Wrong Place

There is an effort to rehabilitate the memory of Joe McCarthy, the pugnacious anti-communist who, as Wisconsin's junior U.S. senator in the 1950s, led a Red Scare crusade widely viewed in history as heavy on witch hunt and short on facts. The latest effort is a book by conservative journalist M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted by History. We're all for getting history right. The argument seems to be that newly available Soviet files indicate a spying effort that would have warranted Mr. McCarthy's fear-mongering and that he even got some names right.

Everything you tell your attorney is in confidence unless you are (a) dead, (b) president or (c) Ken is still working on that.Kim Dae Jung is coming to the wrong place to urge ending sanctions on North Korea. Congress never lifts sanctions.It wasn't only Switzerland but also Sweden, Portugal, Spain, Turkey and Argentina, just like the old movies said.Barry was the real thing. Ronnie just played one on TV.Pub Date: 6/03/98

Beautiful people, ugly litte town. These were Olympic Winter Games that put out their heart in the right place, but in the wrong place in the country.Apart from the grace of its inhabitants, Nagano has proved to be the industrial equivalent of Pittsburgh. A truck stop the size of Springfield, Mo.Ramshackle huts called homes. Soulless concrete and stucco buildings with an occasional exotic Buddhist temple coming as more of a shock than a pleasant surprise.Nagano, even with the perpetual smile on the face of its residents, seemed like Welcome to My Warehouse.

IN THE SPAN of four months, Washington has unveiled two new sports palaces. One is in the wrong place. One is in the right place.The one in the wrong place is Jack Kent Cooke Stadium. It's comfortable enough. Yet its wayward placement just inside the Capital Beltway, like a glowing starship landed between townhouses and a church, resulted from the bitter distillation of politics and its namesake's desperation to get the thing built after years of shopping it around Washington.In Thanksgiving terms, the site the late Mr. Cooke renamed Raljon, Md., was leftover turkey.

A 19-year-old Morgan State University sophomore and honor student died yesterday after being shot in a Govans alley.Police said Marshan Saint Patrick Nelson of the 2300 block of E. Madison St. was in the wrong place at the wrong time when he was shot about 10 p.m. Friday behind the 700 block of McCabe Ave."He was driving to a friend's house with two other friends and apparently drove past the house," said Officer Angelique Cook-Hayes, a city police spokeswoman. "As he pulled into an alley to back up his vehicle, a teen-age male walked up to the vehicle and started shooting."

AS A REPORTER, I always enjoyed covering trials where judges like James B. Dudley presided.Judges like him -- outspoken and sharp-witted -- give spectators a little extra. Listening to them dispense justice in their uninhibited style is like watching a crowd-pleasing dunk at a basketball game, even though a routine layup would count for two points just as well.The Sun last month ran a front-page story about a kindred spirit of Judge Dudley's, Queen Anne's Circuit Judge John W. Sause Jr. His legendary temper prompted one lawyer to remark: "You never know when he is going to fly off. He does it frequently.

THREE HIGH SCHOOL seniors in Harford County, including an honors student, are barred from graduation ceremonies after being accused of growing several marijuana plants in a science lab.A softball player in Howard County misses her junior season, pivotal for scholarship eligibility, because she was allegedly caught with a can of beer on a school-sanctioned ski trip.Most Marylanders are familiar with the story of Jodie Ulrich, the Baltimore County student returned to school by a judge, though education officials had refused to allow her back after her pepper-spray canister was set off by a classmate in a school cafeteria.

(For Tony Alexander McKoy, 29, a West Baltimore basketball referee who was murdered May 8 for trying to stop a fight.)Each night at the 11th hourThe TV camera surveysThe yellow taped crime sceneThe yellow chalked outlineOf the bodyNow in the body bagOn the stretcherTrundling to the ambulanceTo haul the corpse awayThe camera revolvesPast prancing giggling childrenClamoring for their moment on TVTo focus onThe grief stunnedThe gawking curiousThe on scene reporterMicrophone...

I DON'T know if Mayor Kurt Schmoke and his campaign manager Larry Gibson are fans of Cole Porter, but he wrote some lines that are very appropriate for their rather panic stricken and desperate campaign strategy: "It's the wrong time and the wrong place . . . it's the wrong song with the wrong style . . . it's the wrong game with the wrong chips."For a politician as "color neutral," and as unresponsive to the African-American community's hopes and dreams, much less its practical needs, as Mayor Schmoke, the use of a race-based campaign theme is hypocritical and more than a little insulting.

MAYBE I'VE been away too long, living abroad and away from the madness. But when I recently returned to the United States after three years in France, I was horrified by the regularity with which I heard and read about murder. Not, however, murder in the traditional sense -- as if there existed some rosy, nostalgic era of clean, clear murder -- but murder all over, murder in spades, random, indiscriminate and cold.American violence, it would seem, has finally hit warp speed. Reading the paper these days is like descending into a blitz delirium of murder and mayhem.

Reginald Davis could smell the barbecue as he stepped off the bus near the corner of North Avenue and Gay Street. His bosses at the Allen Family Appliance store, where he was a longtime service technician, had closed early for a private party, and Davis let his nose lead him toward their grill, a reward for spending the day on jury duty downtown. Foot traffic was heavy. The methadone clinic across the way was open and serving, and some of the neighborhood's daytime workers had begun to make their ways home.

There is an effort to rehabilitate the memory of Joe McCarthy, the pugnacious anti-communist who, as Wisconsin's junior U.S. senator in the 1950s, led a Red Scare crusade widely viewed in history as heavy on witch hunt and short on facts. The latest effort is a book by conservative journalist M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted by History. We're all for getting history right. The argument seems to be that newly available Soviet files indicate a spying effort that would have warranted Mr. McCarthy's fear-mongering and that he even got some names right.

A curveball sent Gerald Laird back to the Texas Rangers dugout in the first inning last night, making him Erik Bedard's first strikeout victim and causing him to turn back toward the field a few times before reaching the bench. The list figured to be pretty long, given the matchups throughout the visiting lineup. It had to start somewhere, and Laird was in the wrong place. The batter's box usually constitutes the wrong place when Bedard is pitching. Bedard struck out 11 to tie the Orioles' single-season record, and Miguel Tejada hit his 12th home run as part of a three-run first inning that sparked a 6-2 victory over the Rangers before an announced 18,926 at rain-soaked Camden Yards.

Mutual funds are not people. Their death does not diminish mankind. Some 900-plus funds were liquidated or merged out of existence in 2006, down about 25 percent from 2005 and the lowest extinction level in several years. While no one truly mourns a lost fund, investors should not ignore for whom the bell tolls. As they shuffled off this mortal coil, some of these funds created a legacy that investors can learn from. With that in mind - and in the spirit of year-end retrospectives about famous people who died in the past 12 months - investors should pay their due respects to the noteworthy mutual funds that passed in 2006.

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- Carl Edwards wasn't exactly sure where the no-bump zones were on the Daytona International Speedway tri-oval when he slid up the track in front of Dale Earnhardt Jr. yesterday in the first race of the Gatorade Duel 150 qualifying races. "It was in the middle of [Turn] 2 one time, and I was like, `He's coming, but I think we're in one of those zones,'" said Edwards, who finished the race in second place between winner Elliott Sadler and third-place finisher Earnhardt.

HAS THERE ever been a war that so many people disapproved of but so few wanted to stop? Have the reasons for starting a war ever been so thoroughly discredited without turning into reasons for ending it? The Vietnam era antiwar movement had an agenda: Bring the troops home. What seems to be today's antiwar position - it was a terrible mistake and it's a terrible mess, but we can't just walk away from it - was actually the pro-war position during Vietnam. In fact, it was close to official government policy for more than half the length of that war. Today's antiwar cause doesn't even have a movement, to speak of, let alone an agenda.

BOSTON - Now that her 15 minutes of fame are over, may I tip my hat to Linda Grabel? It isn't easy to give the president of the United States a pop quiz. But at the second debate, the 63-year-old legal secretary asked: "Please give three instances in which you came to realize you had made a wrong decision and what you did to correct it." By now it's well known that the president couldn't come up with a single mistake except, shucks, maybe an appointment or two. The question, as he restated it, was, "Did you make a mistake going into Iraq?"

CORAL GABLES, Fla. - Sen. John Kerry sharply criticized President Bush last night for what he called the president's "colossal error in judgment" in handling Iraq, even as the senator vigorously defended himself against Bush's accusations that his positions have shifted with the political winds. In a 90-minute debate on foreign policy and homeland security, the first of four campaign duels, Kerry acknowledged having made verbal missteps in discussing Iraq. But he said his stumbles paled by comparison with the president's failures in managing the war in Iraq and its growing bloodshed.

NEW YORK - On Sept. 10, 2001, his son Henry was born. On Sept. 11, his adopted city was attacked and 2,749 men and women died in a cascade of concrete and steel. A few months later, Bob Kerrey - the high-profile bachelor senator from Nebraska who has reinvented himself as a New York college president and second-marriage "geezer dad" - wrote a Christmas-card poem that he sent to family and friends. The last two stanzas are infused with the kind of stubbornly sunny optimism that seems to shine especially bright in his native state: Hearts brought down by bitter fall Hear laughter and resist.

It's no surprise to find a doctor at the golf course ... except if it's midnight New Year's Eve. Yet, that was Dr. Ant Gear's tee time at North Island Manawatu Club in Wellington, New Zealand, as he attempted for the second year in a row to become the first person in the world to complete a round of golf in the new millennium. "I wanted to make sure I had both years covered in case someone gets picky about which is the true millennium," said Gear, referring to worldwide confusion about whether a millennium - or a century or a decade - starts with a year ending in the number 0 or the number 1. "Just to be safe," Gear once more raced around the course with a luminous golf ball, a 3-iron and a light strapped to his head.