I saw Katharine Hepburn once several years ago in New York. A limo had stopped in the middle of a quiet street in the east 50's, near some construction debris -- a very large rock -- blocking the parking space in front of one of the town houses. Suddenly, out jumps Ms. Hepburn (she must have been in her 80s) from the back of the limo, and furious, marches over to the rock, picks it up, and heaves it on to the sidewalk, all the time swearing a blue streak in the direction of her driver. She then turned abruptly and charged into the town house. Meekly, the limo driver proceeded to park the car where the rock had been.

The Times' coverage is pretty neat, since they also post the original Times' reviews of her movies.

*****

Somehow, this just seems like old news.

I guess it is, in a sense. As nothing much has changed since Sept. 10, 2001, except for this, this, and this. Feeling any more secure yet? What color is it?

This post from TalkingPoints has it all: An indictment of both the Bush administration's handling of Iraqi nuclear capabilities intelligence before the war, as well as their handling of Iraqi nuclear scientists after the war.

And I must apologize, I have assumed that the Bush administration, the Pentagon, and the neocons had no plan for post-war Iraq. Turns out they have two (thanks to Dave for the link).

Amy Sullivan at Political Aims (highly recommended) directs us to this article in the Washington Monthly, describing the "K Street Project" (I started to write an entry on this last week, based on an Alan Murray column in The Wall Street Journal, but I accidentally deleted the whole post just as I was finishing it. I was so dispirited by what I had written -- and then deleted -- that I just didn't have it in me to recompose it).

It is pretty clear that the vast right-wing conspiracy (at first I thought the site was a parody, but now I'm thinking not; it's clearly in an irony-free zone) -- long an enemy to the federal government -- is now intent on co-opting it:

"One way was to start ensuring that the new GOP agenda of radical deregulation, tax and spending cuts, and generally reducing government earned the financial support they thought it deserved. In 1995, DeLay famously compiled a list of the 400 largest PACs, along with the amounts and percentages of money they had recently given to each party. Lobbyists were invited into DeLay's office and shown their place in 'friendly' or 'unfriendly' columns. ('If you want to play in our revolution,' DeLay told The Washington Post, 'you have to live by our rules.') Another was to oust Democrats from trade associations, what DeLay and Norquist dubbed 'the K Street Strategy.' Sometimes revolutionary zeal got the better of them. One seminal moment, never before reported, occurred in 1996 when Haley Barbour, who was chairman of the Republican National Committee, organized a meeting of the House leadership and business executives. 'They assembled several large company CEOs and made it clear to them that they were expected to purge their Washington offices of Democrats and replace them with Republicans,' says a veteran steel lobbyist. The Republicans also demanded more campaign money and help for the upcoming election. The meeting descended into a shouting match, and the CEOs, most of them Republicans, stormed out."

Co-opting, hell. They mean to own it, lock, stock and barrel.

And, of course, the Bush administration's airbrushing of history continues. No issue is too small for some revisionist history.

*****

Sorry that I haven't been living up to the mission of the blog and have failed to post much baseball news. Truth is, Selig hasn't done anything stupid lately. But, fear not, the All-Star game is coming and besides the fact that Selig has, stupidly, made World Series home field advantage dependent on the winner of the All-Star game, I'm sure that in the festivities he'll announce some edict certain to alienate fans and piss-off players. And George Steinbrenner.