Cool summer trends persist, making this past weekend a delight for all kinds of outdoor activities, including alley tennis.

On to far more important matters, including child safety. The New York Times, in its Sunday Styles section, takes on the issue of the day for the country’s parents. In a story titled “Why Can’t She Walk to School?,” the paper takes a look at suburban fears in the aftermath of the Jaycee Lee Dugard case.

Here’s the story’s key stat: “About 115 children are kidnapped by strangers each year, according to federal statistics; 250,000 are injured in auto accidents.” Does that mean that parents who continue driving or walking with their kids to school into their teens are paranoid and depriving them of the skills they need to become independent? Probably.

Swine flu is hitting local campuses pretty hard. And it’s “ten times” worse than run-of-the-mill flu, according to a interviewee in this Washington Post story. That’s a good quote and all, but hey, I am not so sure about this. Run-of-the-mill really, really sucks. You can end up with temperatures, sore throat, nasty coughs, chills, and so on. Swine flu, no slouch, does a lot of that same crap to you, but to really get a good comparison, you’d have to find someone who got swine flu and then run-of-the-mill flu a very short time thereafter. Otherwise, the comparison simply cannot be trusted. CDC, I’m sure, would back me up on this.

Wilbon is getting all kinds of shit in the comments section for calling the Serena foot fault a “bad call.”

Run into bad traffic in D.C. on Sunday? Blame this.

Post’s Del Wilber gives a good sum-up of authorities’ efforts to unravel the monster tax scam that cost D.C. taxpayers $50 million:

Investigators visited D.C. government offices late at night to pull files. They strung along a key conspirator to give themselves more time to wrap up the case. Eventually, an FBI agent got [Harriette] Walters to confess in her own handwriting. And another agent befriended the former tax manager, easing her through a series of interviews that proved crucial to understanding the scheme’s scope.

“We were on the hunt, but at the same time, you don’t want it to end in her evading prosecution,” [federal prosecutor Timothy G.] Lynch said, describing the first few months of the case. “It was both an exciting and angst-ridden time.”

Post-partisan the Washington Times is not. Check out how happy the paper was with the tea-party protest that hit D.C. on Saturday. The following are excerpts from the write-up by Donald Lambro and Kristi Jourdan.

Cheerleading Sentence No. 1: “Tens of thousands of conservative “tea party” protesters brought their angry grass-roots movement to the steps of the Capitol on Saturday in a muscular political demonstration against big government spending, budget deficits, taxes and President Obama’s sweeping health care plan.”

Cheerleading Sentence No. 2: “In a patriotic, flag-waving ‘March on Washington’ that conservative leaders said was a newly energized political movement determined to stop the Obama administration’s tax-and-spending programs, the protesters stretched for blocks up Pennsylvania Avenue to a massive rally on the West Lawn of the Capitol, chanting, ‘USA,’ ‘Enough, Enough’ and ‘We the people.'”

Yes, WashTimes actually called the event “patriotic.”

Cheerleading Sentence No. 3: “Many of the protesters said they had not been politically active before but decided to come to the rally because they felt that government spending was out of control and that proposals pending in Congress, like the health plan that is being drawn up by the Democrats, would rob them of their freedom of choice and burden their children with trillions of dollars in debt.”

Cheerleading Sentence No. 4: “But Saturday’s rally at the doorstep of Congress was only a part of yesterday’s turnout. Rally organizers said many other rallies were held across the country for people who were unable or could not afford to travel to Washington.”