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Bill Moyers finds parallels with the degradation of rampant steroid use in baseball to how degraded our country has become by those seeking quick ways to short cut and short circuit level playing fields.

You don't get a level playing field with performance enhancing drugs, any more than you get an honest government with political action committees and bundled contributions, or a fair economy with some derivatives, hedge funds, and private equity managers taxed at rates lower than their janitors. You get a level playing field only when the fans demand it. Suppose people stopped attending games in large numbers, stopped watching on TV, stopped buying the products hyped by the icons. The leveling would happen, or baseball as a money-making business would die. It's not likely to happen. If we can't organize to stop a brutal, bloody war in Iraq, or rectify an economic system that divides us further every day, we can hardly expect collective action from baseball fans.

There was a lesson in George Mitchell's report that I'm not sure even he recognized. The day Americans don't feel strongly enough about the need for level playing fields to fight for them -- the day when cutting corners and seeking an edge become the national pastime -- is the day democracy will be lucky even to find a seat in the bleachers.

The entire transcript available here.

More blog links from Bob Morris of Politics in the Zeros (where I blog about antiwar, global warming, Left politics, etc.)

Subtopia, the amazing "field guide to military urbanism," has the scoop on the migrant detention center being built at Gitmo to house 10,000 people in case, y'know, there's a boat crisis or something.

Hawaii activists convinced a sugar plantation to burn sugar cane scrap to fuel an ethanol plant rather than coal. Using local biomass is way more carbon-friendly as it eliminates shipping coal from the mainland and the traditional burning of cane in the fields - and also saves the owner money. So, everyone wins. We need more solutions like this.

Ecosocialism joins green with red, saying we need new economic structures to deal with global warming and peak oil.

4th Generation Warfare is the military doctrine that says small, non-state players can damage and sometimes defeat much larger, more powerful forces - something with direct relevance to all manner of conflicts today.

And who would have guessed My Boyfriend is a Twat, her hilarious (and totally workplace safe) blog, would turn into a book?

Send tips to bob (at) polizeros (dot) com.

Shakesville: Bush trys to re-ignite the Cold War

Rising Hegemon: Like a "Smokeless" Klan rally.

TPMCafe: The Associated Press' crappy reporting makes Obama's remarks sound really threatening  Here's some more shoddy newspaper work

The New Editor: Winnie Mandela, Nelson Mandela's wife, is barred from Canada

Feministing: Feminists want to have sex without getting pregnant and therefore are murdering whores.  Scott has more...

Boozhy: American soldiers patrol Afghani marijuana fields (sound track gets an X rating)

If, like me, you're having trouble keeping track, go over to Lies from the Bush-Cheney administration

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NASA Probe Penetrates Tom Cruise's Ego that one blog

THE DEATH OF A MUSLIM WOMAN

In the past four months, six Muslim women living in Berlin have been brutally murdered by family members. Their crime? Trying to break free and live Western lifestyles... Hatin's crime, it appears, was the desire to lead a normal life in her family's adopted land. The vivacious 23-year-old beauty, who was raised in Berlin, divorced the Turkish cousin she was forced to marry at age 16. She also discarded her Islamic head scarf, enrolled in a technical school where she was training to become an electrician and began dating German men. For her family, such behavior represented the ultimate shame -- the embrace of "corrupt" Western ways. Days after the crime, police arrested her three brothers, ages 25, 24 and 18. The youngest of the three allegedly bragged to his girlfriend about the Feb. 7 killing....read on

...So I really am "Daddy's girl." And no man can approach me as an independent agent because I am not my own, but belong, until my marriage, to my father. At the time of my marriage, my father gives me away to my husband and there is a lawful change of ownership. At that point and at that point only, I am no longer bound to do my father's will. Instead, I must answer to my husband. If you read the rest of Numbers 30 you will see that this is the case. Notice that there is no intermediate point between Daddy and Hubby. There is no "limbo land" where the girl is free to gallivant on her own, "discovering herself" as she walks in fields of gold, apart from any defining covenant head, doing whatever she sees fit....