Strip Search And Other Bad Surprises.

"The Supreme Court on Monday ruled by a 5-4 vote that officials may strip-search people arrested for any offense, however minor, before admitting them to jails even if the officials have no reason to suspect the presence of contraband."

The New York Times

4/3/12

If a poor man is arrested for wrong, little or no reason (I've heard it happens) corrections officers can now perform an invasive strip search of him. That means search his rectum for weapons. Yet, if the same man has prostate cancer, the same Supreme Court Justices can - by ruling against the insurance mandate - condemn him to death by making health care unavailable to him. In other words: if you go to the joint, you join the second-joint club, but if you need a manual prostate exam, the government washes its hands.

"So we sang the chorus from Atlanta to the sea/As we were counting the corpses."

Scholars have raised the official body count of The Civil War to 750,ooo. An increase of approximately twenty per cent. That makes my morning. The Civil War is now - officially - bloodier, deadlier and more tragic than I ever thought. Thanks.

"As we were golfing through Georgia"

I don't think anyone's ever had their Bar Mitzvah at the Augusta Country Club, home of the Masters Tournament. Likewise, their Ladies Room has always been hard to find. So, learning of their racist history is not exactly a surprise. Yet, I was shocked when an article by Karen Crouse on the front page of The New York Times (4/3/12) quotes Clifford Roberts, one of the club's founders in 1933 and a longtime Masters chairman, as saying, "As long as I'm alive, all the golfers will be white and all the caddies will be black." It's just so . . . blunt. There it is - in black and white. Literally. Mr. Roberts, by the way, died in 1977.