The Kentucky Derby is here!

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Frisien Fire

Bollinger with her foal, Frisian Fire

I Want Revenge

Dunkirk




The Favorite

I Want Revenge is the current favorite, although the weather in Louisville may change that. Joe Talmo rode a fabulous race in the Wood Memorial. The horse had a horrendous start and conceded two or three lengths to the next to last horse. Talmo steadied his horse and rated him. He made a number of moves, threading him through the second pack about half way around and fighting his way near the final turn to get out four wide around. He took charge in the stretch and held off a very credible challenge by West Side Bernie by a length and a half. He ran the mile and an eighth in 1:49:49. His grand sire is A.P. Indy. His mother was Argentine, sired by Roy—a top notch sire with blood lines including both speed and stamina.

Dunkirk

Dunkirk is an intriguing entry. He ran second, a length and a half behind Quality Road in the Florida Derby at a mile and an eighth. I estimate he ran it in just over 1:48, at least five lengths better than anyone one else in the field ran that distance.

Had he not had cracked hooves, Quality Road would have been the favorite.

You can see this dappled gray in Bob Coglianese picture. His grand-sires have both won the Belmont (Unbrideled and A.P. Indy.) His mom, Secret Status, won the Kentucky Oaks. Garrett Gomez has chosen to ride Prince of the Nile rather than Dunkirk which some see as a negative signal. Dunkirk gains Edgar Prado. Dunkirk may be better off.


The Aussie Connection
The Land Down Under has a horse to back. Andrew Eddy writes in the Age, "THERE will be plenty of Australian horse owners and breeders tuning into this weekend's Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs as victory in the classic by one of the race favourites, Friesan Fire, would create quite an impact in the breeding barn down under."

Friesan Fire is Bollinger's second foal. The second picture shows him as a youngster. Gai Waterhouse trained Bollinger. Among others, the the mare won the Group One Coolmore Classic in Australia six years ago. Vinery Stud, which used to own Vinery Study in New South Wales, brought Bollinger, to America. Colitis cut her racing career short. Ray Thomas tells us in the Daily Telegraph, "Friesan Fire didn't sell as a yearling but Vinery Stud aren't complaining now."

Friesan Fire's father is A.P. Indy who was scratched from the Derby, but won the Belmont and the Breeders' Cup Classic. His grand father is the Triple Crown winner, Seattle Slew. Friesan Fire has had a long layover (seven weeks.) His last race was impressive winning the Lexington over a mile and a sixteenth in the slop. You could see the water on the track, it was so wet. I would prefer to see my horse run a mile and an eighth, but with the forecasted rain over the next twenty four hours, I think I am going with the Aussie connection.

A straw in the Wind

The British and European media have been enthusiasts for our new president. Does anyone remember any interest remotely similar to this for George Bush's first hundred days?

Curiously, the Democracy in America blog on the Economist web site has a posting "another boring press conference." Could this be the turning point? Would Malcolm call it the tipping point? No, no, that's a different more marketable concept.

Another perspective is that the former junior senator form Illinois has arrived at the perfect strategy for defanging criticism: hold so many press conferences and make them so unewsworthy that no one bothers anymore.

Perhaps the most dangerous thing for the Obama white House is the Economist's last sentence: "I'm starting to feel suckered into watching an hour-long campaign advertisement."

The Ideology of Terror or the Peace of Islam?

Is Islamic terrorism better understood as a return to Islam at its core or as an ideological version of Islam, a culture politicized? I would contend that ideology is a rationalistic distortion of reality and the product of literacy and Western thought.

Yale University Press has published a new book by Ali Allawi, The Crisis of Islamic Civilization. Judging from the reviews, Awawi the political route followed by the Islamofacists is untrue to Islam and Islam must reach into its own resources to deal wit the challenge of modernity.

The Economist writes: "Mr Allawi calls his new book an 'attempt to understand the factors behind the decay of the spirit of Islam'. He locates this decay not in the personal piety of the world’s Muslims—which remains vibrant—but in the collective failure of Muslims, over the past 200 years, to come up with an adequate and effective response to Western modernity. The problem is not that Islam is incapable of finding its own path to modernity. Mr Allawi wholly rejects the popular notion that Islam is inherently incompatible with tolerance, democracy, women’s rights—in short, all that the West holds dear.

"The difficulty, he says, is that the predominant Muslim response to the Western challenge has been narrowly political instead of being rooted in the inherited ethos of Islamic civilisation. Seen in this light, the Islamist movements which have received so much attention since the Islamic revival in the 1970s are shallow and passionate. For all their pretence of offering an 'Islamic alternative', they represent, or so he argues, nothing more than Western modernity in Islamic garb."

Mr. Allawi is an experience politician in the post-Sadam government and worldwide bestselling author.

Say it Ain't So, John

Baseball is not everybody's sport these days: the national pastime is less national than it once was. The sport's power flowed from that special glow radiating from youngsters' eyes as they saw the big stadium and the luxurious green field in an urban industrial world. For anyone who has felt baseball as the emotional personification of American culture, the words, "Say it ain't so" hit you in the gut.

This is, of course an allusion to the Black Sox scandal: the crisis of our identity a hundred years ago. The image of the little boy looking up in disbelief and hopeless hope to Shoeless Joe Jackson is more than most can bear as he calls out the legendary, "Say it ain't so."

The stories leaking out of that city by the Potomac are such as to make us cry, "Say it ain't so."

Georgetown is the oldest Catholic university in the United Sates. John Carroll, later to become the first bishop in the United States, founded the university. I cried when I read the account of how he learned the Jesuits were dissolved. This evil news caught up with him in Britain in a letter from his brother received on his way back to the U.S. from Europe.

President Obama spoke at Georgetown, Tuesday April 14th. (Read the story at Catholic News.) His handlers requested that the symbols behind him be covered. I suppose they figure they have an infinite right to control the setting. But it doesn't mean that his hosts had to comply. Over the place where the President was to speak were the initials IHS in the usual stylized manner the Jesuits use to indicate the name of Jesus. The image above gives you the idea. This picture is from the Church of the Gesu, the Jesuit church in Rome.

What is amazing and disheartening is that Georgetown complied. They covered the name of Jesus to bask in the President's reflected glory. Jesus told us not to hide our light under a basket. The Jesuits hid Him under a basket, or more precisely a piece of plywood.

The University and the President's office both claim the shrouding was the unintentional consequence of their attempt to set a proper background for the U.S. flags. Image is everything, right? I guess you can't expect a bunch of flacks to understand the symbolism of covering the name of Jesus in a Catholic university.

When President Obama spoke, he used Jesus' parable of the two men one who built his house on sand and the other who built it on rock. Some might wonder just what Georgetown's Catholicism is built on.

Keep In Touch with the Campus Groups that Are Opposing Honoring President Obama's Pro Abortion Policies

A coalition of twelve student groups have joined to protest Notre Dame's granting an honorary degree to President Barak Obama. Click on NDResponse's web site. In this internet age, the pro life students and faculty are not hiding their light under a bushel basket.