Off-Day Musings

The Cubs are off today; so TV-wise, we have Oakland vs. Texas on ESPN2, or the College World Series on ESPN. And didn't it seem like any time you turned it on, Rice was playing Stanford? (They play again for the title tonight.) Were there even any other teams in the CWS? I'm not that fond of hearing that pinging sound from aluminum bats anyway. I think I'll watch the A's -- incidentally, if you haven't read "Moneyball", the book about how Billy Beane formed the A's with very little cash to work with, you ought to. Terrific read. One of these days I'll write a full review of it here.

Man, talk about digressing -- I've done it again. Here's what I intended to write about, today's Supreme Court decision giving colleges the right to use racial preferences in admission decisions.

Well, hem, haw, er...

This is a tough one, all right, and I was really surprised to see that Sandra O'Connor, formerly very conservative but now considered a "swing" vote, was the "swing" in this 5-4 decision.

Look, we all would love to have the USA be a colorblind society. But it's not. And there is prejudice every single day in our country, and yes, we have made tremendous progress in the last 50 years. O'Connor put it best in her opinion:

"We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today."

That's exactly right. Each generation being raised is, I think, successively more tolerant. I hope my kids will be the ones who will at long last find a generation totally prejudice-free. I also thought it was odd that the Court ruled the opposite way in the undergraduate case that was brought to them on the same issue. But at least our country has gone on record as saying equal opportunity must be given, and even if some help is needed to overcome hundreds of years of prejudice, that should be the law of the land.

Perhaps even more importantly today, the Court upheld the provisions of the 2000 Children's Internet Protection Act and said libraries could filter computers that could be accessed by children, if they want federal funds. This could have a chilling effect on free speech, though the court did note that any adult who asked, could have the filters disabled.

It won't stop anyone from saying what they want to say on the Internet. I wonder what words I could use here that could be filtered?

Nah, I think I'll keep this blog G-rated. Or at least PG-rated.

See what a day off from Cubs baseball does to you?