Broadsheet

The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior, but not today. Today we grieve, we pray, and we hope to God this fate never befalls another.

"Quack, Quack, Quack," a new exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, showcases the prints, posters and pamphlets that guaranteed everything from "animal magnetism" to cures for "the indiscretions of youth" — and were the precursors of today's spam e-mails and late-night infomercials that also promise the moon but rarely deliver.

Huffington Report appears to be a culture and politics webzine in the classic mold of Salon or Slate. It will have breaking news, a media commentary section called "Eat the Press," and its most interesting innovation, a group blog manned by the cultural and media elite: Sen. Jon Corzine, Larry David, Barry Diller, Tom Freston, David Geffen, Vernon Jordan, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Harry Evans and his wife, Tina Brown. That's just to name a few, and Huffington is still recruiting.


Her business partner is Ken Lerer, the head of AOL Time Warner corporate communications until Bob Pittman lost and Dick Parsons won. (Lerer left the company before "AOL" disappeared from the name.) Huffington declined to comment on the Huffington Report, citing timing issues, as the site's soft launch is apparently set for April.

While my son Zeke knew that I was in a fragile emotional state during the period before I wrote the suicide post (it might have been the constant crying that gave me away), he was not aware of the extent of it until he overheard someone discussing what I wrote. He did not react then, but I knew there was something wrong. I sat him down and explained what had happened, that I had been taking the wrong pills and that my doctor had fixed my medicine. I asked him if there was anything he was afraid of. He looked at me, his deep blue eyes full of unshed tears, and said, "I am afraid you're going to kill yourself."

Some senior lawmakers, including Ted Stevens, the Alaska Republican who heads the Senate Commerce Committee, and the commission's chairman, Kevin Martin, have suggested that it may be time to extend the indecency and profanity rules to cable and satellite-TV providers, which now account for viewership in 85 percent of U.S. homes.

While promoting the bill Tuesday, Rep. Baxley said a university education should be "more than one biased view by the professor, who as a dictator controls the classroom", as part of a misuse of "their platform to indoctrinate the next generation with their own views."

Question: If the Republican sock-puppets who passed the Schiavo law weren't doing it mostly for political posturing, why didn't they just do what they've made abundantly clear they expect the federal judiciary to do: Order the doctors to put the feeding tube back in. What hypocrites they are.

While he has maintained much of his once-vaunted reputation abroad, he has come under pointed criticism in Washington, where some members of Congress have called on him to resign before completing his term in office at the end of 2006.

"If any report has Kofi Annan's name all over it, it is this one," said Mark Malloch Brown, Mr. Annan's outspoken new chief of staff.

Mr. Mayne is only the eighth American to be honored since the Pritzker was first awarded, in 1979 to Philip Johnson. He is to receive a $100,000 grant and a bronze medallion on May 31 in Chicago's Millennium Park in a ceremony in the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, named for the founder of the prize and designed by the architect Frank Gehry, one of the Pritzker jurors, who won in 1989.

The Pritzker jury acknowledged this eclectic quality in its citation. "Mayne's approach toward architecture and his philosophy is not derived from European modernism, Asian influences or even from American precedents of the last century," it says. "He has sought throughout his career to create an original architecture, one that is truly representative of the unique, somewhat rootless, culture of Southern California, especially the architecturally rich city of Los Angeles."

Ultimately, what a president reads may be less important than why he reads. It is to be hoped that he reads to expand his knowledge, deepen his sympathies, gain perspective, and cultivate a humility at odds with Washington, D.C.'s preening self-importance.

"That was a sad performance by the Boston University hockey team," Terriers coach Jack Parker said. "It was beyond belief how poorly we played in every phase of the game. We looked inept on the power-play rush, inept on our forecheck. We looked slow, back on our heels. It was just unbearable to watch.

There wasn't one thing I could point to in the first two periods that made us look anything like how we've played in the last three months," Parker said. "Bad time to lay an egg. Maybe we can come back and get this out of our system so when we play in Worcester next week it won't be our last game of the year."

A harsh reaction to "Freebird" came from the late comedian Bill Hicks during a Chicago gig in the early 1990s. On a bootleg recording of the show, Mr. Hicks at first just sounds irked. "Please stop yelling that," he says. "It's not funny, it's not clever -- it's stupid."

The comic soon works himself into a rage, but the "Freebirds" keep coming. "Freebird," he finally says wearily, then intones: "And in the beginning there was the Word -- 'Freebird.' And 'Freebird' would be yelled throughout the centuries. 'Freebird,' the mantra of the moron."

To understand the phenomenon, it also helps to be from Chicago. When asked why they continue to request "Freebird," Mr. Hicks's tormentors yell out "Kevin Matthews!"

Kevin Matthews is a Chicago radio personality who has exhorted his fans -- the KevHeads -- to yell "Freebird" for years, and claims to have originated the tradition in the 80s, when he says he hit upon it as a way to torment Florence Henderson of "Brady Bunch" fame, who was giving a concert. He figured somebody should yell something at her "to break up the monotony." The longtime Skynyrd fan settled on "Freebird," saying the epic song "just popped into my head."

Costello and the Impostors put on a dazzling two-hour-plus, 30-song-plus show, a tour de force performance by one of the greatest rock bands in the world. They were lean, fast and powerful -- not a trace of age-related fatigue -- and they were also extraordinary tight.

It's amazing that the band can sound so tight even with the presence of a wild card like mad-scientist keyboardist Steve Nieve, who keeps up a steady barrage of fevered ornamentation and gloriously over-the-top flourishes. That they do is largely thanks to Pete Thomas, one of the great rock drummers of all time, with an amazing, jittery, ahead-of-the-beat feel -- it's as if he's always rushing, but by some strange trick of space/time relativity, staying perfectly in time.

The Impostors played many of the songs from 2004's "The Delivery Man," Costello's best record in years, but they also ranged through that inexhaustible catalog of songs, playing hits like "Radio Radio," "Watching the Detectives," "Pump It Up" and "Peace, Love and Understanding," as well as more obscure gems like "Kinder Murder," "Clown Strike" and "Hurry Down Doomsday."

Even when the band played Costello hits from the '70s, the versions they played were often radically reimagined, and always performed with passion and ferocity and without pandering to the crowd. I was reminded of something Costello had said in his interview earlier in the day, that he was trying to make music without nostalgia. And it occurred to me that in all of his recent music, however bad some of it has been (and some of it has been very bad indeed), he's been succeeding at that not inconsiderable task. The only artists of comparable endurance and stature I could think of who have managed to keep their music so fiery, full of vitality and free of nostalgia, are Bob Dylan and Neil Young -- certainly rarefied company.

Only one of the deaths occurred at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, officials said, showing how broadly the most violent abuses extended beyond those prison walls and contradicting early impressions that the wrongdoing was confined to a handful of members of the military police on the prison's night shift.

In some of the cases, including the death of an Iraqi, Manadel al-Jamadi, in Abu Ghraib in November 2003, most of those initially charged with crimes by the military have ended up receiving only nonjudicial punishments, and neither their names nor the details of those punishments have been disclosed.
Altogether, Army criminal investigators had conducted 68 detainee death investigations with 79 possible victims as of February 2005, said Lt. Col. Pamela Hart, an Army spokeswoman. Of those investigations, 53 have been closed and 15 cases remain pending, Colonel Hart said.

In addition to the 24 Army cases listed as criminal homicides and the 11 cases listed as justifiable homicides, 28 cases are listed as confirmed or suspected deaths from accidents or natural causes. An additional five are cases in which the cause of death has not been determined, Colonel Hart said.

AWESOME -- Angina With Extremely Serious Operative Mortality Evaluation

BATMAN -- BiodivYsio® BATiMastat SV stent versus balloon ANgioplasty

HeADDFIRST -- Hemicraniectomy And Durotomy for Deterioration From Infarction Relating Swelling Trial

IMPRESS -- Inhibition of MetalloProtease by BMS-186716 in a Randomized Exercise and Symptoms Study;

PROVE IT -- PRavastatin Or atorVastatin Evaluation and Infection Therapy;

SHOCK -- SHOuld we emergently revascularize occluded coronaries for Cardiogenic shocK


Seriously, how can people keep a straight face at cardiology conferences?


"Oh yeah, Bob, it's easy enrolling candidates for the AWESOME study."

"Great, John. But we're under a lot of pressure in the PROVE IT trial to, you know, prove it. Hey, over there -- who's that guy?"

"That's Batman."

The doctors would have to either admit they goofed in waiting (which would sink them), or admit they're hiding something (which would sink them, their patient, and generate a hundredfold increase in questions), or open up the chart and explain each decision, piece by piece (which could still leave the doctors and Clinton vulnerable to more questions, and would require responsible reporting to avoid headlines like, "Clinton docs were worried about AIDS!" -- and, I should add, this would require a responsible audience).

In short, I wonder if doctors, patients, reporters, or the general public are ready for this level of inquiry and access.

Trial lawyers and police PR have learned to manage the press in high-profile cases. Same with the NTSB after a plane crash. They control the amount and rate of information disclosure, they give some food for thought each day, they steer the conversation while they go about their investigations. CBB and I have more or less assumed that doctors were not playing this game -- that if someone were asking the right questions we'd have a story that made sense.

But maybe the docs are managing the press with the savvy of a PR agent. In the case of Clinton, they're not going to spend one second talking about the chance of HIV or malignancy, even if it's on their differential, even if they're testing for it. From their perspective, it's simply not worth bringing up other options at this point. Better to stay on message and not encourage more questions.

So is this a failure of good reporting? Or have the doctors and patients decided in advance just how much they're going to reveal to journalists? And would more aggressive, educated reporting actually give us more information in these high-profile cases, or would it turn the sources against the media and bloggers alike?

This post is really more about how women are more harshly punished if they go on the attack, which is what Maureen Dowd wrote about. It's not just that we (generally) feel worse when we are attacked, but that we are (generally) more likely to be perceived in a negative light if we do attack.

(1) Of 1,494 blogs that met the researchers' definition of influence, 759 were liberal and 735 were conservative.

(2) Even though numbers of blogs were fairly balanced, conservative blogs showed a greater tendency to link to other blogs (84% linked to other blogs, 82% received a link) compared to liberal blogs (74% linked to other blogs, 67% received a link). That behavior is captured in the following graphic from the paper, which illustrates the division between liberal (blue) and conservative (red) blogs. Orange links go from liberal to conservative, purple links from conservative to liberal. The size of each blog (indicated by a circle) reflects the number of other blogs that link to it.

The Colonel was a tough State Trooper, a cop who had survived many gun battles, who carried another trooper out of a gun fight, who clung spread-eagle to the pitched roof of a farm house to drop tear gas down the chimney and smoke out a gunman inside.

He was a rigid superintendent of the State Police Academy, yet fatherly: He urged cadets to go to college at night to earn degrees. The academy was just the beginning of one's education, he told them -- a sentiment that was not shared by other officers in the state police force in the early 19xxs.

His cadets didn't know what drove him to give that advice: The Colonel, who rose in the ranks of the State Police from horseback patrol in the remote mountain coal regions of the state, to the High Commissioners office, had never finished high school. His lack of education always burdened him personally, even though he accomplished so much in his life, a son said.

The Colonel revamped the curriculum for the State Police force's training and worked as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Justice to help police departments across the country develop training programs and drug investigation procedures.

The Colonel was superintendent of the State Police Academy from 19xx to 19xx, a time when the state police force was about half as big as it is now. It was common for troopers to patrol the state's rural counties alone, and he realized that troopers had to be smarter, wiser and independent.

"You had to be very self-sufficient to make sure you came home alive and with all your body parts, and he understood that," said a County judge who was a cadet at the academy during the Colonel's tenure.

"In some places, if you said, 'Sergeant, I would like to go to night school,' you'd be on perpetual evening shift. It was significantly different back then. But the Colonel knew he had to create and craft and mold these raw cadets into a very self-sufficient officer who could deal with anything that came at him in the middle of nowhere."

The Colonel's first assignment as a trooper was in 19xx, when he rode on horseback in the coal regions and mountains, patrolling strikes. He was assigned to barracks across the state until 19xx, when he was promoted to major and named Academy Superintendent.

Three years later, he was appointed State Police Commissioner, the force's top post, by the Governor. After retiring in 19xx, he was named Deputy Secretary of the State Department of Health and established the state's first narcotics investigation unit, which later became the model for the Drug Enforcement Agency of the US.

The Colonel received 23 citations for bravery and valor in the line of duty, but rarely talked about any of those accomplishments, his family said.

"He would grudgingly tell you a little bit when you asked him," said one of his sons. "I don't think he liked to talk about it as 'heroism.'"

Instructors at the academy would hint about the superintendent's bravery as cadets memorized the state police's creed, a vow that troopers make to lay down their lives for others.

"They would mention the fact that on more than one occasion, he had done exactly that". It impressed the cadets. "You can talk the talk, but if you haven't walked the walk, you really don't know what you're talking about" a colleague said.

At home, he escaped police work by cooking, singing and gardening. At night, he would sit at the kitchen table, studying for a test he would have to take to earn a promotion in rank. "Almost every night he'd do homework," his son said. "But he was an incredibly bright man. He had street smarts and an unbelievable memory" that impressed prosecutors in the courtroom. While a sergeant, the Colonel moonlighted as a legal assistant, writing briefs for a County Judge.

His image of a State Trooper was one of integrity, an officer free of any political ties that could corrupt. He was registered as a lifelong independent in elections, and staunchly believed that all troopers should be independents, his son said.

"He thought a political party affiliation gets in the way of your job," his son said. "He demanded the utmost integrity from people. He had it himself. It was not just show -- he had phenomenal
integrity."

Although reported as a simple thing, Bill Clinton is having a complex surgical procedure for a severe problem. His left lung lining has filled with blood and fluid, become rubbery, and caused the underlying lung to collapse. Clinton's people claim this is a not unusual side effect of heart bypass surgery...

HOWEVER

This is not common and either the doctors missed this condition or they have been hiding it from the press for six months OR...There is something else entirely going on. Bill Clinton's surgery was six months ago. So either he has an unusually persistent post-operative effusion OR he has a delayed effusion.

"In the end, the winner was revealed to be a convicted con artist whose platform seemed to consist of the deportation of illegal immigrants and the castration of child molesters."

"To be out there with those guys -- they're my best friends and pro surfers whom I've known for a long time -- to be just laughing our heads off without a worry in the world, it's what surfing is all about," he said.

"I don't think anyone has had more fun on a wave like that since the dawn of time," he added.

Syria, Syrian troops, Syria's intelligence services, must get out of Lebanon now," the president said.

"The world is beginning to speak with one voice. We want that democracy in Lebanon to succeed, and we know it cannot succeed so long as she is occupied by a foreign power and that power is Syria," Bush said.