Ronnie Earle, Movie Star

Apparently, the Austin, Texas DA has been letting a film crew record his pursuit of Tom DeLay. And Earle’s methods of pressuring corporations to pay off his favorite causes in exchange for leniency are . . . unorthodox, to say the least. And we remember Earle’s use of the DeLay investigation to raise money for Democrats, which the Houston Chronicle called “a stunning display of prosecutorial impropriety.”
You know, I was appalled by the personal attacks heaped during the Clinton years on Ken Starr, an upstanding public servant and a man whose previous career had been one of unblemished integrity and civility. I felt then – and still do – that the relentless attacks on Starr, as a means of delegitimizing his inquiry and distracting from the merits of the case, were bad for the administration of justice. And so, I have deeply mixed feelings about the “pig pile on Ronnie Earle” playbook. But the more I see of Earle’s record, the more obvious it is that this is a guy with a long track record of troubling behavior with regard both to this investigation and other politically charged investigations. Maybe he has the goods on DeLay; I’m still in the process of absorbing the ins and outs of Texas campaign finance law in the hopes of making sense of this whole thing. But his behavior certainly doesn’t inspire confidence.

78-22

Mr. Chief Justice Roberts. The “yes” votes included all 55 Republicans, every red-state Democrat but three (Minority Leader Harry Reid, presidential candidate Evan Bayh, and liberal warhorse Tom Harkin), every light-blue-state Democrat but three (Debbie Stabenow of Michigan and Maria Cantwell of Washington, both up for re-election in 2006, and the retiring Mark Dayton), and even liberal stalwarts like Chris Dodd, Carl Levin, and Patrick Leahy.
UPDATE: Chief Justice Roberts:

“I view the vote this morning as confirmation of what is for me a bedrock principle, that judging is different from politics.”

Amen to that. I also see that among the honored guests at the swearing in were the widows of Thurgood Marshall and . . . Potter Stewart? He’s been dead for 20 years (Stewart was replaced on the Court by Justice O’Connor). But apparently his wife is still with us.

Presumed Innocent Until Proven Guilty

Another thing on CNN last night was a panel discussion on Larry King on the DeLay indictment, featuring, among others, left-wing pundit Katrina vanden Huevel of the Nation. King gave her a lot of rope, but at one point he was badgering her repeatedly with the question, “but you do presume that DeLay is innocent until proven guilty, right?”
Too many people misunderstand the role of the presumption of innocence. It’s a legal rule, which applies to juries, instructing them not to find guilt without sufficient evidence, and to start by assuming the defendant is innocent until that evidence has been presented. In that context, of course, it serves a valuable role.
But the presumption of innocence, even as a social norm, shouldn’t preclude pundits – who after all get paid to look at facts and offer opinions about them – from saying they think a public figure is guilty, if the available evidence supports that conclusion. Vanden Huevel would be quite within her rights to explain why the evidence Ronnie Earle has on DeLay shows that he did what he’s accused of doing.
On the other hand, if the presumption of innocence means anything in the realm of opinion journalism, it means that you can’t assume someone is guilty just because the government says so; an indictment alone isn’t proof of guilt, especially when the prosecutor in question has a track record of indicting Republicans without a sufficient basis to do so.
So, if you want to argue that the evidence against DeLay shows he’s guilty as sin, go ahead. There’s nothing un-American about that at all; to the contrary, we all get to have an opinion about our leaders. But if you want to persuade anyone that he’s guilty, it has to be based on something besides the existence of the charges themselves.
UPDATE: A commenter notes that Democrats like to point out that Democratic Travis County DA Ronnie Earle has indicted more Democrats than Republicans. I’ll let John Fund, writing in today’s OpinionJournal’s Political Diary (subscription only – no link)
respond to that point:

His defenders point out that the 63-year-old [Earle] has indicted 15 public officials in Texas in the course of his three decades as a prosecutor, of whom 12 were Democrats. But that ignores the fact that until the mid-1990s, very few Republicans were elected to public office in Texas and many of the Democrats he prosecuted happened to be bitter adversaries of his.
Among them was Democratic Attorney General Jim Mattox, whom Mr. Earle indicted on bribery charges in 1985. He was found not guilty by a jury and went on to win reelection in 1986, but lost a bitter primary for governor four years later to Earle ally Anne Richards. Another target was Democrat Bob Bullock, the late lieutenant governor and state comptroller. After Mr. Earle conducted an exhaustive investigation of his office but failed to return an indictment, Mr. Bullock compared the prosecutor to “a little boy playing with matches” and sought to curb his ability to conduct open-ended investigations of state political figures.

Reading between the lines here, Richards was and is a liberal, and Bullock was known to work across party lines with George W. Bush, so I’m guessing that some of this history is about the spilt between the Richards/Jim Hightower liberal wing of the Texas Democratic Party, and the rapidly-dying conservative wing that produced people like Martin Frost, Phil Gramm, and Charles Stenholm, with Earle being allied with the liberals. Maybe someone more knowledgeable on Texas politics can weigh in on this.

KATRINA: Walking It Back

I caught a few minutes of CNN last night, and, to their credit, Aaron Brown and Anderson Cooper were walking through all of the false stories they had helped circulate during the week following Hurricane Katrina – 10,000 dead, babies being raped in the Superdome, etc. I’ve seen the same stuff done on blogs and in the newspaper investigations that exposed a lot of these falsehoods, but it was really something different to see it on TV, with the reporters who spread the stories walking them back, and with video clips of Mayor Nagin and the now-former New Orleans Police Chief telling totally baseless horror stories to a mortified Oprah. Cooper seemed particularly shaken by the extent to which he’d bought in to and repeated things he’d heard from NOPD sources that turned out to be false. One can only hope that Oprah performs a similar service for her massive audience, many of whom likely don’t read blogs or watch late-night cable news.

My Choice?

Well, I took the quiz, but I wasn’t expecting this answer:
JUDGE ALICE BATCHELDER
JUDGE ALICE BATCHELDER
U.S. Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit, appointed by
G.H.W. Bush, 61 years old
An Ohioan, well regarded and respected for her
intellect and judgment, Batchelder could be a
nominee meant to stifle Democratic criticism.
Batchelder is considered a nominee who could
appear as thoughtful, charismatic and
intelligent in Senate hearings as Judge Roberts
was.

New World Man presents: My favorite candidate for the Supreme Court
brought to you by Quizilla
Actually, I don’t know an awful lot about Judge Batchelder, so I’m not being critical – she’s just not one of the people I’ve been thinking about for this vacancy.
Via New World Man

Time For DeLay To Step Aside

Now, unlike Bill Frist, Tom DeLay has now reportedly been indicted. [Report confirmed]. We shall see what merit there is to the charges, given the history of partisan prosecutions here, but either way, an indictment does warrant DeLay stepping down as Majority Leader until and unless he is aquitted or charges are otherwise dropped or dismissed.
UPDATE: Here’s the indictment in PDF form, via CNN; you can read the whole thing yourself, as it’s only four pages. You will notice that DeLay is not charged with any violations of law in his own right, nor with having committed any “overt act” in furtherance of the conspiracy. In other words, he’s not accused of doing anything.
Of course, in the context of an elected official’s role in his subordinates’ raising of campaign funds, that’s not surprising. Under conspiracy law, what is unlawful is the act of agreeing that the other conspirators will seek an unlawful objective. Thus, whether there’s any basis for this indictment depends almost entirely on what DeLay knew about what these guys were doing, when he knew it, and whether there is any proof that he agreed to it. The indictment, rather typically of conspiracy indictments, gives almost no indication of what that proof might consist of. It does, however, allege that the unlawful agreement was formed “on or about the thirteenth day of September, A.D., 2002,” the date on which the Texans for a Republican Majority PAC delivered a check for $190,000 to the Republican National State Elections Committee (RNSEC). One would ordinarily expect proof of some meeting or other contact by DeLay on or about that date, although with whom is left a bit vague, since he is alleged to have conspired with “one or more of” John Colyandro, James Ellis, “or with . . . Texans for a Republican Majority PAC,” so that the charge could be satisfied by proof that DeLay agreed with some person affiliated with Texans for a Republican Majority PAC other than Colyandro or Ellis.
More on this another day, and of course, while I’m familiar with federal conspiracy law, I can’t say I know anything offhand about any peculiarities of conspiracy law in Texas. If Texas is like federal law, the jury would be instructed that it needs to find that DeLay personally knew he was breaking the law and had the specific intent to violate the law. But the bottom line here is that a charge of this nature will have to go to trial to determine what DeLay’s personal involvement was.

Make ‘Em Earn It

Well, the Mets were finally eliminated from the wild card race last night, but at least they made the Astros win to do it, putting an end to a classic too-little-too-late charge. Not being eliminated until September 27 is a decent moral victory, if you’re counting them. With the team standing 80-77 and 4 of its last 5 games at home against the hapless Rockies, there are still a few more candidates:
*2 wins gets them a winning record.
*3 more wins gets them their best record since the 2000 NL Champions.
*They’re a half game up on the Marlins and Nationals, so holding third place is a realistic goal.
*They’re 2 games up on the Padres, who are in first place.

Putin Says He’ll Go

Vladimir Putin continues to insist he will respect the term limits in Russia’s constitution and step down in 2008. Which is good news, although it remains to be seen if he will follow through. Putin also had some KGB humor to offer Russian TV viewers in a nationally televised interview:

“I do not see my goal as sitting in the Kremlin endlessly and having Channels One, Two and Three constantly show the same face, and if someone chooses a different channel, the FSB director would appear on the screen and tell viewers to go back to the first three channels,” he said during the nearly three-hour program, alluding to a joke from Soviet times. The FSB is the domestic successor of the KGB, the feared Soviet security service.

From The Horse’s . . .

Al Qaeda TV:

The lead segment recounted Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, which the narrator proclaimed as a “great victory,” while showing Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia walking and talking among celebrating compatriots.
That was followed by a repeat of a pledge on Sept. 14 by Abu Musab Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, to wage all-out war on Iraq’s Shiite Muslims. An image of Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born Sunni Muslim, remained on the screen for about half the broadcast.
The masked announcer also reported that a group called the Islamic Army in Iraq claimed to have launched chemical-armed rockets at American forces in Baghdad. A video clip showed five rockets fired in succession from behind a sand berm as an off-screen voice yelled “God is great” in Arabic. The Islamic Army asserted responsibility last year for the killing of Enzo Baldoni, an Italian journalist who had been kidnapped in Iraq.
A commercial break of sorts followed, which previewed a movie, “Total Jihad,” directed by Mousslim Mouwaheed. The ad was in English, suggesting that the target audience might be Muslims living in Britain and the United States.
The final segment was about Hurricane Katrina. “The whole Muslim world was filled with joy” at the disaster, the anchorman said. He went on to say that President Bush was “completely humiliated by his obvious incapacity to face the wrath of God, who battered New Orleans, city of homosexuals.” Hurricane Ophelia’s brush with North Carolina was also mentioned.

KATRINA: NOPD Chief No More

The chief of the New Orleans Police Department has stepped down. According to some reports, as many as 300 of New Orleans’ 1,750 cops went AWOL during Hurricane Katrina, and that’s before you discuss cops who joined the looting. A man can’t be proud of running a department that goes to pieces like that in a crisis, when it’s needed most. LA cop Jack Dunphy explains.

All Tied Up

Jay Caruso wonders what happens if the Red Sox, Yankees and Indians all end up tied. A commenter provides this 2003 response from Major League Baseball:

Scenario #5: If three Clubs in a League are tied with identical winning percentages at the end of the championship season and two of those tied Clubs are from the same Division and are also tied for first place in that Division and the third tied Club has the highest winning percentage among the second-place Clubs in the remaining two Divisions, the Division Champion shall first be determined by a one-game playoff on Monday, September 29. Any playoff games played to determine a Division champion shall not count in determining which Clubs are deemed tied for a Wild Card designation. Clubs that were originally tied with a Club or Clubs for a Wild Card designation shall still be considered tied.
Example of Scenario #5: The Houston Astros, St. Louis Cardinals and Florida Marlins all have identical winning percentages at the end of the championship season. The Astros and Cardinals are tied for first place in the NL Central and the Marlins have the highest winning percentage among the second-place Clubs from the NL East and NL West. The Astros and Cardinals would play a one-game playoff on Monday, September 29. The winner shall be declared the Division Champion. Despite the loss, the losing Club would still be considered tied with the Marlins for the lead in the NL Wild Card. Those two Clubs would play a one-game playoff on Tuesday, September 30. The winner of that game shall be declared the Wild Card.

Cert Granted

Well, the Supreme Court is back in business agreeing to hear 11 cases for the new term even before John Roberts arrives. Two big ones, in terms of issues of public interest, are on campaign finance issues:
*Randall v. Sorrell, Nos. 04-1528, 04-1530, & 04-1697:
Do Vermont’s mandatory limits on campaign expenditures by candidates for state and county offices violate the First Amendment? (I noted the constitutional issues with Vermont’s Act 64 three years ago here; more here and here).
*Wisconsin Right to Life Inc. v. Federal Election Commission, No. 04-1581: Is the Federal Election Campaign Act’s prohibition on corporate disbursements for electioneering communications unconstitutional as applied to certain communications by Wisconsin Right to Life Inc.?

Selling Frist Short

Well, the latest Beltway feeding frenzy is on, and Bill Frist is the main course. If you haven’t followed this story, which as Jon Henke notes has already hit the front pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post, Frist

is facing questions from the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission about his sale of stock in his family’s hospital company one month before its price fell sharply.
The Tennessee lawmaker, who is the Senate’s top Republican and a likely candidate for president in 2008, ordered his portfolio managers in June to sell his family’s shares in HCA Inc., the nation’s largest hospital chain, which was founded by Frist’s father and brother.
A month later, the stock’s price dropped 9 percent in a single day because of a warning from the company about weakening earnings. Stockholders are not permitted to trade stock based on inside information; whether Frist possessed any appears to be at the heart of the probes.
A spokesman said Frist’s office has been contacted by both the SEC and the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan about his divestiture of the stock.

In contrast to the Democrats, Republicans have a tendency to panic and throw their leaders under the bus at the first whiff of ethical trouble. Sure enough, even hardy souls like Captain Ed and Leon H, as well as the libertarian Henke, are calling for Frist to step down, and Tom Maguire doesn’t much seem to have his heart in defending Frist. The desire to have nothing to do with this kind of trouble derives from a healthy impulse, and in Frist’s case – as was true with Trent Lott – it is driven in part by unrelated frustrations over his shortcomings as Majority Leader. But based on what we know so far, there is absolutely zero reason to believe that Frist did anything wrong, or that he will or should be in any legal jeopardy.
As an initial matter, some people have questioned whether there was a problem with Frist making any investment decisions at all, given that his assets were supposedly in a “blind trust” to comply with Senate ethics rules. Shockingly, however, Senate ethics rules on the matter turn out to be fairly porous, as Tom Maguire notes: precisely because ethics rules require federal officials to make regular disclosures about their assets, it’s not really possible for them to be entirely unaware of their holdings.
Professor Bainbridge, who was one of the first people on the Right to jump on this story, gives the necessary legal background. Basically, under the securities laws – my own area of practice, by the way – the initial question in an “insider trading” case is whether the trader was aware of information about the company that is material (i.e., information that would be important to an investor making a decision to buy or sell) and nonpublic (which means what it sounds like: information not in the public domain). As Prof. Bainbridge notes:

If some SEC enforcement lawyer in fact were to start looking into this, the first question will be whether Frist had material nonpublic information about HCA at the time he ordered the sale. If he had the common sense God gave gravel, the answer to that will be a resounding no. For somebody in his position to retain access to such information would exacerbate the inherent conflict of interest that arises when he deals with health care issues, as well as potentially exposing him to insider trading liability.
Assuming Frist did not possess such information, there’s no legal problem with the sale.

He goes on to discuss the longstanding dispute over whether the SEC needs to show trading while in possession of material nonpublic information, or whether it needs to show that the trader actually used the information. That is indeed a vexing issue, albeit one that is somewhat theoretical in many cases (the evidence of use is often circumstantial anyway). Prof. Bainbridge suggests that it might matter here if Frist could show a different motivation for selling, such as a desire to eliminate a conflict of interest that would no doubt only become a larger issue if he runs for president. But if Frist can be shown to have had access to information about HCA’s upcoming earnings news before it became public, he is politically toast no matter what the legal outcome.
The same goes, I suspect, for a second part of the legal inquiry that Prof. Bainbridge doesn’t address. Frist, as far as I can tell, has no formal relationship with HCA, so he is not technically an “insider” who owes legal duties to its shareholders. Thus, at least under the securities laws, he can only be prosecuted if (1) he was a “tippee,” i.e., some person inside the company tipped him off to inside information in violation of that person’s own duties to the company and in exchange for some benefit (such as a share in the profits), or (2) he “misappropriated” confidential information that was entrusted to him by the company in some relationship of trust and confidence. The misappropriation theory would likely not apply to information Frist may have received from members of his extended family who were involved in running HCA; the Second Circuit rejected application of the theory in such circumstances to a member of the Waldbaum (grocery chain) family in United States v. Chestman, 947 F.2d 551, 570-71 (2d Cir. 1991).
It’s not entirely clear if the “misappropriation” theory could be extended to, say, someone who learned information in his capacity as a government official. The Fourth Circuit rejected such liability in the case of officials of the West Virginia Lottery who bought stock in a company before awarding it a contract in a lengthy and scholarly opinion by Judge Michael Luttig in 1995, United States v. Bryan, 58 F.3d 933 (4th Cir. 1995), but on grounds of wholesale rejection of the theory, which was later approved by the Supreme Court. It should be noted, however, that in Bryan and United States v. ReBrook, 58 F.3d 961 (4th Cir. 1995), the same court upheld the same defendants’ convictions for mail and wire fraud. Thus, again, the issue of whether Frist is really in any trouble here all comes down to whether he had any inside information about HCA, which he denies.
On that score, what we know now suggests that there’s no reason to be concerned. At the moment, there is only pure speculation that Frist had any material nonpublic information. The suggestion (or assumption) being made by his critics is that if Frist sold a huge, long-held block of stock before bad news made the stock drop, he must have had some inside information, absent some other, rational explanation for why he sold. But Tigerhawk, in a post that’s a must-read for anyone attempting to discuss this issue intelligently (link via Instapundit), looks at the trading history of HCA and provides an obvious explanation: HCA had just had a huge run-up in value, and it was publicly known (due to SEC reporting requirements) that a lot of HCA insiders had sold stock (which can be and often is perfectly legal, by the way, depending on the circumstances):

Bill Frist, if he had any information at all about HCA when he ordered his trustee to sell his shares, knew what everybody else knew: that the management was shoveling stock out the door. That fact alone would be sufficient for many investors to sell their shares, and so it should have been for Frist, who was probably trying to get rid of them anyway in advance of his presidential campaign.
Moreover, we — and HCA investors — should applaud Frist for having handled the transaction the way he did. It was well within his rights to sell his shares much earlier in the spring, before the extent of the selling by insiders (including his own relatives) came to light via filings at the SEC. Instead, he waited to give his instruction to his trustee until after all the management selling had been disclosed. The result was that HCA’s public investors had every opportunity in the world to sell their own shares on the basis of the management selling before Bill Frist. The timing of Frist’s sale benefited those HCA shareholders wise enough to act on the insider selling, insofar as they got out the door before Frist.

Now, this is speculation, just as assumptions of Frist’s guilt are speculation, and maybe we will learn something later that changes this picture. But Tigerhawk’s analysis certainly shows why – in the absence of any evidence to the contrary – the most logical explanation is that Frist, having sound political reasons to want to sell the stock anyway, chose to instruct the trustee to sell at what looked to be an opportune time to sell.
(One final point: while they don’t happen in every case, SEC investigations of trading in advance of big announcements – particularly by people, like Frist, who are related to management – are sufficiently routine that there’s really no significance that should attributed to the existence of the investigation by itself.)
Two concluding notes:
1. I don’t have time here to address the fact that Frist seems rather clearly to have lied in TV interviews about the degree of his knowledge of the HCA stock in his “blind” trust except to say that it’s an incredibly stupid lie, given that his ownership of HCA stock was sufficiently public knowledge that interviewers kept asking him about it.
2. As I commented on Leon H’s post, it’s all too easy to bail on Frist’s ineffectiveness as Majority Leader. Remember how disenchanted we Republicans were with Trent Lott? Remember how disenchanted we were with Bob Dole? Remember how happy we were to see both of them go? Have you noticed how unhappy Democrats are with Harry Reid? How miserable they were with Tom Daschle? (Moreover, neither Reid nor Daschle nor Nancy Pelosi nor Tom DeLay nor Dick Armey nor Dick Gephardt has, within the last several years, been an effective spokesperson for his or her party.)
Face it, being a Senate leader is hard, and on issues where the caucus splinters, I’m not sure that personal leadership can do much to pierce the armor-plated egos of Senators with either fear or persuasion. I think the last really popular Senate leader, within his own party, was George Mitchell.
In short: Frist has been a disappointing Senate leader in a number of ways, and certainly his public statements on this issue haven’t helped him. It will be a good thing for the GOP to get a new Senate leader yet again in 2006. But I wouldn’t call for his head over an investigation that shows no sign of being anything more than a routine inquiry that is likely to clear him.
UPDATE: I should add that the mail/wire fraud theory pursued in the Bryan and ReBrook cases wouldn’t be available here – the government’s theory in those cases was that the defendants defrauded the government because their investments deprived the government of the defendants’ “honest services” in the process for awarding the lottery contract. Here, since there’s no allegation of anything affecting Frist’s performance of his legislative duties, that theory would be unavailable.

Ruffini’s Poll Returns

Yes, Patrick Ruffini is running the latest installment of the 2008 GOP presidential tracking poll. Ruffini’s pitch:

This month’s poll has all the features you know and love: tracking results by your favorite blogs, and a complete state-by-state breakdown. I also cooked up a little something special this month: you can now “tag” (or label) your vote so it’s uniquely you. Are you a pro-life libertarian interested in immigration and taxes? Then type: pro-life, libertarian, immigration, taxes — and see how others like you voted! Tired of poll questions that don’t ask you about the stuff YOU care about? Then tag your vote and tell everyone what you think.

Go vote.

The Game’s Appeal

Neo-Neocon offers an ode to baseball’s appeal to old and sick people:

Baseball’s season is long, and a game occurs virtually every day. Someone cooped up and housebound can have a daily appointment with something outside of his/herself, an activity that lasts a number of hours and becomes engrossing, when there are precious few other activities that fit that bill.

Read the whole thing.

BUSINESS: Too Big To Fail

Mickey Kaus nails it:

The NYT’s Tom Friedman, in an exceptionally blowhardish appearance on Meet the Press, laments the effect of massive U.S. borrowing from China:

I think we have–we are now in a position where China has– they’re heading for $1 trillion, OK, of our–in reserves that they’re going to be holding, basically. And the leverage that is going to give China over the United States in the coming years, God knows where– how that’s going to play out.

Hmm. If you lend a trillion dollars to someone, does that give you leverage over them or them leverage over you? I’d always thought it was the latter, especially when the debtor is a sovereign nation. What’s China going to do, repossess the United States?


Also on the economic front, Mindles H. Dreck notes a New York Times column on the Forbes 400 that has it completely backwards about the degree of upward mobility shown by the changes in the list over the past 23 years.

Tax and Spend

There’s been a lot of talk going around lately about government spending, and I thought I’d add some hard data in here on the percentage of GDP consumed by federal taxes and by federal spending. These are official government historical data and projections based on the Fiscal Year 2005 budget. I’ll hold the analysis for now, but this chart gives something to refer back to in later posts:

Continue reading Tax and Spend

Making The Most of It

To give him his due, Jose Reyes has managed to score 93 runs this year despite a dismal .303 OBP (to say nothing of the quality of the Mets’ #2 hitters and the disappointing production of Carlos Beltran). Alfonso Soriano has scored 99 runs with a .310 OBP.
Reyes, at least, still has an outside shot to be the first player to score 100 runs in a season with an OBP below .300 since Jake Beckley and Tom Brown in 1892, back when the average NL team scored 1.82 unearned runs/game (recall that reaching via error counts as an out in OBP); it was done 6 times between 1883 and 1892.
Five players since 1894 have scored 100 runs with an OBP below .310, all of them between 1984 and 1999: Juan Samuel twice, and Neifi Perez, Tony Armas and Devon White once each, with Armas’ .304 OBP in 1984 being the lowest, as well as the only example of a guy managing the feat mainly through power rather than speed. Thus, if Reyes scores 7 more runs without raising his OBP, he will have the lowest mark for a player scoring 100 runs in 113 years.
(List of players scoring 100 with a .309 or lower OBP here).

Anderson Cooper

Interesting profile of CNN’s Anderson Cooper. I did not know he was a Vanderbilt; he’s one of those people who just suddenly appeared on TV and it seemed like everybody knew who he was. Cooper’s had a rough life . . . the funny thing is, the anchors are such creatures of the Manhattan establishment, yet the Big Three were mostly self-made men haling from far from the East Coast, without much in terms of social or educational pedigree – Rather’s a Texan, Brokaw’s from South Dakota, Jennings was from Canada. Cooper is more from the background you’d expect in a big media guy, the background that most New York Times reporters come from.

BJ on the Block

As I noted below, the Mets may well be in the market for a free agent closer this offseason, and if they are, Orioles closer BJ Ryan should be at the top of their list. If you’re wondering why Ryan – a stud closer in his prime, pitching for a team with deep pockets – would be on the market, the O’s are apparently looking at 23-year-old rookie reliever Chris Ray as a potential closer of the future, and could either let him close in 2006 or give the job to a stopgap veteran (Ray’s minor league numbers are here).
I’m not a huge fan of building through free agency generally, or of free agent closers in particular (they tend to be overpriced), and of course the Mets do have some passable internal options, notably Heath Bell. But I don’t see Bell as a highly reliable closer in 2006; he looks like a guy who needs more seasoning in a setup role. And Ryan is the real deal, 30 years old next season, just hitting his stride in late 2003 and blossoming over the last two seasons. Of course, given the heavy investment in the great-now-who-knows-later Pedro, and Cliff Floyd entering the last year of his contract, the Mets are sensibly in win-now mode despite the extreme youth of some of their key players.
(The only Mets closer I ever really trusted was Randy Myers – Benitez blew too many big ones, Franco, McDowell, Orosco and Neil Allen all lived too close to the edge, and Looper, Dale Murray and Skip Lockwood were all just arsonists.)
I’d certainly much rather go after Ryan than Billy Wagner; Wagner’s a wonderful pitcher, but he will be 35 in July, has had injury problems in the past, and has had a bad case of Benitez Disease in big games (7.71 career postseason ERA). And the other options aren’t that appealing: Trevor Hoffman is still deadly effective, but he will be 38 next year, presumably prefers to re-sign with San Diego, and wants big bucks to leave, and Octavio Dotel may not pitch again until 2007.
A free agent closer makes more sense if the Mets are shedding some other salary this offseason (Piazza, for example, will either re-sign for less or go elsewhere, and Cameron could be dealt) and aren’t pursuing other free agents. The rest of the crop is fairly slim. AJ Burnett is the prize, but other teams more desperate for starting pitching will lead the chase; Kevin Millwood is the only other starter worth looking at. Johnny Damon will inspire bidders, but the Mets have two expensive center fielders already; the surplus of outfield options will probably also keep them from chasing Hideki Matsui, Brian Giles or Milton Bradley (although Matsui would be worth it). The Mets aren’t going to pursue Nomar, and presumably wouldn’t sign Rafael Furcal to play 2B. Ramon Hernandez, reputedly a catching option, isn’t all that impressive, and I’m not thrilled about Paul Konerko, although he’d be a major upgrade (Bryan Smith has more on the 1B market).
Oh, and: signing Ryan would keep him away from Atlanta . . . forcing them to get a 1.50 ERA and 35 saves out of some minimum-wage journeyman instead.

Pack Your Bags

Braden Looper, having now lost his closer job, proves tonight that he’s equally capable of blowing a lead in the 8th. Time to shut Looper down for the season and have the doctors get to work on whatever’s been sapping his sinking fastball.
Go to #3 on this list for the guy the Mets need to pursue this offseason. (And for those of you having Benitez-vu, he’s also #2 on this list over the same time period).

Quick Links 9/21/05

*Instapundit thinks spending federal funds and law enforcement resources battling adult (i.e., not child) pornography is a waste of resources. I agree. Porn is a classic example of the sort of thing that, even if you are going to crack down on it, ought to be left to the local level; as the Supreme Court recognized decades ago, what counts as obscene in one community may be acceptable in another. And it’s awfully difficult to argue that pornography has any truly national impact, except by making arguments under which any bad thing has a national impact.
*Unless I remember incorrectly, this represents the first indictment of a Bush Administration official. That’s a marked difference from the record of prosecutions in the Clinton Administration (or the Reagan or Carter Administrations, for that matter). If the history of two-term presidencies is any indicator, this will not be the last.
*Youppi! is back, after a year spent living under an overpass in Montreal carrying a “Will Mascot For Food” sign (in French, of course). (via Kevin Cott).
*Now, Tom DeLay says, “There are programs all over the federal budget that are bloated or wasteful or inefficiently using the funds we provide them, and I’m very interested in identifying them.” How long has DeLay been in Congress?
Some are arguing that it’s time for divided government – that Democrats in Congress would at least produce some pork-killing gridlock. I mean to get to this point in more detail when it’s time to discuss the McCain 2008 campaign, but while fighting pork is a good thing, the real battle is to change the structure of the budget process and rein in entitlements – neither of which would ever be helped even one little bit by electing more Democrats. But I’m not that optimistic that we’re getting anywhere on that front under the GOP, either.
*This looks like a bad idea. So does this, if it means that partisan sniping has led the Bush White House to divert one of its best homeland security people to handle an investigation.
*Rafael Palmeiro is being investigated by Congress for perjury. Which serves him right, but if we’re on the subject of waste of taxpayer money, this is a rather conspicuous example.

Gary Ackerman Goes Blue

From a July 29 press release by my Congressman, Gary Ackerman:

Ackerman noted that “since last fall, I have tried again and again to work with FEMA on this rule so that 9/11 first responders and their families could start collecting the funds raised by the 9/11 Heroes Stamp. But at every step, FEMA – which does a spectacular job responding to disasters and emergencies throughout the country – refused to accept input or provide any feedback as to the content of the rule or when it would be published. I have enormous respect and admiration for what FEMA does in crises, which is why I’m so disappointed in this rule. Unfortunately, more than 45 months since the stamp was created, 38 months since the stamp went on sale, and more than six months since beginning work on the rule, what’s been produced is, frankly, half-a__ed bureaucratic bulls__t. New York’s best and bravest deserve far, far better than this.”

(Emphasis added). I’ve omitted the language here, which is unfortunately not omitted from Ackerman’s press release. Isn’t this crossing a line that should not be crossed? I mean, it’s one thing when a politician uses foul language in a private conversation and it somehow goes public, most famously in the case of Nixon’s White House tapes but also, more recently memorably, in the case of George Bush in 2000 calling a New York Times reporter an unprintable name while talking to Dick Cheney in front of what turned out to be a live microphone. And it’s another thing when that conversation is had in a setting where the politician should have known his conversation would be overheard and publicized, as with Cheney’s use of an expletive to Patrick Leahy in a meeting on the Senate floor. And it’s another thing still when a politician uses a bad word in a magazine interview that’s expressly intended for publication (even if, as in the case of John Kerry’s Rolling Stone interview, the magazine in question is one that uses such language freely), or in a radio interview (as in Ray Nagin’s outburst during the hurricane).
But this is a new low, putting this sort of language in a press release. Now, while I refrain from using bad language on this blog, I’m certainly not innocent of doing so in my daily life, so I’m not getting squeamish here about the words themselves. My point is, simply, that it is yet another step to the coarsening of our culture to incorporate obscenties into the public vocabulary of our elected officials, one of the few areas of public discourse in which that is still taboo, and in which a measure of formality and civility is still expected to prevail. Recall Lileks’ prediction, in August 2002:

Once vulgar words are commonplace in the papers and the television, there’s no going back – and public life just gets cruder and cruder. I know it’s a losing battle. Fifty years down the road a presidential candidate will say “My opponent says I’m soft on the military, and to him and all his advisors, I can honestly say: f**k you.” He’ll be celebrated in some corners for connecting with the genuine people, with those not bound by musty conventions. The authentic people! The ones who really f**kin’ live!

It turned out to be one year and four months down the road, not 50. And Ackerman’s press release is another step down that road. By 2008, will we have candidates who, like Atrios, call everyone who disagrees with them “f___ers” and leave it at that? Even if we don’t, we are headed in that direction.
UPDATE: Jesse Taylor makes the opposite case, and in the process pretty well plays right into the popular caricature of the Angry Left as over-agitated, immature, reflexively oppositional and utterly lacking in perspective.

Getting to First

Following on yesterday’s thoughts, you can see the list here of all players, through 2001, who posted a .370 OBP in a season of 500 or more at bats with a slugging percentage below .400. 27 players have done the feat more than twice, and thus established themselves, at least at some point in their careers, as “pure” OBP guys; I will group them by era.
1871-1919
Jimmy Barrett
Bob Bescher
Donie Bush
Topsy Hartsel
Dummy Hoy
Miller Huggins
Fielder Jones
Clyde Milan
Jimmy Sheckard
Burt Shotton
Roy Thomas
1920-1959
Luke Appling
Richie Ashburn
Lu Blue
Elbie Fletcher
Jim Gilliam
Billy Goodman
Stan Hack
Johnny Pesky
Pee Wee Reese
Eddie Stanky
Eddie Yost
1960-2001
Brett Butler
Rickey Henderson
Tony Phillips
Willie Randolph
Ozzie Smith
It does seem to me that a disproportionate number of these guys played for a lot of successful teams, notably Henderson, Randolph, Ozzie, Gilliam, Reese, Sheckard, Stanky, Hack, Pesky, and Jones.

Follow The Leadoff

Where did all the good leadoff men go – or were they always this rare? It seems, at least, like finding guys who do the basic job of getting on base is awfully hard these days, especially if you think of a leadoff man in the traditional terms of a guy who can run and steal some bases but isn’t a big power hitter. I decided to compare this season to some seasons in the not-too-distant past to see how much has really changed.
What I did was to look at all players with an On Base Percentage (OBP) of .370 or higher (in at least 450 plate appearances), which is a good cutoff to identify the mark of excellence in getting on base (it’s 40 points above the MLB average). Then, I asked two questions:
1. How many of these guys can steal any bases?
2. How many of these guys wouldn’t be used as leadoff men because they are big sluggers? Nobody’s gonna lead off Albert Pujols, after all. And more to the point, as anybody who has played Rotisserie baseball, WhatIfSports or any other fantasy or simulation game can easily understand, in an age of tight budgets, it’s a lot harder to afford a good leadoff man if you have to pay for one who’s going to hit 40 home runs.
Of course, I quickly discovered that I needed a control group to measure how unusual the distribution of the OBP leaders was, so I compared 2005 to 1977 and 1987. I chose 1977 and 1987 because they were the seasons in the 1970s and 1980s most similar to today in terms of league offensive production: In 1977, the NL batted .262/.396/.327 and the AL .266/.405/.329. In 1987, the NL batted .261/.404/.327 and the AL .265/.425/.332. In 2005, the NL is batting .262/.413/.330 and the AL is batting .268/.424/.330. You can see the league leaders in OBP for 1977 here, 1987 here (both based on a full-season 502 plate appearances) and 2005 here.
Let’s look at the breakdown of the .370-and-up OBP crowd in each league by steals and slugging. First, as base thieves:

Year 40+ 30-39 20-29 15-19 10-14 0-9 TOTAL
1977 3 2 2 7 3 14 31
1987 6 4 2 5 3 20 40
2005 0 1 1 6 6 20 34

Of course, since steals are a cumulative category, you’d expect 2005 to be just a little low, since the season’s not over yet. But still: in 1977, 7 of 31 of the top OBP guys stole 20 or more bases; in 1987, the figure is 12 of 40. In 2005, it’s just two guys – Bobby Abreu, whose .515 career slugging percentage makes him awfully expensive to use as a leadoff man, and Brian Roberts.
Then, slugging:

Year Sub-.400 .400-49 .450-99 .500-49 .550-99 .600+ TOTAL
1977 1 7 7 9 6 1 31
1987 2 8 10 9 10 1 40
2005 1 4 5 12 8 4 34

Now, your real slap hitter, with a slugging percentage below .400, is hard to find here in any era: in 1987, even Brett Butler slugged .425. But in each of the two older seasons, you could find a decent selection of guys below .500: 15 of 31 in 1977, 20 of 40 in 1987. This year? 10 of 34. And that group of 10 includes two bona fide mashers who are just below .500 (Abreu and Brian Giles), two slow-moving catchers (Victor Martinez and Joe Mauer), and three guys who don’t run particularly well and have had careers marked by injury and inconsistency, to the point where nobody would have banked on them as leadoff men (Sean Casey, Nick Johnson, and Marcus Giles). That leaves three guys you would legitimately consider as elite leadoff hitters: Derek Jeter, Luis Castillo, and Placido Polanco.
The era of Raines and Rickey, this is not. A corollary is that it may be worth it for more teams to give up on locating a traditional leadoff man and just stack the top of the lineup with sluggers who get on base, especially if they run well (e.g., 1-Beltran, 2-Wright . . .)

Quick Links 9/16/05

*The Washington Post:

Slightly more than half of American teenagers, ages 15 to 19, have engaged in oral sex, with females and males reporting similar levels of experience, according to the most comprehensive national survey of sexual behaviors ever released by the federal government.
The report today by the National Center for Health Statistics shows that the figure increases to about 70 percent of 18- and 19-year-olds.
The survey, according to those who work with young people, offers one more sign that young women are more sexually confident than they used to be.

As a friend writes, “One could, accurately, replace the word ‘confident’ with ‘promiscuous.'”
*Is Anderson Hernandez on the way?
*Michael Newdow may have won another round in California, but the US District Court in DC rejected his attempt to get a permanent injunction against prayers at the inauguration of the President. (Link opens PDF file).
*Maybe you saw, or heard, the tearful story told on national TV by Jefferson Parish president Aaron Broussard:

The guy who runs this building I’m in, emergency management, he’s responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in a St. Bernard nursing home and every day she called him and said, ‘Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, Mama, somebody’s coming to get you. Somebody’s coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody’s coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody’s coming to get you on Thursday. Somebody’s coming to get you on Friday.’ And she drowned Friday night. She drowned Friday night.

If so, you were lied to. Via Jeff Goldstein, who has been en fuego on the Hurricane Katrina story, to the point that he can barely keep his server running.
*Wonder if the people who got all bent out of shape over the Tom Delay-Homeland Security-Texas Legislature flap will go nuts over a Louisiana Democratic Congressman, who is perhaps not coincidentally under federal investigation, diverting the National Guard to clear possessions out of his house rather than save people.
*Speaking of DeLay, if he really believes Congress is doing a good job holding the line on spending and there is no fat left to cut in the budget, it is clearly past time for the House GOP to go get itself a new leader. Via NRO (and yes, I’ve seen subsequent reports putting the quote in context – they make it a little more understandable but no more defensible.
*Then there’s the story of a 57-year-old New Orleans man who drew on his long-ago training as a Vietnam veteran and walked out of town. Via Brian Preston, who has likewise been all over Katrina and its aftermath.
*Classic George Will (via NRO). Favorite line: “You can no more embarrass a senator than you can a sofa.”
*Go read Ann Althouse on John Roberts’ view of the use of foreign law in interpreting the United States Constitution (hint: he’s agin’ it).
*So, what does the Chief Justice do? His main importance on the Court is that he picks who writes the opinions, out of the Justices in the majority (if he joins the majority – Burger used to switch sides just so he could control who wrote what). Rehnquist was reportedly less interested in using this power, except when he wanted one for himself. It was presumably Rehnquist who decided that the Bush v. Gore opinion should be an unsigned per curiam opinion.
However, the Chief has other jobs all to himself, such as heading the Judicial Conference and power of appointment for FISA court judges; this article explains these duties well. And more here. Also, as we recall, he presides at trial if the President gets impeached, although the way Rehnquist interpreted this role left most of the procedural rulings to be made by the Senate, not the Chief Justice.
*Some jokes never get old, especially #4 here.
*Mark Steyn, as usual, had the definitive word on the “Crescent of Embrace” design for the Flight 93 memorial, which has since been scrapped:

[T]he men who hijacked Flight 93 did it in the name of Islam and their last words as they hit the Pennsylvania sod were no doubt “Allahu Akhbar”. One would be unlikely even today to come across an Allied D-Day memorial so misconceived in its spirit of reconciliation as to be called the Swastika of Embrace. Yet Paul Murdoch, the architect, has somehow managed to produce a design whose two most obvious interpretations are a) a big nothing or b) a splendid memorial to the hijackers rather than their victims.

*I agree with this.
*This is hilarious:

In order to draw attention to Wal-Mart’s paying its workers an average of $10.17 an hour with benefits, the UFCW hired a bunch of temps at $6.00 an hour with no benefits. And while the oppressed, exploited Wal-Mart workers slave away in air-conditioned comfort, those blessed with the Union paychecks walk up and down outside in the sun until they get blisters on their feet. The Wal-Mart workers are coerced into taking regular breaks in a private area; the Union employees are dropped off at the beginning of their shift and left to fend for themselves for the entire day.

If the Democrats really want people who work and shop at Wal-Mart to vote Republican, and they get the people who hate the place, I’ll take that deal. Dick Cheney understands that.

Free Fallin’

If there’s anything in baseball more depressing than watching a team that had been hanging around contending suddenly go into free fall and start losing all the time and playing listless baseball, it’s watching this happen for the fourth year in a row. The Mets, 68-60 on August 26, are now 3-14 since . . . they’re like the Bizarro Mets: Kaz Matsui’s hitting about .350 in that stretch, and the rest of the team is helpless. Ugh.
UPDATE: Numbers for the 17-game-and-counting swoon here and here. Matsui’s hitting .353/.529/.382, most likely ensuring himself the chance to compete with Anderson Hernandez for the starting job again next year, Beltran’s hitting .338/.492/.411, and Castro and Piazza are hitting a combined .260/.520/.356, and basically nobody else is hitting anything. On the pitching side, the big disaster (aside from Looper, which was entirely predictable) has been Benson, who’s been a batting practice pitcher for the past month.
SECOND UPDATE: My prediction (linked above) had been two games blown by Looper against NL East foes in September. Well, we’re only halfway through the month and he just blew #2, the first being the game in Atlanta on September 7 where he blew two leads, one in the 9th and one in the 10th, to go with two games (September 1 and 13) where he coughed up an insurance run in the 9th inning of a 2-run loss. This follows two losses and a blown save (in a game they’d led by 8 runs against the Nationals) in August. It’s time for Looper to leave town, now. (And Matsui, Ishii, Offerman, and Gerald Williams should be right behind him).
OF COURSE, elsewhere, it’s Benitez time.

The Googlesphere

Google Blog Search arrives. WaPo has the story.
Which reminds me of something I’ve noticed while searching Technorati and Blogpulse. In my ordinary blog reading, I am constantly amazed by how many talented writers there are out there, people with something to say and a knack for saying it. There are many hundreds of such blogs now, carrying on scores of conversations about every issue under the sun, although I mainly read blogs on politics and baseball.
But then, when you go outside of the widely-read and widely-linked parts of the blogosphere, and start running across things written on LiveJournal and Xanga and the like, you realize how many people there really are out there who just can’t write – or, apparently, think – to save their lives. It’s quite an eye-opener. Granted, some of them are teenagers who will learn eventually, but still.

KATRINA: Making FEMA a First Responder

We’ve heard a lot lately about the notion that FEMA should have taken, and should take in the future, a more leading role in making the federal government, in effect, a first responder to natural disasters and terrorist attacks. Now, there’s a fair debate here over whether the federal government ought to improve its ability to respond quickly with redundant capacity to provide emergency supplies, evacuation, etc. in the event that state or local first responders are for one reason or another incapacitated.
But we should resist, at all costs, the idea (pushed by Mickey Kaus, among others) that the federal government should centralize a greater amount of the nation’s first-response capacity. Let’s look at two aspects of this problem.
1. Vulnerability
Let’s think rationally here, in terms Osama bin Laden would understand, and we – as long as we’re fighting him, or fighting anybody else, for that matter – can ill afford to forget. We have two choices:
A. Centralize disaster-response with FEMA, with the heads of DHS and FEMA and the President personally responsible for making the crucial decisions.
B. Decentralize disaster-response, with decisionmaking power in the hands of 50 Governors and scores of Mayors.
Even the leader of a ragtag terrorist operation can tell you that decentralizing authority into local cells that can operate on their own for long stretches makes you less vulnerable to your enemies. The more we centralize our response to disasters with FEMA, the more we hand our enemies the ability to cripple our response to multiple simultaneous attacks in different parts of the country. Imagine if Flight 93 had hit the White House – wouldn’t it then have been a particularly good thing that Rudy and Pataki could put the NYPD and NYFD into action without awaiting word from Uncle Sam? Why on earth should our response to this disaster be to centralize rather than distribute our ability to respond in a crisis?
2. Local Knowledge
As critics of the Iraq War never tire of reminding us – and, for that matter, as opponents of the Vietnam War often noted – for out-of-towners, there’s no substitute for knowing the neighborhood. Even closer to home, consider the lesson of the 2004 election. As was much remarked at the time, outside of the big cities – where Democrats had longstanding political machines skilled in getting voters to the polls on Election Day – Republican get-out-the-vote efforts were generally more successful than those of the Democratic side, in part because the Republican “GOTV” operation was carried out locally by local voters, whereas the Democrats in many areas were dependent upon outside groups. While you can debate the degree of importance of this factor, virtually every post-mortem on the election concluded that the Democrats need to improve their local grassroots operations.
What has this got to do with disaster preparedness? Quite a lot, actually. Just as with voter turnout, getting people to evacuate a city or gather in a safe shelter is a job in which there’s just no substitute for local knowledge. You have to know who lives where, how to persuade them to budge, and you have to know the fastest way out of Dodge. And even moreso than in doing Election Day turnout, you don’t have time to learn all of that in the chaos of a disaster or an attack that may give just a few days’ or hours’ warning, if even that much.
By all means, let’s talk about improving the federal response to disasters; regardless of who deserves credit and blame for the response to Hurricane Katrina, nobody who watched the unfolding of events in New Orleans could conclude that there is no room left for improvement at all levels. But in so doing, let’s not make ourselves more dependent upon Washington and less reliant on the people who are in the best position to know their own turf.

Mr. Chirac, Tear Down This Wall!

We already knew that George W. Bush was a (rhetorically) committed free trader, even if his actions haven’t always lived up to his rhetoric (ahem, steel tariffs). But this call for the total worldwide abolition of trade barriers, as pie-in-the-sky as it may be under present international political conditions, ought to warm the hearts of conservatives, libertarians and Clinton-style liberals everywhere. Nothing wrong with shooting high and setting goals we can work to, even if it takes the next few decades.

No Longer Just A Humble Carpenter

Yes, this is basically an edited version of the email Bill posted. And in my defense, I didn’t see his email in my Yahoo! box until at least a half hour after he sent it . . .
Bill Simmons and I were having a discussion about how much precedent there is for Chris Carpenter having the sort of dominant, Cy Young-caliber season* he’s had this year, given that Carpenter is 30 years old and has had a mediocre, injury-riddled career.
The obvious precedent is Mike Scott. Scott through age 29 had career bests of 10 wins, a 3.72 ERA, 154 innings, and 83 strikeouts. At age 30, Scott went 18-8 with a 3.29 ERA and 137 K, and the next year exploded on the league, going 18-10 with a 2.22 ERA in 275 IP, striking out 306 batters, throwing a division-clinching no-hitter, and winning the Cy Young Award.
So, who else is similar to Carpenter? Well, recall first that, like Scott, Carpenter built up to this with what looked, just a year ago, like a career year: he was 15-5 last year with a 3.46 ERA (121 ERA+) and 7.52 K/9. I don’t think anyone predicted this season after he broke down (yet again) at the end of last year (me, I’ve been arguing for years that he should be converted to a closer due to his fragility). If you look at guys with big bust-out seasons in their 30s, there’s a bunch of examples of less dramatic turnarounds by guys who were inconsistent or injury-prone in their 20s (Mike McCormick, Kevin Brown, Curt Schilling, Mike Cuellar, Bob Tewksbury), were previously relievers (Wilbur Wood, Hank Aguirre), pitched OK and got huge run support (Steve Stone) or just didn’t get a shot in the majors until they were past 30 (Dazzy Vance, Spud Chandler, Sal Maglie). But I could think of four others who have a similar profile:
1. If you look at the top 10 most similar pitchers to Carpenter entering 2005 on baseball-reference.com, you’d find Jason Schmidt at #9. Schmidt’s career-bests through age 29 were 13 wins, a 3.45 ERA, and 196 K, all set or matched at age 29 (his age-29 season is quite similar to Carpenter’s). At 30, Schmidt went 17-5, 2.34 ERA, 208 K, pitching comparably to Carpenter, if winning a few less games and throwing a few less innings.
2. Bucky Walters, through age 29, had career bests of 15 wins (at age 29) and a 4.17 ERA. At 30, he went 27-11 with a 2.29 ERA and won the MVP Award; other than Scott, he’s probably the most similar case.
3. John Tudor‘s career bests were 13 wins and a 3.27 ERA, until at age 31 he posted the 1.93 ERA in 275 innings and won 21 games. Getting out of Fenway and getting Ozzie behind him had a lot to do with that, of course.
4. Dave Stewart’s career high in wins through age 29 was 10, and he’d never tossed 200 innings before. Stewart at 30 started the string of four consecutive 20-win seasons, although he didn’t instantly dominate the league.
I could be forgetting someone – I didn’t exactly do a systematic study – but I think those are the most dramatic examples.
* – I’ll save for another day the Carpenter vs. Roger Clemens Cy Young debate. Suffice it to say that Carpenter’s season is of legitimate Cy Young quality; the question is whether you can give the award to someone other than Clemens, given how well he’s pitched.

Time To Plan The Victory Parade

June 12, 2007, will mark the 20th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s “tear down this wall” speech at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin. While I suppose I would prefer a more obviously non-partisan anniversary (the 50th anniversary of Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech is in March 2006, which is probably too soon to plan something like this with everything else that’s going on), this would seem as good an anniversary as ever to plan something that should have been done long, long ago: a victory parade in the nation’s capital for America’s veterans of the Cold War.
In past wars, America celebrated victory with parades suitable to honor the returning soldier. That was never done for Vietnam, and as far as I know, it wasn’t done for Korea, either. While the veterans of those wars are mostly still with us, it’s past time to rectify that omission with a celebration that truly embraces their sacrifice and honors their contribution to ultimate victory over Communism.
The main reasons, I suspect, for not having a formal celebration back when the Cold War ended were (1) the way the “long, twilight struggle” ended in gradual stages and (2) a desire to let sleeping dogs lie by not rubbing Russia’s face in its defeat at a time when we were trying to coax it to democracy. 15 years on, those considerations are less pressing. And it could have a salutary effect in the current struggle to remind the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan that their country has the will to win a long struggle and a long enough memory that their sacrifices won’t soon be forgotten, even when we hit setbacks and ask them to fight battles that end with a whimper rather than a bang.
Whether the anniversary of the Reagan speech is used as the jumping-off point or not, of course, there’s no reason why a parade honoring veterans of Korea, Vietnam and other, smaller Cold War battles would not be a genuinely bipartisan event, as there are numerous members of both parties in Congress and elsewhere who fought in those wars and would or should be interested in a formal display of honor for their former comrades in arms.
What are we waiting for?

KATRINA: Over Her Head

Bob Somerby collects excerpts from an interview with Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu, which make clear how incapable she is of answering even the simplest of questions; really, the excerpts alone tell the story. (Via NRO). This line is one no Republican could get away with:

Mayor Nagin and most mayors in this country have a hard time getting their people to work on a sunny day, let alone getting them out of the city in front of a hurricane.

And I thought Republicans were cynical about big urban political machines. (John Hawkins has more horrendous quotes from Left and Right about the hurricane).

Continue reading KATRINA: Over Her Head

Echoes of O’Rourke

John Roberts:

Mr. Chairman, I come before the committee with no agenda.
I have no platform.
Judges are not politicians who can promise to do certain things in exchange for votes.
I have no agenda, but I do have a commitment. If I am confirmed, I will confront every case with an open mind.

PJ O’Rourke’s 1993 speech to the Cato Institute:

The Cato Institute has an unusual political cause — which is no political cause whatsoever. We are here tonight to dedicate ourselves to that cause, to dedicate ourselves, in other words, to . . . nothing.
We have no ideology, no agenda, no catechism, no dialectic, no plan for humanity. We have no “vision thing,” as our ex-president would say, or, as our current president would say, we have no Hillary.
All we have is the belief that people should do what people want to do, unless it causes harm to other people. And that had better be clear and provable harm. No nonsense about second-hand smoke or hurtful, insensitive language, please.
I don’t know what’s good for you. You don’t know what’s good for me. We don’t know what’s good for mankind. And it sometimes seems as though we’re the only people who don’t. It may well be that, gathered right here in this room tonight,are all the people in the world who don’t want to tell all the people in the world what to do.
This is because we believe in freedom. Freedom — what this country was established upon, what the Constitution was written to defend, what the Civil War was fought to perfect.

Hey, there are worse people to sound like.

Another Justice From Justice?

With hearings gearing up on John Roberts, RedState’s Erick Erickson, parsing the latest rumors from sources who might have reason to know, says that while Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez and Judge Edith Brown Clement are off the short list to replace Justice O’Connor, Miguel Estrada (formerly of the SOlicitor General’s office, like Roberts) may be back on it. (Tigercon has more background on the tragic death of Estrada’s wife, the details of which I hadn’t been aware of but which obviously affect Estrada’s own thinking). James Taranto has the not-entirely crazy idea that Bush should instead appoint yet another DC-based former DOJ attorney, law professor and former Assistant Attorney General Viet Dinh.
Interesting that so many of the candidates appear – like Roberts – to be Beltway insiders, rather than judges from outside Washington. Of course, this is partly the Bork/Souter effect: if you want to avoid a candidate with a long paper trail like Bork, yet ensure that you don’t get ugly surprises as with Souter, your best choice is to take someone who is a personally known quantity to a lot of DC Republicans (the way Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justices Scalia and Thomas were – Rehnquist had been at DOJ, Scalia the head of the Office of Legal Counsel and on the DC Circuit, Thomas the head of the EEOC and – like Roberts – briefly on the DC Circuit). Of course, as Estrada and Dinh are both relatively young and many of the objections made to Estrada (including demands for memos he wrote with the SG’s office) are the same as those raised against Roberts, Estrada would seem to be a particularly logical pick if Bush intends to unveil his selection before Roberts is confirmed.

KATRINA: A New Category

I’ve created a new separate category for posts on Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Even as the issue is politicized, I don’t really feel comfortable just logging entries on this topic under the heading of “politics”.

KATRINA: Not So Fast?

Polipundit carried some very optimistic predictions on Friday, from a veteran National Guardsman serving there at the moment, about Katrina’s death toll and New Orleans’ recovery. A sample:

3. The Mardi Gras Carnival Parade will go on “as scheduled” for February 28, 2006.
4. Within thirty days, electricity will be restored to a majority of NOLA.
5. Within thirty days, 90% of the city will by dry enough to access by civilian SUV.
6. Dependent on the restoration of water/sewer service, of which I have no first hand knowledge to comment, large numbers of NOLA residents will be going home by Thanksgiving.
7. Ninety percent, or more, of the residents that were displaced in NOLA will eventually return to the city in search of the now greatly expanded employment prospects in construction.

Read the whole thing. If you look solely at the questions of pumping water out of the city and rebuilding, the optimistic view may well be the better bet; it can be all too easy to underestimate the human, and specifically American, capacity for rebuilding when people need to get resettled. But stories like this one, from Thursday, make me wonder:

Four persons have died in what federal health officials think was likely a bacterial infection circulating in Hurricane Katrina’s contaminated floodwaters in New Orleans, and new EPA tests show the water is full of sewage and lead.
Environmental Protection Agency Director Stephen L. Johnson said yesterday that the amount of E. coli and coliform, a bacterium found in sewage, in the water was at least 10 times EPA’s recommended levels. Lead levels in the water also were elevated, he said.

Sure, the water can be pumped out of the city. But the 1-2-3 punch of bacterial infections, chemical contamination, and mold could make the city uninhabitable in practice for much longer. It took a long time to knock out all the buildings contaminated by mold in lower Manhattan after September 11, and Manhattan isn’t surrounded by humid swamps (recall that even before Katrina, Governor Blanco was forced to abandon the Louisiana Governor’s Mansion for the summer due to a tenacious mold problem). That problem will be multiplied by the need to inspect virtually every building still standing in the city to see which ones need to be knocked down. I want to be optimistic, but I’m not holding my breath.

Equal Time for Terror?

Steven Spielberg’s upcoming movie about the 1972 Palestinian terrorist attacks on the Israeli Olympic team in Munich is bound to stir controversy; I’m withholding my own opinion until I see it. But this is ridiculous:

Steven Spielberg has been criticized by the only surviving Palestinian terrorist behind the massacre at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, Germany, because the director failed to consult him over his new movie dramatization of the tragic events.

So, who did he call? Well, I’ll give you one guess . . .

Mohammed Daoud was a member of terror group Black September in the early 1970s and was responsible for the deaths of 11 Israelis in Munich’s Olympic Village. He has been on the run ever since. But Daoud is so angry with Spielberg’s supposedly pro-Israel stance in new film Munich, he contacted news agency Reuters to put forward his side of the story. He says, “If someone really wanted to tell the truth about what happened he should talk to the people involved, people who know the truth. Were I contacted, I would tell the truth. (Israel) carried out vengeance against people who had nothing to do with the Munich attack, people who were merely politically active or had ties with the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization).”