frank rich & other journalists

Usually I don't love him, even though I generally agree with him. But I think today's column (recently moved from the Sunday arts section to the Week In Review section) is fantastic. It might be wishful thinking; a lot of us are really hoping that public support for the war is sinking and public patience with Bush's smug, insulated, disconnected, and generally duplicitous presidency is waning. It's too easy—and it's premature—to call Cindy Sheehan the catalyst of a movement that will eventually bring down this particularly vile brand of Republicanism, this perfect storm of the religious right, old-fashioned entitled American aristocracy, the worst of American knee-jerk xenophobia and Christian bigotry, and Grover Norquist-brand "starve the beast" economics. I hope it'll end up being true.

On a more depressing note, apparently the POST-GAZETTE has decided to publish in dialect. Two sports headlines—headlines!—today featured the most ignant of all Pittsburghese locutions, the dropped "to be." To wit:

'ATTENTION: KIDS AT PLAY. [subhead] As if you really need alerted to the fact that something special is at work around here.' Page D1

'PENGUINS' HOLES AT SECOND, THIRD CENTER NEED FILLED." Page D12

Interestingly, the online versions of these stories don't reprint these grammatical errors. One voice for the yinzers, one for the outside world?

While in New York, the wife and I saw stickers and flyers all over the place for the United for Peace and Justice march against the war on Sept. 24 in Washington. A vast number of groups are involved in this, but as I understand it the UPJ folks are explicitly NOT working with those creepy (but marketing-savvy) Maoists in ANSWER. We went down for last year's March for Women's Lives, and it was amazing--between 750,000 and million out there.