Ed has put up the Bat Segundo podcast of the May Queen panel, with editor Nicki Richesin and contributors Meghan Daum, Erin Ergenbright, Kimberly Askew, Heather Juergensen, and yours truly.

I also saw on Ed’s blog and elsewhere that Steve Almond has written an open letter to William P. Leahy, president of Boston College, in the Boston Globe, resigning from his adjunct teaching position there. The beef: Condoleezza Rice has been invited to be the commencement speaker at the graduation ceremonies this year. Kudos to Steve for putting his money where his mouth is. (Okay, as an adjunct myself, I know that adjunct teaching isn’t exactly a financial windfall, but still, it’s an income, and with a baby on the way, it takes balls for Steve to quit the steady job.) Almond objects less to Rice’s warring ways than to her record of dishonesty.

During the ramp-up to the Iraq war, she made 29 false or misleading public statements concerning Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and links to Al Qaeda, according to a congressional investigation by the House Committee on Government Reform.

To cite one example:In an effort to build the case for war, then-National Security Adviser Rice repeatedly asserted that Iraq was pursuing a nuclear weapon, and specifically seeking uranium in Africa. In July of 2003, after these claims were disproved, Rice said: ”Now if there were doubts about the underlying intelligence . . . those doubts were not communicated to the president, the vice president, or to me.”

Rice’s own deputy, Stephen Hadley, later admitted that the CIA had sent her a memo eight months earlier warning against the use of this claim.