So the Yankees were almost the first team since the 2000 White Sox to average six runs a game. How many games did the 2000 White Sox win in the playoffs? Oh, right, zero. They were swept by the Mariners.

The Yankees offense (and the Red Sox pitching) get to fatten up their stats by playing the hapless Devil Rays and Orioles 38 times every year. Some years they're genuinely good, but others it's all light and illusion. Front line pitching usually does it. And the Indians and Angels have the front line pitching.

Standing up before Dean Wormer and saying that he's not going to stand there while Wormer insults the United States of America.

Symbolism is important to the creation of change. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave the I Have a Dream speech in Detroit a few weeks before he gave it again in Washington. The first time, it didn't resonate. The second time, it became a part of everyone's (well, maybe not the schools in Jena, I don't know) American History curriculum. The legends that surrounded Rosa Parks worked, even though we now know that there was some hocum involved in her saying she wanted to sit because she was tired. If she'd said instead that as secretary of the local NAACP she had planned the protest, it might not have made international headlines.

In these times, when we can expect a knee-jerk reaction all over Fox News to anything the right doesn't like (ask Max Cleland), choosing good symbolic things to protest, and to protest sincerely, is as important as it ever was. Jena is an easy message to send because the symbolism of the nooses on the trees is not missed by many. And the school officials denying that the black students of today got the message resonates so well as well.

is that these people have to personalize it to "I know these gay folks and they're just as good as me." If I didn't know a single gay person, or a single gay person who wanted to be married, it would still be right. And it would still be right even if I wasn't part of a straight couple myself.

A while back, Taylor Branch, author of "America in the King Years", said at a lecture I attended that in America there are only two popular views of the civil rights movement. In one, civil rights aren't an issue anymore, and there is no need to discuss them, because blacks have legal equality so there is nothing more to be done (a view accepted by our Supreme Court at the moment). In the other, the civil rights movement was a complete failure because there is still racism in America. Nothing in between.

When someone like McNabb speaks the truth about how he's treated, and the scrutiny he's under, it's only news because there really are people who don't and won't see the subtle racism in our society. As Branch went on to say, the civil rights movement wasn't a failure, because it spawned and inspired the end of apartheid in South Africa, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia and numerous other successful movements. But it also wasn't a complete success. White people in this country are too willing to deny their own racism, while taking advantage of white men's privileges. Don't believe me? Who's more likely to get pulled over driving ten mph over the speed limit in Brentwood, me or Charles Barkley? And who can afford better to live there? Not the same answer, huh?

Extra-territoriality in Okinawa led to a major international incident when some US servicemen were accused of rape and the government refused to turn them over to the Japanese. The result was the perfect storm of both having to back down to the Japanese and lose our hard-earned credibility and trustworthiness with a longtime ally.

Now transpose that to Iraq.

First, we're talking contractors, not soldiers. The US government's need for extraterritoriality for contractors is of a much lower value than for its soldiers.

Second, we're talking Iraq, not Japan. A powder keg set to explode. So protecting these assholes is against our own needs and policies.

Third, what we're ultimately saying to the Iraqis is that your laws aren't good enough for us. Imagine a security firm working at the Iraqi embassy in Washington shooting up a bunch of people outside the gates? They'd be in jail before you could say "Osama".

This is a partial response to LipstickLibrarian's question about the Iraqi infrastructure.

There is far, far more money available for redevelopment in Iraq than there is anywhere in the US. The only condition, of course, is that it be funnelled through large multinational corporations who are Republican contributors, so that the actual effect on the ground may not be as positive as the dollars spent indicate. But that's okay, so long as Halliburton remains profitable.

Meanwhile, we have the Secretary of Transportation blaming falling bridges in the United States on earmarks for bike trails. Because clearly in this country, we cannot have both good bridges and good bike trails. We're too poor for that.

As Deep Throat said, "Follow the money." It costs a lot of money to run the automobile transportation system. Cars need to be made. They need to be maintained. They need expensive roads to drive on, and those roads need to take up a lot of land. And of course, they need to be fueled.

So how much of the political structure in this country comes from contributions from the automotive, auto parts, auto repair, construction, real estate and oil industries?

I think that answers the question. This country's policies are not based on what's right, but what fuels campaign contributions. And no investment a company can make pays off as well as one. As long as that system is in place, we get the results we have become used to.