After I suggested being honest about college sports on this blog page, Taylor Branch has made the same case, better, in The Atlantic. With, you know, actual reporting and everything.

Here's a bit from Branch's lead, as a shoe-advertising king pin talks openly about "buying your schools" in order to increase his market share:

It's college football season, and that means corruption and scandal. (Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about that corruption.) We've actually gotten to the point where Sports Illustrated, not the Chronicle of Higher Education but Sports Illustrated, has called for a major university football team to be disbanded.

There's a famine in Somalia, and the World Bank has issued another stern warning about global food prices. Asia Sentinel admits concerns, but their headline reads, Global Food Crisis Fears Abate:

Climate activist Tim DeChristopher due for sentencing
 

An activist who disrupted a Bush administration auction for the oil and gas industry by bidding $1.8m (£1.1m) he did not have for the right to drill in remote areas of Utah is due to be sentenced on Tuesday.

As Bidder No 70, Tim DeChristopher put in bogus bids and won drilling rights to 14 parcels of land at the auction, seen at the time as a last scramble by the Bush administration to open up wilderness lands to oil and gas extraction.

The Consumerist blog led me to Down But Not Out Letters, a selection of fifty letters from the six thousand sent in by unemployed persons to describe their situations. I've quoted paragraphs from a few of them below:
 

I've mentioned National Lampoon's 1973 Last Aid parody before, but I didn't expect anyone to take it seriously.

Hosted by the blogs What Tami Said and Shakesville, today is a Planned Parenthood Blog Carnival. The purpose of the Carnival is for women or men that have been helped by Planned Parenthood to share their positive experiences.

I don't follow murder trials closely and I can't stand Nancy Grace, a former prosecutor who seems to think that no innocent people have ever been accused of a crime in America ever.  When juries acquit in what we outsiders are assured are "slam dunk" cases, I don't get angry about it.  It's pointless, after all, and the jury generally knows better than anybody whether or not a prosecutor has surmounted the "reasonable doubt" hurdle.

Note: Will Kohl over at Back2Stonewall asked me if I’d write him a guest post about some of my experiences in Brazil. Here is that post, originally posted at Back2Stonewall.com

I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t Gay friendly. But it took coming to Brazil for me to become a full-fledged Gay ally. That change started almost immediately upon my arrival.

The FBI has caught Whitey Bulger, after a mere sixteen years. The arrest made national news because of the FBI's well-earned embarrassment and because of the mythology around Bulger. As a crime boss, Bulger was not nationally significant. He was a formidable gang leader with firm control over one slice of Boston's organized crime, but it was only a slice.

The media can't resist talking about Congressman Weiner's penis. That's no surprise. The American entertainment industry exists to talk about penises and the things various penises like. And our news media is only a minor subsidiary of that entertainment empire.

The Truth About Cars  carries this story of a pair of local police officers beating up an old man on a bogus-sounding speeding charge, but there's more info in the source decision, a PDF. 

So, last summer LeBron James decided to leave Cleveland, leading to a massive outburst of Clevesentment and a widespread belief that Cleveland had burned down among my friends and family who don't live there (and not just among them, judging from the search terms that old post collected). A year later, he's gotten himself to the NBA Finals for the first time in his career.

So, Jared Loughner, who tried to murder Gabby Giffords, has been found unfit to stand trial because he is too mentally ill to insist his defense. Loughner, among other things, is apparently loudly insisting that Giffords is actually dead, because he succeeded in murdering her. That's pretty much the definition of "unable to assist in your defense" right there.

In the United States of America - where only 75 people have ever traveled abroad (note: possibly not a factual statement) - the State Department has decided to pepper new passport applicants with questions that are both increasingly private in nature and, well, just plain annoying.

From Consumer Traveler:

There's sad news from Princeton where a lecturer who was apparently in danger of losing his job has taken his own life. That's a terrible thing.

"I think everyone agrees with the goal of reducing abortion by encouraging consideration of other alternatives," [North Dakota governor] Daugaard said in a written statement. "I hope that women who are considering an abortion will use this three-day period to make good choices."

Barack Obama's decision to join the attack on Libya is very much of a piece with his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. There are various grounds on which a reasonable person could object to the Libya strikes (diplomatic reasons, military reasons, pragmatic reasons, reasons of consistency, even Constitutional reasons). But the decision absolutely fits within a coherent and very traditional moral philosophy. Obama walked through most of the key points of that position in his Nobel Prize speech, with one important omission.

The Vandellas and Martha

International Women's Day coincides with Mardi Gras this year.

Interesting juxtaposition.