You'd Think This Many Starlings Would be a Disaster

What do you get when a few hundred thousand starlings gather overhead?

No, that's what I thought, too. It's actually called a murmuration. Observe:



Hat tip to Chicago Ted for pointing me to this.

John Edwards Update

From the Washington Post:

GREENSBORO, N.C. — Something exceedingly strange is happening at the John Edwards trial: all four alternate jurors dressed in red shirts Friday. They each wore bright yellow the day before.

Coincidence? Few here think so.

The demeanor of the alternate jurors and their behavior has become the talk of the courthouse. The alternates enter the courtroom each day giggling among themselves. One of the alternates, an attractive young woman, has been spotted smiling at Edwards and flipping her hair in what seems to some to be a flirtatious manner. On Friday, she wore a revealing red top with a single strap and an exposed right shoulder.

Her actions have not gone unnoticed by courtroom observers, some of whom have chatted about her in increasingly anxious tones during the long stretches of down time while the jury, now in its sixth day of deliberations, meets behind closed doors to decide whether Edwards should be convicted on six campaign finance and conspiracy charges.

 The rest of the story is here.

Crazy Arizona

Timothy Egan:

We interrupt reality to bring you Arizona, once known as the Grand Canyon state....

Let’s start with the secretary of state, a wide-eyed fellow named Ken Bennett. He is Arizona’s chief elections officer. He is a Republican. He is also co-chairman of Mitt Romney’s campaign in Arizona. Recently, a few hundred people who probably spend their lives searching the Internet looking for proof that the moon landing was fake asked Mr. Secretary of State to investigate the birth certificate of the president of the United States.

Bennett got right on it. He put the full force of his office to work on a nonissue that was resolved for all but the looniest of tunes months ago. And, at the height of his “investigation,” just last week, he threatened to keep Obama off the ballot if his questions were not answered to his satisfaction.

In response, more than 17,000 people this week put their names on an online petition asking the secretary of state to investigate whether Mitt Romney is a unicorn.

An Insight Too Good Not to Share

From The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin, by Adam Hochschild:

At the end of our meeting, [a former Bolshevik who spent 20 years in Stalin's gulag] tells me a joke; like a haiku verse, it contains a hint of what went wrong in the Russian Revolution, and of what might have been, a path not taken.

"A descendant of the Decembrists (reformer aristocrats who rebelled against the Tsar in the 1820s), a woman, sees a crowd demonstrating in the street and she sends her daughter outside: 'Masha! Go and see what's going on.'

"Masha returns and says, 'Lots of people are out in the street.'

"'What do they want?'

"'They're demanding that no one should be rich.'

"'That's strange,' says the woman. 'My grandfather went out onto the street and demanded that no one should be poor....'"

Reverend Wright

You couldn't have missed the news stories last week about a proposed Republican ad campaign intended to bring back the "God damn America" speech of Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

Andrew Tobias pointed his readers to this column by Pat Cunningham in the Rockford (Illinois) Register Star.

I ask you:  Whose words were worse?  Jeremiah Wright’s, for inviting God’s punishment of America for its racism? Or Jerry Falwell’s, for saying that God had punished America [on September 11, 2001] —  and rightly so — for its liberalism?

Last Saturday, Mitt Romney delivered a speech at Liberty University, a school founded by Falwell, and said this of the late reverend:

In his 73 years of life, Dr. Falwell left a big mark…The calling Jerry answered was not an easy one. Today we remember him as a courageous and big-hearted minister of the Gospel who never feared an argument, and never hated an adversary. Jerry deserves the tribute he would have treasured most, as a cheerful, confident champion for Christ.

I will always remember his cheerful good humor and selflessness.

There were no qualifications in Romney’s praise of Falwell, no hints of disapproval of Falwell having blamed America for Sept. 11, no effort to distance himself from the suggestion that God had punished America for not hewing to Falwell’s moral code.

 So, there you have it. Barack Obama has disowned the man who said “God damn America,” but Mitt Romney has praised the man who said God has rightly punished America with horrendous acts of terrorism.

And yet, some people want us to believe that Obama’s morality is the more questionable in all of this.

So why is Jeremiah Wright so much more upsetting than Jerry Falwell?

Oh, yeah. There's that race thing.

What They Didn't Tell You During the Kentucky Derby

According to this NY Times article, Doug O'Neill, the trainer of this year's Kentucky Derby winner, I'll Have Another, has been sanctioned 12 times in the last 14 years for doping his horses.

But the problem is bigger than that. Takeaway quote:

The racing industry has come to realize that lax regulation and the absence of meaningful punishment have fostered a culture where top trainers with multiple drug violations are more the rule than the exception. Of the top 20 trainers in the United States — measured by purses won in 2011 — only two, Christophe Clement and Graham Motion, were never cited for a medication violation, according to the Racing Commission International database.

Enjoy the Preakness.