Good morning, City Desk.

Using insightful analytical phrases like “bunch of BS” and “that kind of crap,” Sarah Palin made her debut on Fox News as a commentator last night! Sorry to say: missed it. But Bill O’Reilly, on whose show Palin appeared, said later the whole thing was really “no different from interviewing Chuck Schumer.” Hmm.

On the home front, D.C. has been picked as a possible host city for soccer’s World Cup in 2018 or 2022. (That sounds exciting, if you care about soccer, but so have Baltimore and Philadelphia and Boston and Los Angeles and Seattle and 12 other cities. Even Tampa Bay.)

A D.C. Council committee has voted to run the city-funded Circulator bus across one river—the Potomac—but not another—the Anacostia. At-large Councilmember Kwame Brown says he’ll fight the fight to get a new route that runs down Pennsylvania Avenue SE to Southern Avenue SE. In a news release, he explained he could not “in good conscious” vote to extend the bus into Virginia while D.C. residents are still waiting.

Metro is holding its third and final day of a “right-of-way” safety workshop today. “Last year we had two employees die as a result of accidents on the tracks and last month we had a train miss a safety inspector because the train operator violated safety procedures,” says Michael Taborn, Metro’s acting chief safety officer. “It is imperative that we strengthen our safety procedures for the thousands of Metro employees who have access to our tracks. Their lives are on the line each and every day.” Is three days enough?

Amen to this sentiment in today’s Washington Post: “Let’s stop praising Mark McGwire to the skies for finally revealing the world’s worst-kept secret—that he used steroids during his storied major league career.” No Hall for you!

The Pew Research Center released some interesting survey results yesterday showing that African-Americans are upbeat about African-American progress. Thirty-nine percent of blacks say the “situation of black people in this country” is better than it was five years earlier—compared to 20 percent who said the same in 2007. Fifty-four percent of blacks also said that Barack Obama‘s election has improved race relations (note: among whites, about a third thought his election had improved race relations, while 45 percent said it has made no difference).

I wonder: What would the survey have shown in the District?