Remember that girl who pitched an all-strikeout perfect game?
Now, the National Baseball Hall of Fame wants to put her jersey on display in the same shrine that includes items which once belonged to legends such as Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio and Hank Aaron. In fact, the hall will host a program for Katie and her Dodger teammates on July 7, during which the young pitcher will donate her jersey.
Way cool.
Letter to the NYT about Krugman's national healthcare column:
I find Paul Krugman's column disturbing. If 72 percent of Americans want a national health insurance program but insurance companies have the power to override that majority, what does that say about the health of our democracy?
I wish that question applied only to healthcare, but it seems like it applies to, well, pretty much everything these days.
At a time when Pakistan is supposed to be going after Al Qaeda terrorists who make merry within the country's borders, our colleague Nicholas Kristof reports that Mr. Musharraf's government has instead arrested a victim of sanctioned gang rape for planning a visit to the United States. Mukhtaran Bibi was sentenced by a tribal council to be gang-raped because her [12-year-old] younger brother supposedly had relations with a woman from a higher caste. After the rape by four men, she was forced by village leaders to walk home nearly naked in front of a jeering crowd.
They've also released the rapists for no apparent reason.
Tell me again about President Bush's deep and abiding love for freedom and democracy and human rights, and how that led him to oh-so-reluctantly invade Iraq?
Oh well, at least it's not like we're friends with anyone who boils people alive - Oops. Never mind.
The Christopher Walken census sketch strikes again!
Apparently his character is working for the Justice Department now...
Flanked by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, Bush said that "federal terrorism investigations have resulted in charges against more than 400 suspects, and more than half of those charged have been convicted."
Those statistics have been used repeatedly by Bush and other administration officials, including Gonzales and his predecessor, John D. Ashcroft, to characterize the government's efforts against terrorism.
But the numbers are misleading at best.
An analysis of the Justice Department's own list of terrorism prosecutions by The Washington Post shows that 39 people -- not 200, as officials have implied -- were convicted of crimes related to terrorism or national security.
Most of the others were convicted of relatively minor crimes such as making false statements and violating immigration law -- and had nothing to do with terrorism, the analysis shows. For the entire list, the median sentence was just 11 months.
So once again, our famously plain-talking president resorts to carefully parsed sentences that are not technically outright lies. Yes, it's true that 400 people have been charged, and 200 convicted, as a result of federal terrorism investigations - it's just that almost none of them actually have anything to do with, y'know, terrorism.
But I still feel ever so much safer, yesirree. At least for the next 11 months.
The Downing Street Memo/Minutes revelations and the various other damning documents originating from those loose-lipped Brits have a whole bunch of my liberal brethren talking giddily about impeachment, but I have to confess to considerably less enthusiasm. Not only do I consider it unlikely, but I actually think it could be counterproductive.
Firstly, while there are some tentative signs of principled Republican resistance to the Bush agenda and questioning of the war and the Bolton nomination, and even Social Security reform, it looks more like butt-covering than genuine opposition. When it's come right down to it on votes like bankruptcy reform and confirming horrible, unqualified right-wing judges, they've been in perfect, bootlicking lockstep. If they're not going to vote against Priscilla Owen or Janice Rogers Brown, they're sure as hell not going to vote to impeach Bush himself, enthralling a fantasy as it may be (I do have a caveat about that, which I'll get to later).
Secondly, I have to ask the question, what does impeachment buy us, really? Yes, we all hate Bush, and I think we all agree that he's the worst president of all time and want to see him humiliated and exposed for the criminal he is, but let's not lose sight of the big picture here. Bush himself is not truly the problem, but only a symptom of the corruption and arrogance that has become the Republican core. What Democrats need to do is discredit and expose the entire Republican party and its media mouthpieces, allowing them to retake control of Congress and start fixing everything that's been broken. They need to cast themselves as the party of grown-ups, who sometimes ask us to make sacrifices and take our medicine and do our homework so we stay healthy and smart and get good jobs.
Impeachment does nothing to advance this; in fact, it essentially absolves congressional Republicans of all responsibility, by allowing Bush to take the blame for everything that's gone wrong, while portraying themselves as innocent dupes. Worse yet, unless there is overwhelming public demand for it (the only scenario in which I can see any realistic chance of a successful impeachment), the attempt would backfire badly and make Bush a heroic martyr of the Republican cause, unfairly attacked by small-minded liberal Democrats blinded by hate and vengeance. Just imagine the backlash against the Clinton circus, magnified by a Republican media avidly hyping the Bush-Under-Siege meme. And if there is overwhelming public demand for it, then the Republicans will see which way the wind is blowing and vote for impeachment, thus making themselves noble heroes who heavy-heartedly put country before party, thus inoculating themselves even more thoroughly from any accountability for Bush's depredations.
And for what? What would impeachment buy us, beyond the I-told-you-so satisfaction? Even if we do manage to impeach Bush, that still leaves us with President Cheney, which is even worse (yes, I know he has zero charisma, but this has consistently been spun as a positive - proof of Cheney's seriousness and steady competence). If we manage to impeach both of them, we end up with President Hastert, which is only a marginal improvement at best. Yes, it could potentially be President Pelosi, but the chances of Democrats retaking the house next year are slim, and I don't think the pro-impeachmentpeople are really looking to wait until 2007 anyway.
My gut feeling is that impeachment talk is premature, and maybe makes us look a little fanatical and crazy. We absolutely need to keep the story alive, and keep hammering away at the message that Bush is a sociopathic liar, but we need to focus more on ways to make the war an albatross around all the Republicans' necks in 2006, not just the lame duck's.
Thomas Benya wore a braided bolo tie under his purple graduation gown this week as a subtle tribute to his Native American heritage.
Administrators at his Charles County school decided the string tie was too skinny. They denied him his diploma, at least temporarily, as punishment.
(snip)
The courts have ruled that students have limited rights to express themselves at school as long as their behavior is not disruptive.... David Rocah, a staff lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland, said there are limits to those rights. Carrying political placards or wearing a clown suit to graduation would presumably be disruptive. The question, he said, is whether a bolo tie under a gown is disruptive.
"There's nothing wrong with wanting graduation to be a formal occasion," he said, "but the idea that everyone should look the same -- they're not all the same."
Rocah called the school's interpretation a "narrow and cramped view of personal autonomy."
Jeez, lighten up! It's just a tie! Give the poor kid his diploma already! Yes, I'm sure the school doesn't want to set some kind of Dangerous Precedent, but come on. A bolo tie may be unconventional, but there's nothing inherently distracting about it. Yes, there are lurid bolo ties (mine are, Benya's is not), but the same is true of "regular" ties, and the school has no restrictions on those.
Graduation Day is supposed to be about the students, not the school or, God forbid, its administrators. So stop digging in your heels to defend the letter of the law, and do the right thing. Kids only get one high school graduation, and it should be an occasion of joy and pride, not an occasion for struggling against bureaucracy. There'll be plenty of time for that later on, I promise.
UPDATE: I think this may be a little outside my usual "beat", but the thing is, in high school and college I was the guy who dressed like a nut. No intent to be disruptive, really - the bizarre 70s clothes just tickled my fancy, and I enjoyed dressing that way as an expression of my eccentricity. So maybe that makes me a little hypersensitive to heavyhanded attempts to stifle sartorial self-expression.
Reading some letters to the editor about Philip Cooney's selective editing of government global-warming reports, I can't help but wonder if there's a memo buried out there somewhere that talks about how "the science and facts are being fixed around the policy"...
From one of today's editorials, on the former anti-environmental oil industry lawyer who has "been fighting the same fight in his new job" by editing government reports on climate change to downplay or discredit global warming:
"It's sad to think of a White House run by people who believe that a problem can be edited out of existence."
And it's downright scary to think of a White House that doesn't believe there's a problem that can't be edited (or spun, or denied) out of existence, and, worse yet, believes that this is preferable to actually fixing the problem.
Yes, it may be easier to paper over problems than it is to actually solve them, but it's disastrous in the long run, and it's not a hallmark of accountability or resolute, courageous leadership, which President Bush supposedly personifies.
