Blog 2006-09 Archives

H/T Erick Erickson.

Congrats to Ted Villa and Nancy Snow Villa, two of my old friends from college, who got a prominent writeup in today's Wall Street Journal (it's on page D1 of the print edition) about how they juggle their business and care for their three children in shifts.

I have finally given in and joined Twitter. Find me at @baseballcrank

Wired has a fascinating look, with the help of Penn and Teller, at how magic works on our brains. H/T

Fortunately, ignorance is curable, at least in the young. Although if that's the way the question was actually written, the teacher's ignorance is another story.

This seems like one of those ideas you're almost afraid to ask what the point is. It has its own website, which attempts to explain and ends up conjuring up mental images of the Hindenberg. Video below the fold.

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A haunting photo essay on the death of Detroit.

*I had a quick piece up at RedState yesterday on Ron Kirk's tax troubles. Kirk is actually not one of the more egregious offenders like Geithner, Daschle or Charlie Rangel, but when you start talking about a third of Obama's appointees, it stops looking like just a coincidence. Maybe Taranto is right that Joe Biden questioned their patriotism.

*I don't think the Lord expends much effort intervening in public policy disputes, but it's kind of hard to avoid wondering if He has a wry sense of humor in tweaking people who think human beings control the weather.

*Ed Morrissey looks at the wholly predictable train wreck that is the Minnesota Senate recount.

*A man punches dog story, sort of. Not a very good idea.

*Of course, Obama wants to vastly increase the federal payroll, with unionized workers who will then be compelled to kick back dues to be donated to the Democratic party. We should be surprised?

*Even venture capital needs federal subsidies?

[M]atch funds for venture capital and angel investments. Venture firms and investors need financial incentives to invest in companies that create U.S. jobs. What if firms with credible histories could receive as much as $100 million in federal matching funds if their investments create jobs in the United States? Investors could keep their normal return plus 50 percent of the returns on the matching funds, while the other half goes back to the government to revitalize further investment. This would give individuals an incentive to double down on investments they would make anyway, but sooner rather than later.

Have we really just been through a credit crisis without learning that people make bad investments when they get too much easy money to play with? And traditionally, the reason to invest in venture capital instead of established companies was the potential for rapid growth and big profits....but of course if you are making it harder for new companies to grow, and easier to take away their profits, then I guess you do end up short on incentives.

*Warner Todd Huston looks at Rahm's message coordination meetings with his old pals Carville, Begala and Stephanopolous.

In case you needed further proof:

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*Megan McArdle on whether World War II ended the Great Depression. Francis Cianfrocca responds here.

*Michelle Malkin looks at how ACORN plans "civil disobedience" to stop foreclosures, thus prolonging the cycle of bad housing loans.

*Genghis at Ace notes the Democratic Party ties of the latest guy accused by the SEC of a billion-dollar fraud. This should sound familiar.

*The New Republic profiles the Politico's knack for scoops and - what comes with that - penchant for inaccuracy. That said, you can smell the jealousy from the newspapermen quoted here (is Bill Keller really the guy to talk about unsustainable business models?)

*Bill Simmons on Mike D'Antoni's offensive system and its limitations. Somewhere, Paul Westhead smiles.

My RedState colleague Mark Kilmer has died. Erick has a tribute to him here. We only found out - Mark only found out - last week that his cancer had returned; none of us were expecting this to happen so quickly. For those of you who don't read RedState, Mark was best known for his weekly roundup of the Sunday morning talk shows, which he did every Sunday for years and which were widely read in DC. He will be missed.

I am pleased to announce that my political commentary will now be appearing at yet another outlet, the brand-newly-launched The New Ledger. More on TNL to follow.

As I have noted before, and as we saw previewed with Barack Obama's executive order repealing the ban on taxpayer funding for international groups that perform abortions and Democratic plans to put federal matching funds for abortions and contraception into the stimulus package, there is no question that the new Democratic majority in Washington intends to go on the offensive in the culture wars in general, and in particular to use federal taxpayer money to subsidize and incentivize more abortions while bulldozing democratically-enacted state law restrictions on the practice and cracking down on private conscientious objectors who do not wish to participate in abortions. TNL contributor Christopher Badeaux takes an in-depth look at the Freedom of Choice Act, what it means and how it is likely to be pushed in Washington in stages rather than as a single omnibus assault that would trigger massive opposition by the Catholic Church, among others.

UPDATE: Obama appears to be backing away from Pelosi's effort to put money for abortions in the stimulus bill.

Tim Blair takes on a catastrophic failure of copy-editing.

H/T

The annual year in review column, always a must-read. January alone contains the most concise summary ever of the Obama campaign, while May contains a concise summary of how John McCain spent the months between wrapping up the nomination and the end of the Democratic race.

Now if this kid's first and middle names were given to one of this man's children...well, you couldn't get worse than that, could you?

This is an exceptionally crummy week to not have time to blog, but work pays the bills (and, as it happens, I'm working on some very interesting stuff - just quite a lot of it at the same time), plus my home PC is still out of service. For those of you who come here regularly, here's your open thread for now on

CC Sabathia
JJ Putz
Rod Blagojevich
Senate Candidate #5
Auto company bailouts

Or, you know, whatever else.

Tough times for Knut the polar bear.

"Bailout" is the 'word of the year'.

Yeah, we're gonna here a lot of that. Past winners.

Between the holidays, work, technical problems (my home PC needs Vista reinstalled), a little post-election burnout, some slow baseball news days and the like, I've gone quiet for a few days here - but I did want to extend a word of thanks to my readers. 2008 has been a good traffic year for the site, culminating in the election, as you can see:

I can't predict the mix of content going forward, but of course I expect to keep up the baseball side of things a little better over the next 12 months, without neglecting the many political battles to come. In the meantime: thanks for stopping by.

Now this is serious.

So, I have reached the point with our two-and-a-half year old daughter where she actually talks down to me. Coupla examples.

1. She's sitting on the toilet (having been potty trained earlier than her siblings) and wants me to read her a book, one with the "Wheels on the Bus" song in it. I can't find it in her room.

Me: "I can't find the Wheels on the Bus book in here. Do you know where it is? Can I read you another one?"

Her: "It's the one with the stripes on the side. Now do you understand?"

2. She tells me she wants to play cars, but I can't make out whether she said wanted to play cards or play cars.

Her: "I want to play cars"

Me: "Cards, or cars?"

Her (leaning her face in and speaking slowly and deliberately): "Say cars."

1. Baseball content, and in general a more normal balance of content, should resume around Thursday.

2. Sadly, I never did get to the end of my list of posts to write up before the election. I'll be rolling a few more things out if I have the time.

Bill Kristol has the news here; this was the end of a long battle with cystic fibrosis. I'll repeat what I said earlier: Dean was one of the good and decent guys on the web, from his start as a pseudonymous baseball and politics blogger at SoxBlog to his tenure blogging with Hugh Hewitt to his gig at The Weekly Standard. I didn't always agree with Dean - he'd been a driver for Mitt Romney during Romney's 1994 Senate campaign and was a big believer in Romney as a presidential candidate - but I always respected his opinions.

Some samples of his writing:

*Defending the Federalist Society.

*Savaging Dinesh D'Souza's book "The Enemy at Home".

*Defending The Weekly Standard against George Will.

*Wondering - oh, how long ago this was! - why John Kerry kept invoking John McCain. And arguing here, here, here and here about the idea that Kerry was a smart guy. I believe it was his posts on the topic of Kerry's intellect that put Dean on the map.

*Reflecting on the Red Sox World Championship in 2004.

*This December 2004 post and the ones above it, on cystic fibrosis.

UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt offers a eulogy. And Allahpundit and Ed Morrissey remember Dean here.

I would echo every word Ed Morrissey writes in this post. I take some pleasure in Dean's success since I was one of the early people to link to him at SoxBlog before he hit it big and ended uo at The Weekly Standard (and, sadly, left the baseball part of his blogging days behind). He really is one of the good and decent guys on the web.

I had started writing this up when I got back from my vacation in August and got sidetracked - I'll just offer up a truncated version here.... we spent a week in Lake George and the last few days in Cooperstown making a pilgrimage to the Hall of Fame. It was the first time I'd been back since the inductions in 1982. The Hall seemed different in a number of ways, although it's always hard to tell how much of that is not being 11 years old anymore. There are a lot more Hall of Famers, now, of course - you can basically go by a set of panels that collect in one place the stars of the 70s, and by now the 80s collection is fairly well-stocked as well. When I was there in 1982, there was basically nobody there I'd seen play; now there are guys like Ripken and Boggs I remember as rookies, and even one guy (Kirby Puckett) who came to the majors, played his whole career, retired, got inducted in the Hall, and died since the last time I was there. Oddly, at random places there were a few shiny new plaques for Hall of Famers who'd been in a while - I guess guys like Ruth and Bob Feller needed their original plaques replaced at some point. (Odd promotion: they were advertising for 9/10 year olds to do a sleepover in the Hall itself, on its hard stone floors among the plaques. That seems very cool but also kinda ghoulish).

The Hall, of course, is a must-make pilgrimage for any serious baseball fan. It's still basically a museum you can cover in one day - although I got rushed through one or two sections because of the kids, we basically covered the whole place with hours to spare. (One thing that struck me in the equipment exhibits: Honus Wagner used a much thicker-handled bat than guys who played at or shortly after the same time, like Sam Crawford. Also, I hadn't known that in the 1880s they used color-coded uniforms, like today's NFL numbering schemes, to distinguish the different fielding positions). I also stopped in the day before at the library (it's only open M-F) - I'd still like to do a book someday if I get the free time, so I wanted to get a concrete sense of how research is done there and what's available. It's basically a one-room reading-room by-request operation, no public stacks at all, but nonetheless very user-friendly.

If I had one beef with the Hall, it's that the caliber of the stuff in the gift shop didn't match up to the souvenirs we got 26 years ago. Back then, we came home with, among others, a book collecting pictures of all the plaques and a punch-out book of cardboard replicas of actual old baseball cards of all the Hall of Famers. I went looking for similar things for my kids this time and came up empty, as too much of the selection was generic MLB merchandise.

We also took some time after lunch to check out a "Heroes of Baseball Wax Museum" down the street. This was a bit less of a serious fan site, but it was a fun mid-day diversion you can cover in an hour or so. The exhibits are eclectic - amidst the ballplayers there's George Costanza, a League of Their Own exhibit, Joe D and Marilyn, even George W and Rudy at Yankee Stadium after 9/11. But they also clearly made use of their unauthorized status to get a hookup with Pete Rose (they seem to have a fair bit of stuff that came from Rose himself) and an exhibit on Joe Jackson. Definitely worth seeing if you have kids.

Driving around upstate New York, you realize how many vast stretches of sparsely-populated greenery and farmland there still is in what people in the rest of the country still think of as a densely-settled urban state. After you've driven through stretches like that in New York, Pennsylvania, even Connecticut and western Massachusetts, and then compare them on the map to the size and scale of the whole rest of the U.S., you really start to appreciate how enormous this country is and how little of it looks like New York City and its immediate surroundings, where I have spent most of my life along with the Boston-Worcester area, northern New Jersey, and Washington DC.

A brief political note: we did see an Obama TV ad or two in Lake George, which struck me as odd since I couldn't see why he'd be advertising in New York (the closest neighboring state is Vermont). We saw a lot of ads for the incumbent Congresswoman, Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand, who was still ripping the Iraq War but solely on grounds that it costs money that could be spent in her District.

I'm back from vacation but it's looking like tomorrow at the earliest before I'm dug out enough to resume regular blogging.

There's a bunch of stuff I'd like to get to today, but I really have to get everything in order before I leave on vacation. So in case I don't get back to the blog this evening, as I did the last two years I have lined up a guest blogger; I will be leaving you in the capable hands of the excellent but semi-retired-from-blogging Ricky West, who really is a good guy despite being a Braves fan.

Great moments in horrifying advertising.

The guest who wouldn't leave.

I'm back from vacation (West Palm Beach), but still digging out. More to follow once I get a few free moments to resume regular blogging.

I'll be away from the blog until Sunday night or Monday. Happy Independence Day!

*Maybe when you hurt yourself moving pillows on your bed, it's a sign you're not really cut out to be a professional athlete.

*Price fixing does not sound like a useful solution to the hazards of maple bats. (H/T). Does anyone really think Major League ballplayers are currently using cheap knockoff bats?

*George Carlin on Kiner's Korner. And a few of his one-liners from the later stage of his career (i.e., when he wasn't high). Some of those were only funny because of Carlin's delivery, and some have become cliches by now, but he does have a few classics there. Carlin was at his best when he was being misanthropic.

*Chicks don't dig the Mariners. (H/T). This would be even funnier if they had not just whupped the Mets.

*Replacing Chris Noth with Jeff Goldblum on Law & Order: Criminal Intent is not a step up. Amusingly, that photo makes Goldblum look quite a lot like Jerry Orbach, though.

*There's money in poverty, if you're a friend of Barack Obama. Decent housing's another matter.

*The Barackheads do not like it if you mock their god.

*It's like joining a cult, except...I'm working on it....let me think ....

*Comparing your client to the Rosenbergs is not a great idea.

*Somebody on Kos tried to do a response (sans permalink) to our RedState editorial on the GOP as the party of freedom of choice, and I think I hurt my brain reading the thing. The paragraph on the salary cap is priceless, and the sad part is that the author presumably intends us to take the Jeff Spicoli quote as authoritative, as if quoting Montesquieu or something. In a similar vein, this is awfully unspecific. Why should it matter if I'm "ungrateful" to farmers - I pay for my food, and that should be enough for them just as it is for lawyers, autoworkers, toymakers, whoever.

*Interesting writeup on great NHL goalie Terry Sawchuk, who I'd never known much about. Man, that's a guy with a lot of problems and a lot of injuries.

*Nice writeup about 100-year-old ex-MLB player Bill Werber (career numbers here). The Babe Ruth anecdote is vintage Ruth.

*Hugo Chavez and Hezbollah, perfect together.

*This is an oldie but a goodie, on Live Earth. Our old friend and Holy Cross classmate Dave Holmes makes it out of this with more of his dignity intact than most of the participants.

*I shouldn't laugh at Al Sharpton on a bicycle (in fact, I can't ride one myself), but what the heck, he's Al Sharpton.

*I have to feel like the AP is stacking the deck when they give us this, this and this as pictures of Spain's fans at a Spain-Russia soccer game and this as the picture of a Russian fan.

To answer practical questions.

*The idea of a steroid blacklist is not implausible, but it's not the simplest explanation, especially where Barry Bonds is concerned: it seems more likely that no team wants the PR headache and distraction of the disgraced, indicted Bonds. And with guys like Jay Gibbons, there's the double issue of "will he still be any good if he's not juicing?"

*Will Carroll on Secretariat:

Here are the important numbers:

Big Brown (2008 Kentucky Derby): 2:01:82 Affirmed (1977 Kentucky Derby): 2:01 1/5 Secretariat (1973 Kentucky Derby): 1:59 2/5

I don't need the advanced numbers like Beyer Speed Figures to see what's at work here. Big Brown won two legs of the Triple Crown, possibly aided by steroids, but he wasn't as fast as the last Triple Crown winner, and he wasn't as fast as horse racing's Babe Ruth. Steroids didn't make a horse into Superman. Horse expert Michael Hindman said it better than I could:

Secretariat would be Babe Ruth if Babe Ruth had once hit 90 homers in a season and no one else has ever hit more than 50. The gap in physical ability between him and all other thoroughbreds is unlike anything else in sports history. Put it this way: Secretariat was capable of hitting 600-foot homers. Secretariat's 35-year-old Kentucky Derby record time still stands, and nobody has ever come close to it. His 35-year-old world record time at a mile and a half set in the Belmont has never been challenged by any horse ever, anywhere. He ran his mile and a half in 2:24. No other horse--anywhere, ever--has broken 2:25.3. That means that the second best time at a mile and a half, ever, would have been eight lengths behind him. Secretariat also set the world record at a mile and an eighth. He ran once on the grass and set a track record at Belmont Park (again at a mile and a half) that still stands 35 years later. Secretariat ran against and beat the crap out of at least five other Hall of Fame horses. Big Brown is beating one of the worst crops of three year olds ever. By the way, we've used Winstrol and Equipoise on horses from time to time over the years, and as far as I can tell it doesn't do much for them other than run up the vet bill.

*Drill, drill, drill. It's not the long-term answer, but it's appalling that the U.S. insists on preferring to import Saudi and Venezuelan oil rather than do the sorts of routine oil exploration and development that's done everywhere else in the world. Note Gingrich's point about offshore drilling in enviro-conscious Norway.

*The NY Times on the dangers of an inexperienced candidate for president. You know, a lot of Bush-hating liberals respond to questions about Obama's experience by noting Bush's relative inexperience compared to some past candidates...but even if you insist on ignoring the advantages Bush had over Obama, I have to ask: are you saying now that Bush worked out just fine? Because that wasn't what I heard from you up to now.

*Yes, McCain's been busy already in key swing states.

*Excellent 3-part interview with Justice Scalia here, here and here. One excerpt:

In the course of writing the book, you and your co-author, Bryan Garner, consulted more than a dozen judges. Did you learn anything about the habits of your colleagues?

We learned an awful lot from them. Stuff that I didn't know. For example, the part about judges who retro-read.

Read the briefs in reverse.

Yeah. If you're really in a hurry and you don't care about how the lawyers have slaved to make sense out of stuff, it saves time because, as the case goes along, it gets narrower. You pare down. It's good if you really want to find the kernel of a dispute. I didn't know that a lot of judges did that. I don't do it. I don't think it's fair to the lawyers.

I'd have to think that would be counterproductive in a lot of cases where the briefs are loaded with references back to complex facts and defined terms in the beginning, but it's a caution to lawyers to consider how a brief looks like from the back to the front.

*Free speech is so un-French.

For my fellow Holy Cross '93 friends: see you at the 15th reunion tomorrow.

Details here.

UPDATE: Speaking of drugs being bad, apparently playing a highly sophisticated crime scene investigator on television won't prevent you from getting busted like a common wino.

So I recently tried out Fox in Socks on my 25-month-old daughter, figuring it was a little beyond her age (stretches have just words that aren't tied closely to pictures in the book, which I explained by pointing out that they were funny words), and she sat for it, but since it was bedtime I figured after that I'd try something easier and more familiar. So I got one of her touch-and-feel-the-animals books, and I started reading, and about two pages in she says, "this book not as funny."

I count blogoversaries from three different points - the debut of my column on the old BSG site in May 2000 and the start of my Blogspot blog in August 2002 are the first two - but as of yesterday I reached the five year mark of this site in its current form. It's always an adventure, balancing the baseball/sports/pop culture and the political/war/law sides of the site, on top of all my other family and work commitments (and blog commitments, as I've assumed an ever larger role over at RedState, where I am currently one of the site's Directors), but it's almost always been fun. Thanks to everyone who stops by.

This looks like a desperate cry for links and traffic...but I'm linking anyway. If you don't mind bad language and generally non-G-rated content you can go vote, or something. There are no real upsets in the 8/9 game anyway.

*Poor cash management. Among other things.

*For the record, I approve of splitting the 7th Harry Potter film in two parts. There are too many good extended action sequences in the book that shouldn't be cut to the bone to fit a 2-hour film schedule.

*I have linked to this Bill James interview before, but I am very interested to hear that James, an avowed fan of crime stories, is finally working on a true-crimes book of his own.

*The saga of the investigation that held a cloud over South Korea's new president up to his inauguration makes for a fascinating tale.

*More Lego Escher creations here and here.

*Who Googled you?

*This analysis of major league managers' tendencies illustrated as cartoon faces is...well, you have to click on the graphic to get the full effect. It's bizarre. H/T Rays Index.

*Today is the 97th anniversary of the introduction of baseball's MVP Award by automaker Hugh Chalmers. The first-ever MVPs? In the AL, 24-year-old Ty Cobb for his first and best .400 season, batting .420/.467/.621 with 47 doubles, 24 triples and 83 steals, scoring 147 runs and driving in 127. In the NL, 28-year-old veteran Cubs rightfielder Frank "Wildfire" Schulte, narrowly over Christy Mathewson, for batting .300/.384/.534 with 21 triples and 21 homers (only the third 20-HR season ever if you exclude the fluky 1884 Cubs), 105 Runs, and 107 RBI.

*Our old friend Dr. Manhattan is back blogging! While I was tied up doing my baseball previews, he had a fine column taking John McCain to task for his knee-jerk ignorance on the connection between vaccines and autism. As a general rule, the more science is involved in an issue, the worse McCain is. He seems sometimes to have a superstitious faith in junk science.

*Former equipment manager Yosh Kawano is leaving the Cubs clubhouse after 65 years. That's a very long time to work for one baseball team and not get a World Series ring. I think Kawano's name is familiar to me from one of Joe Garagiola's books...as in, he was there when Garagiola played for the Cubs.

*Via Pinto, Travis Nelson at Boy of Summer has a lengthy attack on Melky Cabrera. I'm more optimistic about Cabrera's potential for across-the-board growth as a hitter, but I'd generally agree that his prospects are much dimmer if you don't regard him as a competent defensive center fielder.

*There's no such thing as an innocent non-Muslim? This may go a ways to explaining what this means. I can't buy into Hawkins' notion, which has been pushed for some time by my RedState colleague Paul Cella, that the U.S. should bar immigration by Muslims, but when you consider Hawkins' logic, I have to admit that that's more an emotional reaction than a reasoned position on my part.

*While I don't agree with all the analysis, David Frum and Bill Kristol have some useful points about the perlious passivity of the Bush Administration in responding to criticism, most particularly the conviction that there's no point in fighting over the past. The Administration's enemies have nourished a number of myths about the past 7 years that have proven terribly corrosive of its credibility, goodwill and, ultimately, ability to get anything done. (On a related note, consider how little press went to the Army Corps of Engineers' ultimate admission that its design defects caused the flooding of New Orleans).

*Yes, Glenn Greenwald is still a fool who has trouble with elementary logical reasoning.

*The Nineties economy in a nutshell. This, too.

*Guns don't kill people, guns kill movie scripts.

*24 is coming back! Maybe that means Jack Bauer will stay out of trouble.

Over the last several weeks I've been dividing my blogging time largely between writing about the presidential election and crunching numbers and getting up to speed behind the scenes to prepare for my annual division previews. Now, with the season starting in earnest March 31 (leaving aside the March 25 Japanese opener between the Red Sox and the A's) and 6 divisions to cover, ideally before that date, I really need to put my back into getting my preseason division previews in shape. As a result, expect the site to go to a more sporadic publication schedule as I roll out the divisional previews. I may not go completely dark on politics - there's just so much material out there - but just about anything worth saying today about the elections will be equally worth saying in April.

I really miss referrers.net and its code that used to run on this site giving me an instant look, not just for the front page but every page on the blog, at how many visitors were entering a particular page from a particular site. Among other things it was a much more reliable guide than anything else I have both to who was linking to me and how many eyeballs they were sending my way.

Today, this post from nearly 8 years ago has drawn, estimating from SiteMeter, hundreds of people to this site. And I have no idea from where. I'd be willing to pay to get a service like that back, as I was paying before; but it just does not seem to exist, or if it does I can't find it.

Actual sentence from troubleshooting section of iPod player manual, suggesting possible cause of problems: "There has case by switching between standard and extended most, iPod backlight is out of control."

This may seem odd to the single men out there, but it will come as no surprise whatsoever to anyone who has been married for any appreciable amount of time.

And her little dog, too.

You know you have a serious garbage-disposal problem when people are talking about taking steps "just like Kosovo" to solve it.

How can the use of feng shui, a traditional Chinese concept, in a California McDonald's "help all customers tap their inner Zen," Zen being a Japanese religious/philosophical concept? You would think an AP reporter named Nguyen (a Vietnamese surname) would know the difference, but apparently all "Asians" are alike to her.

A person knowledgeable about her Vietnamese heritage would be acutely sensitive to such distinctions,the distinction between Chinese and Japanese culture and tradition being of enormous importance to East Asian history. A person raised in America to think of all "Asians" as a homogenous mass to be agglomerated for political purposes might miss that distinction. I infer the latter.

*Pedro: kicking it clean.

*Barack Obama as the Mirror of Erised.

*Debra Burlingame on Bill Clinton's Puerto Rican terrorist pardons.

*Good roundup of what's expected from various shows with the writers' strike over.

*The morality of waterboarding. This probably deserves a longer post but I agree 100% with the point that you have to consider the morally correct thing first and let the law follow.

*The most badass U.S. presidents in history. Hilarious.

*Stephen Green on why Hillary's South Carolina strategy was actually the opposite of Rudy's mistake.

*A fitting assessment of Harry Reid.

*Bob Klapisch has a must-read (really!) article about how the Twins got backed into the Santana deal with the Mets instead of taking better packages from the Yankees and Red Sox (one is left with the impression that the Red Sox, possibly rationally, lost interest once the Yankees were out of the bidding - unlike the Yanks they don't have unlimited financial resources and have a fairly solid pitching staff at present). Via Pinto. On the one hand, the Twins' new GM Bill Smith clearly screwed up by turning down a deal involving Phil Hughes, Melky Cabrera and two additional prospects in December; on the other hand, the Yankees will probably regret turning down a last-minute chance to get Santana for just Ian Kennedy, Melky and one other prospect (and I say this as someone who thinks Melky has a good shot to be a real good player).

*Speaking of great reporting, Fred Barnes' account of how President Bush decided on the surge, based heavily on interviews with the president himself, is also a must-read for intelligent discussion of the subject.

*The five stages of voting in Republican primaries. Via Vodkapundit. Absolutely spot-on.

*The wages of Kelo: the Second Circuit this morning affirms the use of the eminent domain power for the munificent public purpose of bringing the Nets to Brooklyn.

*Stanley Kurtz on Waziristan past, and Waziristan present.

*This is an amazing story, if true.

*You will look long and hard for two savvier observers of presidential politics than Karl Rove and Patrick Ruffini, and their takes on the 08 scene are worth reading, especially Rove's point about exit polls and Patrick's point about the advantages of online fundraising (added advantage he doesn't mention: online donors don't show up demanding favors).

*The FBI interrogator who questioned Saddam after his capture confirms what we all knew: Saddam intended all along to retain the ability to ramp up WMD production as soon as he could, and he made a deliberate effort to appear to still have WMD capability:

Mr. Piro: "The folks that he needed to reconstitute his program are still there."

Mr. Pelley: "And that was his intention?"

Mr. Piro: "Yes."

Mr. Pelley: "What weapons of mass destruction did he intend to pursue again once he had the opportunity?"

Mr. Piro: "He wanted to pursue all of WMD. So he wanted to reconstitute his entire WMD program."

Mr. Pelley: "Chemical, biological, even nuclear."

Mr. Piro: "Yes."

*Great move by the Yankees snagging Morgan Ensberg. Ensberg has had his struggles lately and granted he will be less useful as a first baseman, but his combination of power and patience makes him a potentially very useful bat.

*Color me un-shocked that Clinton crony Strobe Talbott would be duped by Soviet agents.

*The real DB Cooper, unmasked? Nah, he would never have stolen paper currency just months after Nixon took us off the gold standard.

*Mark Steyn rightly takes McCain to task for his hostility to making money in the private sector. I think John Hinderaker has the better of the argument about preferring McCain to a novice politician like Romney on foreign affairs - unlike Steyn's example of Hillary, McCain is a longstanding, indeed life-long, foreign policy hawk who has no illusions about the likes of Putin (I believe he once said he looked in Putin's eyes and saw the lettters "KGB"). And Pejman properly takes McCain to task for misrepresenting Romney's position on timetables and the surge, which is a shame because there really is a fair contrast (see here and here) on the fact that McCain was a longstanding, vocal leader on Iraq strategy while Romney played the role of a cautious follower who always kept his options open to bail on victory in Iraq for the greater good of getting himself elected.

*Andrew Ferguson on Fred: brilliant. Ruffini's Fred postmortem is also worth reading.

*This video about Hillary's role on the Board of Directors of Wal-Mart will likely hurt her mostly in the primaries, and certainly doesn't scandalize me. But it's amusing and interesting on a few levels, not least the accent she was using back then. There's also a lesson about what drives journalists; biases are one thing, but when Brian Ross mentions that he covered this story 16 years ago, it's pretty clear that returning to it now is about Ross' career more than about Hillary.

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*Tom Maguire on Paul Krugman's efforts to put lipstick on the pig of the European welfare state. Of course, deceit is to Krugman what the fedora and the bullwhip are to Indiana Jones.

*And here I thought Daniel Webster had driven him out of New Hampshire permanently.

*Megan McArdle has the, er, skinny on people who are waaaaaaaay too sensitive.

*Excellent GOP primary roadmap from David Freddoso.

*Don't mess with Vladimir Putin, Part XXVIII

*Two war-related decisions yesterday from the DC Circuit; one that rejects First Amendment challenges by Cindy Sheehan to her arrest at a protest but reverses her conviction for failure to prove her state of mind, the other of which rejects a variety of civil claims against Donald Rumsfeld and a variety of other DoD personnel, brought by Guantanamo detainees claiming that they were tortured or otherwise mistreated in violation of the Geneva Conventions.

*The All-Messed Mets Team.

*Heh.

*Slate has a really silly article about the demise of the billable hour, while admitting that the big law firms that handle high-end cases (i.e., lawyers like me) are not likely to abandon hourly billing any time soon. Yes, it's true that basically every lawyer in private practice hates the billable hour; that's been true as long as anyone could remember. And it's true that clients don't love it either, and that if change comes to billing methods, it will come from client demand. But like Churchill's dictum about democracy being the worst form of government except every alternative that has been tried, hourly billing endures because lawyers and clients alike are familiar with it, and for potentially major litigation, it's hard to come up with alternatives that don't have larger problems. The flaw in the Slate piece is not suggesting any feasible alternative - that works at least minimally for both lawyer and client - for how to bill a case that walks in the door with potentially huge damages liability, yet even the most experienced litigator can't tell you up front whether it will be quickly dismissed or settled, or end up in years of labor-intensive discovery and trial, or somewhere in between. Without a workable alternative, large organizations will always prefer the tried and tested, and work within that framework to make the process work for both parties.

*Dave Barry's Year in Review. Priceless. Too much great stuff to excerpt.

*Mark Steyn cautions against

writing New Hampshire off as just another effete decadent coastal latte-swilling gay-marriage weekend home untypical of the conservative heartland, just a Studio 54 in the mountains full of transplanted liberals hitting on coked-up moose as they stagger around in search of a restaurant serving something with arugula. NH delivered Bush's margin of victory in 2000. It remains the north-east's still-just-about non-liberal state. If the Republican Party can't come up with a candidate that has some appeal in New Hampshire, its prospects of winning in November are dramatically reduced.

*From Kevin Drum, grudging acceptance of military progress in Iraq, and a picture-perfect sample of the attitude I described here. And yes, I still think it more likely than not that Hillary pulls this out, although while Iowa didn't really surprise me that much (the race there had been close for months), I've been surprised at how quickly her support in NH seems to have cratered. Speaking of which, Patrick Ruffini and Jay Cost, two of the Right's savvier campaign observers, lay out how Hillary can win the nomination even after losing New Hampshire, as she is now expected to do. Patrick focuses on the Nevada caucuses, while Jay focuses on the delegate math, particularly the superdelegates.

*Ralph Peters argues that the US Navy should have reacted more aggressively to an obvious provocation by the Iranians in the Gulf on Sunday. He's clearly right about what the Iranians were trying to do, and I'm generally sympathetic to the power-politics argument that failing to respond to provocations only brings larger ones. On the other hand, you don't start fights you are not prepared to pursue to the bitter end. As Peters describes it, the encounter came awfully close to the line at which a US Naval commander would need to open fire to protect his vessels, but I don't buy the idea that we always have to initiate combat over this sort of thing, which is the logical endpoint of Peters' argument.

I've been writing on the web since 2000 and blogging since 2002, and in all those years, 2007 has been perhaps the toughest in terms of being satisfied with my ability to produce consistently new and interesting content for my readers - so with things a little quiet here over the past week or so and probably staying that way for the next few days, I hope you will indulge me here if I run a retrospective look back at my best work from this year, or at least the posts I enjoyed the most. For newer readers, it's a chance to catch up on things you may have missed. Posts are grouped in three subjects and listed chronologically within those. As you can see, the 2008 presidential election is somewhat overrepresented here, while the baseball postseason is underrepresented.

Sports

A look at Hall of Fame and Hall of Fame candidate middle infielders.

Critiquing Baseball-Reference.com's translated statistics.

Review of Michael Lewis' The Blind Side.

Taking a victory lap on the BALCO leak.

EWSL review of 2006 and EWSL age analysis.

EWSL previews for the AL East, AL Central, AL West, NL East, NL West and NL Central.

A brief history of the rise of lefthanded pitching.

Assessing Scott Boras.

Is Billy Wagner the best lefthanded reliever ever?

That high-flying Mets defense, before it collapsed down the stretch, and after.

Baseball's most impressive records. Probably my favorite post of the year, and definitely my favorite baseball post.

Tom Glavine's 300th win, and the career path of the average 300 game winner.

My BBC Radio debate with David Pinto on Barry Bonds.

Michael Vick and the NFL players union.

Reviewing The Bronx is Burning (the book).

The role of pitching in the history of the Detroit Tigers.

Willie Randolph: the motivational poster.

The home run imbalance between the leagues.

The greatest late-season runs of all time, including the 2007 Rockies.

The horrible almost Yorvit Torrealba signing.

The Milledge deal.

The Cabrera/Willis deal.

The Hall of Fame ballot: Yes on Gossage, No on Dawson.

Isiah Thomas: the most hated figure in NY sports history?

Tim Raines and the Tablesetters.

Politics, War and Law

The wrong way for Rudy to argue about abortion.

Why I'm with Rudy.

Obama's plan to withdraw from Iraq beginning May 1, 2007.

Mike Huckabee: the right man for the wrong job.

The Iranians in Iraq.

The case against a national minimum wage.

John Edwards' amnesia on Iran and Israel.

Barack Obama, pandering to cannibals.

Bill Richardson, sucker for tyrants.

A culture war roundup from the courts.

On Imus and the Rutgers press conference.

A look at campaign finance laws through the lens of Torii Hunter's bat.

Those tax hiking Democratic governors. More here and here.

Eliot Spitzer's pro-abortion zealotry, and the Seven Stages of Liberal Legal Activism.

Tax amnesty for illegal immigrants.

John Edwards' fantasy foreign policy.

Obama's health care plan.

The elements of a third party presidential run.

Harry Reid, the Insult Comic Senate Majority Leader.

The Libby pardon. I'm not even sure if I still agree with this post, but I did put a lot of thought into it.

A satire on the (then-)sinking McCain campaign.

Trying to nail the Hillary jello to the wall on Iraq.

Two cheers for the hypocrites.

John Edwards doesn't want to know.

A taxonomy of the presidential candidates.

Why Fred Thompson needed to get specific. (He since has).

Uncivil litigators.

The Spitzer/Hillary posts on drivers licenses for illegal immigrants, here, here, here, here, and here.

The Trouble With Mitt Romney, Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

Smearing John Edwards.

Expanding the battlefield.

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Michael Gerson.

Yes, Hillary will win the nomination.

Pop Culture and Other Fun Stuff

The Star Wars prequels as they should have been.

Predictions and a wrapup on the end of The Sopranos.

Reviewing the fifth Harry Potter film and the final Harry Potter book.

Pennsylvania Travelogue.

I seem to have suffered some sort of server attack that has wiped out everything (posts & comments) posted to the site since Christmas Eve. My apologies. If anybody happens to have a blog-reader or other cache-type service that still contains the text of any of my posts for 12/25-27, it would be great if you could copy & paste and email them to me at:

baseball_crank at yahoo *dot* com

Thanks.

UPDATE: Got 'em, thanks to reader Dave S.

An overdue idea, but awfully pricey.

*Studes says Jose Reyes' problem down the stretch last season was not hitting too few ground balls.

*TIME Magazine looked into Vladimir Putin's heart, too, and named him their Man of the Year for discarding the remaining constitutional breaks on dictatorship in Russia. Unlike President Bush, TIME can't excuse this as diplomacy.

*You'll shoot your eye out! Mike Huckabee may have a serious problem with granting too many clemencies to violent criminals, but Mitt Romney's refusal to grant any pardons or clemencies at all took him to the ridiculous length of refusing to expunge the conviction of a decorated Iraq War veteran who was convicted at age 13 of shooting a friend in the arm with a BB gun.

*Britney Spears' 16-year-old sister, who was supposed to be the responsible one, has announced that she is pregnant. At least she's keeping the baby.

*Businesses that should exist but don't.

Apologies for the general lack of content and specific lack of baseball content - it's been crazy in a couple of ways, and I admit that the baseball stuff has been crowded out a bit from all the work that has gone into the Romney series, of which two installments remain. Hopefully I can return soon to the hot stove league and postseason awards beat.

*California wildfires lead to a shoulder injury that could cost Joel Zumaya half of next season.

*Tom Maguire on Paul Krugman willfully ignoring evidence of how the Iranian regime's assistance to Al Qaeda did, in fact, contribute to the September 11 attacks. Krugman just can't help himself.

*A note about something missing from the California disaster: looting.

*Matt Yglesias looks at evidence that independent voters are more aggreived about illegal immigration than anything else, a finding that surprises me. Via OTB. It's pretty clear that the government needs to rebuild confidence in border security before the political environment will again permit serious consideration of a path to legalization.

*Don't put your suicide note on YouTube unless you really mean it.

Taco Bell infringes on my intellectual property:

If it were worth the filing fee, I would do something.

Hat tip: Red Sox Republican, who emailed the pic.

*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.

Today's Dilbert is a classic:

I am totally a sucker for anything that combines Legos and YouTube. Do I need a better reason? I think not:

When you reach the point of "DFred," I think this form of abbreviation has reached its logical nadir. I believe it started with A-Rod, followed by J-Lo, in the mid-90s. As far as I am concerned it should not have gone beyond those two.

I have returned from my travels to exotic Pennsylvania. Thanks to Dr. Manhattan for filling in (the other planned guest blogger proved to busy to post).

Citizens Bank Park

We kicked off our trip to Pennsylvania by hitting Citizens Bank Park for a Saturday night game against the Braves (which offered a rare reason to root for the Phillies). We had bought tickets for the Sunday afternoon game, on the theory that a night game would be too late in particular for my 17-month-old daughter, but ESPN decreed that the Sunday game had to be moved to 8pm. Fortunately, the Phillies were very accomodating in exchanging our tickets, and we were able to get a row of six seats even though Saturday ended up being sold out.

It's a beautiful ballpark in the Camden Yards style, with large open-air walkways behind and under the seats. We took the kids to a Build-a-Bear in the lower level before the game, in which you could build a stuffed Phillie Phanatic (note: this was somewhat more of a summary process than your typical Build-A-Bear). We sat in Section 414 on the first base side of the upper deck (from the map you can see the view), which despite the height were good seats except that the steep angle of the upper deck puts you at the mercy of the good sense of the people in the front row to sit down and avoid blocking the view of home plate. Of course, the Phillies fans were not exactly shrinking violets about letting people know to sit down. We were sitting behind a rather indecently vocal collection of Braves fans (the guy in front of us was nice, the others were unwisely loud) and as for the Philadelphia fans, well, the reputation of Philly as the toughest park in the big leagues for the home team is well-deserved. The next day's paper didn't headline the game "Drunk on Boos" for nothing. The phans there hate Pat Burrell almost as much as Mets fans do, and they really hate Adam Eaton, the latter with good reason. I shouldn't laugh since the Mets have Brian Lawrence in the rotation and he is basically the same pitcher, but at least the Mets aren't paying Lawrence $8 million a year. Eaton was terrible, put the Phils in a hole they almost but couldn't quite get out of even against Lance Cormier.

Also on the stadium: the food didn't impress me. The Liberty Bell that lights up for hometown homers was OK but no Magic Apple. The out of town scoreboard along the fence takes some getting used to but is tremendously informative. There are too few places to get the count; I didn't love the layout of the big CF scoreboard. There were a preposterous number of moths in the air for the upper deck. The jerseys? Chase Utley jerseys were definitely the dominant theme. I did see one old-school fan wearing a Doug Glanville jersey. That said, the sign of a baseball town is the proportion of fans wearing the hometown colors, especially the female fans, and the Phillies phans don't disappoint (there were a very large number of young women and teens wearing the identical uniform of colored Phillies T-shirts and very short white shorts).

The racial makeup of the phans is a shock: I know in most towns your baseball crowds are largely white, but to get to Citizens Bank Park you drive through miles of all-black neighborhoods (what looked to my eye like working-class neighborhoods with clean, respectable houses, not slums), but in the park and the parking lot the only black people you see are ticket scalpers.

The Phillie Phanatic comes out at the 7th inning stretch, but unlike Mr. Met he fires hot dogs rather than T-Shirts into the seats. And lemme tell ya, Mr. Met is badly outgunned; while he uses a light shoulder launcher to fire shirts into the crowd, the Phanatic uses a hot dog shaped cannon mounted on a jeep.

Also on the game: I have never seen more dropped third strikes in my life. The Mets bullpen may be a mess but at least we don't have Jose Mesa. And Jeff Francouer has a freaking gun in right field; he uncorked one throw that had my jaw dropping before it was more than two feet out of his hand.

DUKW Tour

On Sunday, we took the "Duck Tour" of Philadelphia, which is cheesy but entertaining (we had always meant to take those tours in Boston and DC but never got around to it). One thing that made me think when we got off: they mentioned that the amphibious DUKW bus/boat you ride around in was manufactured during WWII and that they had sat dormant for years until the idea came to refit them for tourism...it made me wonder: were we riding on a piece of history? I guess that the DUKWs they use for these tours have been extensively refitted from military to civilian uses, but the idea that any part of the vehicle we were riding may have been used in the war gave some additional meaning to a tour that touched on everything from colonial Philadelphia to Rocky.

King Tut

Born in Arizona, moved to Babylonia....sorry, couldn't help myself. On Sunday evening, we went to see the King Tut exhibit at the Franklin Institute. On the whole, the exhibit was interesting, indeed, riveting, just knowing you are looking at things made - in some cases, of wood - multiple thousands of years ago. We went as well to the IMAX film about the excavation of the bodies of many pharoahs in the 1880s. Unfortunately the staff misinfored us about the starting time so we not only missed the beginning but ended up sitting in the front row. The baby's eyes nearly rolled out of her head trying to comprehend an IMAX screen from the perspective of the front row. The film, narrated either by Saruman or Count Dooku, talked about how the pharoahs believed that they would be immortal as long as their names were said, in which case I suppose thy succeeded, but then it also talked about how they were using the mummified bodies of Ramses the Great and other pharoahs to study disease, like they were hoboes who gave their bodies to science for a few bucks. Somehow, I can't imagine they would have approved.

The exhibit starts with relics from tombs other than Tut and works its way up to his immediate family (interesting note: the Egyptian royals may have been primitive but they found time to remember unborn fetuses of the royal family), and then escalated to Tut's own burial chamber and the things on his body...but I was disappointed when it ended with the diadem that crowned his head - and no sarcophagus, no death mask. I guess it's perhaps a politically difficult time to get that stuff out of Egypt but the whole iconography of the exhibit - including the repainting of the museum's steps - is in the image of the sarcophagus. It was a big letdown when nothing of the sort was there.

Instead, after you leave the Tut exhibit, you enter...the gift shop. Which sold, I kid you not, a Tut tissue dispenser modeled on the head of the sarcophagus (you pull Kleenex out of the nose). I guess being donated to science isn't the worst of it. (My son got a Tut baseball - I was disappointed not to see Cap Anson at the Pyramids).

After the gift shop, the next room has a glass case containing Bobby Abreu's #53 Phillies uniform. Talk about being put on metaphor alert.

Hershey

By coincidence, I was vacationing the same place Dr. Manhattan was this week - Hershey, PA. And lemme tellya, Milton Hershey could have taught the pharoahs a thing or two. His name is on the town, it's on the candy company, it's on the amusement park, it's on a school he endowed with $60 million in 1918, there's a statue of him at the amusement park and biographical filmstrips, there are even Kiss-shaped streetlamps on Chocolate Avenue (which intersects with Cocoa).

OK, out of time - short takes on some things I may or may not have time to revisit later: we saw more Amish people at Gettysburg than we did in Amish country; we saw Ratatouille in the theater, and it was no Incredibles but still very entertaining; and Jesus must have a good press agent in Central PA because He has one heck of a lot of billboards in the area.

Here's the deal: I'll be away from the blog this week, so I am leaving up this announcement so you will know that I have guest bloggers. Unfortunately, for reasons I have explained, I can neither add nor alter the names of co-authors on this blog, so both of my guest-bloggers will be logging in under the name of last year's guest blogger, Mike Rogers of Mike's Neighborhood. I promise I will fix this as soon as I can, but for now, that'sthe best option we have.

Confused yet? Hopefully not, and I'm asking them to say up front in each post which is which. One of the guest bloggers was once (so long ago I had deleted his account) a co-blogger here under the nom de blog "Kiner's Korner." The other, long absent from the blogosphere, is none other than Dr. Manhattan.

Give them both a big welcome, and apologies for any confusion.

Posted by Dr. Manhattan

A belated welcome to all of the Crank's readers from vacation in Hershey, PA, home of chocolate and misbehaving laptops. (Given my intermittent blogging history, it is only too typical.) I ask your forbearance for a little while longer. By tomorrow, all connecton issues should be cleared up and I should have a few posts up that should provide grist for debate.

I'm currently running Movable Type 3.33. I am trying to create new authors on my blog - I will be going on vacation in the near future and have guest bloggers lined up - and need to figure out how to add new authors. I can find my way to the "Authors" page, which is supposed to allow you to add authors, and can even edit the permissions of the existing authors, but there seems to be nowhere on the page to add new authors or edit the names of the existing ones. Anybody know enough about MT to help me out here? I'd try tech support but I don't even know how to contact MT (their site boots me off every time I try to login), plus I suspect that even if they still support 3.33, it will cost an arm and a leg to get an answer to a simple question, if I can even get one in time.

*Did Mike Bascik purposely make it easy for Bonds to go deep? The argument isn't wholly illogical, but I find it very unpersuasive for such a serious charge. Occam's Razor suggests that Bacsik is just a bad pitcher, albeit one who was willing to try to make Bonds hit the ball and not just get a free pass.

*Dennis Martinez was 2-19 in his career against the Yankees. In a similar vein, Larry Jackson has to have been the all-time master of beating up the weak teams; from 1957-68, Jackson was 39-8 with a 2.20 ERA against the expansion Mets and Astros, 20-11, 3.08 ERA against the Cubs (when not pitching for them) but no better than .500 against any other team; against the rest of the league he was 124-148, with a 3.57 ERA.

*Spinlessness from Barack Obama on Bonds. Via Instapundit.

*Why on earth is this dispute being decided by a federal court?

*Val Kilmer wants to ban the Koran.

*Maybe we could keep secrets better if there was money in it.

Jonathan Last directs us to breathtaking awesomeness.

That thing doesn't actually float, does it?

*Pedro Feliciano's meltdown on Saturday can probably just be chalked up to nobody being perfect (Wagner, whose ERA is down to 1.39, is almost certainly overdue for one of those games), but with Joe Smith down in the minors, it's also a reminder that guys like Feliciano can go south on you in a hurry if overworked. The Mets don't have the juice for a Mark Teixeira deal at this point, so the deal they need to make is for another arm in the pen.

*Via Bob Sikes: Bill Robinson has died. Robinson always seemed like a classy guy, and as a ballplayer he was (along with Mike Easler) one of the guys rescured off the scrap heap in mid-career to help build the Pirates into a championship team in the late 70s and early 80s: Robinson was a 31-year-old .235/.386/.281 hitter and busted ex-prospect when he came to Pittsburgh, but batted .276/.477/.313 (114 OPS +) over 8 seasons at Three Rivers. RIP.

*David Pinto makes an excellent point about changing sizes of ballplayers: scrappy little Craig Biggio is the same listed height and weight as Willie Mays and Carl Yastrzemski.

*For all the guff David Wright takes, recall that in 2007, he is batting .295/.516/.423 with runners in scoring position and .333/.611/.400 in the late innings of a close game.

*I banged out a quick column on Spitzergate last week that I never got around to cross-posting here. Mindles Dreck and Prof. Bainbridge both point out that Spitzer would not have cared whether corporate executives claimed, as he does now, not to have known of their subordinates' misconduct.

*Ryan McConnell aptly sums up my feelings about Glavine:

I'll be honest: I hated when Steve Phillips and the Mets signed Tom Glavine five years ago. I thought it was a stupid, misguided attempt to steal away a rival's player and a complete waste of money. But, while Glavine's never been a personal favorite -- I'm Irish, grudges don't fade as easily for us -- he's far outperformed any reasonable expectations of him while behaving in the most professional, likeable manner possible. He may not be dominant any more, and he seems particularly prone to giving large leads away lately, but I'll always remember the tremendous performance he turned in during last year's playoffs. And I'll be thrilled to see him finally achieve his 300th win.

He also quotes this bizarre statement from Wallace Matthews:

Historically, he may be the best pitcher the Mets have had on their staff since Tom Seaver was run out of town 30 years ago...

How soon they forget. Has Matthews never heard of Pedro Martinez?

*Jaw, meet floor: Byron York notes Obama's pledge in last week's debate "to meet, one-on-one, in his first year as president, with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bashir Assad, Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, and Kim Jong Il."

They never learn. They never, ever, ever learn.

*There are many reasons to doubt the veracity of TNR's formerly pseudonymous mil-blogger Scott Thomas Beauchamp, but Megan McArdle, as usual, cuts to the root of why the stories set off people's BS meters even beyond the parts (e.g., the Bradley dog-hunting tales) that seemed to clash with physical reality:

It beggars belief that 100 or more people silently watched some pottymouthed privates taunting a cripple who had acquired her injuries in the line of duty. I'm moderately well-versed in the stories about battle-hardened veterans committing atrocities in World War II. I've never come across a single story about making fun of your own side's wounded.

Atrocities, and just plain barbaric behaviour, do happen, even on the good guys' side. But the fact that they happen doesn't mean that anything can happen. AFAIK, the taboo behaviours soldiers engage in tend to fall into fairly well-defined patterns: rape, pillage, looting, revenge exacted on innocent but handy targets, graveyard jokes, taking trophies from the enemy dead. There's a kind of primitive logic to them that may sicken you, but still ultimate[ly] makes some sort of emotional sense. Beauchamp's stories defy that logic, which makes me distrust them.

*This study doesn't sound too promising by itself, but it is true that fantasy baseball is a great microcosm of how humans learn and adapt - getting your butt whipped in a fantasy league, and the desire to avoid doing so again, is a great motivator for not just gathering information but also learning how to sift between the useful and the fool's gold (similarly, I have crammed years of lessons about, say, the value of on base percentage into the past year by playing Strat-O-Matic with my son).

*John Kerry, Genocide Denier.

*Yes, Bush has been more stymied than Clinton in getting judges through the Senate.

*Who else but James Lileks would describe the young Hugh Hefner as being "built like a bag of yardsticks"?

*Bonobo apes: not so politically correct after all (somebody tell Maureen Dowd!).

*How Roger Clemens ruined Michele Catalano.

*Crazy Pooh.

*Hanson is back. I actually thought those guys had talent, if not much depth to them (unsurprising, at their age back then). I'll be interested to see if they've done anything useful with it now that they have grown up.

*Shockingly, Justice O'Connor's case-by-case approach to the law has left her jurisprudence with little influence now that she is not there to vote on particular cases.

*NCLB - hated on the Left, distrusted on the Right, but getting results?

Finished the Harry Potter book last night, after a week of squeezing it around some very busy work commitments and thus no free time remaining for blogging. Review to follow later, after which regularly scheduled blogging will resume.

I'm way, way too busy to blog right now, so I will just say this: this morning's rush hour we had Bilblical floods, and for the evening rush hour we get fire and brimstone. I hope someone isn't trying to tell us something.

70-year-old woman arrested and injured in a struggle with police in Orem, Utah. Her crime? Having a brown lawn.

Not the same.

If you're wondering, things have been a bit rocky around here the past few weeks, and probably will be for much of July, at least; work in particular is just crazy right now. One thing I finally got accomplished Friday was to get my home desktop back. Regular readers will recall my misadventures with Hewlett Packard; I finally succeeded in returning the defective replacement for my defective original. H-P was schizophrenic to deal with throughout the process; the online purchase system is a dream, the tech people were unfailingly polite, the machine looked really nice, and their marketing folks are very diligent about bombarding new purchasers with helpful emails. At the same time, the computer didn't work, the replacement didn't work, the repair people orginally didn't show up and then just refused to come, and it was a horrendous ordeal to try and get someone on the phone who would admit to having the authority to give me my money back. At one point I talked to eight different people in two days, each of whom assured me that the next person they sent me to (in some cases volleying me back and forth between the same two phone numbers) would be able to authorize a refund.

Meanwhile, I went to Best Buy and bought a Gateway. Buying from an actual human turned out to be a big plus - the guy got me a Gateway with the same processor as a comparable H-P for hundreds of dollars less. They even offered local on-site installation and data transfer from the Geek Squad, a service company that clearly knows they are in the service business. Granted, it took a few weeks even with these guys to schedule an appointment - but when the Geek Squad guy was running late, he called, and he showed up only an hour late rather than weeks or months. And he set the computer up and it works. Granted, Windows Vista takes some adjusting, and with both computers I was surprised to discover that nobody has 3.5" floppy drives anymore. But I'm back in business.

There really is nothing that says New York quite like walking through Penn Station early in the morning listening to South American immigrants playing "Hotel California" on the pan flute, is there?

Ever have a song stuck in your head by someone who never sung it (at least, as far as I know)? Had that the other day, had Barry White singing the WKRP theme song. And well, I should add. Once a few years back it was Britney Spears (I must have just heard a song on the radio - I couldn't hum the tune to two of her songs) singing the Kinks' "Till the End of the Day," another time Wilson Pickett doing Bon Jovi's "Never Say Goodbye," much better than the original.

"Baby, if you ever wonder..."

My tribulations with Hewlett Packard, previously chronicled here and here, have reached their logical endpoint. To recap briefly, my brand new HP desktop didn't work at all, so HP was going to send someone out to look at it pursuant to the extended/in-home service contract I paid an extra $300 for; the guy never showed, and only later called to say the motherboard he was supposed to replace wouldn't be in until late May (later revised to late June). Once I got the second date I had them send me a new PC instead.

So the new PC doesn't work either; it has the exact same problem. I called tech support tonight, to get them to hopefully send someone out who would actually come. Naturally this led to an hour or more on the phone being tranfserred through five different people (one of whom was in laptop support, the prior person having ignored me when I said desktop), and having to retell the whole tale from the top for each one.

Finally, I get past the guys who wanted to run me through all the same steps that accomplished nothing last time, and onto the guy who could authorize sending someone out...and he tells me that until the old PC has returned the in-home service doesn't apply to the replacement.

Which, in the interim, still does not work. Even though it, like its predecessor, is brand new.

I have had it; I'm sending everything back to HP, getting my money back and never buying a computer from them again. I've now been a month without a working computer (I'm typing this from my wife's laptop) with no realistic prospect of having one any time soon. I keep reading all this great stuff about HP (the Wall Street Journal had a cover story recently on them surpassing Dell as the #1 maker of computers) but as far as I am concerned, a company that can't sell a computer that actually functions is not one I want to do business with.

Sorry, comments are down right now, because HostMatters sent me an email telling me that they were cutting off the comments until I upgrade to Movable Type 3.2 (which I did months ago - I'm running 3.33 now) and do a bunch of other technical goobledegook that is beyond my free time and technical expertise. What drives me nuts is dealing with people who think that running a blog means you understand how to download plugins and rewrite scripts. I have no way of knowing whether the problem here is that HM is a bad host or MT is a bad platform, or both, and given how little time I ordinarily have to blog in the first place, I don't need to spend a bunch of time trying to find out.

Meanwhile, 13 days after my new PC arrived from Hewlett Packard, I still have no functioning computer other than to keep borrowing my wife's laptop. The service guy who was supposed to come last Friday to replace the motherboard - to provide the expanded warranty service we paid hundreds of extra dollars for and repair a brand new machine that does not work at all - simply never showed up. When my wife called (I've been reminding her to take notes - dealing with computer companies is like litigation, you need to document every conversation), they finally admitted that the part the guy was supposed to bring hadn't come in and won't until the end of this month. So, no computer. The fact that I don't want to go through the hassle is the only reason I have not returned the whole thing yet, but I may.

We also have no functioning washing machine. My wife got the call from Sears asking us to buy the extended warranty/service contract on our Kenmore machine, since the 1-year warranty will soon run out. She said no - and just a day or so later, the machine basically melted down, and won't run at all because all of its fancy electronic parts are dead. (Dare I ask whether this has anything to do with the fact that this is an energy-saving washing machine). Progress on having that fixed is also slow.

(I won't even get into the fact that I can no longer connect my iPod to my wife's Dell laptop without frying the USB ports, which means no more downloading music).

I was switching back and forth last night between the GOP debate and the Met game before catching up on last night's "24," so let me give you my observations on what I did catch, plus a few other bits:

*It may almost be time to add Shawn Green to the list of Omar's successes - I'm really amazed that he is hitting .324 and slugging .525, when he looked for all the world like he was headed irreversibly downhill last season. It's a Mike Lowell-style resurgence. Green doesn't look like a power hitter; he's built like a finesse pitcher. The Mets have batboys beefier than Green.

*24 has just gone catastrophically off the rails since the end of the plot with the Arabs. They should probably have ended the season right there. In particular, we have seen no explanation of how Chaing new where and when to call Jack to start this whole thing, and no good reason why the White House should have agreed in the first place to negotiate with a state actor holding a U.S. citizen hostage in Los Angeles. It's gone downhill from there. The Russians seem awfully touchy about nuclear technology that their own consul was basically handing out like Halloween candy, yet blase about threatening war with the U.S. when they know that the U.S. has access to that technology. The simplest explanation is this one.

It looks like Jack is finally leaving Los Angeles after this season. This means we can ask a question that would come up for no other show: will they kill off Los Angeles?

*The account of the White House hospital visit to John Ashcroft, by the way, sounds so much like something from 24... a scene very, very radically different from the caricature of Ashcroft as a jackbooted thug. I would love to have been a fly on the wall for Bush's talk with Comey to know how his concerns were ultimately dealt with or whether Bush just twisted his arm on the importance of the intelligence being collected.

*That set for the debate looked like a bad game show...I missed the rules, were the candidates actually buzzing in for rebuttal time?

*Rudy had the best response of the night when he slammed Ron Paul for essentially saying the U.S. had invited 9/11. I think Paul misread his invite to the Green Party debate. As I have said before, one Ron Paul in Congress is a good thing, but more of them would be a disaster. Any time he opens his mouth on foreign affairs you see why.

*Runner-up line goes to Mike Huckabee: "Congress has been spending money like John Edwards at a beauty shop".

*Of course, both of them have stiff competition from Fred Thompson's brilliant and hilarious response to Michael Moore.

*Having seen only transcripts of the first debate, I had not seen Paul or Tom Tancredo live before, and they were much unlike my image of them from reading their statements for years - Paul seemed like a frail old man, and Tancredo seemed meek and nervous; I was expecting a guy who looked and sounded like Bob Dornan.

*Goldberg and Vodkapundit had basically the same reaction to Romney - of course, Romney's father was a car salesman (well, a CEO of a car company, actually). In positioning himself as a conservative, Romney is basically a smart businessman pursuing an underserved market, not a man seeking higher office out of a firm belief in anything in particular, and it shows.

*There is really, really no purpose to Thommy Thompson and Jim Gilmore being in this race, none.

*Other than his position on trade, I can't think of a single thing I have seen from Duncan Hunter to dislike. Hunter has no realistic chance of getting the nomination, but he might not be a bad running mate - he's a serious guy who looks and sounds like a serious guy.

*From what I saw, compared to some of the last debate's questions, I have to say that the Fox team was just miles better than the MSNBC team in asking questions that GOP primary voters would actually want to see answered (one exception was the justly-booed question to McCain about the Confederate flag) and avoiding speechifying by the moderators. From here on out they should just have Brit Hume & co. do all the GOP debates and Tim Russert do the Democrats.

So much philosophy, so little time.

I am writing this from my wife's laptop. Why, you ask? Well, I finally had to get a new computer, since my old one was 7 years old and wheezing badly (still running Microsoft ME).

Having had quite enough of malfunctions and Dell tech support over the years, I decided to buy a Hewlitt Packard, having heard good things generally and seeing as how the company is doing so well, I assumed the products would be good. My HP Pavillion Slimline with its state-of-the-art LCD monitor arrived early this week, looking sleek and a significant upgrade in every way from the old desktop battleship.

Except it will not work. Just keep getting this "Monitor Going to Sleep" message. Tech support seems convinced that the problem is the computer, not the monitor; in either way the thing is entirely useless. Tonight they tried to get me to take a screwdriver and open the thing up...a brand new computer out of the box! They gotta be kidding. Now they want to send me a box and have me send them the computer back to fix, taking who knows how long, and in the meantime I had essentially dismantled my old PC.

Unbelievable. I just can't seem to buy anything that works on the first try.

UPDATE: So, HP has decided it's the motherboard, and they are sending someone to my house on Friday to replace it. It took some talking to get them to agree to do that even though we have the warranty/home service contract and even though I'd already been through two prior calls to establish that it didn't work, but at least now we hopefully will get a functional machine.

Meanwhile, my iPod is no longer on speaking terms with my wife's laptop, which is supposed to run the iTunes. I can't win...

*There's a fair number of debates from the Virginia Tech shooting I don't have time to weigh in on now (there's the gun control issue; Glenn Reynolds aptly summarizes the case for less of it here, there's the university's reaction time, and there's the appalling spectacle of NBC News broadcasting the killer's videotape), though it seems the most important question is why it was so hard to get the killer out of circulation or at the very least on a list of people who should not be permitted to buy firearms, when he was giving off every sign of being a potential danger to himself and others and everyone around him saw those signs and several people tried to do something about it.

In all the horror I did find one moment of a little levity from this quote:

Briettney said her friend, who was shot in the knee, buttocks and shoulder, was expected to be all right. "The one day he goes to class, he gets shot three times!"

*If you were wondering what was so gosh-darn important about holding that Rutgers press conference: the Rutgers coach now has a book deal.

*All three of my fantasy baseball teams have Felix Hernandez. This is not good news for any of them. Perhaps letting him throw a 111-pitch complete game on a cold April night in Fenway in his last start was not such a good idea.

*I definitely did not see a Mark Buehrle no-hitter coming. The past four years, Buehrle has finished second, second, first and first in the AL in hits allowed.

*You can read my reactions to the partial-birth abortion decision here, here and here. This is also a good summary of the concurrence (H/t).

*Please, wear your seatbelts.

This is insane.

52-year-old Slovenian swimmer Martin Strel has set a world record by swimming the length of the Amazon River - but somehow, this article just doesn't make it sound like much fun:

By Thursday evening, he was struggling with dizziness, vertigo, high blood pressure, diarrhea, nausea and delirium, his Web site said. But despite having difficulty standing and being ordered by the doctor not to swim, Strel was obsessed with finishing the course and insisted on night swimming.

+++

He said he was lucky to have escaped encounters with piranhas, the dreaded toothpick fish, which swims into body orifices to suck blood, and even bull sharks that swim in shallow waters and can live for a while in fresh water.

+++

Cramps, high blood pressure, diarrhea, chronic insomnia, larvae infections, dehydration and abrasions caused by the constant rubbing of his wet suit against his skin frequently tormented him.

Strel, who lost some 26 pounds, said there were times he felt such pain in his arms, chest and legs, "that I could not get out of the water on my own."

Why? Because it was there, I guess.

I'm just catching up now after a business trip to Arizona; regular blogging should resume soon. I had not been to Arizona before; definitely a new experience for an East Coaster, from the unnaturally clear skies (the moon being visible pretty much all afternoon) to the everything-takes-30-minutes-by-car sprawl.

Also, got to see my first live spring training game, Teusday's Giants-Mariners game that ended 9-8 Giants on a late Seattle rally that wasn't enough to overcome Horacio Ramirez getting pasted. A few thoughts on that. First, as a Mets fan I'm sad to see Ramirez no longer pitching for Atlanta; Seattle is highly unlikely to get equal value after dealing Rafael Soriano for him. Second, up close in person Barry Bonds and Ichiro look even less like big league ballplayers (especially next to a monster like Richie Sexson) - Bonds looks, at most, like a retired athlete, while Ichiro looks like a miler. But Bonds hit the ball with his customary authority (a double that would have been a homer but for a 25-30 foot high center field fence) and seemed to be moving OK, albeit at spring training coasting speed. And third, I never, ever expected to attend a baseball game and see Rey Ordonez play again.

Lileks has a variety of amusing things in today's Bleat. I liked this:

The second complaint was Outraged that I advocated animal torture in the piece about the Minnesota Youth Symphony. I likened the sound of bad orchestras to a sound a cat might make if sawed in half. Because as you know we have a big problem with ca[t]-sawing, and it’s just not a joking matter.

Two-sport star Samuel Adams (hey, the slogan says "Brewer-Patriot") has unveiled the "ultimate beer glass." It's . . . shapely. Funny, I always thought the ultimate beer glass was defined as "a full one."

I guess Irving Maimway is still in business after all.

*I'm not thrilled to see any foreign leader meddle in US domestic politics, but it is nonetheless heartening in John Howard's war or words with Barack Obama to see a reminder that the "international community" is not as monolithically anti-American as sometimes portrayed. Powerline has some useful thoughts on why Obama's response was so ham-handed. Of course, the Democrats are never as solicitous of countries that actually support our policies.

*An interesting analysis of the Hamas-Fatah accord. Via Frum. My guess as to the alternative explanations for Abbas' behavior would be "all of the above." I tend to think that the accords are a good thing simply for the fact of their existence, i.e., the fact that an Arab government sat down two warring Arab factions and got them to negotiate an agreement without the involvement of the US, the UN, Israel or financial or territorial concessions from any of the above. Hamas is still Hamas, but I still believe that while you can't negotiate about terrorism, you sometimes need to negotiate with terrorists, and it's not like there are other good alternatives. The best policy for the US is to avoid the situation as much as possible and play "show me" - i.e., make the Palestinian regime demonstrate its trustworthiness and peaceable nature before we give them anything. At least with Hamas in power, there is less pretense that they are actually peaceable or trustworthy unless they can genuinely demonstrate otherwise through deeds.

*There is little enough worth saying about the Anna Nicole Smith story; she rose to fame due to her natural physical gifts combined with tremendous ambition and a corresponding willingness to use and add to what she had, and she fell due to a lack of sense and even greater lack of discipline. A familiar Hollywood story. But Larry Miller has useful words on the litigation that will long outlive her:

Since yet another of the heart-broken offspring has gallantly appeared to pick up the cudgels and continue contesting it, I'd like to offer two choices of what I think is some pretty good advice: (1) Get a job. You didn't earn that money and you don't deserve it. And, by the way, every penny of it should go to Anna Nicole's daughter. Or, (2) Try your best to get reincarnated as a sexy woman.

*Yes, CENTCOM is indeed engaged in the blogosphere.

*A statute beached by the tides of history: Y2K litigation reform.

Ouch. Maybe they got him confused with Frankfurter.

Really bad.

The Jar Jar Binks of Software bites the dust.

*The Schottenheimer Playoff Coaching Index!

*From the same source: Rick Mirer, the worst NFL QB ever. Note that the list also includes Danny Kanell, Scott Brunner, Kerry Collins, Dave Brown, and Kent Graham.

*Via Instapundit, the Top Ten Iraq War Myths.

*In one January strike, the Iraqis brought down the highest ranking casualties of the war. (Confirmed here). One hopes this was just a coincidence and not a sign of inflitration or other compromising of our operational intelligence.

*John Kerry finally gets good press - in Iran's state-run media. I had more on his latest foot-in-mouth episode at RedState yesterday, including links to other sources. The most charitable reading of all this is that Kerry really is an idiot.

*Jimmy Carter backs off the implication that suicide bombing is a legitimate tactic that need not be stopped until the Israelis make certain concessions.

*Israeli PM Ehud Olmert on Iran. (A government that now includes a Muslim cabinet member - don't hold your breath for a Christian or Jew in the regimes of Israel's enemies).

*Did Barack Obama choose to run in 2008 rather than wait longer because a run now would be easier on his children, ages 5 and 8?

*Obi-Wan's cloak for sale!

Every time you think you've exhausted the possibilities for bizarre homicides, there's something new.

*Mmmmmmm.....pitchers in mini-camp.

*I feel Milton Chappell's pain. Those chances don't come around very often, but the worst of it is having to sit silent while the other guy fails to make your best arguments.

*The real Muhammad. There are extremely good aspirational reasons why our government should continue to insist, however tendentiously, that the true and faithful interpretation of Islam does not include imitating the Prophet's own 7th century behavior, but Andrew McCarthy draws a pretty bleak picture of what that behavior entailed and why Muslims today have difficulty separating it from their doctrinal canon.

*John Roberts on being the Chief. Via Bashman.

*Rudy on the Surge. And payback time for the Iranians. Time permitting, I'll have more to come on this issue.

*Mitt Romney has some explaining to do, which he takes a not-quite-on-point crack at here.

*Amateur hour for the Democratic Senate caucus, while Harry Reid circles the wagons around his tribal benefactors. I'm not in favor of the current campaign finance laws, but David Vitter is 100% right that the tribes, now that they are in a major revenue-raising business subject to extensive low-profile federal regulation (and thus a honey pot for Congressional venality), should get the same treatment as corporations. Of course, on the cui bono? side, I assume that Vitter, as the sponsor of this measure, and Mary Landrieu, the lone Democrat to support it, both care about the fact that the tribes compete with Louisiana gambling interests.

I'm deeply delinquent in getting to this one, but Matt Welch tagged me in the blog game of "5 Things You Don't Know About Me". Let's start by acknowledging that you won't be surprised that I could give you variations on Matt's #2 until you begged for mercy. And I cannot possibly top #4 on Drezner's list.

1. I'm seriously double-jointed, and in high school once got caught by a teacher demonstrating - in class - my ability to put my foot behind my head. While sitting in a desk. (Note: at 35, I can no longer do this). Fortunately, this was a sufficiently absurd spectacle that the teacher just chuckled and went back to writing notes on the board.

2. I've never ridden a bicycle. I tried once, briefly, on my honeymooon in Ireland, but didn't last. There's actually a very long list, in fact, of things I have not done, from breaking a bone to skiing to smoking a cigarette (I even lived across the street from a golf course for six years without ever playing golf), but that one sticks out.

3. People who went to college with me know this - we had a "lip synch" contest, and my senior year I did "Old Time Rock n' Roll," by myself, "Risky Business" style (since it was onstage, I could get away with white spandex shorts in lieu of just briefs). Somewhere, video exists of this. Amazingly, no alcohol was involved.

4. True fact: I have never met Bill Simmons. Bill and I have known each other for many years, from reading each other's columns on the college newspaper at Holy Cross (which is a very small place, after all) to having many mutual friends to Bill giving me my start writing on the Web on his old "Boston Sports Guy" site to joining each others' WhatifSports leagues to being in regular email contact for the past several years. But we've never actually sat down together. Funny world - I've met people ranging from Ted Williams, Tom Seaver and Warren Spahn to Barbara Bush, Clarence Thomas and Rudy Giuliani. But not Simmons.

5. Felix Millan singled home Leo Foster to beat Rick Rhoden and the Dodgers 2-1 in the bottom of the ninth on August 28, 1976. That was the first major league game I attended.

Who should I "tag"? Patterico, Geoff Young, Academic Elephant, Beldar, and Pejman.

UPDATE: John Salmon joins the fun.

:
You are Spider-Man

Spider-Man 90% Iron Man 75% Hulk 65% Superman 60% Green Lantern 50% Robin 47% The Flash 45% Supergirl 25% Batman 20% Catwoman 20% Wonder Woman 5%

You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz

As usual this time of year, I'm creating new categories for the new year. This is especially important for those of you who come here directly to the baseball category page, which should now be here. Update your bookmarks accordingly. Also note that posts about the 2008 presidential race will be in the Politics 2008 category.

On deadline today; work has not let up over the past few weeks. I plan to be back to regular blogging tomorrow.

In the meantime, a thought for the past week - you could not buy a better contrast between American and Arab politics than the lives and deaths of Gerald Ford and Saddam Hussein. One man, decent and modest, fought for his country in his youth, rose to the highest office in the land largely on the basis of being sober and inoffensive, and lived three decades of peaceful retirement after being asked by his people to leave; though widely recognized as one of our lesser presidents, he has nonetheless been accorded the honors of a state funeral and fulsome praise from his countrymen. The other, cruel and megalomaniacal and with delusions of historic grandeur, brough ruin, repeated war, and invasion, had to be pulled cowering from a hole in the ground by foreign troops and was sent by his people forcibly to the gallows, mourned only by a disgruntled few, his death celebrated by the many.

Also: Congratulations to Jon Henke! Or, more properly, congratulations to the Senate Republicans on hiring Jon Henke.

Well, in case you hadn't noticed I have been way too busy with work and other stuff lately to keep up on the blog much, especially the baseball content. Never fear! This too shall pass, I've been doing this for six years now, it always does.

Anyway, I'm unlikely to have much else up here until after Christmas. In the meantime, Merry Christmas, and happy Hanukah and whatever other holidays you may be celebrating this season.

What would we do without them?

*One of the more doleful implications of a very narrowly divided polity is the places it leads partisans to go in search of that one last vote that turns an election, a court, a majority, a presidency. So it is difficult for Republicans to resist the temptation to hope for a change in the Senate upon the news that South Dakota Democrat Tim Johnson is in critical condition after what may or may not have been a stroke. The right thing to do, of course, is to wish Senator Johnson and his family well (this is especially so because Tim Johnson, whatever his ideology, is not a loathesome human being like Ted Kennedy). Thinking otherwise may be only human, but it's a reflex to resist.

All things considered, it probably would be for the better if more states had laws that require the appointment of a replacement Senator of the same party, followed by a special election, if an incumbent dies or needs to be replaced - I believe such a law is in place in Hawaii, which has a GOP Governor and two elderly Democratic Senators, and a similar law (the details of which I forget) was enacted in Massachusetts when John Kerry was running for president. That said, existing practice in the absence of such a statute is to replace the Senator however the governor wants, as happened when the Republicans lost Paul Coverdell's Senate seat in Georgia and John Heinz's seat in Pennsylvania (both of which the GOP recaptured at the next election), or when Jesse Ventura appointed an independent to fill out Paul Wellstone's term.

*Count Rudy Giuliani and John McCain with the skeptics about the Iraq Study Group. As of Sunday, Mitt Romney was ducking the issue and saying he hadn't read the report, although a commenter at RedState has a purported statement from Romney that likewise hits the right notes in rejecting consensus for its own sake and rejecting negotiations with Iran and Syria. Still, there's a worrisome pattern to Romney's delayed reactions. The GOP needs its next candidate to be someone who can roll with the punches and drive the public narrative.

On the other hand, Syria loves the ISG report:

The United States will face hatred and failure in the Middle East if the White House rejects the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, Syria warned on Sunday, according to The Associated Press. Syria's ruling party's Al-Baath newspaper urged President Bush to take the group's report seriously because it would "diminish hatred for the U.S. in region," AP reported.

*Academic Elephant over at RedState notes a movement (see also here and here and here), apparently with at least tacit U.S. approval, to break up the current governing coalition in the Iraqi Parliament so as to remove the increasingly ineffectual al-Maliki as leader, build a new coalition that does not depend on the support of Muqtada al-Sadr, and set the stage for a second and hopefully final military showdown with the Sadrists. This would be a necessary step to finishing the job in Iraq.

*This is just a really cool article about turtles. It also pretty well captures the NY Times science section, which still does about the best stuff in the paper - but the headline writer couldn't resist going for an anti-people headline that is really only a small part of the article.

*Great New Republic profile of Sam Brownback, once you make allowances for Noam Scheiber's view of the Catholic Church as a secretive cult. I'm not inclined to support Brownback for president because I don't think he can win (not least of which, the man isn't exactly Mr. Charisma), but I probably agree with him on more issues than most of the other candidates. He'd make a great Senate Majority Leader someday.

*Peter King (the football writer, not Peter King the Congressman) admits error, supports Art Monk for the NFL Hall of Fame.

*I'm all for attacking terrorism at its roots, but poverty ain't it. It's political and religious extremism married to anti-American and anti-Israel ideologies.

*Justices Scalia and Breyer debate the divisive issue of unanimity.

*Eliot Spitzer under pressure from Democratic legislators to allow drivers' licenses for illegal immigrants. New York moved to require more secure driver's licenses after September 11 by requiring social security number background checks before issuing a driver's license. Little faith though I have in our new Governor, you would think he won't be this indifferent to law enforcement and security concerns, let alone allowing the privileges of citizenship without its burdens.

*I'm sorry, this is just hilarious.

*Linda Greenhouse on the shrinking Supreme Court docket. This point is a useful fact:

One [reason] is the decreasing number of appeals filed on behalf of the federal government by the solicitor general’s office. Over the decades, the Supreme Court has granted cases filed by the solicitor general’s office at a high rate. In the mid-1980s, the office was filing more than 50 petitions per term. But as the lower federal courts have become more conservative and the government has lost fewer cases, the number has plummeted, opening a substantial hole in the court’s docket.

As recently as the court’s 2000 term, the solicitor general filed 24 petitions, of which 17 were granted. Last term, it filed 10, of which the court granted 4. This term, the solicitor general has filed 13 petitions; the court has granted 5, denied 3 and is still considering the rest.

This, I'm less convinced of:

In private conversations, the justices themselves insist that nothing so profound is going on, but rather seem mystified at what they perceive as a paucity of cases that meet the court’s standard criteria. The most important of those criteria is whether a case raises a question that has produced conflicting decisions among the lower federal courts.

I can certainly attest from my own practice that I routinely encounter issues of federal law that are deeply unsettled or as to which a circuit split exists (in areas like securities law, RICO, the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, class action procedure, etc.). The Court has been wise to trim its docket from the days of the 1960s-70s; the quality and care with which opinions are crafted has noticeably increased, and it's crucial for the Court to get things right because it often will not return to a particular question again for decades, if ever. But if the Court really wants to take on a few more cases it should have no problem finding appropriate vehicles to clarify unsettled issues.

*Consumer fraud statutes as a remedy for descendants of slaves? (See p. 14). (H/T). I know at least under New York's consumer fraud law, you need to show some loss beyond than just having bought something you would not otherwise have bought, and Justice Breyer has worried about the free speech implications of such lawsuits, which I guess puts him to the right of Judges Posner and Easterbrook on this one.

*DC District Court finds that its jurisdiction over the Hamdan habeas petition has been validly stripped.

*This essay on the Democrats' coming move to strip funding from missile defense programs is one of the best I have read on the subject of SDI. This is an especially good point about the Democrats' insistence that the program be shown to be 100% effective before money is spent improving or deploying it (a rather different tack than they take when dealing with, say, medical research or alternative energy sources - or global warming, for that matter, even though unlike the battle against combustible fuels money spent on missile defense is a single, transparent cost and imposes no burdens on individual liberty):

[L]ike software, most successful weapons systems are best debugged after being deployed. And some weapons systems were never tested at all before deployment.

Complex weapons systems have often been used successfully without proper testing. In 1940, Britain's new air defenses - radars, ground observers, anti-aircraft guns and squadrons of Spitfires and Hurricanes - had never been tested against even a small scale simulated attack. Yet they won the Battle of Britain. Likewise in the 1991 Gulf War the first two E-8A ground surveillance radar aircraft had only just begun a long testing process when they were shipped to Saudi Arabia. During the war they performed magnificently and now these aircraft are in high demand all over the world.

For decades, critics of advanced technology weapons have pointed to testing failures to support their drive to cancel the programs. Yet test failures are a normal part of the development process of any weapon system. Consider the M-1 tank. Its early tests were riddled with failures, yet now it is one of the most effective tanks in the world.

Yes, missile defense is expensive and unlikely to ever be 100% foolproof, and yes, we have other means of deterrence. But especially if we are unwilling or unable to act militarily to stop nations like Iran from getting nuclear weapons, the reduction in the potential threat to the U.S. and its key allies is enormous, and well worth the money. But then, it's never really been about the money but about guys like Carl Levin having an ideological fixation on stopping missile defense no matter the underlying facts. The Democrats' move will also break faith with and alienate one of our key allies, Japan. As usual, when they get on one of their left-leaning foreign policy jags, the Democrats treat the actual commitments of our allies as a worthless trifle.

*This December 2005 Iraq analysis from Steven den Beste looks prescient now. I'm still deeply alarmed by the mounting indications that Maliki is taking orders from Sadr and Sadr is taking orders from Iran. We are now locked in a battle for regional supremacy to see if the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah-Taliban-Al Qaeda axis can strangle democracy in its crib in Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon - a battle that looks more and more everyday like the battles we fought in Central America in the 80s and Southeast Asia in the 70s against Communism.

*Patterico catches the LA Times consistently telling only part of the story of a discrimination lawsuit against the LAFD. This is one of those stories I had seen and thought there was something missing from it - Patterico fills in the blanks, which make the whole episode sound more like a sophmoric prank than racism.

What galls me is this, from an LAT editorial:

Scathing audits have outlined the LAFD's erratic disciplinary policies, poor leadership and hostile work environment, yet those reports have failed to dislodge the frat-boy culture. Maybe a public airing of its dirty laundry will.

Now, fixing a bad disciplinary system is fine, and stamping out racism is a noble cause. But a "frat-boy culture" is the concern of the law, why? These are firemen. They run into buildings that are on fire for a living, buildings that have a nasty habit of collapsing on or under them or otherwise acting in a highly dangerous and unstable fashion. Fire departments, like military organizations and police departments, are sustained in their dangerous mission by their unique institutional cultures. People who haven't walked a mile in their boots should be very hesitant to tamper with that culture.

*Speaking of employment law, the Democrats are also poised to add homosexuals to the list of protected classes who can raise the shield of federal litigation to prevent them from being fired or passed over for promotions. Via Bashman. Now, in theory, private businesses (as opposed to, say, religious organizations) should not be able to fire people because they are gay. But anyone with even passing familiarity with the three-ring circus of employment law can tell you that these statutes do not exist in theory - they are, instead, a practical weapon reached for by the kinds of people who get fired from jobs, and usually deservedly so, or to force companies to go through all sorts of contortions in figuring out the proper demographic composition of layoffs rather than just running the best business case.

What is more, what is often an issue is whether a person is perceived as being a member of a protected class, or what the employer knew about their membership in that class. Now, it's usually not hard to figure out who is black, or a woman, or in a wheelchair, but after that things get complicated, and with sexual orientation we enter unchated ground. Do we really want to create a whole cat-and-mouse industry over employers' knowledge of their employees' sex lives? A federal gaydar jurisprudence? ("The court finds that the company's awareness that the plaintiff enjoyed men's figure skating. Summary judgment denied.") If there's one thing the Democrats are experts at enacting, it's the Law of Unintended Consequences.

Or maybe, for their backers in the plaintiffs' bar, not so unintended.

*Good RCP Blog look at Barack H. Obama. I'm split on whether, as a matter of practical politics, this really is Obama's moment to run at the top of the ticket. On the one hand, his liberal record will only grow the longer he is in the Senate, especially now with a Democratic majority, blunting the appeal of his rhetorical moderation. The usual rule is that you run when people want you to run - that's the moment. On the other hand, it seems awfully presumptuous to run after one unfinished term in the Senate, when he has manifestly not accomplished anything. My guess is that moreso than John Edwards in 2004, Obama would be well served by running for VP even if on a losing ticket.

*Speaking of finding the right moment, the GOP field seems to be attracting people whose moments would appear to have passed - like Tommy Thompson and Frank Keating, two star GOP governors from the 1990s.

*Matt Welch takes a harsh look at John McCain from his perspective as a left-leaning libertarian. I loved the subtitle.

*In the same vein, a couple of links about Rudy Giuliani here and here.

*Via Instapundit, Eugene Volokh notes a decision from the Washington Supreme Court recognizing an individual right to bear arms. This only sharpens the conflict I noted three years ago with a Ninth Circuit decision holding that California could impose tort liability on legal sales of firearms within Washington State.

*Not me, but might as well be.

*TV sictom/romantic comedy comes to the factory floor. I will be more than a little surprised if Hollywood gets this one right and is entertaining in the process.

OK, I know content has been slow here lately - it's been busy at work and the baby's not been sleeping well, and that eats away at my blogging time from both ends. I'm also working on some longer-term projects that don't hit the site right away. The good news is, my tech guru has finally come up with a way to close comments on older entries, which seems to have solved the spam problem once and for all, so when I do have time I'm able to focus again on writing.

Apparently, even when Americans vote Democrat they are still Nazis at heart. And the prophet Elijah was just like Barney Frank.

(In fairness, another episode of "Blogging the Bible" compares God to Don Rumsfeld).

Here is where things stand:

*I wanted to get rid of the spam, but it seems there is no workable solution right now for adding registration without a huge hassle. However, I may get in the habit of shutting off comments when I know I'll be away from my computer for more than a day or so, so I don't get inundated.

*In the meantime, to keep the spam from ending up on the site, I've instituted a form of comment mediation: the Whitelister (hat tip to Chaz Hill of Dustbury). Basically, your comments will go into moderation unless I have your email address on a list. I already entered the addresses of the last 20 or so commenters here, which should include most of the regulars, but if you leave a comment and it doesn't show, email me (if I don't catch it right away myself) and I'll add you to the list of trusted commenters. It stinks, I know, but the goal here is not to become a spam farm.

Anyway, I'm still hoping for the day when most of my blogging time can be spent, you know, blogging.

Well, it was nice to have the comment section back, but 500 spam comments overnight convinced me to shut them off again over the holiday weekend, at least until we can install the permanent fix.

Lots to catch up on here - the blog is now once again operational after an upgrade to Movable Type 3.33. Comments should be working again soon, but I may be instituting registration. It pains me to do that, but I'm sick and tired of spam-busting, and most of the comments here tend to be from a handful of regulars anyway.

UPDATE: Comments are open and working for now, but I will probably put in some sort of registration or authentication system once I figure out how to get one to work.

Blog will be down a few days for repairs. In the meantime my political stuff can still be found at RedState.

1. Yes, I know comments are still down. I'm pursuing options for a more permanent solution, but I'd like to see if I can do it without leaving Movable Type. Among other things I hate having to get a whole bunch of new permalinks to the old entries.

2. Unsurprisingly, I expect to be doing mostly politics for the rest of this week, while we pore over the election results and before the offseason begins in earnest.

3. Tonight, I may or may not be blogging here; if I'm not posting here I may be over at RedState.

Which is exactly what it sounds like. Via Murdoc.

Yes, for some reason the comments are out of service again. The percentage of my blogging time that I spend on spam and site maintenance just keeps rising.

UPDATE: It appears that the comments were shut down by Host Matters precisely because the waves of spam attacks were overwhelming the server. Really, no punishment is too harsh for spammers...I've been told I now need to upgrade to another version of Movable Type, as if I have nothing better to do with my time than tinker with the behind-the-scenes technical stuff, most of which I don't understand anyway.

Just ran a search for links to my stuff, as most bloggers do from time to time, and noticed that Michelle Malkin quoted a comment I posted at RedState, and that I got my first hate diary at Kos.

Do I really need to say more? Shrimp on a treadmill, man!

A telemarketer calls the wrong guy. (Audio). Via Ace.

*PJ O'Rourke on the two parties entering the 2006 elections. Via QandO.

*A manifesto for Republicans facing the 2006 elections. Though I'm not sure an anaology to the Spartans at Thermopylae will raise a lot of spirits.

*A maybe not-so-different kind of border fence. Of course, the Chinese have tried the wall-building thing before without notable success.

*There's a difference between historians and lawyers, on the one hand, and journalists, on the other; only the latter think that you can prove your point through sloppy paraphrasing, playing fast and loose with primary sources, and citing the testimony of the anonymous. Bob Woodward's new book is a classic example of this. Be sure to read the whole thing, long as it is, and reflect on Woodward's motive.

*Now, Hugo Chavez has gone too far!

*What I take away from this story about Bill Simmons playing video golf with Tiger Woods is that Bill definitely lives in a different world from the rest of us these days.

*Jon Weisman at Dodger Thoughts has a handy guide to assessing media rumors in the baseball offseason - in fact, I would say that it's good advice for evaluating media rumors generally.

*Mike Carminati notes the historical rarity of the Yankees losing in more than two consecutive postseasons. Note the short list of teams before 1995 that appeared in the postseason three years running without winning it all.

*Eliot Spitzer's role on the Claus von Bulow case.

*A Robin Williams film appreciation by a critic who really hates him. Like Eddie Murphy, Williams didn't lose so much his comic touch as his judgment in scripts.

Instapundit links to an article bemoaning the decline of cursive writing, but doesn't think it's such a bad thing:

I'll take neat printing over sloppy cursive any day, and -- take it from a guy who's graded a lot of bluebooks -- nearly all the cursive you see is sloppy.

Granted, handwritten high school/college/law school exams tend to be excessively sloppy, given the intense time pressures involved, but I'm with Glenn. In my current line of work I take a lot of notes and I basically always print; it makes my notes much more legible to me and others than my script ever was, and once you are in the habit of printing it's not appreaciably slower. I use script only to sign my name.

The big story today - I've been hearing the sirens from my office - is a small plane crashing into an apartment complex on 72d and York. Word just came across Fox News that the plane was registered to Yankee (and ex-Met) pitcher Cory Lidle. No word on who was on board.

UPDATES: ESPN says Lidle was on board and is dead:

Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle died Wednesday when a small plane he was piloting crashed into a 50-story condominium tower Wednesday on Manhattan's Upper East Side.

This is shocking, shades of Thurman Munson and then some. Presumably Lidle was on his way home from the end of baseball season. I always liked Lidle when he was with the Mets, and he had some decent years, especially in Oakland. Lidle was 34.

Here's an article from September about Lidle as a pilot. As you will recall, Lidle was a descendant of Robert Fulton, the inventor of the steamboat; I guess the interest in transportation ran in his family.

Readers at Athletics Nation remember Lidle. Commenters at MetsBlog are talking about a tough interview Lidle did with Mike and the Mad Dog earlier this week.

Bloomberg's doing a press conference now. He's basically saying NTSB will have to clear up what happened, nobody knows much else for certain yet, reports are conflicting. Air traffic control lost contact around 59th street as Lidle was heading north. Bloomberg is utterly emotionless.

This obviously casts a very serious pall over tonight's scheduled games, including two of Lidle's former teams. The Mets may not play anyway, given the rain (more on the implications of that later).

Via Instapundit, though, a smidgen of humor: Alec Baldwin being . . . well, Alec Baldwin.

Looks like the comments function is off again. I'll see when I have time to get someone to fix it.

I realize that most of this site's readers will be watching the Met game tonight, but if you happen to not be watching or want to record/Tivo it, I am scheduled (assuming the pre-taped segment isn't cut) to be on "The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch" at 10pm tonight on CNBC (probably the third or fourth segment) discussing Washington scandals, with special emphasis on my Weekly Standard article on the subject.

I can't promise scintillating television, but I think I got through it with a minimum of hemming and hawing. Bear in mind that (1) I had no idea what the questions would be and (2) I only found out around 10am today that I would be on TV.

UPDATE: So, I'm on national TV tonight and there's a Mets playoff game on ... and my TV dies. After 11 years of flawless service. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

SECOND UPDATE: Well, they cut me. We did get the TV fixed, but to no avail. Sorry to those of you who tuned in.

Despite its success I don't think this will ever catch on as an anti-theft device.

Yeah, another bunch of links and quick hits, heavy on politics and war.

*First of all, for my own purposes I should note here that as of this week I have been at my law firm for 10 years. A milestone, of a sort.

*This putatively hostile profile of Mitch McConnell makes him sound like the ideal leader for a legislative majority - a guy who's a brilliant master of parliamentary rules and techniques, a workhorse rather than a showhorse who has a keen understanding of how to hold his caucus together and has been an instrumental player in some of Bill Frist's biggest successes. The authors criticize him for not writing "landmark legislation" or taking to the airwaves, but they have to concede that McConnell has done, in his fight against campaign finance regulation, the very thing the Framers most hoped a a Senator would do - wage an unpopular one-man battle against landmark legislation that is simultaneously self-interested (by protecting incumbents) and hostile to our constitutional guarantees of free speech. And as for his partisanship, (1) the authors don't really even pretend that Tom Daschle wasn't an arch-partisan and (2) "bipartisan" legislation is usually a warning to watch your wallet anyway.

*While I share David Frum's frustration that Bush didn't spend more of his UN speech pressing the case against Iran, I thought this passage in the speech was one of the best articulations yet of why the battle against tyranny in the region is so important to the battle against terrorism - as Bush's predecessor would say to himself, "it's the propaganda, stupid":

Imagine what it's like to be a young person living in a country that is not moving toward reform. You're 21 years old, and while your peers in other parts of the world are casting their ballots for the first time, you are powerless to change the course of your government. While your peers in other parts of the world have received educations that prepare them for the opportunities of a global economy, you have been fed propaganda and conspiracy theories that blame others for your country's shortcomings. And everywhere you turn, you hear extremists who tell you that you can escape your misery and regain your dignity through violence and terror and martyrdom. For many across the broader Middle East, this is the dismal choice presented every day.

This is, by the way, a signal difference from the Cold War - the Communist bloc may have fed its citizens propaganda, but at least they were literate and educated, and thus easier to reach with a contrary message. Illiteracy is a particular problem in Egypt and one of the reasons why Egyptian society presents a greater danger than, say, Iraq or Iran of the populace embracing Islamist nutcases if given the vote.

*Links on the continuing saga of the threats of violence against the Pope for implying that Islam preaches violence: was Pope Benedict trying to build pressure for Christians to receive the treatment in Muslim lands that Muslims receive in Christian lands?; the archbishop of Sydney isn't backing down; David Warren on the BBC; and Fr. Neuhaus at First Things has some reflections. More detail on the violence and threats of violence here, here, here and here. Josh Trevino offers trenchant analysis, especially this parallel:

There's an illuminating historical incident from the tenth century that deserves wider dissemination, and that the Pope might have used in lieu of Manuel II Paleologue's quote. That Emperor was the last to enjoy a full reign in a free Empire; but nearly four hundred years before, the Empire was enjoying a resurgence. Manuel II Paleologue ruled barely more than Constantinople itself - but Nikephoros II Fokas ruled from Italy to the Caucasus, and from Bulgaria to Syria. He was a longtime foe of the Muslim Caliphate, and he observed that a signal advantage of the Muslims was their jihad doctrine. The Orthodox Church then - as now - regarded war as a regrettable necessity, with emphasis on the regrettable part, and soldiers returning from war would be made to perform some manner of penance before again receiving communion. By contrast, Nikephoros II Fokas observed that the Muslims who went to war were directly fulfilling the commandments of their faith, and were accordingly more motivated, violent, and relentless. The Emperor decided that the Christians needed a similar spiritual edge, and so he asked the Patriarch Polyeuktos in Constantinople to declare that any Christian who fell in battle was automatically a martyr. In effect, he requested a Christian version of jihad. The Patriarch and the entire Church hierarchy, so often in that era mere tools of Imperial policy, refused. The Emperor was forced to back down, and within a few short centuries, the Empire was overrun by the Muslims.

Trevino also points out something else. While the founder of Christianity was martyred by the State and the Church endured three centuries of persecution from its founding, Islam began as, and has for most of its existence been, the religion of power and the powerful, united with the State. There are examples of Muslims living under both the culturally light yoke of colonialism (in British India and the brief Western mandates over the former Ottoman territories from 1918 until just after WW2) and Communist opression (mainly in Kazakhstan and the other southern republics that left Russia at the collapse of the Soviet Union), but Islam for the most part does not share the heritage of other faiths in surviving separate from and in opposition to the State. None of this suggests that Islam is necessarily or by nature bad or dangerous, but it does underline why Islamic doctrines have been such potent and hard-to-defuse weapons in the hands of actual and would-be tyrants.

*I had hoped to get to the issue of the Senate Intelligence Committee reports on pre-Iraq-War intelligence sooner and in more detail, but I have only thus far had the chance to read parts of the reports. Critics of the reports have been out in full force on the Right - Stephen Hayes says the report glosses over Saddam's history with jihadist extremists, as does Deroy Murdock, Byron York looks at the fact that Chuck Hagel, a Republican on the committee, had a former Kerry campaign staffer on the committee staff, Wizbang has a link here to a piece that appears to rehash some of Hayes' reporting, and here to a CNN report from 1999 (quoted by Hayes in his book) claiming that Saddam offered asylum to bin Laden. Read and judge for yourself - like I said, I haven't had time to digest all of this yet.

*From the National Law Journal on the Supreme Court's new term:

"There are some stand-out cases and each of them will test whether this is a 'restrained' Court," said constitutional law scholar Douglas Kmiec of Pepperdine University School of Law, referring to the abortion, affirmative action and punitive damages challenges.

+++

Kmiec concedes that it is "very difficult at first blush" to see why a conservative, restrained court would take the [partial-birth] abortion challenges, since there is no circuit split and there is a recent precedent.

"Maybe the answer is: It's not a fully restrained court, especially in this case where Justice Kennedy has been waiting to prevail, and justices [Clarence] Thomas and [Antonin] Scalia have not fully signed on yet to the Roberts-Alito method of decision-making," said Kmiec.

Um, the Executive Branch has asked the Court to reverse lower court rulings that struck down an Act of Congress. I don't care what your judicial philosophy is in deciding a case like that, the Court is almost always going to take a case in those circumstances; it would be a serious dereliction of its institutional role not to.

*A female Supreme Court justice in Yemen? Baby steps.

*Lawrence of India: funny how this statute didn't get mentioned in Justice Kennedy's discussion of international precedents in Lawrence v Texas. Remember, foreign law only counts if it helps one side.

*Jane Galt has more on the illnesses of Ground Zero workers.

*Correction: Hekmyatar wasn't actually captured.

*Ricky West on Keith Olbermann's guest list.

Ahoy! A few thoughts, mateys, from Captain Blood:

If a man conceal any treasure captured or fail to place it in the general fund, he shall be marooned. Set ashore on a deserted isle, and there left with a bottle of water, a loaf of bread and a pistol with one load. If a man shall be drunk on duty he shall recieve the same fate. And if a man shall molest a woman captive against her will... he, too, shall receive the same punishment.

+++

Dr. Peter Blood: Nuttall, me lad, there's just one other little thing. Do you think you could find me a good stout piece of timber? About so thick and so long?

Honesty Nuttall: Yes, I think so.

Dr. Peter Blood: Then do so and lash it to your spine - it needs stiffening. Courage! We'll join you at midnight.

+++

Crewman: [Captain Blood's ship has just received a terrible broadside from the one remaining French warship] We're sinking! What should we do?

Dr. Peter Blood: Do? We'll board a ship that's not sinking!

I think we can safely file this under "if you have to ask, you're missing the point."

Sorry I've been a little short on baseball content the past week. That was certainly one crushing loss for the Marlins last night. Anyway, on to some links:

*My initial reaction to the news that Pakistan was effectively conceding its lack of sovereignty over the mountainous, tribal, Taliban/Al Qaeda-infested Waziristan region on the Afghan border (more here and here) was that the last grounds for pretending that Pakistan, and not the U.S., was responsible for cleaning out this hornet's nest was gone, and that we would need to brace for a bloody invasion that would inevitably (given the terrain and hostile locals) require heavy U.S. casualties and massive civilian deaths, given that the only really feasible approaches to the warren of hills and valleys are (1) go in single file like sitting ducks or (2) bomb the place back to the Stone Age, Curtis LeMay style. Ed Morrissey and McQ were more guardedly optimistic - after all, Musharraf was also simultaneously working out an agreement with Hamid Karzai to take a joint approach to rooting out the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the border regions, and if there's one thing we know about Pakistan it's that an awful lot has gone on there the past five years that has never been made public. I remain skeptical, but as Bill Roggio reports that the Taliban has already violated the agreements with Pakistan (surprise!) while the accord with Karzai was followed very rapidly by the capture of troublesome Afghan warlord and sometime Taliban ally Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, it is possible that progress is actually being made in the region that is still the most likely haven of bin Laden and Zawahiri. Stay tuned.

*Here in NY, the dominant story in the media lately has been the illnesses (mainly respiratory problems, although class action lawyers have been trying to squeeze the square peg of unrelated ailments into the same hole) suffered by Ground Zero rescue/cleanup workers. The Daily News on Saturday had an interesting article on how dogs at the rescue site have not suffered comparable illnesses despite working long hours at the site without any protective gear. The obvious physiological differences between people and dogs are noted, but it seems to me there are two further issues that probably exacerbate the difference. One is behavioral: some of the people who labored long and hard at Ground Zero may be smokers, and smokers are always at greater risk for other respiratory problems (a fact examined at exhaustive length in studies of asbestos). The other is psychological: if people expect to get sick, they may be more vulnerable. Dogs didn't expect to get sick. (I'm not trying to blame people who got sick, mind you; just saying that the interaction between the mind and illnesses of the body remains poorly understood).

*Excellent point by Orin Kerr (via Instapundit): despite the great hue and cry over the NSA surveillance program, the actual footprint of War on Terror legislation and executive actions on civil liberties has been much narrower than a lot of people expected five years ago.

*John Hawkins runs down the GOP's best chances to gain Democrat-held House seats. Many of them are not great pickup odds right now, but are still within striking distance. As in the Senate, I think Republicans will have to make a few gains to hold the chamber given the likelihood of losing Republican-held seats.

*Of course, Democrats oppose voter ID that would make fraud more difficult. I wonder, given the specific issue discussed here, whether there is some sovereignty-based grounds for exempting the Navajo.

*Make Afghanistan the new Iowa? Can you really grow good corn crops there?

*A good start.

*I won an award!

*Our friends, the Saudis.

*I've been stunned to see recent reports that Dunkin Donuts wants to expand nationally - I always thought they were every bit as national and synonymous with donuts as McDonalds with burgers and Kentucky Fried Chicken with fast food chicken.

*Some people have no respect for the dead.

*Good Josh Bolten smackdown of Harry Reid.

*TNR on Sistani's withdrawal from politics as Shiites disregard his cautions about sectarian violence.

Read More »

Glenn Greenwald has started another blogfight with Patterico, and yet again he doesn't seem to know who he's tangling with (see here, here, here and here). The short summary is that Greenwald made a simple error of fact - he confused Patterico with a guest poster on his site, who had seen "Path to 9/11" because he works for a top-rated LA morning radio show. A sane person would admit the error and go back to blogging about more substantive issues, but Greenwald instead chose to dig in, ramp up his already elevated levels of outrage, and dig up personal dirt on the guest poster. Amazing.

Nice Worcester Telegram & Gazette profile of the latest business venture by my friend and Holy Cross classmate PJ Sansonetti. And ConfirmThem welcomes Curt Levey, who was a year behind me at Harvard Law and has been active in the conservative movement ever since.

You shoulda seen the one that got away.

Nasty head cold knocked me for a loop yesterday and I'm still playing catch-up today. Hopefullly I'll be back blogging by tonight or tomorrow.

Do cows have accents? Or do some farmers just spend way too much time with their cows?

Where else can you find a chimpanzee playing Ms. Pac Man? (Of course, I could not shake the creeping suspicion that this was somehow supported by taxpayer money, but that's just me)

Someone has gone to inordinate lengths to parody our good friend Bill Simmons with a Bill Simmons column generator.

Thanks to Mike Rogers for keeping the site updated while I was out of town. I'm back from Florida now and digging through the hundreds of emails I have backlogged, from site comments, spam, etc.

Apparently I'm mentioned in Sports Illustrated, which is very exciting news, but no longer being a subscriber I don't have the issue and have yet to be able to view the article online (here) and the newsstands I checked this morning didn't carry SI. Could someone with access to the online article email me the text? Thanks.

UPDATE: Got it. Cool. Welcome, SI readers! If you want to sample the posts mentioned in the article, the "Least Favorite Mets" list is here and here, and the series on the 2006 Tigers and the great pitching teams is here, here and here. There's a lot besides baseball here, but if you dislike my politics (or politics in general), you can always just bookmark the baseball-only category.

*Justice Stevens' opinion in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld took Senators John Kyl and Lindsay Graham to task for inserting a colloquy in the Congressional Record that didn't actually take place on the Senate floor, instead relying on statements by Harry Reid and Carl Levin; lots of bad press followed, and left-wing blogs tore into Kyl and Graham (see here and here for examples). Well, well, well, Ramesh Ponnuru points out that Levin's and Reid's statements were also inserted into the record and didn't take place on the floor. Which supports both the view that the Republican Senators did nothing unusual and - as Ponnuru notes - the common-sense position of Justice Scalia that legislative history can't be trusted. Kyl and Graham are owed an apology, big-time.

*Catallarchy uses a useful analogy to demonstrate how badly rate-regulated monopoly energy companies handle demand for their product.

*Megan McArdle meets the moonbat sense of humor.

*The picture on the second page of this article suggests a distracted photographer.

*NY GOP Senate candidate John Spencer's campaign blog rounds up some of the evidence against Hillary Clinton's national security credentials.

*IMAO T-Shirt Bride Sarah K. reads the tea leaves from the casting of the fifth Harry Potter film to guess at what storylines will and won't be pursued (with an 850+ page book to trim into a 2-3 hour movie, a lot will undoubtedly be left behind).

*Tom Maguire notes Duke Law Professor Edwin Chemerinsky's unfamiliarity with the basic facts of the Wilson/Plame civil suit despite having put his name behind their complaint.

*I'm not sure what's more characteristically French - that they instituted paid vacations by force of law, or that the Vichy government sent the architect of that law to Buchenwald.

*Allahpundit on Jake Tapper's interview with Kos: "It's like the chickenhawk Creation Myth."

*They found 50? The good news is, apparently our Majority Leader is prettier than theirs.

*Yummy. You just don't see enough sun dials at baseball stadiums these days. Then there's the Bleacher Bar.

This post by John Scalzi vivisecting a marketing email sent on behalf of Napster is side-splittingly hilarious. (H/t Instapundit) I actually got the same email - verbatim, of course, though my blog and readership are rather different - and just stuck it aside to review later because I couldn't immediately make sense of what it meant and it left me with a vaguely bad feeling that this was spam or a trick of some sort. Good marketing never makes you think it sounds like a 411 scam.

The postscript: if you believe a comment left on Scalzi's thread, apparently by the CEO of the marketing firm, Scalzi's post got the author of the email fired. The comment, by the way, claimed that the email was "specifically developed for outreach to a database of comedic fansites," which doesn't explain why it went to Scalzi (a novelist who writes sci-fi) or to me.

Ken Arneson spots an unusual road sign in Denmark. The comments are pretty funny.

If you check the Digits.com counter on the left, which has been up since August 2002, you will see that as of lunchtime today I am within 800 visits (a day's worth, give or take) of cracking a million. Thanks to everyone who has visited, linked to or otherwise helped out the site.

I would advise Glenn Greenwald not to tangle with Patterico. (More here). The last guy who did that ended up losing his job.

UPDATE: I might have advised Greenwald to not repeat the exact same mistake Hiltzik made. I'd predict that Greenwald would lose his job and end up fleeing the country, but as he apparently has no job and left America for Brazil a couple of years ago, I guess the worst that can happen is to lose still more credibility on the internet . . .

SECOND UPDATE: Greenwald claims that the "sock puppets" must be someone else who lives with him. Also, he notes that he only lives in Brazil half the time. Though he remains, if you've read any sampling of his blog posts, remarkably cavalier about American national security. Anyway, the main problem with Greenwald is his persistent hysteria about the Bush Administration and the ways in which that leads him to extremely attenuated factual and legal conclusions and bad policy arguments. But it's amusing, after his bitter attacks on other bloggers, to see him get called on this.

How can I not reciprocate when I get a link from a blog called "Star-Spangled Haggis"?

One suggestion to small blogs looking to get noticed: bloggers love links, but they love traffic even more. I tend to follow to see who is sending me readers.

May 25: Moved to new house.
July 9: Finally located TV remote.

I can't summarize this lengthy screed except by saying that Megan McArdle is wonderful.

Read the whole thing. And, from the same sources, this is unbelievable (warning: needs sound).

I've post-dated this so it stays at the top. Yes, I am well aware that the comments on the site are busted. And my efforts thus far to get help have been unsuccessful. If anyone can help or offer suggestions, I'd be much obliged.

UPDATE: I miss the feedback of having a comments section, but I simply have neither the time nor the technical skill to sift through self-help forums to find an answer. What I need is someone to get this done. Specifically, if anyone can recommend someone who can fix this sort of thing, let me know. I am willing to pay.

SECOND UPDATE: Comments are fixed!

*Clarice Feldman at The American Thinker starts the discussion of whether the Haditha "massacre" was a hoax. It's too early to tell - but of course it hasn't been too early for potential House Majority Leader John Murtha to pronounce the guilt of all involved in war crimes or for the domestic Left and America's enemies overseas to sing the same common theme. More here on TIME Magazine's corrections to its initial story, and a longer roundup and links here.

*At least Republicans pretend to want to limit government spending. The absence of even that pretense is what makes the Dems frightening as stewards of the public purse. Well, that and a 40-year track record as the House majority.

*"Dems slipping in state races": A USAToday front-pager today on the Democrats' struggles in governors' races, prominently featuring Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm and Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle.

*I've said it before: Mike Huckabee, New Democrat.

*This may be of some relevance to the ongoing interrogation debate. And of course, Zarqawi read Newsweek (via Taranto) By contrast, Tom Elia asks if the BBC could "actively help the government by passing along coded, top secret information in order to advance the objective of winning a war" as it did in advance of D-Day. In the BBC's case, it's even worse - the BBC isn't just a media organization that heaps scorn on the government and works at cross-purposes to it - it's one that does so with taxpayer money and the benefits of governmentally sustained monopoly power.

*From my blog (and RedState) to John Fund in one week. Cool.

*Bring it on! I last revisited the ongoing battle between John Kerry and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in detail here back in September 2004. Well, in late May, Kerry decided to reopen the battle in the pages of the New York Times, but Thomas Lipscomb is answering in detail, with the first two installments here and here. Read the whole thing - especially, read part two to the last line.

*This is not usually a firing offense (via Bashman)

*The US District Court in Massachusetts, following the lead of the Florida and Massachusetts state bars, disbars F. Lee Bailey. The First Circuit affirms, explaining along the way how the once-prominent criminal defense attorney came to this pass.

*Mac Thomason on the downfall of Roy Moore.

*Mark Steyn on the DC sniper's admiration for Al Qaeda.

*Leading Democrats' reactions to Zarqwi's death - most of them are OK, but Hillary's otherwise fine reaction is marred by a typically Clintonian urge to personalize the issue:

I saw firsthand the terrible consequences of Zarqawi's terrorist network when Bill, Chelsea and I visited the hotel ballroom in Amman, Jordan last November where Zarqawi's followers had detonated a bomb at a wedding party, killing and wounding innocent people.

Because, you know, if a Clinton wasn't there it didn't happen.

*Reviews of every stadium, from a blogger who's visited them all.

*Scott Erickson on Jeffrey Maier:

Pitcher Scott Erickson, who started the game for the Orioles and was in line to get the win before Armando Benitez served up the fateful pitch in the eighth inning to Jeter, said he hopes Maier makes it to the major leagues, "just so I can drill him -- I'd like to get one shot at him."

(H/T)

*Dan Lewis calls on Selig to resign in the wake of the Jason Grimsley story. We should not be surprised at Grimsley's attitude towards the drug policy. Recall that this is the same guy who confessed to assisting Albert Belle in covering up a corked bat and whose father was a notorious spitballer.

*"The Rocket's 10th strikeout earned free tacos for the standing-room-only crowd at Whataburger Field." David Pinto notices something that caught my eye too about Clemens' performance.

OK, I don't blog about parenthood here all that much, but indulge me here for a minute. Or not; it's my blog. Anyway, yesterday my youngest daughter played peek-a-boo with me.

Now, if you know babies, you know they love peek-a-boo, and some of them have a nearly inexhausible patience for watching a parent or pretty much anyone cover and uncover their face repeatedly. Since my youngest daughter is just three months today, I wasn't sure if she was quite old enough to respond to peek-a-boo, but a few days ago I did it and got a laugh out of her.

So, yesterday I was doing it again, and she was sitting in her car seat with a blanket a little below her chin, and she didn't just smile - she pulled the blanket up with both hands and lowered her face so the blanket covered her eyes, and then popped back up again. In other words, she played peek-a-boo with me, and not just by doing exactly what I was doing but imitating the concept. Of course, that got a tremendous rise out of me, and my wife and mother-in-law came to watch - and she did it again. As in, seven or eight times in a row, ducking behind her blanket and then pulling it back down and popping back up again, to leave pretty much no doubt that she was doing this on purpose.

Parenthood is a lot of work and, at times, more than its share of aggravation, but there are times when you are reminded very directly why it's worth it.

Michele and her co-blogger have matching stories about the AMC Pacer.

Yes, I'm moved now and gradually getting unpacked. And yes, I'm aware that the comments function is busted at the moment, but as of yet I have no clue how to fix it. Hope you're enjoying the holiday weekend as well as honoring our war dead who give Memorial Day its significance; hope to be back soon.

We're moving tomorrow, so the blog should be quiet at least the next two days.

*A field guide to Christianity. Hilarious. Via Megan McArdle.

*Some days, the bear eats you.

*Laurence Tribe pens an op-ed for the Boston Globe entitled "Bush stomps on Fourth Amendment". (Via Bashman). You have to wait until the third paragraph to discover that the "stomping" in question is permitted by a 1979 Supreme Court decision, and that Prof. Tribe's argument is really that the Supreme Court should overrule its prior precedent, not that Bush is somehow flouting the law and the courts.

*More troubles for Milberg Weiss.

*The Pentagon hands over the roster of inmates at Guantanamo.

*Baseball Prospectus finally has HACKING MASS standings up. My team is currently ranked #21 out of 1,427. And BP's Kevin Goldstein is souring on Andy Marte.

*Today's Day by Day is pretty amusing.

*A devil's theory of J. Michael Luttig: There's been a lot of ink and pixels spilled debating why Fourth Circuit judge and Supreme Cout short-lister J. Michael Luttig decided to leave his life-tenured job to become General Counsel at Boeing. The decision became doubly interesting with the announcement (detailed on the front page of today's Wall Street Journal) that Boeing has reached a tentative settlement of criminal charges with the Department of Justice.

As is often true of these things, the answer is probably a bunch of reasons. Clearly, Judge Luttig will make more money at his new job, likely multiples of his $171,000 salary as a federal appellate judge, and his kids are reaching college age. Other proffered explanations - Judge Luttig didn't really love the solitary life of an appellate judge, he was frustrated by his clashes with the Bush Administration over the Jose Padilla case, he figured out that after Roberts and Alito the next Bush SCOTUS nominee couldn't be another white male and would likely not be the #1 guy on conservative wish lists, etc. - may also have much truth to them.

But here's another thing: Judge Luttig is young enough, at 51, to bide his time a bit. Boeing is heavily regulated by a Senate committee chaired by John McCain, who has been a critic of the company, and the new GC will have as part of his job the task of mollifying Senator McCain. Which will mean working with him personally. And McCain, of course, if elected president, will need to appoint conservatives to the Supreme Court to keep the restive GOP base happy. Perhaps you see where I'm going with this: I think it is at least plausible that Judge Luttig, understanding the ways of Washington, considered among the factors in his decision that getting to know John McCain would be a surer path to the Supreme Court than continuing to write Fourth Circuit opinions.

Know when to wheel away, know when to run.

I hadn't noticed - I'd finally stopped checking - until Instapundit mentioned it today, but Michele Catalano is back; this essay is pretty much vintage Michele. Welcome back.

Although the blog didn't open until August 2002 and this site in its present form opened in April 2003, I count my real "blogoversary" as my first weekly column for Bill Simmons' old Boston Sports Guy site, which ran six years ago today, calling for baseball to change the rules to require relief pitchers to face at least three batters (go read the whole thing - I still stand by the proposal). The internet was but a pup then, and the word "blog" unheard-of. Somehow, I'm still going six years later, and while we all have our dry spells, unlike a lot of the burned-out bloggers out there I hardly feel like I'm running out of things to say (more often I come up with ideas too ambitious to get them done - right now I've got at least three long political pieces in draft form, one long statistical study yet to start, and a couple other baseball, politics and law columns I'd write now if I only had more time to write).

Anyway, thanks to everyone who has read, linked, commented, advertised or otherwise supported my writing these past six years.

Question for other bloggers: know where to get a good referrer log? I used to have a code at the bottom of each page that showed how much incoming traffic I got from every external source - with the unreliability of Technorati and the near-total demise of the trackback function, it had become my best resource for finding out who had linked to me, and by far the best way to track which links provided a lot of hits (Site Meter doesn't connect traffic to particular pages to particular links). Unfortunately, that code - from a site called TrueFresco.org - has gone to a registration-required pay service (see here). Fair enough; I decided their service was worth paying for and signed up, sending via PayPal $17.95 to sign up. And: nothing. I can't log in. They won't answer my emails. Is it a scam, or just bad service? I have no idea. But I'd love to find a substitute, if anyone has a better idea.

*Bush's approval and disapproval ratings explained.

*The Weekly Standard has a hilarious account of disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff and his role in the making of the Dolph Lundgren action flick "Red Scorpion". Via Volokh.

*Amy Langfield has pictures of and from the new Seven World Trade center; the fifth from the bottom is strongly reminiscent of the view from my office in 1 WTC back when I was on the 58th floor. Via Welch.

According to this, the world's five largest nations, in terms of land mass, are (in order) Russia, Canada, the US, China, and Brazil. Can you name the next five? Answers after the break.

Read More »

*Count me out of any complaints about there being a Flight 93 movie. I'm sick of being told how we can and can't commemorate September 11. In World War II they didn't flinch from making movies about the war that was on - go watch a movie like Mrs. Miniver, which won Best Picture in 1942 and took on the blitz while the bombs were still falling in England. The Flight 93 story has everything: real villains, real heroes, real tragedy, and the reality of why we fight and what the difference is between them and us. We need to have this movie.

*More on Iran another day, but I just gotta say, reviewing how bad our options are with regard to both Iran and North Korea: thank God we got rid of Saddam before he got that far down that road. In the meantime, compare this excellent Mark Steyn analysis of the Iranian situation and how it got this way (h/t Drezner) with this Michael Kinsley hand-wringer on the same question, and see if you can spot the difference. (Hint: Steyn says what he thinks we should do. Kinsley can't).

*Stuart Buck asks a good question about the Iraqi mobile bio-not-weapons lab. (His source is his brother-in-law, for what that's worth). And Ed Morrissey catches the Washington Post misleading readers on the subject.

*A Constitutional right to vagrancy: Such a very Ninth Circuit-y opinion from the Ninth Circuit, authored of course by a Clinton appointee.

*Speaking of which: I asked around my office and nobody wants to bet against the Supreme Court taking this case. Let's see: Ninth Circuit? Check. War on Terror significance? Check. Campaign finance/First Amendment angle? Check. Dissent by heterodox group of judges including Kozinski and Reinhardt? Check. (UPDATE: More on the same).

*So, let me get this straight: Cindy Sheehan now thinks President Bush is spending too little time at the ranch? Go away, please. (UPDATE: Looks like the AP has changed the story at this link).

*Libertarian and reluctant 2004 Bush voter Megan McArdle notes three things the Bush Administration has gotten right without getting adequate credit:

The first is trade. The Bush administration's committment to free trade has been downright inspiring. . . .

The second is education. . . . for the first time we are forcing educators to ask basic questions like "Can all our children read?" and we have stopped letting them segregate minorities into special education tracks that don't count for evaluation purposes . . .

The third is foreign aid. . . . the Bush administration made countries comply with the conditions before they got any cash.

As usual, McArdle isn't hesitant to criticize Bush, but she makes a good case that he's been right on all three of these counts. Read the whole thing.

*Conservatives=racists? Jeff Goldstein has a lengthy take-down of this particular substitute for thought.

*Via RCP Blog, a profile of Caitlin Flanagan, who writes on what is, by far and away, the single most divisive topic you can raise in American society: the tradeoffs of mothers of small children working outside the home vs. staying home with the kids.

*Another battle over a Founding Father's legacy, in this case Hamilton. My general view of the Founding Fathers is this: their virtues - foresight, wisdom, physical and moral courage, restraint in the exercise of power, leadership, stirring rhetoric, keen understanding of human nature - grow all the more impressive with time, and make all generations to come after them look small by contrast.
But their vices are another matter. Look carefully at any portrait of the Foudning Fathers and you will see among one or another of them envy, racism, extremes of ideology, partisanship, factionalism and incivility, libel, lust and licentiousness, venality, pride and ego, etc. While their virtues were all too rare, their vices were all too common and familiar (a fact that no doubt informed their generally dim view of human nature).

*Lawyers, watch where you post about your own firm's cases on the internet. (via Bashman).

*First, shoot all the lawyers: unrest in Nepal.

*This is just a wild photo.

*Life on Planet Rickey.

*Charming portrait of Congressman Jim Moran, one of Holy Cross' least admirable alumni.

*Saddam and suicide attacks on America: Ed Morrissey connects the dots. Disbelieve if you like, but another must-read for anyone interested in getting to the bottom of Saddam's regime's multifaceted terrorist ties and ambitions rather than continuing to hide behind the same old talking points. I remain skeptical that Saddam's regime was actually involved in the September 11 attacks - I think it more likely than not that the Iraqis' ties to Al Qaeda didn't run quite that deep - but a prudent person would not rule that possibility entirely out, either, and the fact that there wasn't immediate evidence pointing in that direction is no reason for investigative reporters, bloggers and historians to stop looking. Kudos to Captain Ed for doing the legwork of hiring his own translators to vet this particular document.

*John Hawkins interviews Mike Huckabee, Republican governor of Arkansas and a possible dark horse candidate for the 2008 nomination. Huckabee is defensive on taxes, but perhaps reasonably. But consider this answer:

John Hawkins: Let me ask you one more question here. If someone came up to you and said, "Mike Huckabee, pick any three pieces of legislation you'd want to see passed nationally, and we'll tell you they'll definitely make it through, what three would you pick? Take your time. I understand this is a tough