Lame

Just because the current board of commissioners in Carroll County is considered "lame duck" doesn't mean its decisions should be "lame brained." Last week's decision to postpone the purchase of a 114 1/2 -acre parcel on Cranberry Road outside Westminster for a future high school was nonsensical, irresponsible and not in the public's greater interest.While the election may have changed the composition of the board, it did not mean that county government operations grind to a halt. County agencies continue to process subdivision approvals, building permits are being granted and the county's school-age population continues to grow.

I am a cyclist who has done big miles for a long span of years. I am also one who was hit from behind by a car in 2005, an accident which both projected me 85 feet into the air and required more than a year of recovery. I was lucky to survive and would not have, save for the helmet I was wearing. That said, I know what I am talking about. The logic of those cyclists recently quoted in The Sun ("Helmet bill gets objections from bike advocates," Feb. 13) is why most drivers hate bike riders.

There's nothing like saying "thank you" to a few loyal state government aides by sending them off to Harvard for three weeks -- at taxpayer expense. That's exactly what Gov. William Donald Schaefer is doing this summer in an arrogant display of lame-duckism at its worst.With six months to go till the end of the Schaefer administration, the governor is handing the state comptroller the bill -- roughly $45,000 -- for a bunch of lame-duck Cabinet secretaries and other political appointees to attend a program for senior executives in state and local government at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

It's sometimes said that a lame-duck president is a weakened leader from the first day of his last term. The two-term limit of the 22nd Amendment, imposed by wrathful Republicans in 1951 in response to FDR's breach of the George Washington tradition, is supposedly a political kiss of death against achieving future goals. But President Barack Obama, in his second inaugural address and then in his State of the Union Address starting his second term, issued a blunt pushback against the lame-duck sentence.

By the score they came, the bruised and the lame.Casualties of the weather, they nursed broken wrists, ribs and hips, sore tailbones, stretched muscles, separated shoulders, cracked heads, even two cases of frostbite."

The best thing that can be said of "Career Opportunities" is that it's not very long.Brevity is its only mercy. A slap-- mixture of "Home Alone" and "The Breakfast Club" set in a strip-mall department store as written by John Hughes in what appears to be less than a weekend, the movie proves only that if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, imitating yourself -- as Hughes does here -- represents genuine desperation.The movie is wretchedly desperate. When it's not full of self-pity, it's full of nonsense.

M R "Ducks"?M ain't "Ducks."M R bucks, which is the only thing that "D2: The Mighty Ducks" is all about.Is there a zone beyond shameless? Is there some distant county on the far side of squalor? Is there an answer to the eternal question "How low will you go?"The answers to these riddles are, Yes, Yes and Very Low, and all are contained in this pathetic sequel, a film that panders so grimly to its audience that it gives sniveling a bad name. It leaves no flag unwaved, no ethnic or demographic group unslobbered over, no cliche unmolested.

Let's start with the good news: Under the current laws of physics, there is no possible way that 1996 can be repeated. This is important, because it means we won't have to go through the Madonna pregnancy again. Nor will we ever again have to watch wealthy twits desperately bid insane amounts of money for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' old stuff.But above all, we will not have to repeat the 1996 presidential race, which was so lame that it could have been promoted by Don King.Going into the year, you'd have thought it would be a close contest.

WASHINGTON - Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman told a House committee yesterday that the government has responded effectively to an outbreak of mad cow disease and is working hard to persuade trading partners to reopen markets to U.S. beef. "U.S. beef is safe for consumers in the United States and around the world, and we are urging our trading partners to base their decisions on science," Veneman told the House Agriculture Committee. At the same time, congressional critics prepared legislation that would prohibit lame or injured cattle from being slaughtered for human consumption.

Nine million cows keep American dairy aisles stocked, but all their laboring back and forth to the milking parlor is getting them down. One in five now has leg or foot pain - a condition called lameness that costs the agricultural industry more than a half-billion dollars annually and can leave the animals unable to produce much milk or even stand. To keep the udders, and the dairymen, in business, a team of inventors led by a University of Maryland, Baltimore County engineer has built a device that weeds out cows for early treatment.

For 15 years, the Slaughter Across the Water cast shame on Annapolis. The city regularly lost the annual tug-of-war match over the harbor to its Eastport rivals. The Annapolis team has had to recruit last-minute tuggers from bar stools and bathrooms. Worse, apathy has forced the team to rely on volunteers from the opposing Maritime Republic of Eastport, the same rascals who have stolen the flag from City Hall and "kidnapped" its mayor. "From what I heard, they had to bribe people with beer to come to the Annapolis side last year," said Marie Dall'Acqua, an organizer with the city's Take-Back-The-Tug campaign.

Things can always get worse, can't they? I used to think reviewing any Baltimore Ravens telecast with Dan Dierdorf and Greg Gumbel in the broadcast booth was about as bad as things could get on my beat. But Sunday, I found out there was a much lower rung of hell to which the TV gods could send me: reviewing a Ravens telecast with Dierdorf and Gumbel in the booth and the Ravens playing really, really poorly for most of the game. I thought the 43-13 loss to the Houston Texans would never end. I went to my iPhone (about a thousand times)

I thought I had said all I was going to say about Fareed Zakaria's plagiarism Friday night when I wrote about how wrong it was to steal the words and ideas of another -- and how deadly for a public intellectual. Read here what I said about Zakaria's actions shredding any sense of intellectual authority I once thought he had. But then, came the lame defenses from some other people in the media the last two days -- defenses that only underlined in my mind what I said about the deeply confused and debased state of journalism today.

The most interesting aspect of Bristol Palin's new reality show on Lifetime is how much padding the producers had to do to fill the time between an hour's worth of commercials Tuesday night. The padding was so bad that they showed the one scene with any energy and conflict four times during the hour. And that's a scene that anyone who still has any interest in this sorry Alaskan clan has already seen for months on YouTube. You know, it's the one in which Bristol Palin and two of her friends (and a posse of reality TV producers and technicians)

A Russian source recently brought an obscure but disturbing article to my attention. Published last month by a little-known online journal called the Oriental Review, the piece, "Active Endeavour And Drug Trafficking," proposed that not a single gram of heroin has been confiscated on the Mediterranean Sea since the inception of NATO's Operation Active Endeavour, a maritime operation launched a month after the Sept. 11 attacks with the mission of "monitoring shipping to help detect, deter and protect against terrorist activity.

The learning curve for Chelsea Clinton, special correspondent, continues to bend in the wrong direction. Clinton's Wednesday night report on chain restaurants that donate leftover food to charity was slightly better than her previous efforts. But only because the producers used every trick in the book to give us less Chelsea and more of anything they could find to distract us from her. Less was marginally more. One of the most striking aspects of the report was how similar its opening was to the first report she did for "Rock Center" a few months ago. Her debut opened with needy children in an after-school setting getting a free meal, and so did Wednesday's.  But in the first report, the producers gave us lots of Chelsea.

If you prefer more wrestling and less talking on wrestling programs, you probably hated Thursday night's TNA Impact. However, if strong promos are more your thing, then you probably really liked the show. With all the talking and just four matches, the show never dragged for me. The absence of any lame comedy skits also was appreciated. (For more, go to baltimoresun.com/ringposts)

The following editorial appeared in another zoned edition of the Baltimore Sun last week:* Carroll CountyJust because the current board of commissioners in Carroll County is considered "lame duck" doesn't mean its decisions should be "lame brained." Last week's decision to postpone the purchase of a 114 1/2 -acre parcel on Cranberry Road outside Westminster for a future high school was nonsensical, irresponsible and not in the public's greater interest.While the election may have changed the composition of the board, it did not mean that county government operations grind to a halt.

Shame on you. What an embarrassment The Sun's coverage of the Baltimore Marathon was. Accompanying the article describing "one of the most thrilling finishes in the event's 11 year history" you chose to offer photos of a bunch of runners-up approaching the finish line and photos of the racers interacting with the animals at the zoo. Buried on page 16 of the sports section were pictures of the two winners, Stephan Muange of Kenya and Olena...

I have no beef with the student Republicans. Oh, I disagree with them about affirmative action, and probably a dozen other things as well. But I am not troubled - amused, but not troubled - by the way they've expressed their view. Unfortunately, others have been less sanguine. The story goes as follows: The GOP student group at the University of California at Berkeley wanted to illustrate its opposition to pending legislation that would allow state universities to consider race, gender, ethnicity and national origin as factors in admission.