Duck! and Gather

Check out Gates Case Shocker. Here’s the money quote:
The 40-year-old woman whose emergency call to Cambridge police sparked the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and a raging national debate on race relations claims she never said “black” men were breaking into his house.
“This woman is 100 percent clear on what she said,” [...]

Check out the video at 0:33. Officer Crowley recounts his version of the incident with Prof. Gates. He says, in a calm, non-threatening, voice: “I asked him if he could step outside and speak with me”. He says this as if the request is an entirely reasonable and straightforward one. Maybe [...]

For me, the whole Henry Louis Gates Jr. arrest story comes down to the first 10 seconds of the interaction between himself and Sergeant Crowley. In Gates’ own words, those first ten seconds went like this:
So I went over to the front porch still holding the phone, and I said ‘Officer, can I help you?’ [...]

In my last post, I call the Henry Louis Gates arrest a perfect story and a “matchstick”. The reason I call it “perfect” is that:

No reasonable person could confuse Gates, a short, 58-year-old, handicapped, egghead, with a perp.
No reasonable person could confuse Crowley, an intelligent professional, with an honorable track record, [...]

The only American holiday that I “buy into” is July 4, Independence Day. To me, the rest of the holidays seem either anachronistic and/or contrived, and certainly driven by the retail corporations. But July the 4th will remain live and meaningful so long as there is an America. This is because America is a live, [...]