There are four things I want out of life: clean water, healthy food, a roof over my head, and to change the world.

(or “Here we go with this again")

OK, here’s the deal. Several years ago, I wrote an Easter story for the now-defunct runningincircles.com. I got in the habit of re-publishing it every time Easter rolls around, and it remains by far my most popular post since I started my first web site in 1999.

In that vein, I present to you for the fourth year in a row, A Roman Soldier’s Easter.

Obsidian Wings points us to a great comment by Ezra Klein on Geraldine Ferraro’s* comment that Barack Obama is lucky to be black:

“Obama is not a woman, nor a white man. He’s who he is. To say that if he were different, things would be different is to say nothing at all. As a white woman, maybe he would have led a military coup and established himself dictator. Who knows!? Hell, if he were a slightly less inspiring speaker, or had an off-night at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, he wouldn’t be in this position either. Similarly, if Hillary Clinton were a black man, it’s unlikely that she would have been a national political figure for the past 15 years, as it’s unlikely that she would have married another man from Arkansas, and unlikely that the country would have put an interracial, same sex couple in the White House. But so what? This is an election, not Marvel’s “What If?” series.”

* = who?

Sorry the commenting system is broken right now. I apologize and I’ll have it up in a couple of minutes.

[EDIT: Comments are working again]

OK, this NYTimes Op-Ed is a little over the top. He’s writing (about a week too late) about Hillary Clinton’s “Ringing Phone” ad:

I have spent my life studying the pictures and symbols of racism and slavery, and when I saw the Clinton ad’s central image — innocent sleeping children and a mother in the middle of the night at risk of mortal danger — it brought to my mind scenes from the past. I couldn’t help but think of D. W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” the racist movie epic that helped revive the Ku Klux Klan, with its portrayal of black men lurking in the bushes around white society. The danger implicit in the phone ad — as I see it — is that the person answering the phone might be a black man, someone who could not be trusted to protect us from this threat.

I’d guess that people who spend their lives studying “pictures and symbols of racism” are likely to see racism regardless of whether it actually exists, because this is just downright insane.

Apparently the New York Times thinks that sleeping children == Klan Members. Riiight.

I'm kind of glad I'm not a Roman Catholic right now.
http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30200-1308679,00.html?f=rss

[EDIT: The Catholic News Service explains why the media reports were misinterpretations.]