I was standing, waiting for the bus home earlier, and I overheard four college girls talking about race, ethnicity and the nature of minorities. Why? I don't really know. I guess that's what college girls talk about.

Anyway, as they were talking, I came up with a theory that I am goint to present to you, my faithful readers, in its unfinished form. Here goes:

Race is not stone.

Looking at it now, my theory may not be as clear as I would like in its shortened form. Look at it this way: say everyone in the world were to wake up one day and decide that there were no stones. When they walked outside, they would find that the stones were still there, all over the place. If they tried to pretend they weren't they would be dashing their heads against rocks and dying, and no one would be able to figure out why.

Now say everyone woke up one day and decided that there were no races. Without people to believe in them, they are non-existent. So, only one thing needs to happen to be rid of all problems in regard to race: make people realize that there are no races.

That's the basic idea. If I come up with a way to make it brilliant, I'll be back.

I have heard and read all sorts of curmudgeonly middle aged men complain that Rap or Hip-Hop is not music, but never as well as this:

Only Bach is as relentless, as monotonous, as cat's-cradled as hip-hop. Hip-hop is nor music, in my estimation. (If music resolves) Hip-hop does not progress, it revolves, replicates, sticks to the floor. It is not approximate emotion. It is approximate obsession. The "voice," the bard, the oracle, the messenger, the minister of propaganda intricately, saucily rhymes, chugs, foreshortens, sneers, insinuates, retreats. The voice betrays no emotion; has none; this is not rage, but cleverness. Too wise. Too sly. A dictatorship of rhyme. There is a message; the message is masonic; the conveyance too dense; deep as a trance. The voice is preoccupied and always in the present. It is the voice of schizophrenia. It is bad advice. It is the voice of battle - Beowulf, Edda, the madder psalms - the voice justifies endlessly. What is going to happen if you don't stop this! On and on and on. Slamming the table. It is a post-lude to music. Long after emotion has been flung from the bone, the beat remains. The beat plows through the rubble of music, turning under the broken arches of melody, stabbing about for rhyming shards - raising them, rubbing them together rhythmically - trying to ignite.
-Richard Rodriguez

Steigerwald has a pretty decent column on immigration, but there is one bit that I just don't get.

Instead of building reverse Berlin Walls on our borders, we should be figuring out how to give Hispanic immigrants temporary work permits so they can freely criss-cross our borders, the way rock stars and Euro-bankers can.

What the hell is a reverse Berlin Wall? Do you put soldiers on the top to force people to cross against their wills?

I'm excited. It is now possible (not likely, but possible) that some of the bad guys (Who? Rove maybe? Rice? Dare I hope Rumsfeld?) will actually be going to prison. It makes me feel poetic.

Eenie, meenie, miney, mo
Catch a top White House official by the toe
Put him away in Leavenworth
Eenie, meenie, miney, mirth

Whee! It's fun. I encourage you to play the tWHo prison game at home.

The Washington Post reports that the blood is, as they say, in the water:

Yesterday, a senior administration official said that before Novak's column ran, two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson's wife. Wilson had just revealed that the CIA had sent him to Niger last year to look into the uranium claim and that he had found no evidence to back up the charge. Wilson's account touched off a political fracas over Bush's use of intelligence as he made the case for attacking Iraq.

"Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge," the senior official said of the alleged leak.

So, who did the leaking? The smart money for the new leaker is George Tenet, the DCI. The original leakers are a more interesting question. It smells like a Karl Rove type political smear, and his sort of damn-the-torpedoes attitude to the ship of state. The other official could be one of his deputies, but that is unlikely. First, none of them are high up enough to be described as "top." Rove himself probably isn't. Plus, these people had to be in a position to know what was going on over at the CIA. Tenet and Colin Powell are probably out due to integrity and patriotism. Bush and Cheney are out because it is inconsistent with the dignity of their offices to do something like this directly, plus it is unlikely that they could call Novak or any of the other five journalists (third mystery: who are the other journalists? William Safire springs to mind) without causing a stir in the newsroom. Rice and Rumsfeld seem nasty enough, and it isn't necessarily unusual for the National Security Advisor or the Secretary of Defense to talk to reporters. Cabinet secretaries in most other departments wouldn't know any more than Rove: CIA operative lists are not, as a rule, forwarded to the Secretary of Transportation. Tom Ridge is a wild card. He has kept his head down for the most part, but is a latecomer to the administration and probably doesn't have the apparatchik mentality that is required to pull of this kind of political attack. Still, he could be either the original leaker or the whistle blower. Interesting possibility: He leaked Plame, but had a crisis of conscience and leaked again as the whistle blower.

If is somebody like Rove or even Ari Fleischer (a long shot: it seems suspicious that he left at the same time this story came out, but he had planned to leave for a long time before) then another question raises itself. Why do the party hacks have access to classified information? If you don't know the info, you can't compromise national security.