I'm always amazed at who blurbs what. Genre writers for example occasionally attract a nice review from a well-known literary writer. And a movie star will put his or her name on a novel occasionally. But nothing prepared me for picking up a battered old paperback by old-time pulp writer Frank Belknap Long and find it blurbed by...Eudora Welty! G'Amighty. You have to wonder how that came about.

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I'm beginning to feel sorry for Senator Craig. As I've said before I don't have the stomach for seeing some people publicly shamed and humiliated. Yes he was a hypocrite and yes there's a certain pleasure in seeing a would-be homphobe brought down this way. But I think of his family...there's no fun it for me. Hell I even felt sorry for Dick Nixon when he resigned (or at Eisenhower allegedly said when an aide suggested Nixon as his running mate: "Nick Dixon? Who the hell is that?") When he started talking to his dead parents there on the dais as he gave his resignation speech...I had tears rolling down my cheeks. As my cousin said, "The prick won't even let you hate him right." This sympathy doesn't extend to any of the the Bushies. No tears for Craig, either. But I do think it's amazing that the GOP blocked congressional investigations into Mark Foley and Tom DeLay (!) and went after Craig immediately.

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While Craig actually plead guilty, Richard Jewell was condemned even though he hadn't done anything at all...

Buried in all the Craig news coverage was the fact that a true victim died. Richard Jewell struck me as one of the saddest and most forlorn of God's creatures. Most of us have known Richard Jewells in our lives and in my case the two or three I knew were good people. It just never went together for them somehow. You couldn't look at that face of Jewell's without knowing how lucky you'd been in your life--and how unlucky his lot had been. So long, Richard.