Newhart

CNN and MSNBC have pieces on the brillance of Bob Newhart, the white-collar standup comic, on the occasion of his receiving an award. My mom had the old records with Newhart’s standup routines, and as good as his sitcoms were, if you never heard his standup act, you missed a lot. What was really revolutionary about Newhart’s act was his ability to create an act with no funnyman, just a straight man.

Pigs

Bury Muslim terrorists in pig skin? Personally, I’ve been in favor of this for some time. There’s plenty to question in Russia’s war with Chechnya; there’s fair grounds for debate over the wisdom of using gas that proved fatal to many of the hostages; there’s serious room for questioning why the Russians had such easy access to what may have been a banned chemical; and there’s no defending Moscow’s refusal to give timely, accurate information about the gas to doctors responding to treat the hostages. But I can’t fault Putin for preferring a raid and the slaughter of the hostage takers over concessions, and I’ve been in favor of this type of anti-“martyrdom” burial practice for some time. The Israelis have done this sometimes, as well. Those who sow savagery deserve to fear what they may reap.

Chicken, or Egg?

Rob Neyer notes that good major league managers who managed in the minors generally had winning records there, but that it’s meaningless because guys who lose in the minors never get a chance in the majors, plus good organizations produce good players at both levels. Nonetheless, especially in modern times, the unpredictability of minor league managing, given the massive roster turnover, is a steep hurdle, and you have to think highly of anyone who’s able to clear it repeatedly.

Failing To Fog The Mirror

It was completely official that the Carl McCall campaign was toast when even the New York Times endorsed Pataki. What’s sad is that McCall’s trouncing may be taken in some quarters as evidence of the folly of an African-American candidate who, to his credit, has refused to play the race card, who made his name in statewide office rather than narrowcasting to a carefully gerrymandered legislative district, and has always run essentially as a moderate (Pataki’s ads in the city have bashed McCall for being insufficiently liberal).

To Be Fair

There are some writers who just have a predetermined theory, and want to fit all the facts into it. Example: there are a lot of fans, especially stat-head types who read sportswriters with a critical eye, who love to argue that various players get treated unfairly by the media for no other reason than that they are not nice to reporters. This. I submit, is true. Barry Bonds is a great player, he’s mean to reporters, and reporters hate him, so believers in this particular theory often cite him as Exhibit A of a man whose reputation has been sullied for no good reason just because he won’t suck up to reporters.
That just ain’t the truth, as I’ve argued repeatedly; I won’t recount all the history here, but there is loads of evidence that Bonds is a jerk who is justly loathed by teammates, opponents, and fans, for many reasons having nothing to do with his quotability. People who think that this argument is true of Bonds just because it’s true of, say, Eddie Murray, aren’t paying attention. They’re just repeating slogans as a substitute for thought.
That said, even Bonds deserves to be treated fairly by the media for what he is, and Jonah Keri at the Baseball Prospectus catches the weaselly Rick Reilly and the sleazelly Bob Klapisch doing a completely unethical hack job on Bonds by taking a menacing quote and removing its critical context, which is that reporters after Game 7 were pressing in too hard on Bonds’ son.

Girls Club

The Washington Post with a good roundup of the faults and bad reviews of the late, unlamented ‘girls club’. All I saw were the ads and reviews – from the ratings, I gather I was not alone in this – but among the show’s numerous flaws were its Lifetime-network-ish assumption that nothing in the least has changed in the way women lawyers are treated at work (in San Francisco, no less) since the Fifties, and its equally absurd presumption that a successful law firm would be sending first-year associates out, without training, no less, to do things like the opening statement of a murder trial. What planet did David E. Kelley practice law on?

PJ O’Rourke Interview

PJ O’Rourke, interviewed in the Atlantic: “one finds, especially by the time one reaches one’s fifties, that there are a limited number of types of people in the world, and you went to high school with every single one of them. You can visit the Eskimos, you can visit the Bushmen in the Kalahari, you can go to Israel, you can go to Egypt, but everybody you meet is going to be somebody you went to high school with.”
O’Rourke also has some provocative observations about conservatism and humor:
Libertarianism is a way of measuring how the government and other kinds of systems respect the individual. At the core of libertarianism is the idea that the individual is sacrosanct and that anything that’s done contrary to the well-being of the individual needs some pretty serious justification. The burden of proof should always be on people who want to restrict the individual’s liberty and responsibility.
That’s different from conservatism. In its worse forms, conservatism is a matter of “I hate strangers and anything that’s different.” But in its better forms, conservatism simply says that the structures of society, both civil and political, religious and so on, are the result of a long series of trial-and-error experiments by millions of human beings, not only all over the world, but through time. And that you should toss out received wisdom only very carefully. Obviously there are some ideas that were around for centuries that were not good (slavery comes to mind). But when people have been doing something for a millennium or two, there is probably a reason. And you better be pretty careful before you just throw it out.
Do you find that conservative humorists have a different humorous sensibility than liberal ones?
Well, I don’t know about that. I think that all humorists are essentially conservative, because humorists depend for a lot of their jokes on getting the reader or viewer or listener to laugh at things that are outlandish and strange. The audience is not laughing at things that are familiar or, as we may say, “conservative.” The ridicule of the new and the odd is at the root of all humor, so in a way, even the most left-wing humorist is a conservative. Christopher Hitchens when he’s being funny is an example of that.
O’Rourke’s observation underlines why I, like most post-Reagan ‘conservatives’, am probably more libertarian than conservative, more apt to look at longstanding practices and ask why they can’t be replaced with something that gives more autonomy to individuals and less control to government. As I’ve emphasized before, though, most people of my leanings continue to shy away from identifying with libertarianism because (1) in its doctrinal form, libertarianism doesn’t just prefer individual autonomy to tradition; it raises individual autonomy to the kind of value that can almost never be outweighed by anything else; and (2) conservatism is much more respectful of religion and morality, which are the essential building blocks of a civil society.

Are The Islamists Idolators?

Disturbing article in the latest National Review about the appointment, as supreme court justice for Afghanistan, of a believer in sharia law who pronounces his intention to impose Islamic law including outlawing other faiths. I’m reading it, and it hits me: maybe I just don’t understand Islam well enough, but to my ears, the whole sharia-courts phenomenon thoughout Islamist societies seems to be blasphemous and idolatrous by its very nature. Consider:
+The sharia courts purport to speak with the Voice of God, and to pronounce, not fallible human interpretations of God’s will, but God’s judgments themselves. Nor is this a carefully circumscribed authority, like the rare occasions when the Pope speaks ex cathedra; they do this stuff every day.
+More importantly, the sharia courts arrogate to themselves the sole and unchecked authority to carry out God’s judgments. Death or multilation can be and often is the penalty if a sharia court judges that an individual has transgressed the court’s view of God’s laws.
+Individuals can be charged with, and beheaded for, blasphemy just for questioning the sharia court’s authority.
Can somebody who knows more about Islam explain to me how this arrangement doesn’t effectively set up the sharia court itself as the object of worship, obedience and devotion, under the harshest of penalties, and in substitution for the devotion of invidual conscience directly to divine authority?

Slogan’s Heroes

Maureen Dowd says the policy of Don Rumsfeld and his Pentagon staff — the focus of her obsession (the girl who cried ‘Wolfowitz’) — “can be summarized: ‘We’re No. 1. We like it that way. And we’re going to keep it that way.'”
Hey, I like the sound of that. It fits on a bumpersticker and everything. . .

BASKETBALL: Sports Guy Loves This Game

I haven’t linked to him that much, actually, but of course you can’t start the basketball season without reading Bill Simmons’ previews. The Eastern Conference Preview is here, the Western Conference Preview is here (Simmons always does the East first so he can save his Finals prediction for the second column). Simmons on Joe Johnson of the Suns: “I watched him in Boston for 50 games. Intently. And he doesn’t have it. I can spot three things in life — toupees, fake breasts and NBA players who drift during games. And he’s a drifter. Considering that the Suns need him to make The Leap, that doesn’t bode too well for their playoff hopes.”

Your Heart Is Full of Unwashed Socks

While we’re lingering on the ugly side of the Left, Jonah Goldberg is peering deep into the darkness of the soul of the Democratic Party, specifically the memorial service for Paul Wellstone, and is horrified by what (and who) he sees:
Like some perverse “Where’s Waldo” drawing, wherever large groups of Democrats congregate, you know if you can find Bill Clinton in the picture they will behave like jackasses . . that rally . . . shamelessly used Wellstone’s death for partisan advantage while its organizers cynically accused their opponents of doing precisely that. Blaming others for something awful you’ve done is perhaps the defining attribute of Bill Clinton and his legacy on the Democratic party. Wellstone did many good things out of principle � including work with Jesse Helms, a man he grew to befriend, on human rights in China. But he will now be invoked by Democrats everywhere simply to get out the vote, beat up Republicans, and raise millions of dollars in campaign contributions.
In short, so long as they hold onto the Senate, the Clinton Democrats � who often found Wellstone’s principles inconvenient � will find him more useful dead than alive. They will rewrite the story of his life to fit any cause they choose � much as they have done with other Democratic martyrs like John and Robert Kennedy (a Cold War anti-Communist and the attorney general who personally authorized the bugging of Martin Luther King, respectively). Wellstone’s distinctiveness and honesty will melt in a warm pool of mass-marketed nostalgia. And, if Republicans complain, Democrats will simply charge insensitivity and laugh all the way to the bank.”

The Art of the Smear

Instapundit had a link to this story, but Glenn Reynolds’ tag line didn’t nearly do justice to Harry Stein’s saga of how a Dallas newspaper deliberately and very falsely smeared him as a racist, apparently in an attempt to sandbag a potential nominee to be Federal Reserve chairman. The story captures perfectly the iron triangle of (1) a single audience member determined, possibly in advance, to take offense at Stein’s talk; (2) reporters willing to be taken in by the claim; and (3) Democratic politicians looking to make hay on their absolute favorite topic. This is the kind of story that makes me so mad I can’t even see straight; Stein’s good name is trashed with the most malicious of intentions and for the basest of purposes, and he is left with utterly no recourse but to try to tell the whole story in all its length and nuance. Rod Dreher on NRO linked to this blog post reflecting on a similar story, about protestors determined to shut down truthful discussions of Islamic regimes’ treatment of Christians and Jews. The truth, sadly, does not always set us free.

Beyond Bizarre

Andrew Sullivan and Rand Simberg point out that Ted Rall and Buffalo State College “journalism and media studies” professor Michael Niman need the tinfoil in their hats changed again.
Sullivan aptly catches the parallel to Vince-Foster-was-murdered theories in the paranoid Left’s wish to charge George W. Bush with murdering Paul Wellstone. (James Taranto at Best of the Web Today also jumped on Niman’s column yesterday).
Just a few funny ones: Rall: “spending a decade’s worth of savings in six months . . . A man capable of these things seems, by definition, capable of anything” Gee, Ted, whaddya think of Gray Davis? Actually Rall probably thinks he’s a right-wing nut case. Rall also cites, as evidence of Republican depravity, claims that “GOP workers phoned senior citizens to tell them that Wellstone was plotting to take away their Social Security.” Of course, no Democrat would ever, ever suggest that an opponent intended to take away anyone’s Social Security . . .
Besides, anyone can play this game. When John Heinz died in a plane crash, the Democrats gained a Senate seat, and the Republicans lost a family fortune that may some time soon bankroll John Kerry’s presidential campaign. When Paul Coverdell died suddenly and without warning, the Democrats gained a Senate seat. When Mel Carnahan, who was trailing in the polls, died in a plane crash, the Democrats gained a Senate seat (note how Rall describes Carnahan’s opponent as “future Bush Attorney General John Ashcroft” – as if anyone knew that in October 2000, and as if Ashcroft would have become the AG if he had won re-election). Now, a Democrat is endangered, and just as he appears to be momentarily ahead in the polls, he dies in a plane crash so the Dems can run a party veteran on his memory.
In other words, motive in politics is a two-way street, and using motive alone to make charges of murder is, to put it mildly, irresponsible. What’s really insane is that my taxes pay Niman’s salary, and that respectable journalistic organizations pay Rall’s. Forget the outrageousness – the quality of this kind of stuff just isn’t fit for the National Enquirer, let alone a major newspaper or university.

Pipes on Sniper

Daniel Pipes says that the media has been too quick to turn a blind eye to the possibility that John Muhammad was motivated by Islamist ideology:
“Islamists in Pakistan, reports Arnaud de Borchgrave, expect that ‘in the next 10 years, Americans will wake up to the existence of an Islamic army in their midst – an army of jihadis who will force America to abandon imperialism and listen to the voice of Allah.'”

OH, THE HUMANITY!

Dahlia Lithwick of Slate captures some of the ironies of the now-infamous Clifford Chance memo. (The New York Law Journal also captures the real bad news in the memo, from the perspective of big-law-firm managing partners). Of course, Lithwick herself is not innocent of griping about (spare us!) the tedium of being an internet legal pundit, where one never has to set foot in a courtroom with fewer than nine judges in it. (Any litigator who follows the Supreme Court could have told her that the real drama of First Monday in October is the cert granted/cert denied lists).

A Word In Favor Of The Billable Hour

The NY Times calls out the usual parade of horribles to denounce the billable hour. I’m no fan of the billable hour, to be sure, but critics invariably lose most of their steam once they try to come up with a workable alternative. Clients pay the bills, and for large law firms engaged in defending civil litigation or in many types of corporate transactions, clients have generally preferred to have the bills determined on the basis of hourly rates. In areas like bankruptcy, it’s the courts themselves that often determine the bills, and they do it by the hour. There are intermiediate steps that can be taken to help clients keep a watchful eye, like the ABA’s task-based billing codes that some clients prefer. None of this excuses the egregious cases of fraud, like people billing 44 hour days, but at the end of the day, as long as clients are reviewing the bills and are happy with what they are paying for what they are getting in return, the billable hour system will endure.

1787 in the EU

A new proposed EU constitution! With a President, federalism, common citizenship, and a common bill of rights, all under the title “United Europe”! Stop me if this sounds familiar. “Valery Giscard d’Estaing, president of the convention on the future of the EU, compared the draft constitution to the work done by the founding fathers of the US.” Haven’t we been led to believe that the French consider that an insult?

Use It Or Lose It

Dick Morris says Bush is losing popularity because he looks less Presidential when he’s campaigning rather than stumping for war. His solution: stop campaigning! But this ignores the point of why his popularity matters right now: because there’s an election around the corner. Bush can hoard his high ratings, or risk some of his more ephemeral support to get the Congress he needs.
Besides, the fair-weather Bush supporters – the hard-core Democrats who nonetheless back the President on the war – will come back when the war in Iraq starts, because their support is all about the war on terror. That is when he will need those people – they aren’t going to vote for Republican congressional candidates in great numbers anyway, but they will keep the heat on poll-watching Congressional Democrats to support the war effort, and they may yet vote Bush in 2004.

Rampaging Lileks

You hate to link to the same people every day, but I laughed so hard at Lileks’ Bleat this morning I almost fell off my chair. He takes on the Pet Shop Boys, Avril Lavigne, and Walter Mondale, and likes only one of the three. A taste of his observations on Mondale: “I was a hardcore Democrat [in 1984], and I remember watching the [convention] speech and thinking: we are going to lose. We are going to lose 51 states. Puerto Rico will demand statehood just for the chance not to vote for this guy. . . [Now] I just feel sorry for the guy. If he wins, he has to leave home, leave his family, leave his nice job, and go back to the ossuary of the Senate for six years. One night he�ll find himself staring at the lovely ceiling, listening to Robert Byrd drone on – for heaven�s sake he was talking when I left and twenty years later he still hasn�t shut up . . .”

Just The Dregs

This is the Mets in a nutshell:
Divide the team into two groups – “guys you should trade”, and “guys you should keep.”
The “guys you should trade” are all under contract for many more years at gobs of money.
The “guys you should keep” are all free agents.
Bravo, Steve Phillips!

American Lawyer Killed In Bali; CCRW Memo

An American-born lawyer – a former Nebraska football player working in Hong Kong for the international firm of Clifford Chance (formerly Clifford Chance Rogers & Wells) – is among those confirmed dead in the bombing in Bali. He was reportedly planning to leave the globe-trotting law business for a job back home with his family in Kansas.
Turning to something completely different, but also on the subject of Clifford Chance . . . well, as a big-firm associate at one of the firm’s sometime competitors, I’ll just pass on without further comment the link to this New York Law Journal story as a sample of the blizzard of bad press coming from the leaking of this internal memo by associates unhappy with the firm’s billable hour targets and a host of other issues.

Fraudulent Statistics

Starting at this post and scrolling down, Ombudsgod has a good series of posts on inflated statistics about sexual assault, domestic violence and related topics. These are real problems, but it is always frightening to see the need implied in these types of fraudulent statistics — the need to shock, the need to insist that these are the biggest, the worst problems. It’s the one-upmanship (one-up-personship?) of the agenda of victimization at work, in which it is not only important to show that a problem exists and must be addressed, but that the problem is so vast that it calls for a thorough uprooting of the whole society. There’s also, I think, another dynamic at work: the statistics are intentionally inflated because their proponents want people to dispute them, so that they can invoke wedge-issue rhetoric about how their voices are being ignored, how this is just like ancient rules about disbelieving women who cry “Rape,” etc. Stuff like this shouldn’t bother me this much, but it does. It’s also why I love my job: one of the great joys of being a litigator is having the tools at your disposal to confront and puncture untruths, one at a time.

Flashbacks

Two things caught my eye in the flashbacks shown in the pregame coverage of Game 7. First, how unbelievably hokey the uniforms, the ballpark, and everything else looked in the coverage of the 1979 series. If you’d told me this was minor league footage, I might have believed you. Two, like an unexpected apparition, the scene of the 1985 “I-70 Series” between the Royals and Cardinals featured the teams meeting before the game with Missouri’s then-governor . . . John Ashcroft.

From 41 Games Back

One of the really staggering figures last night was when Joe Buck noted that the Angels had finished 41 games out of first place last season. Here’s my quick survey of teams finishing 20 or more games out of first place the year before winning the World Series:
1953 Giants — 35 games behind Dodgers
1913 Braves — 31.5 games behind Giants
1990 Twins — 29 games behind A’s
1968 Mets — 24 games behind Cardinals
1911 Red Sox — 24 games behind A’s
1923 Senators — 23.5 games behind Yankees
1986 Twins — 21 games behind Angels
1958 Dodgers — 21 games behind Braves
You’ll notice that most of the teams at the top of the list were not only mediocre to bad, but they also trailed behind great teams.

Barry Bonds’ Legacy

Now, Barry Bonds won’t be remembered as the guy who never hit in October, never played in the World Series. He will instead be lumped in the company of the two guys he resembles most, in his own way — Ted Williams and Ty Cobb — as guys who never won it all. Sure, maybe the Giants get back there, but I doubt it. The age on this team, the likely departure of Kent, the injuries that are likely to gradually drag Bonds down . . . we all knew this was his chance.
Unless he winds up with the Yankees, of course.

Livan Hernandez

Livan Hernandez became the fourth pitcher with a losing record to start Game 7 of the World Series. The others: John Matlack, a good pitcher stuck with a 14-16 record by a bad offensive Mets team in 1973; Johnny Podres, famously, 9-10 in 1955; and the most puzzling of all, Hal Gregg, 4-5 with a 5.87 ERA for the Dodgers in 1947, which appears to have been the result of incredibly bad management of the staff to leave no one else available to start the deciding game, but also the fact that Gregg had been virtually the only effective Dodgers pitcher in the series, with the exception of relief ace Hugh Casey. Five other guys were close: John Smoltz was 14-13 in 1991; Joe Magrane was 9-7 in 1987; Jack Billingham was 12-12 in 1972; Curly Ogden was 9-8 in 1924; Bill Donovan was 8-7 in 1909.

Wellstone’s Legacy

Time to get down to the callous business of figuring out where the Minnesota Senate race goes after Wellstone . . . Lileks (a Minnesotan) has a lengthy explanation of why it’s proper to remember the man well (I’m not excerpting it; go read for yourself) but is cold and withering in his assessment of the Democrats:
If it�s Mondale as a replacement, it ought to make Wellstone�s supporters scowl a bit. The true heir to Wellstone�s policies would be the Green candidate – but oddly enough, none of his supporters are suggesting that anyone vote for that fellow. Policies are one thing; power is quite another. The objective is not to carry the Wellstone torch for the next six years. The objective is control of the Senate. The Wellstone legacy turns out to be no more than a seat marked D.

BLOG/Busy . .

Been busy . . . lots to blog about. I’ll get around to it all later in the week. One thought: as so often happens with championship teams, how these Angels will be remembered will be heavily influenced by the future development of Francisco Rodriguez (a/k/a Danny Almonte) and John Lackey.

Fernandomania!

Where were you when Cal Ripken broke the consecutive games record? You don’t remember, do you? Did you even watch the game? I didn’t. Sure, it was interesting at the time, but a moment you will remember forever? If you’re keeping score at home, Major League Baseball’s fan voting produced this Top Ten List:
The Top 10 Most Memorable Moments (as voted by fans):
1. 1995 – Cal Ripken breaks Lou Gehrig’s streak with his 2,131st consecutive game.
2. 1974 – Hank Aaron breaks Babe Ruth’s all-time home run record.
3. 1947 – Jackie Robinson becomes the first African-American Major Leaguer.
4. 1998 – Mark McGwire & Sammy Sosa surpass Roger Maris’ single-season home run record.
5. 1939 – Lou Gehrig retires with his “luckiest man” farewell speech.
6. 1985 – Pete Rose passes Ty Cobb as the all-time hits leader.
7. 1941 – Ted Williams is the last man to post a .400 average.
8. 1941 – Joe DiMaggio hits in 56 straight games.
9. 1988 – Kirk Gibson’s pinch-hit homer sends LA on its way to a World Series upset.
10. 1991 – Nolan Ryan pitches his seventh career no-hitter.

Here’s the complete 30-moment ballot, and ESPN Page 2’s list of moments they left entirely off the list.

The two lists, totaling 40 ‘moments,’ present an inviting target, although
each does bear the marks of careful selection of more of the moments than not. They left off the Merkle incident in 1908, when the pennant race turned on rookie Fred Merkle’s failure to touch second base on a game-winning hit (he was on first). Many other pre-1930 moments get ‘dissed’ here – like the stunning conclusions to the 1912 and 1924 World Serieses, the incredible finish to the 1908 AL pennant race, the Black Sox fixing the World Series, and the Yankees crushing the Pirates in the 1927 World Series – and given how few people still remember them, maybe that’s understandable. I might also quarrel that Maury Wills’ stolen base record was more memorable than Rickey’s, and that I, at least, remember Nolan Ryan’s fifth no-hitter as the milestone, not the seventh. After the furor over Roberto Clemente being left off the All-Century team, it’s also understandable that MLB picked Clemente’s last hit, Ichiro’s MVP award, and Satchel Paige’s Hall of Fame induction to satisfy as many constituencies as might be offended. The latter was far from a fitting tribute to Paige, but since many of his best moments are closer in memory to Paul Bunyan stories than documented facts, it’ll have to do. For each of the three, it’s really an inclusion more of the man than the moment, and they are certainly all worthy of a certain share of the game’s honors.

Anyway, the inclusion of Clemente and Ichiro, coming alongside the late-season phenomenon of Francisco Rodriguez, brought to mind another of baseball’s truly phenomenal runs, and one that is maybe not as well-remembered as I would have thought at the time: Fernandomania!

Continue reading Fernandomania!

Goldberg on the Media’s Rush

Jonah Goldberg has the goods on the media’s jump to conclusions about the sniper(s). Instapundit also links to blogger Rand Simberg, with a similar but more pointed observation: that the media was dying to “paint Republicans as bigoted enablers of right-wing violence . . . two weeks before a mid-term election.”
On a lighter note, Wednesday night I was flipping channels with the sound down, and saw on FOXNews the bizarre headline “BREAKING NEWS: A Tree Stump Was Removed And Loaded Into A Truck.”
The scary thing is, I knew what they were talking about.