Controversy

WASHINGTON -- As she faced the world's television cameras to respond to a gross insult by radio and television showman Don Imus, a member of the Rutgers University women's basketball team spoke volumes with one sentence: "I'm not a ho," she said Tuesday at the team's first news conference after the "nappy-headed hos" incident. "I'm a woman and ... I'm somebody's child." Indeed, she is. So are the rest of Rutgers' Scarlet Knights. And anybody who would make them out to be anything else should be ashamed.

LOS ANGELES -- The Los Angeles Times poll just out bring one piece of good news to Gov. Bill Clinton beyond the fat 21-point lead it gives him over President Bush in California. It finds that 75 percent of voters surveyed say Clinton's controversial draft record will have no effect on how they will cast their votes.If this reaction to Clinton's admittedly erratic recollections on his draft record during the Vietnam war is shared around the country, the Bush-Quayle re-election campaign may be wasting its time attempting to hang Clinton with the issue.

The first apology by Rush Limbaugh, posted on his website over the weekend, sounded forced, qualified, almost defensive. The second, broadcast live on his Monday show, sounded sincere and heartfelt. Rush Limbaugh did something not usually associated with either himself or bombastic talk radio. He apologized for calling a woman a "slut" and a "prostitute. " The woman, 30-year-old Sandra Fluke, a law student at Georgetown University, wants the Catholic school to pay for contraceptives in its insurance policy because, she says, she and her friends cannot afford the cost otherwise.

THE 100 Percent Wrong Club, Atlanta's oldest black sports club, should honor John Rocker for bringing his reactionary attitudes into the open where they can be addressed in the Atlanta style -- with humor, truth and reconciliation. After all, similar insecurities and fears are just beneath the surface in many of us. As we approach the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, it's appropriate that we allow his life and teaching to affect our present-day conflicts. Following lessons he learned from Mohandas Gandhi, King taught his closest associates, including me, always to try to give an adversary a "face-saving" way to become a partner in ending segregation and racism.

They rounded up some of the usual suspects the other day, 24 purported illegal aliens who were among the usual crowd of day laborers who gather at an East Baltimore 7-Eleven, waiting for contractors and other employers to drive onto the lot and hire them. On Tuesday, though, several of the cars that pulled in bore immigration agents. Using one widely accepted estimate, the arrests of the Baltimore 24 reduced the number of illegal aliens still at large in the country to about 11,999,976.

SPOILER ALERT: This story reveals features of the plot. Baltimore-born film director Barry Levinson has said his new eco-horror movie, "The Bay," about a Chesapeake Bay turned deadly by environmental abuse, is "80 percent factual. " Bay scientists and one activist who've seen it say the film, which opened Friday, does touch on some very real issues affecting the bay. But they say the artistic license taken with the facts and the gore that makes it a horror movie may overwhelm any back story about what's wrong with the Chesapeake.

It was while she was serving dinner to her kids in 2008 and their dad was out campaigning for president, that Michelle Obama hatched a modest daydream: a vegetable garden on the White House grounds. She'd recently had a conversation with her children's pediatrician about their eating habits, and the poor health of children he was seeing in his practice. It shook her up — he was treating obesity and diabetes in kids — and she resolved to make better food choices for her family. She never said anything to Barack Obama about a vegetable garden (she told interviewers this week that she didn't want to jinx things with a "what if" question)

It was never a matter of memorizing dead spots on the parquet or the way the lip of the south rim bent ever so slightly. The lighting? Nothing out of the ordinary, Andrew Toney reports. In fact, said the former Philadelphia 76ers guard, the only thing special about the creaky court on 150 Causeway Street was that it served as the stage for his most famous role: the Boston Strangler."My first step out of the locker room, I was in range," Toney says. "It was easy. I have no explanation for it. It was just easy for me to score at Boston Garden."

Terrence G. Johnson, paroled amid controversy in 1995 after serving nearly 17 years in the slayings of two Prince George's County police officers, shot himself to death yesterday moments after robbing an Aberdeen bank with his brother, police said.The shooting, which came as police closed in near the NationsBank branch at Beards Hill Plaza, shocked those who knew Johnson as a model former prisoner. And it brought tears at the University of the District of Columbia law school, where, until recently, he had been a second-year student.

Rappers Pitbull and Macklemore & Ryan Lewis will headline this year's Preakess InfieldFest May 18 at Pimlico Race Course, organizers announced Monday morning. In recent years, Pitbull has become one of Top 40's most consistent acts, both in the U.S. and Latin America. "Back in Time," his single for "Men in Black 3," has sold two million copies, and he recently performed as part of New Year's Rockin' Eve. "Pitbull is young and energetic," said Maryland Jockey Club president Tom Chuckas on Monday morning outside by Pimlico Race Course's finish line.