I’m scheduled for cataract surgery in a couple of weeks, and I’m having second thoughts.  It’s not the consent form I had to sign — warnings about death, dismemberment and loss of eyesight are, as we know, just legitimate protections for the surgeon against greedy tort lawyers. What gives me pause is his prediction that after he scrapes away the cataract and implants a permanent lense, I may not need glasses for anything but reading.  That’s the really scary stuff for a guy who’s been hiding behind John Dean wire frames, Buddy Holly all-blacks, and Woody Allen horn rims since age two. (More)

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The police are buzzing like hornets around Freedom Plaza in downtown DC, on edge and anxious to protect the city from a large labor rally. The chant leader is chanting. Hey, Hey! Ho, Ho! Rhees and Fenty got to go. But hold it. These people don’t look like a rowdy bunch of angry union members. Angry they are, but rowdy they’re not. There’s one thing clear to me, we stand here in unity. These are the nicest people in our city, the women and men who guide our children every day through a society that is anything but nice. The chant leader gets one backwards, No peace, no justice. No peace, no justice. These are school teachers, about 2,000 of them, and they’re here in the late afternoon to push back at a tone-deaf schools chancellor who just riffed several hundred of their sisters and brothers with very little warning and, in many cases, no justification. (More)

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I agree with Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, who wrote this morning in “A Nobel for Us” that we as a people deserve the Peace Prize for having had the good sense and strength of character to elect Barack Obama President of the United States in the first place. If that’s true, then we as a people should have the right to decide what to do with the $1.4 million in cash (which is the same as money, as Yogi would say) that comes with the prize, with the caveat that awards be made to promote peace, comity and improve the human condition here and around the world. How do you think we should dole out the money? Here are several of my ideas for spreading around about half of it: (More)

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There it was again, this time in a takeout by Brooks Barnes in the arts section of the New York Times on October 1, that weasel-word phrase “ having had sex with a 13-year old girl.” The word “rape” didn’t appear until deep into the story, and then only from the lips of a couple of French cabinet members. I’d heard a similar “having had sex with” reference the day before on the radio, ditto for articles in the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal earlier in the week. Did she “have sex” with Roman Polanski, or was she savagely raped?

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