Wherein you, the readers, talk amongst yourselves.

From the Times of London:

Perhaps the biggest social statement that the Obamas will make will be where they send Sasha and Malia to school. The girls attend private school in Chicago and are likely to stay in private education in Washington.
…
The Obamas could make a political statement, however, and send their daughters to one of Washington’s predominantly black state schools such as Wilson High, or the “School Without Walls”, which is near the White House.

So, private or public for Malia and Sasha? They'll both get into Harvard regardless, so is it important that in the meantime they be seen intermingling with middle and lower-class black children in DC, the children of the people upon whose support Obama relied?

Presumably because employees of the American government have become so damn laughable to people around the globe, the city of Washington, DC is installing in its metro stations friendly reminders for its citizens to value their own lives. Drawn in by new, "fun" games like hopscotch (at left) and I Spy, depressed commuters in our nation's capital will then be tricked into reading this cheerful slogan: "Life is fun. Keep on living. Use caution around the tracks." Ironically, one way to exercise caution around the tracks is to not play hopscotch on the fucking slippery platforms.

Lucky us, we don't need fancy safety warnings in the subways here in New York, where the human feces and urine soaking the tracks are more than enough of a reminder that we don't wanna go in there.

It's been over 60 years since Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier of Major League Baseball, and yet the sport is still almost completely void of African Americans. In 1995, the MLB was 19 percent black. Now, that statistic has dropped to just nine percent. Experts theorize that a demand for cheap labor is a major cause of this decline. Professional baseball clubs can hire three or four foreign players for the price of one American. On top of that, many inner city high schools don't even offer baseball programs to their student athletes, so there aren't fresh black stars to replace the aging pros.

The nation's capital hopes to reverse this trend. The Washington Nationals and DC's RBI (Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities) are establishing programs intended to revitalize black youth's interest in the sport. RBI provides baseball training, education and mentoring to roughly 500 kids in some of the most economically depressed neighborhoods in DC. For their part, the Nationals have "adopted" several public schools in the city, and each team member is required to visit at least once a month with the students.

"It's important to have minority players involved in the community," says an executive with the Nationals. "The more players they see, the more it moves the ball forward."

We've got one question before a lot of valuable time and money goes into this effort: Why the hell does anyone care how many black kids are playing baseball? For years now, football and basketball have been dominated by black athletes, and yet still this: "Across a range of economic indicators including measures of employment, poverty, housing, income and wealth, blacks were much worse off than whites. If whites scored 100 percent on such measures, blacks scored just 56.8 percent, a figure unchanged from last year … " Is baseball going to get that percentage to 80? 70?

Sorry if we're less than concerned that a few dozen black teenagers can't become blingy millionaires for swinging a stick, we're a bit engaged with trying to understand why an entire race of people is languishing.

What do you do when everyone is criticizing you for having too little political experience? Take that criticism and flip it into a positive. Short resume = short time spent in Washington = anti-Washington = trustworthy. Hey, don't knock it until it's proven not to have worked.

Campaigning in Manchester, N.H. today, Barack Obama unveiled his plan to make the federal government more transparent, including national broadband town hall meetings — he's calling them "21st Century Fireside Chats" — that he says his Cabinet will hold with the American people…

"The American people want to trust in our government again — we just need a government that will trust in us," Obama said, according to his campaign. "And making government accountable to the people isn't just a cause of this campaign — it's been a cause of my life for two decades."

21st Century Fireside Chats? How quaint. But really — what do you have to say about your skimpy political experience?

[BG]