Seventeen-year-old Amon Schute is social drek. He's sneering, jeering, and hateful. He proves it with ostentatious displays of filthy jeans, long, matted hair, body piercings, and tattoos.
 
He's exactly the kind of kid you'd expect to spend his entire adult life in lockup.
 
Sixteen-year-old Coy Minyon is a social cipher. He's weak, meek, and fearful. He proves it with a timorous mask of ultra-conservative clothing, neatly groomed hair, unobtrusive appearance, and a permanent muted existence that makes him invisible to the world.
 
He's exactly the kind of kid you'd expect to spend his entire adult life in total obscurity.
 
Amon and Coy are best friends.
 
Together they plan to gun down a bunch of people in a public place and then off themselves in a blaze of everlasting glory.

March 2008 may go down as a major turning point in U.S. financial history. The Federal Reserve crossed a Rubicon of sorts, lending tens of billions of dollars not to a commercial bank, as has been its historical practice, but for the very first time to an investment bank.

The Mississippi Valley Growers' Association (MVGA) built successful markets over 15 years in Davenport and Bettendorf, with six Iowa Farmers' Market Improvement Competition awards from the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation, the Iowa Department of Agriculture, and the Iowa Farmers' Market Association. The River City Market Association (RCMA) formed 11 years ago. The MVGA and the RCMA have negotiated leases from the city together since 2002. This was confirmed by Charlie Heston, Levee Improvement Commission, at the March 12 meeting. In 2007, we formed a joint board and have shared expenses for patrol officers. We worked diligently to develop a plot map that the patrol officers thought would provide the safest traffic flow for customers. This plot map was submitted to Charlie Heston and leases prepaid in December for the upcoming year.

   Incredibly, President George W. Bush would have us believe that the rights of citizenship are only as good as the ground a citizen literally stands on. In oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court last week in a case involving Mohammad Munaf and Shawqi Omar, a Bush administration lawyer argued that "American citizens, when they go abroad, they have to take what they get."