center, Italy's Italian Restaurant, Jehovah's Witnesses, L.A. Dance Connection, Las Dos Victorias Candy, Lortons Fresh Squeezed Juices, Los Gatos Swim & Racquet Club, Mr. Ralph's Café, Pacific Coast Chocolates, Pinoy-Pinay Filipino Fastfood Restaurant, Poochies Bathhouse, Quality Discount Ice Cream, Rodeo Land Co., SeaWorld, Sharpshooter Range, Sick Dogs Tattoo, Snowy Pines Christmas Trees, Stevedoring Services of America, Stevie G's Prime Time Pizza, T-Shirt Mart, Uptown Touchless Car Wash, and Valencia Pancakes.

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The Environmental Protection Agency determined that burning candles and incense releases fine soot particles and thus contributes to pollution problems. But a spokesperson for the National Candle Association says the concerns are overstated because the pollution exceeds government standards only when the candles smoldered. Both groups suggest trimming candle wicks to a quarter inch, ventilating the house, and keeping lit candles out of drafts.

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The Edinburgh, Scotland, licensing committee gave tentative approval to a large, private fetish party in which a man was set to be hung from meathooks by his nipples, "provided it doesn't cause disturbance to neighbors getting kept awake by the screams of clients or the cracking of whips."

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Two Americans who were held hostage in Lebanon during the 1980s have sued the government of Iran for $100 million for sponsoring their terrorist kidnappers. Eight other victims of terrorism or their families have won large judgements since a law was passed in 1996 permitting lawsuits against countries that sponsor terrorism. Also, rather than allow litigants access to frozen assets and to reduce pressure to seize embassies, which would interfere with foreign policy, Congress recently enacted another law allowing the United States government to pay some of the plaintiffs' damages, with the idea that it would later try to collect the damages from the terrorist sponsor states. Good luck!

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Convicted of four counts of bigamy, Tom Green of Utah, a magazine salesman with five wives and 29 children, somewhat plausibly claimed polygamy as part of his cultural heritage and his religious convictions as a Mormon.

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From a paper published in the Archives of General Psychiatry, February, 2001:

The study of the history of a disease can provide clues to its pathogenesis. We note a possible case of antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) nearly three thousand years ago in the biblical figure Samson (Judges, Chapters 13-16), son of Manoah. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders requires that three of seven criteria be met for the diagnosis of ASPD. Samson meets six:

1. Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behavior: The Philistines tried to arrest Samson after he burned the Philistine fields (15:5) and went to Gaza (16:1).

   

2. Deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying: Samson did not tell his parents that he had killed a lion. Furthermore, he proffered honey for his parents to eat but did not tell them it had come from the carcass of a lion (14:9), and thus caused them to violate their dietary laws.

3. Impulsivity: He burned the Philistine fields (15:5).

4. Irritability and aggressiveness: Samson was repeatedly involved in physical fights.

5. Reckless disregard for safety of self or others: Samson is reported to have taken on and killed one thousand Philistines single-handedly (15:15). He also told Delilah the secret to his strength (16:17), even after she had attempted three times previously to get this secret.

6. Lack of remorse: He gloated (15:16) after killing one thousand men.

In addition, Samson committed many of the actions listed in the criteria for conduct disorder—fire setting, cruelty to small animals (15:5), bullying, initiating physical fights, and using a weapon (jawbone of ass, 15:15). Samson's conduct was considered unacceptable in his time: three thousand Israelites (Samson's own people!) captured him and delivered him to the Philistines (15:12).

Recognition of the diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder for Samson may help us not only to understand the biblical story better but also to recognize instances when a contemporary leader suffers from ASPD.

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In an article titled "Keeping Sex in Sex Education," published in the Southern California Review of Law and Women's Studies, Gary Simpson and Erika Sussman argue that for schools to encourage premarital sexual abstinence is to violate the establishment provision of the First Amendment, because abstinence is supported by religion. They further argue that the provision allowing free exercise of religion does not allow parents to keep their children out of sex education classes.

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The Washington Post reports on the continued suffering in the Balkan region, June 6, 2001:

Refugees can languish in camps for decades....

When American film producer Caroline Baron worked in Kosovo and Macedonia, she was struck by the boredom of the displaced, who had nothing to distract them from their traumas.

Baron dreamed up a project she thought would bring "hopeful entertainment and laughter" to children and exiles [by sending] projectors and films into the camps for Kosovo refugees in April 1999. Now her project, FilmAid International, is taking wing....

FilmAid's library has expanded from Charlie Chaplin movies, cartoons and "Titanic" to include education material on... sexual and gender-based violence and conflict resolution.

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Hollywood released a special Japanese edition of the epic war movie Pearl Harbor that cut out battle scenes in which the Japanese were portrayed as the bad guys. An industry source commented: "We've tried very hard not to portray the Japanese in a very bad light... It won't make a big difference, most people know who won the war." The source added: "Many Japanese fear the film will be seen as a historical document with them as the baddies."

And to avoid giving offense, the Los Angeles Times officially discouraged use of the words "sneak attack" when describing the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, preferring the term "surprise attack" instead.

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California state senator Betty Karnette introduced a bill that would change the language requirement of high school students from "foreign language" to "world language." "The word 'foreign' has a connotation that can be perceived as inappropriate in this day and age of a world economy," she explained.

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At a congressional hearing in which FBI director Louis Freeh was grilled over the agency's bungling of the Timothy McVeigh case, Congressman Patrick Kennedy (D, RI) demanded to know Freeh's position on capital punishment. Kennedy then asked, "What is your answer to the fact that... minorities and poor people have a greater likelihood of being put to death than they have of getting cancer from smoking?"

When asked for a specific reference for this claim, Kennedy's office directed reporters to Richard Dieter, author of The Death Penalty in Black & White: Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Decides. Dieter's actual claim is that "Race is more likely to affect death sentencing than smoking affects the likelihood of dying from heart disease."

"He kind of paraphrased it," explained Kennedy spokesman Larry Berman.

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David Perlmutter in the San Antonio Express-News, May 8, 2001:

If Bill Clinton was, as poet Maya Angelou put it [sic], "America's first black president," then George W. Bush is trying to sound (and dress) a lot like our first Hispanic president.

The Christian Science Monitor, May 14, 2001:

Leaders of the African-American community fondly called Bill Clinton America's "first black president." Now, his successor in the Oval Office seems intent on becoming the first Latino one.

Richard Rodriguez in the New York Times, May 21, 2001:

Some years ago, the novelist Toni Morrison, in a Time essay, proclaimed Bill Clinton America's first black president. Leaving aside the affront to American blacks that Ms. Morrison's conceit carries today, it might be useful to regard George Bush as America's first Hispanic president.

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From the Fall 2001 catalog of the State University of New York Press, a description of The Discourse of Enclosure: Representing Women in Old English Literature, tenure bait from Shari Horner, Assistant Professor of English at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania:

Exploring Old English texts ranging from Beowulf to Ælfric's Lives of Saints, this book examines ways that women's monastic, material, and devotional practices in Anglo-Saxon England shaped literary representations of women and femininity. Horner argues that these representations derive from a "discourse" of female monastic enclosure, based on the increasingly strict rules of cloistered confinement that regulated the female religious body in the early Middle Ages. She shows that the female subjects of much Old English literature are enclosed by many layers—literal and figurative, textual, material, discursive, spatial—all of which image and reinforce the powerful institutions imposed by the Church on the female body. Though it has long been recognized that medieval religious women were enclosed, and that virginity was highly valued, this book is the first to consider the interrelationships of these two positions—that is, how the material practices of female monasticism inform the textual operations of Old English literature.

"This is an important and inventive book. Horner uses a supple argument about the discourse of female enclosure—enclosure in a monastery, enclosure in the body, and enclosure in a text—to link feminist reading of four Old English works not usually read together...."

—Jonathan Wilcox, editor of Humour in Anglo-Saxon Literature

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The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission declared that the Minneapolis Public Library may have subjected its librarians to a sexually "hostile work environment" by allowing computers whose Internet browsers were not filtered for sexual content.

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The police department of Albuquerque, New Mexico, used a series of $25,000 federal grants to purchase 15 squad cars powered with natural gas. But officers were disappointed to find that their new autos only had half the range of conventional patrol cars, refueled at only one location in town, and performed sluggishly, making them useless for chasing after criminals and responding to emergencies. "We didn't get the rose garden we were promised," the department's fleet coordinator told reporters. But the city went ahead with the experiment, he said, "because we couldn't turn down what was basically a free car."

Similar purchasing decisions nearly sent the neighboring state of Arizona into bankruptcy. What was originally intended as a modest $3 million initiative to encourage the use of alternative-fuel vehicles quickly led to a half-billion-dollar boondoggle that some called The Great Pickup Stick-Up.

The state offered consumers generous rebates and tax credits that, coupled with federal incentives, slashed the price of pickup trucks equipped with alt-fuel converters by more than half. Consumers only had to pledge to burn 100 gallons of propane or condensed natural gas—a few refills—but there was nothing stopping them from filling up with gasoline. As a result, what was originally intended to reduce pollution by targeting the worst-offending vehicles led far more people to purchase them.

As word of the subsidies spread, car dealers increased prices of popular truck models as demand rose, and consumers added all the expensive accessories they could think of, knowing that taxpayers would pay for them. Large corporations such as car rental agencies took the opportunity to purchase entire fleets of vehicles at half the usual cost. Many Arizonans disconnected their alt-fuel systems immediately after having them installed, with little fear of penalties since it was all being done on the honor system.

The botched policy led to political scandal and even criminal probes. The program's main political sponsor, former State House Speaker Jeff Groscost, was found to have purchased two new trucks of his own under the program, had close ties with manufacturers of alt-fuel conversion kits, gave interested parties a direct hand in writing the law, and received tens of thousands of dollars consulting for the program's potential beneficiaries in the natural gas industry.

In an emergency session, the Arizona legislature voted to shut out 10,000 to 15,000 of the program's participants, saving $400 million. But some of these angry shutouts filed a class action lawsuit demanding that Arizona abide by their original agreement.

Unlike Arizona, California isn't subsidizing consumers to buy alternative fuel vehicles. Instead, it's punishing producers.

In 1990, the California Air Resources Board decreed that, starting in 2003, 10 percent of all cars sold in the state (roughly 170,000 vehicles) would have to be zero-emission electric vehicles (ZEVs). In 1996, that requirement was reduced to 2 percent (22,000), though automakers were still required to make up for the 8 percent in extremely low-emission vehicles (LEVs). Two years from the deadline, there are roughly 2,200 electric cars operating on California's roads, mostly owned by novelty seekers or affluent environmental activists. There is no sign that automakers will be able to meet the deadline, despite the threat of being fined $5,000 per unsold vehicle.

Although there has been extensive research into battery technology, electric cars remain relatively uneconomical, costing about $20,000 more than their conventional counterparts. Top-of-the-line batteries can take a car 100 miles between charges, but cost $250,000. GM's two-seat EV-1 gets 75 miles to the average charge, but its lead-acid cell battery still adds 60 percent to the cost and weight of the car and takes 5 hours to recharge.

With all the auto manufacturers frantically chasing after a major share of a tiny market, General Motors sued the state of California for regulatory relief, contending that building ZEVs was 150 times costlier than other pollution abatement strategies such as eliminating diesel fuel and encouraging gas/electric hybrid vehicles. Worn-out batteries are also difficult to dispose of, and it is a stretch to refer to electric vehicles as "zero-emission" when the generating plants they rely on emit pollutants.

Cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells operate under a similar set of trade-offs as electric vehicles. While hydrogen burns without pollutants and releases even more energy than fossil fuels, it's not lying around waiting to be stuffed into high-pressure bottles, but rather must be detached from natural compounds such as methane gas or water. Current fuel-cell technology relies on hydrogen extracted from methane, in a process that emits large quantities of greenhouse gases. Domestic sources of methane are far too small to support demand for use in automobiles, and those hoping America would achieve some measure of energy independence would have to confront the fact that the U.S. would have to rely on foreign sources such as Russia, Iran, and other Middle East nations. Alternately, releasing hydrogen from water involves electrolysis, a highly inefficient process that would probably require burning more carbon-based fuels than the use of hydrogen would save. The only sustainable way to produce such quantities of hydrogen would entail large-scale investment in nuclear power plants—a prospect that, oddly enough, is not favored by proponents of zero-emission vehicles.

There are hints that hybrids offer the best long-term alternative, and some conventional gasoline vehicles are also getting arbitrarily close to the zero-emission standard due to computer-enhanced emission control. (Dramatic fuel-efficiency improvements can be achieved from allowing increased use of diesel fuels, but diesel releases more controversial particulate matter.)

The push for alternative vehicles has also had perverse consequences, according to a study by Resources for the Future, an environmental research group. Technology mandates lead to inflated sticker prices fleet-wide, causing consumers to delay their purchase of newer, cleaner conventional vehicles, and thus raising auto emissions across California in what is called the "jalopy effect." And even if California meets its quota, it will reduce auto emissions by a mere 1 or 2 percent.

There are signs that California will do everything it can to allow automakers to fulfill their zero-emission quotas, including redefining success. One credit-earning option would allow automakers to market what are called "neighborhood vehicles" for use in closed speed-bump communities and on roads with speed limits under 35 mph—golf courses, for example. To expedite production of these vehicles, they have been exempted from federal safety standards, allowing them to travel on public roads as well. That means safety experts will have nothing to say at the prospect of Ford's tiny two-seat Think City, which is made of plastic and takes 30 seconds to reach a top speed of 60 mph, trying to merge onto the average California highway.

[Ed.: New York enacted a similar mandate as California's, requiring that 10 percent of vehicles sold in the state use alternative fuels. Massachusetts, Vermont, and Maine are considering similar proposals.]

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