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Maureen Dowd reveals Paul "Wolfie" Wolfowitz's girl friend's new salary in her column today: $193,590. That turns out to be a couple of bucks more than Condi Rice is earning. Wolfie wants to know what all the fuss is about. Evidently this sort of behavior is commonplace in the Bush administration. The commander-in-chief likes to surround himself with a motherly wall of adoring ladies, whose abilities, as it turns out, bear proof of the Peter Principal in all things but protecting their bouncing baby boy from the harsh truth of reality.

Joris Evers at ZDNet recently wrote about the theft of two laptop computers from the Chicago Public Schools, containing the Social Security numbers of some 40,000 employees. Seems the laptops were taken out of the administrative offices and, while the thief has not yet been apprehended, he was captured on surveillance video. The big question has to be why were all those Social Security numbers being warehoused on laptops in the first place?

Was it really that long ago or that much of a problem when it was illegal to use Social Security numbers for anything other than what they were intended for?

Now we know why the Bush administration wants to take a middle road on the illegal alien issue: They put out a help wanted sign for the position of War Czar and nobody applied for the job. At least five former generals turned the position down. Evidently there are some things that even former generals refuse to do. According to The Washington Post, retired Marine Gen. Jack Sheehan said, “The very fundamental issue is, they don’t know where the hell they’re going.” Funny, the rest of us seem to know where they are going, and it involves a handbag.

So was Don Imus making fun of the girls' basketball team or was he ineptly making fun of people who make fun of girls' basketball teams? Since I've never listened to his radio show and only caught about 30 seconds of the simulcast on TV once, I have no idea where this guy is coming from. But Robert Wright has a good take on the situation in his New York Times column today, pointing out that Ann Coulter consistently gets a free pass on such behavior as she uses racist slurs to describe Arabs and Muslims. As Wright points out, Coulter doesn't have a radio show to broadcast her hate speech, but TV networks of all sorts continue to invite and, one supposes, to pay her to appear on their shows. Perhaps CNN and Fox will start to invite Imus to share the redneck buffoon point of view in the name of equal time.

In baseball parks around the country tomorrow, people will be celebrating the day, sixty years ago, that Jackie Robinson stepped across the white lines and broke the color barrier in major league baseball.

In those days, just following the war and the Great Depression, the National League was made up of eight teams, each with twenty-four players. That's 192 jobs at the major league level. On that day, only 191 white men had jobs, one less than in the previous year.

It took players and fans some time to get used to seeing teams made up of mixed racial players. Today, most of us recognize Jackie Robinson for the courage and grace he displayed and we happily celebrate our diversity. In those days, white men saw this adventure as another step to keep them down, forcing them once more to compete with a larger pool in the workplace. The story of race in this country, to a greater extent than most of us like to admit, is a story of class. Race has always been used thus. If you can play one group of folks against the other, you can control them both. They'll be so busy hating one another that they'll never look up to see who is really benefiting from the divide that the average Joe has helped to build and maintain.