An intriguing suggestion from an Army sergeant in Afghanistan:

When we honor the flag by saluting it, we are honoring what it stands for. We honor freedom, the people it represents and a way of life.

Isn’t it time our flag saluted back when a person makes the ultimate sacrifice? Shouldn’t the flag, which represents our society, tip its hat when someone dies to ensure it will fly another day?

If the flags on our [forward operating bases] were lowered for just one day after the death of a servicemember, it would show the people who knew the person that society cared, the American people care.

Seems a perfectly valid point.

(Thanks to AMERICAblog for the link.)

Why mascots don't make particularly good memorial service attendees:

The pros and cons of the top twenty Democratic presidential candidates, courtesy of regular McSweeney's contributor John Moe.

Quoting a poll out this week from Harvard's Institute of Politics:

[M]ore than one-third (35%) of likely 18-24 year-old Democratic voters say Senator Obama would be their first choice for President in 2008, followed by Senators Clinton (29%) and Edwards (9%).

Nine percent? Nine percent? Come on, America's Youth. Wake up and smell the Two Americas!

In response to the Virginia Tech shooting:

"The president believes that there is a right for people to bear arms, but that all laws must be followed," spokeswoman Dana Perino said.

Good to know he has his priorities in order.

I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere else, so I have nothing to link to (sorry, loyal readers [ha!]), but here's a thought: Gonzales testifies on Tuesday, and by all accounts, it's going to be brutal. Is it a coincidence, then, that Bush will be spending Wednesday parleying with Congress at the White House? Or was that deliberately calculated to knock Gonzales off of Thursday's front pages? Just wondering.

Happy Jackie Robinson Day.

I tend to be pretty skeptical of the the whole "cost of a gallon of milk" question (mostly because, despite the fact that I buy milk at least once a week, I couldn't answer the question myself), so I've been glad to see that a lot of the response to Giuliani's recent bungling has been along those same lines. The best response I've seen, though, is definitely this one, in which Michael Tomasky suggests replacing the fairly arbitrary "price of milk" with a list of ten numbers that really would demonstrate political in-touchitude.

If any of my loyal readers (ha!) are BloggingHeads fans, riddle me this: why does Ann Althouse keep showing up?

The Onion solves a Masters mystery.

With all the other shenanigans going on these days (the U.S. Attorneys, the missing White House emails, the arbitrary lengthening of troop deployments [which the affected troops found out about by watching a Pentagon press conference]), I hope the Congress has the time to focus on this:

Five years after the Bush administration began a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department has turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to court records and interviews.

Although Republican activists have repeatedly said fraud is so widespread that it has corrupted the political process and, possibly, cost the party election victories, about 120 people have been charged and 86 convicted as of last year.

Most of those charged have been Democrats, voting records show. Many of those charged by the Justice Department appear to have mistakenly filled out registration forms or misunderstood eligibility rules, a review of court records and interviews with prosecutors and defense lawyers show.

In an interesting experiment, the Washington Post's Gene Weingarten sent classical violinist Joshua Bell into the L'Enfant Metro station for an incognito street-performance. Weingarten's article on the result is well worth a read.

(And for more great long-form Weingarten, be sure to check out Doonesbury's War.)

Update: In the interest of fairness, it would appear that there are plenty of people who aren't quite as impressed as I am. To the extent that those people object to Weingarten's occasionally-purple prose ["Tall and handsome, he's got a Donny Osmond-like dose of the cutes, and, onstage, cute elides into hott."], they'll find no argument here. But to the extent that they attack the story's scientific bona fides and read into it a sanctimonious rant on the cultural cluelessness of Washington's Metro riders, I think their indignation is misplaced. To quote Weingarten's online chat:

[Generic Questioner]: Was this story intended to be an indictment of the soul of the federal bureaucrat?

Weingarten: The simple answer is, no. It was not my intent, nor could anyone reasonably draw that inference from the story. We didn't have a control group; we had only one shot at the experiment, and you just can't fairly generalize one way or another. I really believe this.