Thanksgiving break

Off to Large Southwestern State for Thanksgiving, where the boy's grandparents, aunts, and new cousin will all be there to help him celebrate his second birthday (which was last week, but what's wrong with a party that goes on for 10 days?). We hear that there are more checkpoint lanes at the Pittsburgh International Airport now, so we hope that'll speed things up. We're also planning to check out the "Kidsport" area at the airport, which we hope will distract the boy from running maniacally up and down the terminals, getting underfoot.

I've been watching the news about the Kenneth Tomlinson/Corporation for Public Broadcasting mess. Tomlinson, who was hired by Pres. Bush to head the CPB (the semigovernmental nonprofit that administers the money that goes to NPR and PBS) and, implicitly, to provide political "balance" to PBS and NPR, went after public broadcasting with a vengeance. Tomlinson resigned on Nov. 3 after coming under investigation by the CPB's Inspector General. It's coming out that Tomlinson understood his job responsibilities perfectly, but apparently those responsibilities went counter to the stated legal restrictions of the job. Recent stories detail how Tomlinson's primary motivating principles were political, which the law forbids. Go figure.