Blog 2006-08 Archives

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.

*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).