Saturday morning roundup

Petula Dvorak's poignant appreciation of those we lost in the storm.

For the Gulf to recover, we can't proceed under the delusion that the Deepwater Horizon spill was the first and only thing to damage it; we have to address decades of abuse and neglect. With the pipeline leak threatening Lake Michigan, can anyone argue in good faith that these are one-off, freak events? Under what clean water standard would Jesus be baptized in? On a lighter note,
The Style Invitational prints winning Gulf spill parody song entries; definitely worth checking out, though in the editor's own words, they're "editorial-cartoon funny rather than comic-strip-gag funny."

A Chinese official reacts comically when caught off guard by the Obama Administration's assertion of anatomy:

Foreign Minister Yang reacted by leaving the meeting for an hour. When he returned, he gave a rambling 30-minute response in which he accused the United States of plotting against China on this issue, seemed to poke fun at Vietnam's socialist credentials and apparently threatened Singapore, according to U.S. and Asian officials in the room.

"China is a big country and other countries are small countries, and that's just a fact," he said, staring directly at Singapore's foreign minister, George Yeo, according to several participants at the meeting.

We need to avoid leaving Afghan allies at the mercy of those they helped us fight. Nor can we abandon Afghan women and girls.

Health Care reform will benefit women.

Charles Blow on our dysfunctional national discourse on race. A brilliant excerpt:

He’s on a crusade to convince the lemmings of Foxland that President Obama is governing under the principles of Black Liberation Theology, a “grave perversion” of Christianity in which “minorities are saved in the sense that white people constantly confess and repent of being racist and meet the economic demands of minorities via the redistribution of wealth as a consequence of, in some form or another, reparations.” What? Oh, Glenn.

I have to say, I don’t know how these Fox viewers do it. Listening to a Beck argument is like living in an M.C. Escher drawing — fantastical illusions that defy logic and strain the brain.

Apparently there's an architectural/aesthetic reason for Metro's mood lighting.

Online language exchanges allow you to practice in anonymity.