Voros Revisited

Preseason predictions, even well-thought-out ones, are always good for entertainment after the season. Here are Voros McCracken’s, with the Mets first, the Angels last, the Twins under .500 and the Astros winning the World Series. Just a reminder that predicting players is an inexact science, picking teams is closer to a crapshoot, and baseball can still be an unpredictable game. I relied heavily on McCracken’s Defense Independent Pitching Stats calculations from 2001 to pick my rotisserie baseball starting rotation this year, and wound up with Mike Mussina, John Burkett, Steve Sparks, Doug Davis, and Jeff Weaver. Not that I’m bitter.

The Magic Garden

I was watching TV with the kids yesterday, and what should come on WPIX but an old episode of “The Magic Garden,” in all its Seventies glory, from bell-bottom trousers to the wacky pastel colors everywhere. The show, for those of you who never saw it, was a preschool show, with two women (Carol and Paula) who sang songs, acted out stories, interacted with puppets, the usual kids’ show stuff. My kids, 3 and 5, loved it. What amazed me was how quickly something like that can take you back, bring back all the little details of the show that have sat dormant in your memory all these years. I’m quite certain I haven’t seen the show since I was about 6 years old (I’m 31 now), but the gimmicks (the Chuckle Patch, daisies that tell corny jokes, to the Storybox with its low-budget costumes for storytime playacting) and the jingles (“you don’t need a key, so follow me, there are no locks on storybox, on story box”; “see ya see ya, hope you had a good good time . . . “) all came piling out of the recesses of my brain.
It was also a reminder – today’s kids’ shows are quite good, some of them, and so were the shows I used to watch, but they’re different now – shows like Blues’ Clues and Dora the Explorer are just busier, more crowded with THINGS TO SEE AND LEARN!!! than the shows I used to watch as a preschooler. Better? Worse? Just that the world keeps moving faster and getting more complicated, and times never stand still. It’s the reality we all deal with, either way, and the world my kids have to prepare for will already be different than the one I live in now, which is plenty modern enough for my tastes.

All About Oil

Jonah Goldberg made fun of the UN Security Council a few weeks back by noting the likelihood that countries like Cameroon were just selling us their votes in return for whatever concession they happened to be looking for. Turns out that, in the specific case of Cameroon, that would be – surprise! – oil. Cameroon and Nigeria are locked in a dispute over oil-rich territory just off their coastlines, are appealing to international organizations to settle the issue.

General Wesley Clark

General Wesley Clark has been making presidential-candidate type noises. The National Review’s John Miller is on the case, and thinks the Democrats should give serious thought to whether Clark should be on the vice presidential ticket in 2004. Meanwhile, check out this blog for the latest on Vermont Governor Howard Dean’s uphill bid to recreate Jimmy Carter’s 1976 outsider campaign for the Democratic nomination.

Steyn Is Online

I had planned not to blog today, but some news is too big to wait: Mark Steyn now has his own website, marksteyn.com (“The One Man Global Content Provider”), with links to his commentary in outlets the world over. including his latest, on George W. Bush’s Achilles heel: his refusal to recognize the Saudis as our sworn enemies. The sun truly never sets on Steyn’s empire of warmongering good sense. (Thanks to Tim Blair for pointing this out).

Discounting the Mets

The Mets plan to vary ticket prices in 2003 based on things like the quality of the opponent, the weather, etc. Of course, the biggest variable is the quality of the home team – if the Mets are serious about adjusting prices for demand, we should see prices drop sharply throughout the season as the prospect of contention becomes ever more distant. On the other hand, I can’t wait to see the headline “Ordonez Goes On Disabled List, Mets Raise Ticket Prices 50%.”

The Silencers

Mr. Instantaneous points to a column by Neal Boortz suggesting that Daschle’s and Gore’s assaults on the media may be part of a long-run campaign to outlaw talk radio, perhaps through the campaign finance laws. I don’t think the Democrats would go that far (I’ve been wrong on that score before), but they may be hoping to ‘shame’ the mainstream media outlets into tilting further to the left. Unfortunately for the Democrats, money talks, and the competitors of Fox News, for example, seem to have figured out that their target audience – people who are interested in news – includes an awful lot of people who think the media is too liberal and want to hear at least a semblance of objective reporting, respectful treatment of conservative ideas as such, and opinion commentary by conservative voices. Thus, NBC had Rush Limbaugh doing commentary on Election Night, which is probably one of the things that set so many Democrats off.

Unmasked

Looks like the truth is seeping in after all. The three main articles on the New York Times editorial page today – and the three most e-mailed by readers – are columns by Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd and an op-ed by Salman Rushdie, all denouncing in uncompromising terms the evils of radical islamism and its Saudi benefactors. Dowd’s is somewhat incoherent as usual, but if she sticks to her theme and does at least one Saudi-bashing column a week (a la Michael Ledeen’s drumbeat on Iran), she’ll be doing the nation a valuable service.
Rushdie:
The Islamic world today is being held prisoner, not by Western but by Islamic captors, who are fighting to keep closed a world that a badly outnumbered few are trying to open. As long as the majority remains silent, this will be a tough war to win. But in the end, or so we must hope, someone will kick down that prison door.
Over to you, George.

Emily’s Blacklist

One sign of a party losing its discipline and focus is when moderates in critical elections get abandoned by activists over a single issue. A good party has to purge the occasional extreme apostate in a primary, but dumping Mary Landrieu will almost guarantee that the GOP holds the Senate for the next four years. Yet, the American Prowler reports that Emily’s List is doing precisely that, over a single vote to ban partial-birth abortion. The Prowler even quotes Paul Begala ripping the group for its extremism.
Just don’t hold your breath for the New York Times to bellow that divisions over abortion are splitting the Democratic party.

The Christmas Party

Slate’s Dear Prudence advice column tells a guy to break up with his girlfriend rather than let her go to an office Christmas party at her law firm where spouses and ‘significant others’ are not invited. Leave aside the general asininity of this advice, although it may be harmless; the fact that the guy has written to an internet advice columnist to say he doesn’t trust his girlfriend suggests that this particular relationship is doomed anyway. But consider Prudence’s first reaction: “Office Christmas parties are famous occasions for drunken women lurching at the boss … or the other way around.” Am I naive, or is this a totally outdated stereotype? I mean, my law firm has an annual Christmas party, and people are generally too uptight about the possibility of making fools of themselves to dance, for crying out loud. I mean, not that extramarital affairs and the like don’t happen in the business world, but I really can’t see the office Christmas party as a major culprit in that kind of thing, especially at a party full of lawyers in these days of hair-trigger sexual harassment litigation. Get a grip!

Kathleen Parker on the Miss World Riots

The wise and always even-tempered Kathleen Parker (she’s the anti-Coulter) perfectly captures the Miss World riots in Nigeria. The lunacy gripping northern Nigeria at the moment is fairly persuasive evidence for those who argue that the real problem we face is not principally one of Arab culture but of Islam, and it likewise supports Ralph Peters’ theory that we should be most concerned about attacking radical Islam from the outside in, i.e., starting with non-Arab Muslims in places like Indonesia, Nigeria, etc.
Of course, Nigeria is a hugely strategically important place in its own right, partially because it has massive reserves of oil, partially because it is making fitful steps towards restoring a fully functioning democracy, partially because it’s nearly the only sub-Saharan African nation (other than South Africa) with any chance of both modest prosperity and democracy, and that’s something we should encourage. The central government has been critical of the Islamic extremists, and I believe that the nation as a whole is more Catholic than Muslim. It’s one place the United States should be watching carefully.

Even Conason Has His Limits

Andrew Sullivan notes that Joe Conason (or, actually, a reader he cites with approval and interestingly placed elipses) cites a bunch of examples of why voters are supposedly motivated solely by a preference for the nicer, friendlier guy in a presidential race. Significantly omitted from his list is Bill Clinton. Wassamatta Joe, couldn’t bear to apply this particular chestnut to the Prophet WJC?

Al Gingrich

Leaving aside the usual Times spin, this poll has very, very bad news for Democrats, and is consistent with the conventional wisdom that the 2002 election was principally a battle between a popular and trusted president and an opposition party stuck badly in reverse. The two big findings are the rising number of people with an unfavorable impression of the Democratic Party generally, and the horrific numbers for Al Gore: a 19% favorable rating vs. 43% unfavorable. Those are Gingrich-like numbers, or worse, and suggest that Gore would have an enormous task ahead of him just trying to hold onto the votes he got two years ago. If Gore’s own polls show similar results, he will really have to be consumed by his own obsessions to run again. Is he really that far gone?

Bogus Issue of the Week

GOP Senate candidate Suzie Terrell says Mary Landrieu “threatened me” by saying, after a debate, “This is your last campaign.” There’s always been a higher standard for candidates running against women, and apparently it even applies to how a woman Senator speaks to a female challenger. Then again, as Glenn Reynolds points out, this sort of thing is fair game for Republicans under Daschle’s Rules of Debate.

Moore Idiocy

According to this Washington Times report (link via OxBlog), self-parodist Michael Moore has stooped to blaming the victims of the September 11 hijackings:
The most breathtakingly idiotic segment of his show came toward the end, when he turned to the subject of the September 11 hijackings. Mr. Moore had already let us know that he had doubts as to whether Osama Bin Laden actually organized the attacks. If that were not bizarre enough, he went a step further. Brandishing a box-cutter, he wondered how the terrorists managed to subdue the passengers on the airliners using such modest weapons.
I would have thought the answer was obvious. Yet you can rely on Mr. Moore’s fertile imagination to come up with a different response: The people on the airplanes allowed themselves to be intimidated because they belonged to a pampered, privileged class which had grown used to allowing other people to do the dirty work for them. What is more, Mr. Moore would have us believe that if the planes had been carrying 90 poor people or 90 black people or 90 skinheads, the outcome would have been very different. I am glad to report that even Mr. Moore’s loyal audience fell silent at that point. There are, it seems, limits even to their gullibility.
UPDATE: Our good friend Larry points out that mocking Americans for being too soft and pampered to defend themselves is a particularly ridiculous argument coming from a guy who’s promoting a movie that claims that Americans are too violent and trigger-happy and too in love with their guns: “The NRA, a target of Moore’s idiocy, is the epitome of a group that believes, if necessary, people might have to do their own dirty work.”

To Take The Case?

BIG decisions on deck at tomorrow’s conference about what cases the Supreme Court will take, including the Michigan affirmative action case (which presents squarely the issue of whether schools can use “diversity” as code for racial preferences) and a challenge to the 1986 decision finding no constitutional obstacle to sodomy laws (a debatable decision, but expect much enthusiasm for re-visiting this issue from corners of the profession that swooned with ecstasy over the 1992 decision that held that Roe v. Wade had been on the books too long to be reconsidered). The Court’s decisions on whether to take the cases may be available as early as December 2.

Ledeen and Steyn on Iran and Islam

Michael Ledeen with the latest from Iran, and Mark Steyn on the consequences of failing to name the enemy:
[T]his is the Islamists’ great innovation — an essentially political project piggybacking on an ancient religion. In the last year, we’ve seen the advantages of such a strategy: You can’t even identify your enemy without being accused of bigotry and intolerance. What we still can only guess at is the overlap between the ideology and the religion. It seems unlikely that many Muslims in, say, Newark or Calgary or Singapore would wish to be suicide bombers themselves, but what seems clear is that in these and other places there is — to put it at its most delicate — a widespread lack of revulsion at the things done in Islam’s name. On the one hand, Muslims deny it’s anything to do with them: A year ago, in The Ottawa Citizen’s coast-to-coast survey of Canadian imams, all but two refused to accept Muslims had been involved in the September 11th attacks. On the other hand, even though it’s nothing to do with them, they party: In Copenhagen as in Ramallah, Muslims cheered 9/11; in Keighley, Yorkshire, you couldn’t get a taxi that night because the drivers were whooping it up.

The Guru’s Grievances

I hope you caught Peter Gammons’ Saturday column on Things Wrong With Baseball. Not that I agree with all his diagnoses, but it was a well-thought-out piece (combining, apparently, the Guru’s own thinking with that of his sources). I part company on griping about guys like Francisco Rodriguez being on the postseason roster, but it’s true that the Angels were able to make mock of the rules requiring the roster to be set by September 1. Many of these points are familiar ones to any reader of Bill James.