Damsel of Distress

Martin Kozlowski

Our Enemies and the Election

Scorpions Special: Deadliest Stings

Part 1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQD-zBLDuuY (7:54)

Part 2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoNliHLVqLI&feature=related (8:01)

Part 3 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnLscAKKnv0&feature=related (6:39)

Christians & Politics

A Herd of Unicorns: The Myth of Evangelical Political Engagement

"How Evangelicals Traded Their Spiritual Authority for a Mess of Political Pottage."

Unplugging U2

The U2 Unplugged series is a devotional style look at a dozen U2 songs, designed to explore biblical issues and themes by diving into the band's lyrics.

Introduction

Preface: An Unmistakable Gospel Trail

Part One: Love’s Victory

1. The Club Vertigo Letters, “Vertigo”
2. Dancing the Perfect Storm, “Drowning Man”
3. Crashing into a World of Karma, “Grace”
4. Love for a Cross-Eyed Culture, “God Part II”

Part Two: God & Me

5. The Courting of an Untamed God, “Wild Honey”
6. Thirsty Worship, “Gloria”

Part Three: A Complete Faith in an Incomplete World

7. A Gritty Faith, “40”

8. The Overturned Sardine Can, “All Because of You”
9. Glimpses of a Far Off Country, “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”

Part Four: A Disciple’s Life

10. Mysteriously Ever After, “A Man and a Woman”
11. Sleeping Giants, “Crumbs from Your Table”
12. A God of Positive Promise, “Yahweh”

Part 1-12

• Dancing the Perfect Storm: Unplugging U2's "Drowning Man"
• Crashing into a World of Karma: Unplugging U2's "Grace"
  
• Love For a Cross-eyed Culture: Unplugging U2'a "God Part II"
  
• Sleeping Giants: Unplugging U2's "Crumbs From Your Table"
• The Club Vertigo Letters: Unplugging U2's "Vertigo"
• The Courting of An Untamed God: Unplugging U2's "Wild Honey"
• A God of Positive Promise: Unplugging U2's "Yahweh"
• Thirsty Worship: Unplugging U2's "Gloria"
• Mysteriously Ever After: Unplugging U2's "A Man And A Woman"
• The Overturned Sardine Can: Unplugging U2's "All Because of You"
• Glimpses Of A Far Off Country: Unplugging U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For"
• A Gritty Faith: Unplugging U2's "40"
  

Castellini part of Reds' problem

Wayne Krivsky didn't see his firing coming at all. Nobody did, other than Reds owner Bob Castellini, because even after Castellini hired Walt Jocketty to be the heir apparent to Krivsky -- and created a tense atmosphere that rival general managers thought affected Krivsky -- the assumption was that no change would be considered until after the 2008 season.

Because, after all, what sense does it make to make a change 21 games into the season? If Castellini ultimately intended to install Jocketty, if he intended to dump Krivsky at the first sign of failure, then he should've made this move last fall. By waiting, Castellini became part of the problem.

According to sources, one of Castellini's major internal complaints about Krivsky's work was his spring signing of Josh Fogg, who subsequently pitched poorly for the Reds before being dropped from the rotation. But Fogg was signed out of desperation, with Krivsky seemingly reacting to Castellini's win-now dictum. If Castellini had simply made the change he wanted to make last fall, Jocketty could have made the deliberate, big-picture decisions that the Reds needed at that stage in their development. Or Castellini could have decided to wait until the end of this season to evaluate Krivsky, who has been on the job a mere 26 months.

But instead, Castellini straddled the decision-making process, and the Reds are worse off for it.

At worst, Krivsky's grade in operating the Reds would be a solid B. He swapped for Brandon Phillips just before the second baseman blossomed. And while Krivsky would modestly say he did not see stardom coming in Phillips, a rival GM says this: "The bottom line is, he went out and got the guy for nothing, and he deserves credit for that."

Krivsky essentially got Josh Hamilton for nothing, picking up the center fielder for relative pennies in the Rule 5 draft. And at a time when you cannot get good young pitching through trades, Krivsky pried Edinson Volquez away from the Rangers for Hamilton. "In this market," said an assistant GM, "that's a steal to get a pitcher who can make an impact."

He got Jeff Keppinger for nothing. He made a great trade in his first month on the job, swapping Wily Mo Pena for Bronson Arroyo, who gave the Reds a couple of good years. The Reds probably overpaid for Francisco Cordero and have probably hung on to both of their lumbering corner outfielders, Ken Griffey Jr. and Adam Dunn, when they might have been better off moving one or the other. But it is unclear if those decisions were, in fact, made by Krivsky, or above him.

Within the industry, the Reds' swap of Austin Kearns and Felipe Lopez for relievers Bill Bray and Gary Majewski is widely regarded as a terrible deal, because evaluators feel Krivsky didn't get equal value for position players and very much overrated the prospective impact of middle relievers. But Kearns and Lopez really haven't made much more of an impact for Washington than Bray and Majewski have for the Reds; we are not going to look back in the same vein as Lou Brock for Ernie Broglio or Chris Young and Adrian Gonzalez for Adam Eaton.

The Alex Gonzalez signing was a gamble, and appears to be a bust. The Mike Stanton signing turned out to be a $7 million mistake, and signing Corey Patterson to a $3 million deal for 2008 was odd, given Patterson's track record. But the only team that has a perfect record in the free-agent market recently has been the Florida Marlins, who choose to play the nickel slots. Every team has made free-agent gaffes, and you can credit Krivsky for this: As Jocketty considers changes moving forward, he won't be saddled with any Zito or Soriano or Giambi contract albatrosses. Almost all of Krivsky's signings have been two- and three-year deals.

The Reds have pieces they can build on: Aaron Harang, Johnny Cueto, Volquez, first baseman Joey Votto, and star prospect Jay Bruce, who should be called up in the next month or so. Jocketty is in an excellent position to make this team better. And while Castellini might not think so, Krivsky deserves a lot of credit for that.

Firing a GM is not like firing a manager, writes Paul Daugherty, who notes that the draft is not far away. Jocketty says it's not too late to win this year, and he's looking to establish a winning atmosphere. It wouldn't be surprising if one of the first things he does is to gauge the trade value of Dunn; rival evaluators say that the Reds need more athleticism in their outfield, and Dunn might bring back some return in a deal. The losing must stop, says Castellini.

Dusty Baker learned from Krivsky himself that he had been fired, writes Hal McCoy.

A Bush Success (not that he gets credit). The Medicare drug benefit is working better than predicted.

Now in its third year, the drug benefit is working better than predicted. More than 1,800 private plans are competing for enrollment. More important, Medicare beneficiaries like the program. Recent independent surveys show 85 percent are satisfied with their coverage. And little wonder: In 2008, the average beneficiary premium is just $25 per month, well below the original estimate of $41.

The program's competitive design is holding down costs for the government as well. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced earlier this year the new drug benefit's costs will be 40 percent--or $244 billion--less over ten years than originally projected. This is an unprecedented achievement in health care policy.

There are important lessons to draw from this experience. For liberals it is that the greatest threat to public support for their ideology is reality. It's been said that you can prove the possible by the actual--and in this case, the "actual" is that sensible public policy can liberate markets to work in health care just as they work in every other area. Governmentalists have a deep interest in grounding policy debates on issues like health care in abstractions and appeals to fear of the unknown. Pro-market reformers, on the other hand, need only to test their propositions against reality.

...Many fiscal conservatives--including Senator John McCain--opposed the drug benefit because of its undeniably high cost--$49 billion last year. Those concerns were legitimate, and it remains true that the rest of Medicare needs significant reform. But conservatives should also see that broader Medicare change is now more plausible because the public has seen competition work in the drug plan.

We won't get to where we need to be in health care all at once. But a decade from now, the importance of the Medicare prescription drug benefit's groundbreaking success will be obvious to all, including conservatives. It will rank as one of George W. Bush's best domestic legacies.

10 Things You Probably Didn't Know About U2

The Divorce Generation Grows Up

Grant High School's class of '82 were raised on 'The Brady Bunch'—while their own families were falling apart. These are their stories—in their words.

Emily Shur for Newsweek (top)

Brennaman maintains criticism of Cubs fans

Trigger Happy

...According to the 2006 General Social Survey, which has tracked gun ownership since 1973, 34% of American homes have guns in them...Who are all these gun owners? Are they the uneducated poor, left behind? It turns out they have the same level of formal education as nongun owners, on average. Furthermore, they earn 32% more per year than nonowners. Americans with guns are neither a small nor downtrodden group.

Nor are they "bitter." In 2006, 36% of gun owners said they were "very happy," while 9% were "not too happy." Meanwhile, only 30% of people without guns were very happy, and 16% were not too happy.

In 1996, gun owners spent about 15% less of their time than nonowners feeling "outraged at something somebody had done." It's easy enough in certain precincts to caricature armed Americans as an angry and miserable fringe group. But it just isn't true. The data say that the people in the approximately 40 million American households with guns are generally happier than those people in households that don't have guns.

The gun-owning happiness gap exists on both sides of the political aisle. Gun-owning Republicans are more likely than nonowning Republicans to be very happy (46% to 37%). Democrats with guns are slightly likelier than Democrats without guns to be very happy as well (32% to 29%). Similarly, holding income constant, one still finds that gun owners are happiest.

...A bit of evidence that self-reliance is at work among gun owners comes from the General Social Survey. It asked whether one agrees with the statement, "Those in need have to take care of themselves." In 2004, gun owners were 10 percentage points more likely than nonowners to agree (60% to 50%).

That response is not evidence that gun owners only care about themselves, however. In 2002, they were more likely to give money to charity than people without guns (83% to 75%). This charity gap doesn't reflect their somewhat higher incomes. Gun owners were also more likely to give in other ways, such as donating blood. Are gun owners unsentimental? In 2004, they were more likely than those without guns to strongly agree that they would "endure all things" for the one they loved (45% to 37%).

South Carolina's Contender - Mark Sanford

Ismael Roldan

Embrace Your Inner Teddy Roosevelt - An economic agenda for John McCain.

The New E-spionage Threat

• China's Response to BusinessWeek
• Interactive Graphic: Anatomy of a Spear-Phish
• Podcast: Behind the Cover
• An Evolving Crisis
• BusinessWeek TV: New Cyber Threat
• Video: Defending the Homeland
• Warning About Certain Internet Addresses
• CERT: Online Attacks Threaten U.S. Financial Institutions (.pdf)
• CERT: U.S. Defense Contractors and Government Employee Targets (.pdf)

The Christian & Alcohol

Does Life Begin at Conception? Obama, Hillary Respond

The Fiscal Consequences of Divorce

Families that stay together, save together. That's the conclusion of a new study indicating that U.S. taxpayers are forking out at least $112 billion annually, and over $1 trillion dollars per decade, on divorces and unwed childbearing. This estimate is based on federal, state, and local government programs and lost tax revenue.

Says the study's principal author, Ben Scafidi of Georgia State University: "These costs are due to increased taxpayer expenditures for anti-poverty, criminal justice and education programs, and through lower levels of taxes paid by individuals whose adult productivity has been negatively affected by increased childhood poverty caused by family fragmentation." Similar work by Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation has found that children who grow up in fatherless homes are far more likely to have behavior problems, drug abuse, high school drop out rates, and to be in poverty as adults.

What can government do? The Institute for American Values, which underwrote the Scafidi research, recommends modest taxpayer funds to support efforts to decrease divorce rates and unwed childbearing. That may be a waste of money, as these are the types of activities best undertaken by churches and private support networks. The best hope is that the lesson will be taken to heart by the media, politicians and educators, reversing some of the casualness with which divorces are sought and granted. In the 1970s and '80s, a school of thought maintained that breaking up troubled marriages was a win-win. Feminists argued it was a form of women's liberation, the children were better off, etc. But a steady drumbeat of research has shown that in most cases almost everyone is rendered worse off by divorce and separation. That includes taxpayers.

Cincinnati Reds broadcaster Marty Brennaman rants about Chicago Cubs fans

Comments about the rant

Griffey outspoken on race issue

Not just Bono's wife

CREDIT: Mike Hutchings, Reuters

Ali Hewson and Bono visit a rural clinic in Lesotho, one of several African countries that produce a line of fair trade organic clothing. Africans would much rather work than accept charity, says Ms. Hewson, wife of the Irish rock star.

"I don't want to end my life feeling I've only looked after myself, that everything I did was to protect myself. I want, when I die, to believe that I've achieved what I was supposed to achieve, that is, to help other people in whatever way I could."

Ali Hewson

It was the first morning of the rest of her life. Dark-haired, dark-eyed 12-year-old Alison Stewart no sooner arrived at Mount Temple Comprehensive School in Dublin than Paul Hewson, a grade above her, spotted the new girl.

"He worked very hard at being the heartthrob," she recently told an English journalist.

"He came up to me within the first day and asked did I know where his class should be going? It was just an excuse to talk to me, and I thought, 'What an eejit.'

"I remember that on the fourth day of school, I saw him walking across the courtyard and it was, bing! That is the guy for me."

For a year, he pursued while Ali, determined not to be just another of his girls, was cool. But the next year, Paul's mother died suddenly of an aneurism. That year, Ali, 13, helped Paul -- from washing his clothes and cooking his food to keeping track of his house keys and walking with him to school.

They began dating in November 1976, when Ali was 15. Paul is now world-famous as the Irish rock group U2's lead man and humanitarian-at-large, Bono.

He told talk-show host Larry King years later: "I joined U2 and I started going out with Ali, so it was a good month."

When Ali was 21, and Bono was 22, they married. They have four children, aged six to 18, whose names reflect religious values and the strong Christian theme in U2's music: daughters Jordan and Memphis Eve, and sons Elijah Bob Patricius Guggi Q (partly named for friends) and John Abraham.

"It is hard, sometimes. I hate being called 'Bono's wife,' and being identified just as that," she said in 1993. She has avoided public attention "I'm very protective of my kids, and of my life with Bono. It has worked well up to now, the sort of life (in which) I can go out and do the normal sort of stuff, and he can take all the heat. I'd rather work behind the scenes."

Over the years, she has left obscurity and 'Mrs. Bono' behind. Her work started after U2 joined rocker Bob Geldof in his first Live Aid concert to raise money for starving Ethiopians.

"The children out there had nothing, nothing, yet they seemed to be really alive spiritually. For me, the culture shock was in coming home, back to supermarkets full of food and children who seemed spoiled, who had everything, and yet were so starved of spirituality and any understanding of what life was about."

She gave up her dream of a four-year nursing degree to keep the relationship strong as Bono and U2 topped charts worldwide.

In 1989, at age 28, she graduated with a degree in social and political science, giving birth to their first child, daughter, Jordan, two weeks after her final exams.

Though the Hewsons have homes around the world, they strive to raise normal, unspoiled children in their large Killiney home in south County Dublin where they overlook the Irish Sea.

Being a single mother while U2 toured for months, even years, "is as hard as it is for any single parent," she said. "But then, the difference is that if something goes completely wrong, I can just phone Bono. He's probably one of the best psychologists I know. He always comes through for me."

Being a mother, Ms. Hewson said, started her involvement with Greenpeace's campaign against contamination by England's Sellafield facility, which lies 200 kilometres across the Irish Sea. To protest building THORP, a nuclear reprocessing centre at Sellafield, she organized a 1992 stunt in which U2 and Greenpeace donned radiation suits and transported drums of "contaminated mud" from the Irish Sea to the nuclear site perimeter.

In 1993, seven years after the Soviet nuclear power plant, Chernobyl, exploded in Ukraine, she made her first trip to Belarus, where 70 per cent of the contamination fell.

There, she said, four million children suffer from leukemia and other cancers and genetic deformities. It was her first of many gruelling 5,600-kilometre trips -- sometimes driving one of many ambulances filled with medical supplies.

She was working for Chernobyl Children's Project, which provides care for children, many of them abandoned, deformed and dying from "Chernobyl AIDS."

Project founder and former Irish presidential candidate Adi Roche has been the driving force for dozens of medical convoys, for thousands of children who recuperate in Ireland, for surgeries and transport of hundreds of dying children from Belarus to actor Paul Newman's camp at Barretstown Castle in County Kildare.

The Hewson-Roche team, and others, spent three weeks in Belarus in 1993 where they filmed in high-radiation exclusion zones to make the award-winning documentary Black Wind, White Land -- Living with Chernobyl.

They filmed children, among them nine-month-old Anna. "Both her legs are short. Both her ears are closed," said Ms. Hewson.

"I just picked her up and it's just one of those things where we bonded." She has been adopted by an Irish family and is Ms. Hewson's goddaughter.

In 1996, Ms. Hewson was part of an Irish aid convoy to Belarus and Western Russia to mark the 10th anniversary of the (April 26, 1986) Chernobyl explosion. Chernobyl's estimated toll ranges from 50 direct deaths and 4,000 eventual deaths to more than 500,000 deaths and nine million people affected.

In 2003, she narrated Chernobyl Heart, a film about the suffering left by Chernobyl, which won an Oscar in 2004 for best documentary.

In 2002, she headed a 1.2 million-postcard protest directed at then-prime minister Tony Blair, Prince Charles and the head of British Nuclear Fuels demanding that Britain close Sellafield because of its failed safety record and periodic nuclear contamination of air and water over decades.

"Sellafield has the potential to be 80 times the size of the Chernobyl accident," she said.

(Britain had to shut down THORP in 2005 after a massive internal leak went undetected for nine months. It plans to reopen this year for another three years, over objections from Ireland, Iceland, Norway and Austria.)

"There are people being born with Down syndrome and higher numbers of leukemia cases on Ireland's east coast," said Ms. Hewson, "but research is not being done into this." Since 9/11, she has noted: "The 75 tonnes of plutonium sitting on its site can't but be at the top of any terrorist's list."

In 2005, she, Bono and New York designers Rogan Gregory and Scott Hahn started a Fair Trade organic clothing label EDUN -- nude spelled backwards to suggest natural and Eden. (The Hewsons are shareholders in an organic food chain called Nude.)

"Bono's biggest impression of the Africans is that they don't want charity. They want trade," says Ms. Hewson. "If you have it made in Africa, you create trade there, you can create jobs there."

"Rich countries subsidize their own agricultural sectors by about $1 billion per day," said Ms. Hewson at EDUN's launch. She cited the $4-billion annual subsidy the U.S. hands its cotton farmers. "Then they flood the market with (cheap) cotton. It's unfair. It's a false economy and just crushes African farmers."

DONNA JACOBS is an Ottawa writer; her e-mail is nnabjacobs@hotmail.com