Global

The World Series provided a heck of a photo-op for George W. Bush when he threw out the first pitch one night, aiming at a large TV audience. For the most part, the game that followed was a pleasure to watch -- midway through a week that combined what's best and worst about major league baseball in an era of compulsive media spin.

Baseball may not quite be America's favorite sport anymore, but it still has plenty of emotional resonance. For that reason, politicians and corporations alike are eager to graft themselves onto the climactic games of the post-season.

The 2001 World Series attracted an abundance of the commercial hype that we've come to expect from pro sports, plus a gauntlet of patriotic imagery bordering on jingoism. The play-by-play included a steady flood of brand-name plugs -- "Budweiser, the official beer of Major League Baseball," the John Hancock "In Game Box Score," the "Nextel Call to the Bullpen" -- along with frequent overlays of Old Glory.

No sane nation hands to a wartime enemy atomic weapons set to go off within its own homeland, and then lights the fuse.

Yet as the bombs and missiles drop on Afghanistan, the certainty of terror retaliation inside America has turned our 103 nuclear power plants into weapons of apocalyptic destruction, just waiting to be used against us.

One or both planes that crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, could have easily obliterated the two atomic reactors now operating at Indian Point, about 40 miles up the Hudson.

The catastrophic devastation would have been unfathomable. But those and a hundred other American reactors are still running. Security has been heightened. But all are vulnerable to another sophisticated terror attack aimed at perpetrating the unthinkable.

NEW YORK, N.Y. -- It now looks, with 20-20 hindsight, as though he should have taken a few more deep breaths before smacking that tar-baby that is Afghanistan. We're running out of time for three reasons -- winter, Ramadan and the prospect of millions of people starving to death.

We've run out of time to set up a bridge or coalition government and so, of necessity, are throwing our lot with the Northern Alliance. According to the Afghan women's organization, the Northern Alliance is as bad as the Taliban and, in addition, consists of minority tribes who have always warred with the majority Pushtan.

We seem to have bombed everything bombable, including the Red Cross twice. At this point, it seems to me, we can give it another month and call the war for the season, which is what the Afghans do, and wait 'til next year without any disgrace. What would be worse than disgraceful is causing mass starvation. The humanitarian aid folks are getting frantic about this, and we need to stop and figure out what we can do about it.

The left is getting itself tied up in knots about the Just War and the propriety of bombing Afghanistan. The respected Princeton professor Richard Falk has outlined in The Nation an intricate guide to "the relevant frameworks of moral, legal and religious restraint" to be applied to the lethal business of attacking Afghans.

AUSTIN -- Excuse me if my professionocentrism is showing, but I believe the American media deserve a good chunk of all the blame that is going around for Sept. 11 and its aftermath. Here we are trying to figure out "Why Do They Hate Us?" at this late date. One is tempted to reply, "Where have you been?"

The American media, notoriously provincial country to begin with, have been getting noticeably worse in recent years, with the amount of time and space devoted to the rest of the world shrinking to an ever smaller percentage of the total, while we go relentlessly full-bore, for months at a time after Monica Lewinsky, Elian Gonzalez and Gary Condit.

For some people, war is terror, disaster and death. For others, it's a PR problem.

At the Rendon Group, a public-relations firm with offices in Boston and Washington, pleasant news arrived the other day with a $397,000 contract to help the Pentagon look good while bombing Afghanistan. The four-month deal includes an option to renew through most of 2002.

This is a job for savvy PR pros who know how to sound humanistic. "At the Rendon Group, we believe in people," says the company's mission statement, which expresses "our admiration and respect for cultural diversity" and proclaims a commitment to "helping people win in the global marketplace."

A media officer at the Pentagon explained why Rendon got the contract. "We needed a firm that could provide strategic counsel immediately," Lt. Col. Kenneth McClellan said. "We were interested in someone that we knew could come in quickly and help us orient to the challenge of communicating to a wide range of groups around the world."

"FBI and Justice Department investigators are increasingly frustrated by the silence of jailed suspected associates of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, and some are beginning to that say that traditional civil liberties may have to be cast aside if they are to extract information about the Sept. 11 attacks and terrorist plans."

Thus began a piece by Walter Pincus on page 6 of the Washington Post on Sunday, Oct. 21 -- and if you suspect that this is the overture to an argument for torture, you're right. The FBI interrogators have been getting nowhere with four key suspects in the Sept. 11 terror attacks, now held in New York's Metropolitan Correctional Center. None of these men have talked, and Pincus quotes an FBI man involved in the interrogation as saying, "it could get to that spot where we could go to pressure ... where we won't have a choice, and we are probably getting there."

AUSTIN -- We had one of those "What was he thinking?" moments with Gov. Rick (Goodhair) Perry the other day. The only governor we've got decided to bring back that old bone of contention: prayer in the schools. Nice timing, guv.

Investigators from the Ohio animal rights organization Mercy For Animals (MFA) have released the findings of a month-long investigation into animal mistreatment at Buckeye Egg Farm and Daylay Egg Farm, Ohio’s two largest egg producers.

MFA’s investigation at Buckeye’s facility in La Rue and Daylay’s facility in Raymond began after the organization’s requests for tours of the facilities were ignored. Both Buckeye Egg Farm and Daylay Egg Farm confine millions of hens in tiny "battery cages" (long rows of wire cages holding an average of eight birds per cage).

At both facilities investigated, MFA discovered severe
overcrowding and confinement, hens trapped in the wire of their cages, and dead birds left to slowly rot next to their cage mates. At Daylay, a live hen was found thrown in a dumpster filled with trash and hundreds of dead birds.

The investigation uncovered countless

The last time I was in Selma, Alabama was in 1972, traveling across the South with a group of activists making a movie. (It never came out, which was just as well.) Our group was received with traditional Southern hospitality everywhere throughout the South, except in Selma. We sat down in a café right next to the famous Edmund Pettus Bridge, where voting rights marchers had been gassed and beaten on Bloody Sunday, seven years before. The atmosphere was so thick I had to go stand outside to collect myself. On the street I met an elderly black man in overalls who had worked all his life in Chicago ' 'second worst place in the world' ' before retiring back home to Selma ' 'the worst.' Twenty-eight years later I returned to find the town finally climbing out of that bottom spot.

In Selma, Alabama, there is actually an intersection of Jefferson Davis and Martin Luther King streets. As a spot for a polling place, it asks an obvious question about which way Selma wants to go in the 21st century. The answer, by 57% in a runoff election with a 75% turnout, is Selma's first African American mayor, James Perkins, Jr.