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Sometimes the Republicans … well, you just have to see it to believe it. Now they’re sending out fund-raising letters that tell Republican voters that if the Democrats pass healthcare reform, the Democrats will take away healthcare from Republicans.

Really. Jon Stewart didn’t make it up.

John Fleck, the Albuquerque Journal’s science writer, has a fine love story up on his blog — jfleck at inkstain. Page down just a bit and you’ll see it. It’s just below “Texas Drought.” It’s timing was perfect, Liz and I having just returned from a game Friday night in which we found ourselves in seats we don’t normally occupy.

John’s story is beautiful for lots of reasons, not the least of which being that it could be written only with baseball as the backdrop. It is the most social game we have, the only one given to love stories. Stories like John’s don’t come down from the stands in a football game or a tennis match or a hockey fight.

On Friday night (8/29) Liz and I sat in seats one row from the field behind home plate. (A friend offered them; we accepted.) She’d never sat that close to the field before, let alone that close behind home plate. If you’ve never played baseball, it’s the perfect place to get a feel for the game, for it’s speed, its sounds, its small intricate details.

It was a wonderfully audible moment, identifying a pitch by its sound — the explosive detonation of a fastball slamming into the catcher’s mitt, the softness of a 76 mile an hour change of pace, sneaking its way almost silently into the glove, the in-between sound of a slider, not quite as loud as the fastball, nothing as soft as a change, something with an identity problem maybe.

And then, when a batter gets good wood on the ball … well, there is no sound like that sound.

Of course, Liz was the one to identify the true uniqueness of our position. The ‘Topes hitter stood in the on-deck circle in the bottom of the first, swinging the weighted bat, than his own, stretching, smacking imaginary fastballs into a power alley, watching the pitcher warm up, gauging the ball as it left his hand and headed home.

A soft breeze came up, cool and light on our faces. Liz said, “My God! I can smell his after shave. Not bad, either.”

One more Triple AAA moment. Someone on the field tossed a ball to the bat boy sitting a few feet from us. He juggled it, lost control and it dribbled into the seats. He shrugged, gave up on it and turned around in his folding chair, facing the field. After all, the unwritten law is the unwritten law.

But this isn’t the big leagues with its Darwinian demands on survival. This is different territory. A little kid sitting near us, about five years old, picked up the loose ball rolling near his feet, walked over to the bat boy, tapped him on a startled shoulder, held out the ball and said, “You dropped this.”

–

A long time ago, boys and girls, a fine rabble rouser named Mark Acuff gave the Albuquerque Journal much heartburn in his “New Mexico Independent.” (It’s no relation to the current online New Mexico Independent. Acuff’s was written on and printed on actual paper. (Google “paper.” It will explain everything.)

Now we have a veteran former Journal staffer, Tracy Dingmann, picking up where Acuff left off. ABQ Journal Watch is only a couple of days old, so we shall see what comes. But Tracy worked there for 18 years. She won’t be lacking for sources.

Here’s a taste from Tracy:

“Every day I talk to Journal readers who express dismay at the paper’s editorial stances and seemingly related news coverage – content that often seems driven by a undefined political agenda, not one that simply covers the facts.  The fact that some news stories and editorial opinions appear to be in lockstep flies in the face of the long-cherished journalistic principle that there should be a hefty firewall between news and opinion.

“For me – and for many others I talk to – the problem isn’t so much with the reporters – it’s with the decisions that fall squarely into editorial territory.

“On the news pages, it’s things like headlines that don’t match a reporter’s story, puzzling story choices for the front page or investigations that amount to thinly-veiled vendettas against certain people or groups.

“On the editorial page, it’s endorsements that are wildly out of step with the community, or the barrage of conservative columnists who express views grossly dissonant to the ideological views of most of those who live here.

“Then there’s the things that the editorial department simply doesn’t have – like ethnic diversity in management and a positive image and involvement in the wider community.

“All this is especially disturbing in light of the fact that the Journal calls itself the state’s “Paper of Record,” a term that implies that it covers everything and covers it fairly. The Journal also claims that its news gatherers and editors are “objective,” hewing to the old-fashioned traditional journalistic principle that a newspaper can produce coverage with no bias.

“I’ve always found it odd that there’s no regular outlet for media criticism in Albuquerque.  It needs to happen now, because today’s transformed media landscape means newspapers and other huge companies aren’t the only one who can make their voices heard. Now anyone can point out that newspapers aren’t always the bastions of objectivity they claim to be.

“I believe readers can and should keep an eye on the watchdog. That’s why I’m helping start this media criticism site, which  will take a serious look each week at editorials and news coverage from the state’s largest paper.”

In the past I have suggested that you read Jon Carroll in the San Francisco Chronicle. The reasons are many — his writing, his thinking, his humor, his ability to cut through the baloney and get to the good stuff. Today, I’m going to suggest again that you read him — and there’s an added surprise in the deal, another writer who makes you read slowly — Michael Chabon.

Have you noticed that about good writers? How they slow you down? Their sentences are so beautifully constructed that you must slow down. They make it impossible to speed read. The writing is too good to be read fast.

Here’s a beautiful Chabon sentence: “Childhood is a branch of cartography.”

Think about that for a little while. Carroll wishes he wrote it instead of Chabon. I wish I’d written it instead of Chabon. That’s the way the world spins when you come across a lovely sentence. First thing out of your mind: envy. Then, appreciation.

Oh, well. You’ll find Carroll at the San Francisco Chronicle. You’ll find Chabon at The New York Review of Books. Each writes about childhood and how we’ve changed it, made it more like a prison for the kids and a fearful place for the grown-up. Each of the writers makes his argument with lovely sentences.

Rachel Toor, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education (via Andrew Sullivan’s blog), examines the importance of good writing. Regardless of the field one enters, be it science or business, if you write well, you’ll always have an advantage. If you don’t write well, you might wind up scaring your patient.

Toor writes:

Even now, when I get letters from my own physician giving me the results of lab tests, I cringe. Can I really trust someone to interpret complicated data if she can’t maintain control over her sentence structure? Communication is the fundamental element of most professions. Writing, as Plato reminded us, is a risky business. It should be approached with fear and trembling. Doctors and scientists might sometimes need a reminder that they are writing for humans.

For all the complaining I do when yet another uncivil, vulgar blast comes sailing across cyberspace, I really do like reading stories like this one from The New York Times. The headline says it nicely: “Web Pries Lid of Censorship by Iranian Government.”

Here’s a taste:

Shortly after Neda Agha-Soltan bled her life out on the Tehran pavement, the man whose 40-second video of her death has ricocheted around the world made a somber calculation in what has become the cat-and-mouse game of evading Iran’s censors. He knew that the government had been blocking Web sites like YouTube and Facebook. Trying to send the video there could have exposed him and his family.

Instead, he e-mailed the two-megabyte video to a nearby friend, who quickly forwarded it to the Voice of America, the newspaper The Guardian in London and five online friends in Europe, with a message that read, “Please let the world know.” It was one of those friends, an Iranian expatriate in the Netherlands, who posted it on Facebook, weeping as he did so, he recalled.

Copies of the video, as well as a shorter one shot by another witness, spread almost instantly to YouTube and were televised within hours by CNN. Despite a prolonged effort by Iran’s government to keep a media lid on the violent events unfolding on the streets, Ms. Agha-Soltan was transformed on the Web from a nameless victim into an icon of the Iranian protest movement.

Just a brief briefing of a few things that caught my eye this morning.

HYSTERIA IN ALBUQUERQUE … NOT

Has anyone noticed anything approaching hysteria in Albuquerque? No? I didn’t think so. Me neither.

But there it was right in the Los Angeles Times. Or as Al Martinez, who used to write a column for the paper before some bean counter lopped his head off, called it: The LA (by God) Times.

The story was on Manny Ramirez coming to play a few games with the Isotopes.

The general manager of the Dodgers’ triple-A affiliate, Traub has been involved in minor league baseball for 17 years. He said he has never seen anything like the hysteria that overtook Albuquerque when news broke that Ramirez could be headed its way.

HEATHER ON HACKING

Former New Mexico representative Heather Wilson writes in The Washington Post that we have a problem with cyber-security. Wilson served on the House intelligence committee for six years. She writes in the Post:

Congressional computers have been penetrated, probably by the Chinese. The avionics system of the F-22 fighter may be compromised. Computers of our presidential candidates were hacked into — and probably not by teenagers on a lark. Last year’s advance of Russian tanks into Georgia was accompanied by the disruption of Georgian government computer systems.

These are only public manifestations of a new reality: Attacks on computer systems will be an integral element of future conflict, and the United States is more dependent on computer networks than any other nation.

THE REPUGNANT PARTY

Pulitzer Prize winner Leonard Pitts offers a good argument that when it comes to race, the Republican party needs to take a good look at itself.

First, he offers Sherri Goforth, an aide to a Tennessee state senator, who sent out an e-mail depicting 44 American presidents, 43 of whom are shown in dignified poses. Barack Obama is shown as cartoon spook eyes against a black backdrop.

Then there’s this:

Well, after Goforth’s e-mail, after “Barack the Magic Negro,” and John McCain‘s campaign worker blaming a fictional black man for a fictional mugging, and a party official in Texas renaming the executive mansion “the black house,” and an official in Virginia claiming Obama‘s presidency would see free drugs and “mandatory black liberation theology,” and a Republican activist in South Carolina calling an escaped ape one of Michelle Obama’s “ancestors,” it seems wholly fair to me. Indeed, overdue.

WHAT KIND OF JUDGES DO WE WANT?

Stanley Fish considers the question in his New York Times blog:

In fact – and this is what (Sonia) Sotomayor means when she talks about reaching a better conclusion than a white man who hasn’t lived her life – rather than distorting reality, perspectives illuminate it or at least that part of it they make manifest. It follows that no one perspective suffices to capture all aspects of reality and that, therefore, the presence in the interpretive arena of multiple perspectives is a good thing. In a given instance, the “Latina Judge” might reach a better decision not because she was better in some absolute, racial sense, but because she was better acquainted than her brethren with some aspects of the situation they were considering. (As many have observed in the context of the issue of gender differences, among the current justices, only Ruth Bader Ginsburg knows what it’s like to be a 13-year-old girl and might, by virtue of that knowledge, be better able to asses the impact on such a girl of a strip-search.)

One of these days at an airport somewhere in America, a SWAT team will descend on me. I just know it’s coming.

I thought it would happen after that 10-hour back surgery in 2006, when a neurosurgeon implanted enough titanium in my back for a decent set of golf clubs. Good ones, too. Something Tiger might seriously consider.

But no alarms went off. So about a week ago, I sailed through, while a good friend got the frisk routine, and the wand routine, and the third-degree about his new knee, which involves enough metal to get everyone in a TSA shirt within a 10-square mile radius considerably exercised. Bill said it happens every time at every airport.

And now I have a new back gizmo as of Monday morning. It’s an electronic  nerve stimulator surgically implanted in the back, the theory being that the electronic signals it sends to two leads attached to the spine will disrupt the pain signals going from the lower back to the brain.

I’ve not heard anything about this fine piece of science causing  a TSA commotion.

Oh, and does it work? I don’t know. It’s too early to tell. Right now, I’d be happy to make it past airport security without leg irons.

A friend sends news, with a confession: “You could not make this stuff up. (OK, I couldn’t.)

Here’s a taste:

“The granddaughter of Cuban revolutionary leader Ernesto “Che” Guevara is at the forefront of another revolution — for vegetarianism.

Lydia Guevara poses semi-nude in a PETA campaign that tells viewers to “join the vegetarian revolution,” said PETA spokesman Michael McGraw.”

Took a few days off to visit the city of my birth — Chicago. Met up with an old friend, a New Mexican by birth, who somehow had something go tragically wrong in his life and wound up being a Cubs fan. But he’d never been to Wrigley Field and I told him I’d go — assuming I could find it.

Given that I am a native South Sider, a White Sox fan, and I am precluded from setting foot in Wrigley Field, I made an exception for friendship. So I went with him. The Cubs did not disappoint.

Playing the Twins in inter-league play, they showed what true Cubness means when Milton Bradley, the Cubs right fielder, first lost a ball in the sun in one inning and in the next inning topped it with a display of Cubness you rarely get to see in person.

With Twins runners all over the bases, Bradley caught a fly ball and with great flare and elan tossed the ball into the stands, the ritual of all outfielders after the third out.

The problem of course was that it wasn’t the third out. It was the second out, and Twins runners ran and ran, and Cub fans booed and booed, and the next day the Sun-Times had a fine headline over a photo of the right fielder: “Err Head.”

Perfect Cubness. You can’t help but admire it.

Chicago is a great city. You should go. It has much more to offer than the Cubs (the Chicago Institute of Art, for example; the food; the architecture; the lakefront; the energy of just being in the midst of it all; and of course the music — we managed to drop in on the weekend of the Chicago blues festival in Grant Park).

So now it’s home again, and glad of it. Road trips are good, but they have limits, time expirations, when the adventure begins to sour a little, like milk left out too long. Home always sweetens things up.