Weekly Columnist Roundup: Meat, Schools and Granola

We read all the local columnists, so you don't have to. This week we find meat-eaters being compared to Michael Vick, a lot of bum opinions on city schools and District residents being called "granola."

Courtland Milloy: According to Milloy's Wednesday column in the Post, your choice to eat a hamburger isn't all that different than Michael Vick's decision to brutally fight, torture and kill dogs for money. "We'll kill a duck, deer, turkey -- name any meat -- for the sheer entertainment of our palates or for the fun of the hunt," he writes. While there's little doubt that we judge animals on how cute they are, how useful they are to us and whether or not we've been taught that it's OK to eat them, it's more than a stretch to say that Vick's actions aren't all that different than eating a chicken breast, grilling a steak or buying a salmon filet. At least Milloy makes it clear who he's going to pick for his fantasy football league next season.

Colbert King: The king -- pun intended -- of the District's columnists argued in his Sunday column that new school Chancellor Michelle Rhee faces but one big challenge in her quest to improve public education -- the school bureaucracy. "The central office fervently believes that the status quo is a blessed concept to be defended against all comers," he notes. "The central office has outlived superintendents, elected and appointed school board members, a congressionally created financial control board, an Army general, auditors and a rotating corps of inquiring reporters. Through it all, the central office has remained an incubator for incompetence, obstruction, cronyism and corruption." Hmm. Sound like something else we have here in Washington?

Tom Knott: It's a battle of the extremes, as our favorite right-wing hitman at the Washington Times takes on the ANSWER Coalition and their many fliers plastered around town. And in attacking the so-called "revolutionaries" at ANSWER, Knott gets in a little dig at us while defending the city's actions. He writes: "There are few places more granola than the nation's capital, where the denizens actually believe in the nut-job political messages found in the grocery aisles of Whole Foods, hold candlelight vigils for fallen trees and preach at the altar of multiculturalism from the safety of their highly segregated neighborhoods." If Knott thinks that the District is as granola as things get, he needs to climb out of his bunker and travel a little, shouldn't he?