Episode 161: A New Hope

Well, the Mets today played pretty close to the theoretical best game they could possibly play under the worst possible circumstances: they set a season high for hits and tied their season high for runs scored while allowing 0 runs on 1 hit. John Maine came within 4 outs of the first no-hitter in franchise history and set a career high in strikeouts, while throwing 115 pitches to allow everyone in the pen besides the rawest rookies (Muniz and Collazo) to take the day off without even warming up. Lastings Milledge had his first career multi-homer game. Carlos Gomez made a spectacular diving catch in center field, dodging a collsion with an onrushing Ruben Gotay, to preserve a 13-run lead. Even Sandy Alomar Sr. got into the act, taking a punch to the head that was intended for Jose Reyes, while agitated Mets generally avoided taking the bait of consecutive bench-clearing incidents to avoid engaging in conduct that could lead to a suspension. Only a few instances of baserunning vapor lock by Reyes and Milledge marred the afternoon.
Meanwhile in Philly, Chico was the man for the Nationals and the Phillies played some horrible defense (for all the guff the Mets took for blowing a lead they held for more than 130 days, the Phillies’ lead lasted just one day before they gave it back), Tony Gwynn jr. robbed his padre’s Padres of their chance to put the Wild Card away, and suddenly tomorrow will dawn with two teams tied in the NL East, and possibly three teams tied a game behind the Wild Card leader. On the bright side, the Mets last night finally maneuvered themselves into a situation where they had to play some championship baseball to win a championship, and now they send Tom Glavine, veteran of more big games than you or I could count, against Dontrelle Willis tomorrow with the season in the balance, while Glavine’s senior, Jamie Moyer, faces Jason Bergmann, and Jake Peavy faces Jeff Suppan. The Mets will presumably hold back only Maine and Pedro (the likely 1-game playoff starter, on 3 days rest for his surgically repaired shoulder); “staff” will be available.
For one night, Tug McGraw can cease spinning in his grave. Time to Believe.

Bruuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuce at the Rock

Just a moment to blog here – I just got back from seeing Bruce Springsteen live at Rockefeller Center (which is just a block from my office). It was awesome (and a good deal more fun than last night’s Mets game, which I was at Shea for, and which quickly turned from desperation to a funereal atmosphere). Granted, I couldn’t see Bruce from where I was standing, and I couldn’t hear nearly any of what he said when he bantered with or hectored the crowd or chatted with Matt Lauer, but (a) I was still closer to the stage than I have been for the three times I saw him in concert, and (b) hey, it’s free. It was sort of surreal, since I was across the street and while Bruce was playing there were an endless stream of cabs, trucks, cop cars, buses, etc. streaming by. I also got to see Tim Russert, who wandered in front of one of the big panoramic second-floor windows on his cell phone and waved to the crowd.
Bruce was scheduled to go on at about 8:30, but he came out to do a warmup at 8am sharp – and oddly, he played “The Promised Land,” which he then played a second time as his opener on the air. Bruce and the band both sounded great. After that he played two of the new songs that for various reasons I had not heard previously. First was “Radio Nowhere,” which rocks, and if anything reminded me of “Trouble River,” but bouncier. Second up, and preceded by some political screed about tearing up the Constitution and whatnot (I couldn’t make out enough of it to really be irritated, and besides, we know Bruce’s politics by now) was “Living in the Future,” which has a real vintage E Street Band feel to it. Then he did a fairly somber version of “My Hometown,” and came back out (I assume for the last time – I left a few minutes later) for an encore of “Night,” a little bit of an odd choice at 9am but the longtime Bruce fans in the crowd ate it up.
UPDATE: From YouTube, audio of Bruce doing “Radio Nowhere” in Asbury Park Tuesday night:

And here is “Living in the Future”

It would appear that Bruce may have done one more song after I left….grrr.

Hey, Big Spender

When you adjust for inflation and remove defense spending and entitlements, which recent presidential terms had the highest and lowest rates of discretionary government spending growth?
discgrowth-nodefense-bypresident-cpi.JPG
Neil Stevens has the full story. Remember to consider changes in control of Congress during terms, notably Reagan’s second (the Senate went Democrat) and Clinton’s first (the 1994 elections); it takes three parties (the White House, the House and the Senate) to spend, and credit and blame alike need to be shared.

Six Car Pileup

Another morning, the sun rises, I get out of bed…the Mets’ efforts to kill me having failed for another day. My head hurts even contemplating the effort that goes into David Pinto’s daily calculations every September of the possibilities for a massive tie for the wildcard; you can check out today’s here. Bottom line:

So with five days left, we have a long shot at a six-way tie, and two possibilities for a five way tie. On top of all that, the Brewers gained a game on the Cubs, so we could end up with a tie in the NL Central as well. There is a very small chance that the regular season ends with half the National League teams still in the playoff hunt. . .

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[A] six-way tie results in two days of playoff to determine the division winners, then two days of playoffs to determine the wild card. Who doesn’t want seven extra single elimination games?

(Raises hand)

Fred on Ahmadinejad

Personally, I thought Fred Thompson hit just precisely the right note on Columbia University’s decision to give a platform to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:

I find it ironic that Iran’s president accepted an invitation to speak at Columbia University, since students who dissent on Iranian campuses are not met with debate, they are met by a gun and imprisonment. A few months ago, eight college students were imprisoned in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison for publishing articles and cartoons critical of Iran’s government in a student-run newspaper. The Evin facility has been described as Iran’s ‘most feared prison’ and is known to stone women to death. We need to do our best to empower freedom-loving people throughout Iran.

This, by the way, is the side of Fred that we need to see more consistently. While there are many different problems with giving Ahmadinejad a platform, I loved the way he pointedly ties this to the oppression of campus free speech in Iran (the same line he drew in his response to Michael Moore), which just pierces the hypocrisy of people who pretend like giving this man a platform is somehow advancing the cause of free speech and free inquiry on campus.
Given that we host the U.N., it wasn’t really feasible to deny Ahmadinejad a visa, but the man should not be extended a welcome anywhere. First of all, it should be remembered that the original reason why we don’t have diplomatic relations with his regime is that that regime – including Ahmadinejad personally, as one of the young hostage-takers – violated every norm of basic diplomacy and the most ancient and fundamental precepts of international relations and international law by seizing diplomats and holding them hostage for over a year. Add to that Iran’s longstanding sponsorship of terrorism against the United States and its allies, most vividly in the case of the 236 U.S. Marines killed by Iranian-backed Hezbollah in 1983, as well as Ahmadinejad’s (and the regime’s) longstanding threats against the existence of Israel, Holocaust-denial and plots to build nuclear weapons – none of which the regime has ever shown any remorse for – and you have a man whose appearance here has nothing to do with free speech and everything to do with the raw assertion of power by an aggressive, terror-sponsoring tyranny.
For contrast, check out Tom Maguire’s lengthy demolition of two pitiable Josh Marshall screeds taking Ahmadinejad’s side in this controversy. Maguire notes that Marshall’s position puts him even to the left of his own party’s presidential candidates. Note that while Marshall concedes that “we officially don’t like him. And we classify the country he runs as a state sponsor of terrorism,” he is unable to force himself to admit that Iran actually is a sponsor of terrorism, since that would pretty well disintegrate his entire argument.
As Maguire notes, while Iran is not an Al Qaeda sponsor (with Hezbollah on the payroll, that would be redundant) it’s an overstatement to parrot the talking point about how the Iranians have no responsibility at all for September 11:

[W]hen Dr. Marshall says that “[Ahmadinejad] has absolutely nothing to do with 9/11” he is being disingenuous. From the 9-11 Commission we learned that 10 of the hijackers traveled through Iran en route to the US while Iranian border officials waved them through without leaving any eyebrow-raising passport stamps. Now, Ahmadinejad was not in power in 2000/2001, but as the current leader of the Iranian state he certainly bears symbolic responsibility.

Now, this puts Iran more on a par with the Saudis than, say, the Taliban; the conditions that led to September 11, after all, were the result of an entire region’s combination of fanaticism and terror-sponsoring tryannies (which had every incentive to look the other way at each other’s mischief). But it’s certainly further reason not to welcome the Iranian head of state to Ground Zero.

It’s Official: Lawyers Are Incapable Of Understanding Civility

The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan has ruled, as a matter of law, that lawyers are unable to understand what “courtesy and respect” means.
OK, a little more detail on that one: outspoken Michigan lawyer Geoffrey Fieger, best known for representing Dr. Jack Kevorkian and for running as the Democratic candidate for Governor of Michigan in 1998, was disciplined under Michigan Rules of Professional Conduct 3.5(c), which prohibits lawyers from “undignified or discourteous conduct” toward judges and courts, and Rule 6.5(a), which requires lawyers to treat everyone involved in the legal process with “courtesy and respect.” Fieger’s original grievance stemmed from a Michigan appellate court decision that reversed a medical malpractice verdict, finding that he had

(1) without any basis in fact, accused defendants and their witnesses of engaging in a conspiracy, collusion, and perjury to cover up malpractice, (2) asserted without any basis in fact that defense witnesses had destroyed, altered, or suppressed evidence, and (3) insinuated without any basis in fact that one of the defendants had abandoned the plaintiff’s medical care to engage in a sexual tryst with a nurse. The panel described Mr. Fieger’s misconduct as “truly egregious” and “pervasive” and concluded that it “completely tainted the proceedings.”

The Michigan Supreme Court described how Fieger responded to the decision by this panel – and for all the practicing attorneys in the audience, I would not advise you to try this yourself:

Three days later, on August 23, 1999, Mr. Fieger, in a tone similar to that which he had exhibited during the Badalamenti trial and on his then-daily radio program in Southeast Michigan, continued by addressing the three appellate judges in that case in the following manner, “Hey Michael Talbot, and Bandstra, and Markey, I declare war on you. You declare it on me, I declare it on you. Kiss my a**, too.” Mr. Fieger, referring to his client, then said, “He lost both his hands and both his legs, but according to the Court of Appeals, he lost a finger. Well, the finger he should keep is the one where he should shove it up their a**es.”
Two days later, on the same radio show, Mr. Fieger called these same judges “three jackass Court of Appeals judges.” When another person involved in the broadcast used the word “innuendo,” Mr. Fieger stated, “I know the only thing that’s in their endo should be a large, you know, plunger about the size of, you know, my fist.” Finally, Mr. Fieger said, “They say under their name, ‘Court of Appeals Judge,’ so anybody that votes for them, they’ve changed their name from, you know, Adolf Hitler and Goebbels, and I think – what was Hitler’s – Eva Braun, I think it was, is now Judge Markey, she’s on the Court of Appeals.”

The Federal District Court, however, overruled the State Supreme Court on the federal constitutional question of whether the Michigan rules are vague, overbroad, and “are so imprecise that persons of ordinary intelligence must guess at their meaning.” It’s the latter ruling that prompted the District Court to conclude:

One person’s courtesy may be another person’s abomination. For example, a man extending his hand in greeting may be a courtesy to many. To others, it may be a violation of a fundamental belief. Thus, the chance of selective enforcement based on the judiciary’s sensibilities is too great for these rules to withstand constitutional scrutiny.

Yes, and one man’s threat to put his fist up….well, there is probably merit to the conclusion that rules of this nature are overbroad and give the judiciary power to sanction legitimate speech. But I fail to see how there is any possible basis for saying that Fieger was unable to understand that he was crossing and leaving far behind in the dust any pretense at the minimal level of decency and civility that an attorney is supposed to show to the courts he practices before. Unless lawyers really are unable to understand what “courtesy and respect” means.

Stat Breakdowns of the Day

1. For Jose Reyes’ career, he is batting .353 and slugging .547 when putting the first pitch in play, .336 and .491 on an 0-1 pitch, and .302 and .450 on a 1-1 pitch, and .353 and .545 on a 2-1 pitch, and .287 and .418 overall after falling behind 0-1, but just .259 and .393 after getting ahead 1-0.
Most players have huge splits based on the count, and many hit well on the first pitch, but Reyes is extremely rare for hitting better when the first pitch is a strike than when it’s a ball. Of course, his OBPs are much better when he’s ahead in the count, and like nearly all hitters he hits poorly (in absolute terms) with two strikes on him, but it is perhaps a sign of some benefit to Reyes’ overall aggressiveness as a hitter that getting one strike up on him doesn’t get you far (the same trend can be seen in his 2007 stats but less dramatically, perhaps reflecting his maturation to a more conventional hitter).
Anyone who has watched him over the last six weeks or so knows that Reyes has been swinging at some bad balls again, but when he is on, he does have tremendous plate coverage.
2. If Josh Beckett’s season ended today, he’d be the third pitcher in baseball history to win 20 games while throwing fewer than 200 innings, the other two being Pedro Martinez in 2002 and Bob Grim in 1954. Note that Pedro and Jamie Moyer are the only guys to appear twice on the list of 20-game winners throwing 220 innings or fewer. Unsurprisingly, 13 of the 20 guys on the list are from the past ten seasons.

Fraud By The Left To Smear The War Effort

An admission of guilt:

A Washington man, whose claims to have slaughtered civilians as a U.S. Army Ranger in Iraq were seen by millions on YouTube, admitted in federal court in Seattle today that he was a fake and a liar.
Jesse Adam Macbeth, 23, pleaded guilty to charges he faked his war record. “He was in the Army for 40 days before he was kicked out of boot camp for being unfit,” said U.S. Attorney Jeffrey C. Sullivan. “He was never in Iraq.”…
Macbeth’s story of killing men and women as they left a Baghdad mosque included claims that he was a U.S. Army Ranger and had received the Purple Heart for injuries suffered in combat in Iraq.

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His interview was translated into Arabic and distributed in the Middle East, said the U.S. attorney.
“Macbeth’s lies fueled hostility to our servicemen in Iraq and here at home,” Sullivan said.

H/T
That’s the end result of lies like those of Jesse MacBeth or Scott Thomas Beauchamp: they assist the enemy, who of course depends on winning in the propaganda war battles that can not be won against American soldiers in the field.
For shame.

Those Unnamed Foreign Leaders Are Back!

And this time they’re pissed. Assuming they exist, that is.
For all of his legendary political savvy, Bill Clinton just can’t help himself from repeating one of the stupider mistakes of the Kerry ’04 campaign (which is saying quite a bit): touting the support of (mostly) unnamed and unidentifiable “foreign leaders” who are allegedly supporting Hillary!:

Bill Clinton regularly touts his wife’s bid for the White House by telling crowds that leaders around the globe are pulling for Hillary Clinton’s election in 2008.
Yet none of the leaders the former President cited will back him up, the Daily News has found.
“Every African leader I talked to, every single one when I was there, without any prodding from me, said, ‘For God sakes, I hope Hillary wins. We don’t like disliking America here,'” Bill Clinton said at a fund-raiser for her last month.
“I called the outgoing French president, and he said, ‘Oh, tell me Hillary’s going to win. I’m so tired of disliking America,'” Bill Clinton told the crowd.
Bill Clinton also quoted the immediate past prime minister of Singapore as saying, “‘Please tell me Hillary’s going to win. We need America leading the world again.'”

This is at least a threefer for boneheadedness. First, Bill looks like a liar (perish the thought, I know) because nobody will admit to saying this to him. Granted, they should deny it in public, but with Bill one never knows either way, which is pretty much the point.
Second, it is a visible symptom of the Democrats’ obsession with placing an absurdly high priority on making nice with foreign executives and diplomats, something most Americans rightly regard as at best a very minor foreign policy priority, and at worst a sign of giving away too much to people who manifestly have their own interests and not ours at heart. Shepherds should not be popular with wolves.
And third, it sounds hopelessly naive to suggest that the causes of anti-Americanism in foreign locales is simply the personalities and policies of individual leaders rather than fundamental conflicts of national interest and ideology. It’s true that personalities can play a part – in the specific case of France, our relationship is already improving dramatically due to Chirac being replaced by Sarkozy, but underlying causes of tension between U.S. and French foriegn policies won’t just go away.
Remember the First Rule of Democrats and Foreign Policy: They never learn. They never, ever, ever learn.

A Matter of Trust

I’d mark Thursday as the point at which I officially switched from being annoyed that the Mets were making this race much closer than it needed to be to being convinced that they will go nowhere in the playoffs. While the other parts of the team have had their hiccups, the entire reason for that is the pen. I mean, coming from behind to build a 3-run lead in the late innings and then blowing it to a last-place team is once thing; doing it twice in a 4-game series is just indescribable. You do not need a great bullpen to win in October, but you need an adequate one; a team that can’t protect any lead against anyone just can’t win.
For the record:
Heath Bell: 77 games, 80 IP, 2.17 ERA, 93 K
Chad Bradford: 75 games, 62.1 IP, 3.47 ERA
Brian Bannister: 164.1 IP, 12-9, 3.61 ERA
Royce Ring: 15 games, 15 IP, 3.60 ERA
Henry Owens: 22 games, 23 IP, 1.96 ERA, 4 SV
To be fair, Owens – like Ambiorix Burgos – is down for the count, having required rotator cuff surgery, and Ring hasn’t worked more because he walked 14 guys in 15 innings. And I wasn’t for re-signing Bradford at the price he commanded, except that the team spent almost as much on Schoenweis.
If there is a silver lining for the bullpen from yesterday’s debacle – other than the fact that the offense saving their bacon increases the odds of getting a few days’ breather at the end of the season – it’s that Joe Smith pitched well; Smith has been totally ineffective since his return, but I’d still rather try him in big situations than Mota and Sosa.
Of course, on a macro level the schedule may be the Mets’ salvation, as over the next four days they face Washington at home three times and the Cards once, while a still-not-mathematically-eliminated Braves team rides into Philly.
UPDATE: Of course, the bullpen might look a whole lot better right now if we had Duaner Sanchez, Burgos and/or the elusive Juan Padilla. Realistically, the Burgos deal was still a sensible gamble that just didn’t pan out because Burgos was hurt (this being the Royals rather than the Braves, I assume they didn’t know he was hurt). What’s really inexcusable is the Bell deal, since the Mets never really had a basis to believe that Jon Adkins was going to help them.
SECOND UPDATE: It should be noted that Heilman and Feliciano have both passed their career high in games pitched, Smith is in his first season as a pro ballplayer, and Mota has made 50 appearances in just 105 games on the roster.

The Little Black Raincloud

I’m trying to pry the sky off my head after the Mets had to take Beltran out tonight with a leg injury of undetermined severity, with the announcers discussing the possibility that if Billy Wagner’s not ready to go tonight the team may use a guy who arrived from AA this morning to close.
Now, it’s raining. Ideally, the rain will end the game after 5 with the Mets up by 4, but more likely all it will do is guarantee that Pedro doesn’t pitch the sixth and thus the Mets need four innings of relief work.
UPDATE: Apparently it was a knee injury. Beltran walked off the field under his own power, but we have seen in the past that he does not play well through injury.

Power Imbalance, Part II

Following up on a point from last week – on the whole, home runs are down in both leagues this year, but far more dramatically in the AL, to the point where NL hitters are going yard more frequently than their AL counterparts for the first time in this decade. Of course, as the following chart shows, when you take out NL pitchers and AL DHs, the NL’s power output has been ahead all along, but is dramatically further ahead this season:

Year AL-AB AL-HR AL-DH-AB AL-DH-HR NL-AB NL-HR NL-P-AB NL-P-HR AL-HR/600 NL-HR/600 AL-w/oDH NL-w/oP
2007 73752 2120 7640 298 84208 2550 4505 26 17.2 18.2 16.5 19.0
2006 78497 2546 8035 392 88844 2840 4832 29 19.5 19.2 18.3 20.1
2005 78215 2437 8099 327 88120 2580 5025 18 18.7 17.6 18.1 18.5
2004 78731 2605 8146 328 88622 2846 4932 24 19.9 19.3 19.4 20.2
2003 78311 2499 8094 327 88426 2708 4981 29 19.1 18.4 18.6 19.3
2002 77788 2464 8159 316 87794 2595 4939 27 19.0 17.7 18.5 18.6
2001 78134 2506 8137 337 88100 2952 5007 26 19.2 20.1 18.6 21.1
2000 78547 2688 8178 352 88743 3005 5177 32 20.5 20.3 19.9 21.3

The last four columns are expressed in terms of home runs per 600 at bat. Of course, you could slice the numbers more finely if you had time, to take out the small number of AL pitcher and NL DH at bats and correct for Coors Field, but what’s interesting to me is the dramatic change in one season in the AL, much more dramatic than in the NL. I’ll leave you for now with the data but I may do a little more thinking about whether there is a plausible cause here beyond random variation.

Justice Stevens: “Pretty Darn Conservative”?

WSJ Law Blog carries a series of excerpts from a lengthy NY Times Magazine profile ($) of Justice John Paul Stevens, the senior Justice on the Supreme Court and by any commonly used standard the leader of the Court’s liberal wing. Some of the key excerpts:

“I don’t think of myself as a liberal at all,” he told me during a recent interview in his chambers, laughing and shaking his head. “I think as part of my general politics, I’m pretty darn conservative.” Stevens said that his views haven’t changed since 1975, when as a moderate Republican he was appointed by President Gerald Ford to the Supreme Court. Stevens’s judicial hero is Potter Stewart, the Republican centrist, whom Stevens has said he admires more than all of the other justices with whom he has served. He considers himself a “judicial conservative,” he said, and only appears liberal today because he has been surrounded by increasingly conservative colleagues.

[H]e emphasized that he still thinks of himself as a judicial conservative, which he defined as someone who tries to follow precedents and “who submerges his or her own views of sound policy to respect those decisions by the people who have authority to make them.”

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“Originalism is perfectly sensible. I always try to figure out what the original intent was, but to say that’s the Bible and nothing else counts seems to me quite wrong.”

Up to a point, Justice Stevens is framing his view of the Court’s job in terms similar to those commonly used by Justice Scalia or by Chief Justice Roberts to describe their judicial philosophies, and he’s self-identifying as a “judicial conservative.” Now, you can take this, if you like, as so much disingenuousness in light of his record, but I think it’s also a powerful tribute to how far conservatives in general and Justice Scalia in particular have shifted the landscape in how people within and outside of the Court perceive its role and mission that even Justice Stevens finds it desirable that he be perceived as engaging in the same sort of project, and disagreeing mainly at the margins of what constitutes “judicial conservatism.” Just as was true when Bill Clinton declared that “the era of big government is over,” the moment your opponents start cloaking themselves in your philosophical garb, you know you are winning the battle of ideas. It also means that nostalgia for the old order (H/T) is simply the lament of the losing side in that battle.
Relatedly, Tom Goldstein, who is certainly no conservative himself but is a careful observer of the Supreme Court, has a thought-provoking post on the political implications of the upcoming Term. Among other things, he predicts a victory for Guantanamo detainees in their pursuit of access to federal courts, and notes that whichever way the DC gun ban case comes out, it’s likely to mobilize the Right more than the Left. His analysis is worth considering:

Continue reading Justice Stevens: “Pretty Darn Conservative”?

Lamentations, O Lamentations

How many leads must a man throw away
Before you won’t give him the ball?
How many times must he throw the same way
And watch it go over the wall?
The pennant race, my friends, is being blown again
The pennant race is being blown again
How many times must a manager do
The same thing that cost him last night?
And how many games must the lead dwindle down
Before he can see he’s not right?
The pennant race, my friends, is being blown again
The pennant race is being blown again
And how many arms must a man trade away
Before you can give him the blame?
How many dollars can go to a man
Who can’t show to close out a game?
The pennant race, my friends, is being blown again
The pennant race is being blown again.
UPDATE: I have added a visual representation of Willie Randolph’s handling of the bullpen:

Continue reading Lamentations, O Lamentations

Paul Krugman’s Dream World

Paul Krugman apparently has a blog at the NY Times site (now that they are giving it away for more than it is worth), and Tom Maguire actually read an entire post there, on how Krugman’s utopia – reduced income inequality – requires a revival of the FDR years. Maguire:

Of course, as a policy prescription, urging Dems to inflict a depression and world war on the rest of us in order to achieve Krugman’s vision of greater income [equality] may seem a bit harsh, so I can see why he shies away from that.

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Krugman wants to return us to a happy place we reached by way of war and depression, a place where minorities and women could not work, and where illegal immigrants toiled in the fields but nowhere else. And he wants to pretend that is not how we got there, and not where we were. Good luck. Let’s hope his subsequent blog offerings show a bit more of a basis in reality.

Good luck with that.

The Latest Romney Ad and Strategy


Allahpundit says:

[T]he ad’s really about good government and effective management, both of which conservatives are hungry for and both of which Mitt’s well positioned to push, partly based on his record and partly on his reputation as a guy so squeaky clean that he won’t even use foul language. Rudy’s too socially liberal to get away with an ad like this, Fred has too much lobbyist baggage, and McCain’s too much of an amnesty shill. If any one of the big four’s going to do it, and it needs to be done, it’s Mitt.
Mitt’s also the only one of the big four who’s hinted, however slightly, at drifting away from Bush on Iraq. If things take a downturn this fall, he’ll probably be the first major Republican candidate to tack left to try to capture growing anti-war sentiment among the right.

I’ll refrain from commenting in more detail for now (regular readers should know by now I am not a fan of Romney as a presidential candidate, for many reasons I will come back to when time permits) …certainly, Romney is not the first of the ’08 candidates to (properly) try to distance himself from the Beltway GOP’s departures from conservative principle on spending.
An interesting strategic question is whether Romney will turn out to have put too many of his eggs in the Iowa/New Hampshire basket. Personally, I don’t think Mitt should have any regrets about his IA/NH strategy; I think it was the best angle for him to pursue, and it does still give him a theoretical pathway to the nomination, which was always going to be an uphill battle for him. He started off with a natural advantage in NH as a high-profile neighboring GOP governor, and that squeaky-clean persona made him a good fit for Iowa social conservatives. And he was always going to meet skepticism in the South. You can criticize the way Mitt has carried out his campaign but his overall strategic choices on where geographically to spend his money and time have been sound.

Rick Perry, VP Material?

Now, I’m not from Texas, so maybe I’m missing something here. Matt Lewis thinks Texas’ Governor would be a fine addition to a national ticket:

Perry’s national visibility will also likely increase, as he is rumored to be in line to become Chairman of the Republican Governor’s Association (RGA) — a position that often serves as a stepping-stone toward a presidential bid.
Sources tell me the governor has close relationships with both Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. One can easily imagine that the endorsement of a conservative Texas governor might help Giuliani in his bid to seal the nomination.
Should Giuliani’s wooing work, a Perry VP nomination is certainly imaginable.

From what I know of Gov. Perry, he’s a solid enough Republican but nobody’s idea of a star in the makings, and not really all that beloved by serious people in the Texas GOP – kind of a Texan George Pataki, albeit a better Republican than Pataki because he is planted in better soil.

Your Papers, Please

Hillary! wants to make it illegal to get a job if you don’t have proof of health insurance:

She said she could envision a day when “you have to show proof to your employer that you’re insured as a part of the job interview — like when your kid goes to school and has to show proof of vaccination,” but said such details would be worked out through negotiations with Congress.

Proof of health insurance, yes. Proof of citizenship, no; that would be unfair and mean-spirited. Also, it’s racist to require proof of citizenship and eligibility to vote.
Got that straight?

Anathema

Add to the list of people I never want to see in a Mets uniform again Brian Lawrence, Aaron Sele, and, if he wasn’t already, Jorge Sosa (note that the list already included Guillermo Mota and Scott Schoenweis, as well as Chan Ho Park).
Joe Smith was no prize yesterday either.
UPDATE: Since August 26, Pedro, Glavine, Maine, Perez and Pelfrey are a combined 9-3 in 102.2 IP with a 2.81 ERA, averaging 8.50 hits, 0.61 HR, 3.86 BB and 7.10 K per 9 innings.
In the same period, Wagner, Heilman and Feliciano are 0-2 with 6 saves in 26.1 IP with a 3.42 ERA, averaging 8.20 hits, 1.03 HR, 2.73 BB and 8.89 K per 9 innings.
In the same period, the rest of the staff is 0-2 in 22.2 IP with a 10.32 ERA, averaging 14.69 hits, 2.38 HR, 5.16 BB and 3.97 K per 9.
I demand that you shoot me now.

UPDATE (Tuesday night): Let’s go Mets!

Fred Will Need Specifics If He Wants To Govern With A Mandate

If you watched the inaugural episode of “Fred Answers,” you will note that Fred Thompson did an excellent job of explaining why the tax code is broken, but didn’t actually answer the question of whether he prefers the Flat Tax, the so-called “Fair Tax,” or something different.
Now, we don’t expect presidential candidates to unroll complex legislative proposals at the drop of a hat, so I’m not necessarily criticizing him for not giving his own proposal on the spot. But I am suggesting this: if you expect Fred Thompson to overhaul the tax code or the entitlement system, watch to see if his campaign puts out a detailed white paper or some such document actually proposing to do so. Because if he doesn’t, I submit to you that he will never get any such plan passed through Congress.
Why do I say that? Consider the history. President Bush campaigned on a big, detailed tax cut plan in 2000 (as Reagan did in 1980) and (like Reagan) he got it passed. The Bush tax cut plan had taken a lot of slings and arrows in the primary and general election seasons, but when it came time to propose it, everybody on the Hill knew that the guy who proposed it had survived the election. No Child Left Behind went through a similar process, albeit getting passed in a form that jettisoned some of the more popular elements of the bill (school choice).
By contrast, President Bush didn’t unroll a specific Social Security reform plan in 2004, and three years later, he never has sent up to the Hill proposed legislation on that topic. Even though he had campaigned twice on the general outlines of his plan, he lost the battle to convince people in Congress that he had been elected with a mandate to actually make this happen. Ditto for comprehensive immigration reform.
In 1992, the Clintons campaigned on a national healthcare plan, but many of the details of HillaryCare had been ironed out in secret commitee sessions after the inauguration. Lacking an electoral mandate for the plan itself (which derived as well from having received only 43% of the vote), the Clintons were never able to go over the heads of Congress.
There are exceptions to this, to be sure; genuinely bipartisan “Tax Reform” got passed in 1986, for example, without anyone having run on such a platform in 1984. But that case, as with any of Fred’s plans, would need to be a product of true bipartisan compromise of the sort that few of us would view with any degree of confidence. Other examples of large-scale domestic legislation often involve reaction to perceived recent crises rather than longstanding ills of Washington.
Like it or not, Mitt Romney understands this dynamic, which is why he is running on a health care plan that was actually enacted into law in Massachusetts; if he survives the primary and general elections, the plan will have a good head of steam behind it. Rudy Giuliani and Mike Huckabee (the other two experienced executives in the race) have also unveiled at least the beginnings of detailed health care and tax plans, respectively, and may need to go further down that road themselves.
Sure, it may well be smart electoral politics to avoid the kind of specifics that sink big, complex reform proposals, since the candidate is apt to sink with it. But there’s no way around the fact that a presidential candidate who hasn’t staked his own rear end on a proposal won’t be able to get nervous Congresscritters to put theirs on the line.

The Ninth Circuit Rejects Foreign Policy By Civil Lawsuit

The Ninth Circuit today affirmed the dismissal of a complaint by the family of Rachel Corrie, who was crushed to death by a bulldozer operated by the Israel Defense Forces while protesting the destruction of Palestinian homes, against Caterpillar, the manufacturer of the bulldozers. The plaintiffs also included the families of various Palestinians. The court did not wade into the facts far enough to grasp the extent to which Ms. Corrie was actively abetting the smuggling of weapons used in terrorism against Israel, nor to discuss who was really at fault in the specific incident that led to Ms. Corrie’s death. Instead, it dismissed under the political question doctrine, finding that, because the bulldozers were financed and permitted to be sold by U.S. aid to Israel, it was not the place of the courts to allow a civil lawsuit to decide such explosive foreign policy questions and possibly resolve them differently than would the Executive and Legislative Branches:

The decisive factor here is that Caterpillar’s sales to Israel were paid for by the United States. . . .

+++

Allowing this action to proceed would necessarily require the judicial branch of our government to question the political branches’ decision to grant extensive military aid to Israel. It is difficult to see how we could impose liability on Caterpillar without at least implicitly deciding the propriety of the United States’ decision to pay for the bulldozers which allegedly killed the plaintiffs’ family members.

+++

We cannot intrude into our government’s decision to grant military assistance to Israel, even indirectly by deciding this challenge to a defense contractor’s sales.

+++

In this regard, we are mindful of the potential for causing international embarrassment were a federal court to undermine foreign policy decisions in the sensitive context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Plaintiffs argue that the United States government has already criticized Israel’s home demolitions in the Palestinian Territories. They point, for example, to former Secretary of State Powell’s statement that “[w]e oppose the destruction of [Palestinian] homes – we don’t think that is productive.” But that language is different in kind from a declaration that the IDF has systematically committed grave violations of international law, none of which the United States has ever accused Israel of, so far as the record reveals. Diplomats choose their words carefully, and we cannot subvert United States foreign policy by latching onto such mildly critical language by the Secretary of State. Cf. Crosby v. Nat’l Foreign Trade Council, 530 U.S. 363, 386 (2000) (“[T]he nuances of the foreign policy of the United States . . . are much more the province of the Executive Branch and Congress than of this Court.”) (internal quotations omitted).
It is not the role of the courts to indirectly indict Israel for violating international law with military equipment the United States government provided and continues to provide. . . . Plaintiffs may purport to look no further than Caterpillar itself, but resolving their suit will necessarily require us to look beyond the lone defendant in this case and toward the foreign policy interests and judgments of the United States government itself.

Three cheers for the Ninth Circuit panel (consisting, by the way, of two Clinton appointees and a Carter appointee) for getting this one right.

Phiasco

What an utter disaster this weekend was for the Mets, the only compensation being that the Phillies are still 4 back in the loss column and the Mets’ last 14 games include one game with a team that’s 8 games under .500 (the Cardinals), 6 with a team that’s 17 under (the Nationals), and 7 with a team that’s 19 under (the Marlins), whereas the Phils have three games with Atlanta, three with the Cards, 7 with Washington and none with the Marlins.
It’s bad enough to lose to the Phillies on their strength – the offense really is hard to stop – and the exposing of the Mets’ weakness, their middle relief. But much of the past 8 straight losses to the Phils has been the result of the Mets failing to capitalize on the Phillies’ weak points (not scoring even adequately on their weak pitching staff, especially the bullpen) and being betrayed by their own strengths – the best defensive team in the league making 6 errors in a game (at one point yesterday Jimmy Rollins had induced an error or botched defensive play on five consecutive plate appearances), Billy Wagner blowing games, the best base stealing team in the league repeatedly running themselves out of innings (as Gotay and Reyes did in the pivotal sixth inning on Saturday, including Reyes’ boneheaded caught stealing at third to end the inning, while Carlos Gomez failed to take a key extra base Friday night, costing the Mets the chance to win in regulation).
At this point, I’m counting El Duque out of the postseason picture until we see him make a healthy outing again; it’s ironic (or worse) that after all those years of postseason glory in the Bronx he may be out or effectively useless in October two straight years with the Mets. Some of that may be that the Mets have actually expected him to hold down a rotation slot all season rather than just giving him weeks off in midsummer to stay fresh, of course.
What does that leave for the October staff? Pedro and Glavine are definitely in the rotation; Glavine has righted the ship recently after some doldrums and while Pedro hasn’t been as dominating as 17 K, 4 BB and 0 HR in 16 IP and a 1.69 ERA would suggest (it’s not an accident that he’s allowing more than a hit an inning), he looks plenty crafty enough to deserve a rotation slot in October. For now, that suggests a rotation of Pedro-Glavine-Perez-Maine, and the bullpen would include Wagner-Heilman-Feliciano . . . but after that, who? I hate the idea of using Mota and Schoenweis in a postseason game (even Randolph has to be out of patience with Mota after yesterday), and Sosa has been in a tailspin lately. Sele has been growing cobwebs in the pen, and he’s really done nothing to make me trust him. I’d like to see Joe Smith get a shot if he is completely healthy, but he needs some appearances in the majors again. Collazo and Humber are totally unproven and at this point unprovable commodities. About the only other option is Pelfrey, who has finally been putting things together lately. Pelfrey at least doesn’t give up home runs, but while he’s never terribly wild, he still needs to show more consistent ability to put the ball where he wants it if he is going to pitch important innings in big games.

Harry Reid Draws A Line In The Sand

One of the basic rules of political power is never to stake everything you have on a fight you are not sure of winning. But with rumors swirling that former Solicitor General and Reagan Justice Department official Ted Olson might be tabbed as the next Attorney General, the Senate Majority Leader yesterday laid down an ultimatum on which he was willing to stake the full prestige of his office:

“Ted Olson will not be be confirmed by the Senate,” Reid said after a Capitol news conference. “I intend to do everything I can to prevent him from being confirmed as the next attorney general.”

Reid may well be betting on a sure thing, as the rumor of the day is that Olson is no longer the frontrunner for the job, perhaps due to White House concerns over a messy and difficult confirmation process for Olson in spite of his stellar resume, unquestionable qualifications for the job, past confirmations by the Senate and undoubted ability to best any Judiciary Committee Senator in verbal combat. But for a Senate leader who has accomplished little and failed at many of his goals since gaining the majority, betting it all that Ted Olson will never be confirmed is a risky gamble.

Quick Links 9/13/07

*Michael Lewis is a wonderful writer and a guy who understands and loves markets. You have to read (here and here) his take on the subprime lending crisis. (Not everyone is amused). Lewis himself was a bond trader for a few years in the 1980s, leading to his smash hit book “Liar’s Poker,” and he poses here as a Gordon Gekko-type hedge-fund manager who blames poor people for evertything. The great thing about these pieces is that they are double-edged satire, containing enough cold-hearted economic truth to effectively skewer subprime borrowers and Capitol Hill demagogues, but at the same time mocking the misanthropic (at best) attitudes he parrots.
*Speaking of which, Gekko himself is apparently coming back as a hedge-fund manager (improbable given his insider-trading conviction, but that’s Hollywood – it wouldn’t be as much fun if he was running a car insurance company). I wonder how he reacts when he finds out Martin Sheen ended up President.
*Medieval scholastics would have been awed by the effort exerted by the Third Circuit to determine that putting on a hair net is “work”. Of course, I am thankful not to work in a place of employment that has an “evisceration” department.
*The Constitution stops at the frat house door, as the Second Circuit upholds a college’s right to use anti-discrimination policies to deny recognition to a fraternity on grounds of not admitting women. There’s a case to be made for greater autonomy of educational institutions and a case to be made for the fundamental ambiguity of right-to-association law, but the reasoning used in this opinion is almost as flimsy as the public policy at issue is blinkered.
*An ex-parrot who was impressively intelligent.
*Of course, Michael Moore’s new movie is loaded with untruths. (H/T). That’s like going to a Jackie Chan movie and seeing a lot of kicking.
*Seems like a whole lot of nothing to me.

Bill Belichick’s Patriot Act

No, especially after reading KSK’s take I couldn’t resist that title.
The news that Jets coach Eric Mangini caught Bill Belichick in the act of stealing the Jets’ defensive signals via video camera in violation of NFL rules presents a number of interesting issues. For obvious reasons, the NFL isn’t going to go back and start forfeiting games or kick Belichick out of the league, but the penalty does have to be real and stiff to discourage this sort of thing from happening; the NFL has talked about docking the team draft picks, and a first round pick would be a sufficiently stiff penalty that it should be included. And yes, the penalty should fall on the team as a whole, since this was an operation involving multiple people from the head coach on down for the benefit of the club.
Sign-stealing has a long pedigree, of course, and in baseball we have the now-notorious example (only unearthed 50 years later) of the 1951 Giants’ elaborate surveillance operation. But while baseball has mostly treated it as a venial sin and one that carries no penalty if you aren’t caught red-handed (as the Patriots here were) it strikes me as being a more serious issue in football, given the elaborate nature of the play-calling process in today’s game.
At the same time, I’m not so quick to jump on the bandwagon of people trying to strip the legitimacy of the Patriots’ titles; as is often the case with these things, you start doing that and it raises the issue of who else got away with what that was never known or suspected.
Probably the biggest lesson of the whole affair is that you should never use dirty tricks against people who used to work for you and know your M.O. “The Mangenius” knew Belichick’s tricks from having worked for the Pats; if Belichick expected Mangini to keep quiet out of an unspoken code of loyalty, he shouldn’t have tried the same thing against Mangini’s team.
Oh, and: don’t mess with a guy who knows Tony Soprano.

Splitting Delgado

If you drill down in the splits on Carlos Delgado, some interesting things appear, some of which mitigate his rough season, but some only make him look worse:
*Delgado is, as I have previously noted, hitting just fine since July 1 (.282/.465/.374) in the second half.
*Even more than Beltran, Shea is killing Delgado, who is batting .292/.513/.355 on the road but an anemic .213/.365/.299 at Shea.
*Delgado is batting .322/.592/.402 with no outs, but .170/.327/.255 with two outs, and it’s all those inning enders that have really made him look helpless. Relatedly, he’s batting .224/.388/.326 with men in scoring position.
*Delgado is hitting .285/.492/.352 against the Mets’ NL East foes, including .328/.638/.403 against the Phillies. That matters, a lot.
*Consider Delgado’s problems at Shea, which is notorious for its poor visibility. Consider that he is hitting .289/.510/.379 in day games and .317/.512/.429 indoors, but .241/.418/.307 at night. Consider that he is hitting .283/.532/.342 against finesse pitchers, but .212/.349/.296 against power pitchers.
Does Delgado need his eyes checked, and that’s why he’s having trouble at night and at home? Or is it that – like everyone – he just sees the ball a slight bit better by day and away from Shea, and that that extra microsecond to react is where his declining reflexes, at age 35, are becoming a problem? Perhaps the struggles with power pitchers suggest the latter.

Remind Me Again Where Eliot Spitzer Is Governor Of?

Eliot Spitzer’s remarks today at the September 11 memorial service:

We stand on this terrible threshold remembering all that happened. We feel today as we felt then, that we belong to one another, not because we are inhabitants of the same city or same country but because we are all part of the same human story, part of one community of our fellow human beings. John Dunne wrote these immortal words centuries ago: “No man is an island, entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, apart of the main, any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.”

Well, actually no, Eliot. You are a Governor. Which means you are elected by a particular group of people, who share a basic social contract of self-government (I know it’s hard to get used to that after thinking you were Attorney General of the entire financial world, but there we have it). Now, we New Yorkers are indeed a diverse lot, as people come here from all throughout the nation and the world. But that doesn’t change the fact that we belong to each other because we share a city, a state, and a nation; to the contrary, the fact that so many of your constituents are New Yorkers by choice means precisely that any notion of belonging to one another is about more than just common humanity; it is, instead, a compact grounded in common values, values we can choose to accept, or reject.
The men who flew those planes into our neighborhood rejected them. And they would reject you, Governor Spitzer, and never forget that. They would reject you first of all for your faith, which is certainly the first thing that would pop in their heads while sawing off yours, which they would gladly do if given the opportunity. They would reject you for your city, which they attacked, and your nation, which stands in their way.
We New Yorkers may be a broad-minded lot, but when the day is done, like any other people anywhere, we take care of our own. We elect people who swear to do that, even at times people we do not particularly like. You were not asked to speak at a memorial service for the hijackers (notice the absence of reading of their names?), or for humanity at large. You were asked to speak at a memorial for our neighbors. Whose families and friends are gathered here, because those who died were their family and friends.
I would offer Rudy Giuliani’s statement at the same service as a more appropriate way to offer some general, non-controversial sentiments without descending into this swamp of moral equivalence in which we care not who died, or why:

On this day six years ago and on the days that followed, in the midst of our great grief and turmoil, we also witnessed uncompromising strength and resilience as a people. It was a day with no answers, but with an unending line of those who came forward to try to help one another. Elie Wiesel wrote this about the blackest night a human being can know: “I have learned two lessons in my life. First, there are no significant literary, psychological or historical answers to human tragedy, only moral ones. Second, just as despair can come to one another only from other human beings, hope too can be given to one only by other human beings.”
God bless America.

As James Lileks once put it, speaking of former Minnesota Senator Mark Dayton:

It’s as if people of Dayton’s ilk believe they’re really Senators in some transnational body that represents the world, not a weirdly-shaped state with its head jammed up against the broad flat butt of Canada. I’m starting to think they’re all Senators from the United Federation of Planets, and soon the Temporal Police will show up and take them back to the future.

Governor, by those sentiments, you are no family, no friend of ours. We need someone who understands that our Governor is supposed to be on our side, and not just on the side of “humanity” in general.

Not Forgetting

It only hit me when we turned over the calendar to September that the 11th would be on a Tuesday this year. Mercifully, it’s a rainy morning; yesterday was more reminiscent of the day. This video of the news reports at 8am that morning should bring it back.
For remembering the events of September 11, I still can’t add to what I wrote when it was still fresh in my mind.
We have been fortunate indeed – and it is not just luck, of course – that there has been no follow-up attack within the U.S. in the six succeeding years. I have to say, I’m increasingly pessimistic that this can keep up, especially in light of the Left’s continuous and longstanding assault on every method of intelligence-gathering we have – electronic surveillance, interrogation of captured detainees, boots on the ground, covert operations, use of defectors and double-agents, reports by citizens of suspicious behavior – and on our ability to act on them.
It is altogether fitting that this day in Washington is taken up with the question of whether and how the United States will continue the fight in Iraq. One of the central facts that the Vietnam analogists always ignore is the geographic, strategic and cultural centrality of Iraq to the Arab and Muslim worlds, which of course are the origin of the threat that struck us on that September morning. The case for abandoning Vietnam would have been far weaker had the war been fought in Poland. These days, the anti-war crowd is mainly occupied with contortions to prove that we are not actually fighting Al Qaeda and related jihadists in Iraq. But short of admitting that we were not going to conduct a broad offensive campaign to get to the problem at its roots, there was never a good answer to how we were going to win a war on terror with Saddam at our back, as he would have been had we started the second stage (after Afghanistan) anywhere else. And today, the option of having a “do-over” of the past five years having faded into the alt-history swamp, the question is still more pressing: given that the very ideological forces we are fighting, and who attacked us that day, have made it a priority to defeat the United States in Iraq, how can the wider war be won without it being seen that the U.S. has defeated them there?
I’m thankful this morning for the men and women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan precisely because I remember that morning six years ago.

Declawed

Further to my note on Jeremy Bonderman the other day, yesterday’s Tigers-Mariners slugfest – featuring a poor pitching performance by 21-year-old Felix Hernandez and yet another meltdown by the 24-year-old Bonderman – was a fine illustration of the difficulties of bringing along young pitchers these days, especially in the AL. You could scarcely find two more talented young arms than these two, and both have great stuff and good control and have been generally healthy (Hernandez’ balky elbow earlier this year notwithstanding) while pitching in the two best pitcher’s parks in the league. Yet, Bonderman’s now sporting a 4.78 career and 5.01 season ERAs, has never had an ERA below 4.00, and had never won more than 14 games; Hernandez (let’s not call him “F-Her”) has a 4.03 career and 4.17 season ERAs, and his career high in wins is 12. Either or both could still become major stars as soon as next season, but the point is the struggles they have required just to become slightly above-league-average pitchers. Meanwhile, the most heralded young pitcher in the AL, Joba Chamberlain, has pitched the grand total of 14.1 major league innings and has yet to start a game.
For the Tigers, this portends a larger problem. They are in the unusual situation, for a Detroit team, of being awash in young arms – Bonderman, Justin Verlander, Joel Zumaya, Andrew Miller, Zach Miner, Jair Jurrjens. Yet their pitching staff has been awful, 9th in the league in ERA.
This got me thinking about the historic role of pitching in the Tigers franchise. If you look at the real ace seasons, 200+IP and an ERA of less than 3.00, only the Red Sox of the original 8 AL teams have had fewer such seasons since 1920 than the Tigers (the numbers: Red Sox 27, Tigers 29, A’s 34, Twins/Senators 36, Orioles/Browns 37, White Sox 39, Indians 44, Yankees 61). Here’s Detroit’s list.
I also looked at the role hitting and pitching has played in team success, broken out by the team’s winning percentages. I included the 2007 season, in which Detroit is 2d in the AL in Runs Scored, 9th in ERA, and has a .538 winning percentage. “Runs High” is seasons where the Tigers have ranked higher in the AL in Runs Scored than in ERA, “ERA High” is seasons where they ranked higher in ERA than in Runs Scored, and “Tie” is where they finished the same. The “Avg” figures show their average finish in each category in seasons when they posted winning percentages in that category.

W% Runs High ERA High Tie Avg R Avg ERA
All 64 33 10 5 6
.500+ 42 16 6 3 5
-.500 22 17 4 7 8
+.600 8 1 1 1 2
.550-.599 12 4 4 3 5
.500-.549 22 11 1 4 6
.450-.499 11 9 1 5 7
.400-.449 7 3 2 8 9
-.400 4 5 1 10 10

First of all, we have a reminder here that, the 1994-2005 period notwithstanding, the Tigers have been an exceptionally successful franchise over the years. Of course, this is more a descriptive table than a predictive one; if there’s a reason why the Tigers have far more frequently built winning teams around offense than pitching it’s Tiger Stadium, which is no more. Still, historically there has been a very pronounced tendency for Detroit’s teams to rely more on their bats, and that tendency has only been more pronounced in the years when they have had their best seasons.

The September 10 Party

Nancy Pelosi is visiting Ground Zero today to promote…a health care bill. No, you couldn’t make this up if you tried:

The speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, will meet with Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Spitzer today and tour the World Trade Center site on the eve of the sixth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The trip coincides with a new proposal, the 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, a bill to be introduced tomorrow in Congress that would provide comprehensive medical coverage and financial compensation to those who became ill after being exposed to dust at ground zero.

Now, I’m not necessarily opposed to compensating people, especially those who worked (formally or informally) for the government in clearing the site and got sick as a result. Although of course with any such bill creating a new spending entitlement there will be issues of how exactly the government will decide what sort of proof is required to tie illnesses or claimed illnesses to the site.
But it’s so typical of the Democrats that they are most comfortable dealing with soldiers, cops, firemen, etc. when they can get away from endorsing anything they actually do and treat them solely as passive victims to be nursed by the federal government.

The Driver’s Seat

The Mets may not be in clinch mode, but they sure are looking like they have the NL East well in hand. Yet again today, Pedro was not dominating, but showed he could turn the dials when he needed to, and had that one inning with the three strikeouts when he made the Astros look like amateurs. Between him and Wagner getting back on track, I’m feeling pretty good about the next 4-8 weeks.
Guillermo Mota is another story. I know Randolph is basically playing the elimination game right now to see which pitchers to give roles to in October, but Mota sure is not making a good case for himself.

Club for Growth Reports

The Club for Growth, the supply-side advocacy group, has its report on Fred Thompson up. The Club’s reports are very helpful in presenting the facts on each of the candidates, although of course there’s a certain amount of editorializing you may or may not agree with. The Fred one notes his “generally pro-growth with an excellent record on entitlement reform and school choice and a very good record on taxes, regulation, and trade” but chides him on pork, tort reform and McCain-Feingold.
The Club gave a mainly positive writeup on Rudy, effectively grading him on a curve for the degree of difficulty of being pro-growth in NYC; a qualified positive writeup on Romney (“a mixture of pro-growth accomplishments and some troublesome positions that beg to be explained”), a harsh treatment of McCain for “the Senator’s vocal and class-warfare-laced opposition to the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts; his occasional but eager support for increased government regulation; his support for raising Social Security taxes; and his persistent attacks on political free speech in the form of the McCain-Feingold Act”, a postive treatment of Sam Brownback other than his support for Bush’s 2003 Medicare bill, and what can only be described as a hatchet job on Mike Huckabee. No word from the Club on whether reports on Hunter, Paul and Tancredo will be forthcoming.

Neither A Surgeon Nor A General

Koop.jpgYuval Levin had an interesting article in the most recent National Review (subscription only) explaining, against the backdrop of recent charges by Congressional Democrats of undue politicization of the Surgeon General’s office, that the Surgeon General job really has nothing else to do but make politically provocative pronouncements, given that the real responsibilities of the office have long since been given away to the Department of Health and Human Services and subsidiary agencies like the CDC and NIH:

When the post was created in 1871, the surgeon general was head of the Marine Hospital Service, which cared for American merchant sailors. Under the first surgeon general, John Maynard Woodworth, the MHS took the form of a uniformed pseudo-military service, and was assigned some crucial public-health responsibilities, most notably the maintenance of quarantines. In 1889, the larger U.S. Public Health Service was created, and the surgeon general was made its head. The MHS, meanwhile, was folded into the PHS and became its Commissioned Corps, a uniformed service assigned to help prevent the spread of disease and bring medical care to areas in need. Today, it continues to perform these functions through its roughly 6,000 doctors, nurses, pharmacists, engineers, and other uniformed officers.
The surgeon general’s duties, in short, fit the grandeur of his title. But since 1953, when another reorganization created the cabinet-level office now known as the Department of Health and Human Services, the surgeon general’s duties have gradually contracted. In 1968, the responsibility for running the PHS was moved to the assistant secretary for health, to whom the surgeon general now reports.

This is much the same problem that besets the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. All government agencies are inherently political to one extent or another, but agencies that have no real executive responsibilities have no check on becoming simply mills for churning out propaganda.
Levin’s argument, which is worth reading at length, is that the Surgeon General has basically come to be an oracle of public health, one of the last bastions accepted by the Left – along with environmentalism – for the role of public moralizer (albeit the kinds of morals promoted on the Left). But really, the article can just as easily be read as a brief for abolishing the office entirely. There are more than enough agencies already charged with actually carrying out the job of improving public health. We shouldn’t have to pay another one to preach the government’s gospel to us.

Maybe Not The Natural

Rick Ankiel under investigation for using HGH. According to the New York Daily News’ report on an ongoing investigation

Ankiel has not been accused by authorities of wrongdoing, and stopped receiving HGH just before Major League Baseball officially banned it in 2005, The News reported.

Of course, HGH doesn’t work, or at least doesn’t work other than in conjunction with steroids.

Walkoff Trivia

Baseball-Reference.com (which, by the way, just debuted a brand new updated-thru-2007 minor league stats page with stats going back to 1992, including helpful all-on-one-page listings by franchise/year – see here for the 2007 Mets farmhands), has a breakout of the 8 walkoff homers to end a postseason series. There’s a bunch of fun ways to do the trivia on this one (e.g., name the pitchers), but try this: 7 of the 8 came in tie games. Which was the only one hit from behind?

Continue reading Walkoff Trivia