NY Times: "WHO needs standardized tests when we have college basketball? By one estimate, more than 10 percent of all American adults participated in a pool this year to choose the winner of the men's N.C.A.A. tournament, which ends Monday. That's about 25 million people - about eight times the number of students taking the SAT this year.
The N.C.A.A. tournament is a good test because it is fair. Everyone has an equal chance of winning. Success isn't related to experience, knowledge, number of basketball games watched or hours spent studying newspaper accounts or listening to sports programs. The official tournament bracket shows exactly how the leading experts rank each team.
These folks aren't perfect, but no one in your pool knows more than they do. In the last quarter-century, a No. 1 seed has won the championship more than half the time (13 champions were seeded No. 1). No. 2 teams have won it all five times, and No. 3 teams three times. No champion has been seeded lower than eighth.
Instead of just worrying about how well we will do, we can learn a lot by watching the way people fill in their brackets. Co-workers who wouldn't show you their profile on a personality test or their score on an aptitude test will gladly explain why they chose the teams they did. The office pools around the country can help us learn how we make decisions."

It's Friday afternoon and news of the pope's health has just been brought to my attention. Only one question comes to my mind. Will the pope and Terry Schiavo be friends.... in heaven?

If I had better contacts, well any contacts for that matter, I would go straight to the president. Apparently he has god's phone number. They converse all the time, sometimes god goes so far as to give Bush direct orders. Now that the pope is on his death bed he will soon be moving to his final resting place. Bush is on the verge of becoming the holiest man alive, so who else better to ask this question to?

However, I don't have those contacts, so we may never know. My guess is they won't be friends. After all, wanting to die is a sin. Terry Schiavo, allegedly, wanted to die rather than live in a vegetative state. She's a sinner. She might even burn in hell. Only God can judge her. And the pope can forgive her for sinning.

Am I being insensitve? Maybe. But what is hands down insensitive is hard-line catholics telling people when they should live and when they should die. DeLay, Bush, and company--that's you. Will they apply the same pressure on the pope? The pope, refusing medical treatment, medical treatment that kept Terry Schiavo alive for 15 years, is choosing how he will die. A choice refused to others.

Now that SCHIAVOTV is off the air, I'm sure the next 4 days, 96 hours will be POPETV all day, everyday. I hope you all enjoy.

NY Times Op-Ed: Maureen Dowd:
"Like the new Woody Allen movie, "Melinda and Melinda," it is possible to view today's big story on the tremendous intelligence failures before the Iraq war as either comedy or tragedy, depending on how you look at it.
For instance, on the comic side, The Times reported yesterday that administration officials were relieved that the new report by a presidential commission had "found no evidence that political pressure from the White House or Pentagon contributed to the mistaken intelligence."
That's hilarious.
As necessity is the mother of invention, political pressure was the father of conveniently botched intelligence.
Dick Cheney and the neocons at the Pentagon started with the conclusion they wanted, then massaged and manipulated the intelligence to back up their wishful thinking."

MSNBC - "Blocked" and balanced : "'Blocked' and balanced


• March 29, 2005 | 3:59 PM ET | Permalink

It’s here, The Fox Blocker.

It’s not just a David Kelly fantasy. Sam Kimery says he's sold about 100 of the little silver bits of metal that screw into the back of most televisions, allowing people to filter Fox News from their sets, since its August debut.  Of course, he has also received death threats from Fox fans, who naturally wish to kill anyone who does not share their views. 'Apparently the making of terroristic threats against those who don't share your views is a high art form among a certain core audience,' said Kimery, 45. We note that Kimery is formerly a registered Republican, even a precinct captain, but says he became an independent in the 1990s when he said the state party stopped taking input from its everyday members. Kimery now contends Fox News' top-level management dictates a conservative journalistic bias, that inaccuracies are never retracted, and what winds up on the air is more opinion than news. 'I might as well be reading tabloids out of the grocery store,' he says. 'Anything to get a rise out of the viewer and to reinforce certain retrograde notions.' We also note, for fairness’ sake, that Kimery doesn't use the device himself; his remote is programmed to only a half-dozen channels. Plus he occasionally feels the need to tune into Fox News for something 'especially heinous.'"

NY Times Op-Ed: Maureen Dowd: "Some may mock the Vatican for waiting until everyone on earth has read 'The Da Vinci Code' to denounce 'The Da Vinci Code.'
I am not one of them. It's Easter, and I don't want to blot my catechism.
It's a little late, now that the two-year-old thriller by Dan Brown is a publishing miracle - with 25 million copies sold in 44 languages, a cascade of other books inspired by the novel and a movie with Tom Hanks set to start filming this spring - for Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone to intone on a Vatican radio broadcast: 'Don't read and don't buy 'The Da Vinci Code.' '
But when you think of the history of the Catholic Church, the Vatican is acting with lightning speed. It took the church more than 350 years to reverse its condemnation of Galileo. The Vatican only began an inquisition of the 16th-century Inquisition in 1998. It wasn't until the reign of Pope John Paul II that the Vatican apologized for the crimes of the Crusaders and offered contrition for the silence of Catholics in the Holocaust. The church has still not apologized for shameful dissembling by its hierarchy on the sex abuse scandal. And America's Catholic bishops only last week announced they were finally going to get serious about opposing the death penalty."