Category: Blog 2006-Present

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.

Continue reading Geography Quiz

*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 thing to pull off the top of your head.
Mike Huckabee: Yes, it’s one thing to think about it at the state level which is the water I’ve swam in for all these years versus suddenly throwing me into the nation… I think, you know — the three, ..again, this is sort of off the cuff — and tomorrow I might have a different answer, but one of them would be that we would create more incentives for companies to encourage healthy behavior, not just to provide health care because, again, I think it’s the wrong answer. That encourages people to be unhealthy, but that would mean that you’d empower citizens to handle their own health and give them financial incentives for doing a better job of it. It’s a combination not just of health savings accounts which are a good thing, but even health savings accounts, you have to have some, you know, some capital to start with, to make it where it’s worthwhile. So overhauling that system is one thing.
Secondly, I think I would create a system where people who wanted to further their education could offer volunteer services as young people either in the military like they have with the GI Bill — or in some other form of volunteerism, because there really is a sense of which a lot of Americans do not appreciate their freedom. They do not really recognize just how good they’ve got it. This would give them an opportunity to give something back in exchange so that they wouldn’t have to go to college and incur a huge level of debt in order to further their education. The reason that education is important is because without higher levels of education than a high school diploma, they’re not going to be able to be competitive enough in the marketplace.
A third thing…I think I’d also pass legislation that would insure that the federal government had to live within its budget, a balanced budget amendment and that it could not balance its budget by simply passing costs on to states or local governments.

If I had to pick two words to describe a platform built around these three ideas, it would be “New Democrat.”
*Vodkapundit on what victory in Iraq is, and what it isn’t. This is, of course, a subject I’ve addressed at greater length before.
*Hey, illegal aliens – vote Democrat!
*I’m sorry, but I’m just not buying this story. You can’t make me believe it.

3 arrested at Mass. baby shower brawl”:

An argument at a baby shower escalated into a brawl in which one man was shot and the pregnant guest of honor was beaten with a stick, police said. . . .
Authorities said the shooting victim, Aristotle Garcia, got into a fight with a man who is dating his ex-girlfriend. The argument, over whether the woman let their 5-year-old daughter drink beer, escalated and drew in two other people . . .

So, tomorrow my wife and I bring home our new daughter (baby #3) from the hospital; she was born Monday afternoon. I’d post more but my wife is insistent that we put as little information about the kids on the internet as possible. Let’s just say the little lady, like her sister, exercised her full female prerogatives and arrived ten days late.
Hence, of course, the blogging interruption, which will continue; I’ve actually got a fair amount of stuff stored up from my review of how Established Win Shares Levels (explanation here for new readers) panned out in 2005, and am frantically at work on the 2006 EWSLs, which I use as the framework for my preseason previews. I’ll be at home this week and next, so even with the chaos of a new baby I expect to make some progress on that front, but there’s no predicting how far I’ll get or how much of it will make it into completed posts any time soon. The collateral consequence of this is that the political content around here should be pretty minimal through Opening Day.
Having a third baby six years after the last one is, as I’ve said before, like coming out of retirement. Every time I feel too old for this, I try to remind myself that lots of people our age (34) are just getting started; we’re really just old compared to when we had the first two (I was 25 when my son was born).
Looking at all the baby stuff they sell these days (car seats, infant toys, etc.) and how far it’s all advanced from where our first daughter was born, I feel like we had our kids in another century. In fact, we did have our first two in another century, in what seems like another world. When we last brought a baby home from the hospital in the summer of 1999, I was still working in the World Trade Center; Bill Clinton was the president, and “the war” meant Kosovo. John McCain was still a relatively obscure Senator, Howard Dean an extremely obscure governor. The Mets’ pitching rotation included Orel Hershiser and Masato Yoshii; the major league home run leader was Mark McGwire. Wade Boggs was still playing. Patrick Ewing and the Knicks were the defending Eastern Conference champs. “The Sopranos” was coming off its first season on TV.
I hadn’t started wrting on the web then; nobody had heard of “blogs.” Bill Simmons was still an obscure web writer, Glenn Reynolds a law professor known only in his field, Duncan Black and John Hinderaker were just working lawyers, and Aaron Gleeman and Matt Yglesias were still in high school. 1999 was the year I bought my first Baseball Prospectus. (Heck, when my son was born in the summer of 1997 I didn’t even have email at work). In 1999, my mom was still with us.
The new arrival shares the name of my grandmother, who was born in 1900 as a subject of Queen Victoria. Life goes on . . . and I should go get some sleep, while the house is still quiet.

This morning in Midtown Manhattan I saw a guy apparently commuting to work on a unicycle. I guess now I’ve officially seen it all. This was the best one since I was in Cambridge, Mass. and saw a bearded academic-looking type (complete with corduroy jacket with patched elbows) riding a bicycle while smoking a pipe.

If you are or know a pro-Israel college student interested in a fairly good-paying summer internship, you may want to check this out.

NRO’s Bench Memos pointed the other day to The New Constitutionalist, a site run by Holy Cross political science professor David Schaefer and including, as a contributor, Joe Busher, a classmate of mine at HC (we were in constitutional law together – Joe’s a sharp guy). Welcome to the web!

Saw this one a few places:

Continue reading Sci-Fi Quiz

Brian Williams is lucky there are only two prominent and relatively light-skinned young African-American Democrats in Congress. Oops. Although I’m not sure how you could mistake anyone for Obama.

If you’re wondering: my wife and I are expecting baby #3 at the end of February, give or take a few weeks (you never know). As a result:
1. I’m working like crazy right now to get everything done that needs to be done work-wise before the baby gets here; and
2. Once the baby arrives, I’ll be at home for about two weeks.
The net result of both of these facts is that posting is going to be irregular around here for the next month or so. And doubly so because I’ve got to prepare some things for baseball season. I don’t intend to let the blog go dark for long stretches, but I can’t really promise regular every-morning posting for a bit.

I often find I have too much to do and not enough time to do it in. Yet I often see news items suggesting that some people have the opposite problem, causing them to spend the time necessary to learn how to do things like eat 26 grilled cheese sandwiches in 10 minutes. Or, perhaps more astonishingly, attend an event at which you watch someone else eat 26 grilled cheese sandwiches in 10 minutes.
Then there’s the guy who invented the “Chuck Norris Facts,” some of which are admittedly very funny.

*Saber-Rattling, Canadian Style – or a neat bit of triangulation to distract from the reality of a less anti-American posture.
*Fun, unverifiable, malicious rumor of the day: a Kos diarist says Ken Salazar isn’t supporting a filibuster of Judge Alito because he struck a deal to get James Dobson off his back. Certainly, everying we’ve seen from Salazar lately suggests a man cracking under the strain of criticism on judges. This sounds like an exaggeration by a disgruntled staffer filtered through some anonymous dude on the internet, but it could be a version of the truth.
*I know I’ve been on this theme for a while now, but under pressure from opponent Rick Santorum, putatively pro-life Democratic Senate candidate Bob Casey in Pennsylvania has now come out in favor of confirming Judge Alito, and the Blogometer has a good roundup of lefty bloggers’ teeth-gnashing over Casey’s announcement, which drives a serious wedge into the Democratic caucus; unlike Ben Nelson, Casey’s defection can’t be explained by an overwhelming Republican tilt to his state. (But it is consistent with the prior endorsement of Pennsylvania’s Democratic Governor, Ed Rendell, whose wife is a Third Circuit colleague of Alito). Could it be that there really just isn’t a valid basis to filibuster Judge Alito?
*On the other hand, Bill Nelson is opposing Alito because he’s not conservative enough?
*Instapundit thinks Chirac’s tougher rhetoric with Iran is a result of the riots in France. Could be; could be that he’s posturing due to voter anger over those riots. Could also be, though, that most of the Muslims in France are Sunnis and many are Arabs, and he feels safer sounding tough with Persian Shi’ites.
*John Spencer’s gonna have some fun taking on the Clinton terror-fighting record.
*Ricky West on the two-edged sword of getting hot and bothered over people who are pictured with the First Family.
*Will this junior high school teach this?

I’m interviewed by the National Journal’s Blogometer today.

*Eliot Spitzer picks a running mate who is popular, African-American and disabled (he’s blind), and still manages to run afoul of Charles Rangel and other self-appointed NY City Democratic power brokers. (Via NRO). You can debate whether this says more about (1) Spitzer’s abrasive personality, (2) the endless demands and elephantine egos of guys like Rangel, or (3) why it’s so hard for the NY City Democratic party to produce leaders with a spine (the results of which are on garish display every four years in the mayoral elections). Spitzer will be the next governor pretty much no matter what, but it’s instructive to watch how easily he alienates even his own allies.
*Characteristically brilliant Megan McArdle analysis of the chimerical connection between abortion and sex education:

Now is the time of year when William Saletan tells us that we should stop arguing about abortion and just keep women from getting pregnant in the first place.
Well, thank you, Dr. Insight. Hey guys–let’s stop arguing about the death penalty, and make it so no one ever commits heinous murders!

Read the whole thing.
*This New Republic analysis of the educational crisis facing boys in this country is deeply alarming and a must-read. The suggestion that some sort of implicit or explicit affirmative action may be needed for male students is appalling. The article fingers a number of the likely culprits, from lack of interest in reading to an unduly feminized curriculum. Like it or not, boys thrive on competition and challenges; that needs to be retained as part of the educational process. While the article notes that many of the problems are at the grade-school level, it underscores my conviction that the sexes are better off being separated at the high school level.
*Instapundit quotes Howard Kurtz:

I’ve always wondered why busy lawmakers make so much time for lobbyists, at least when they’re not playing golf or being comped at Signatures, and gradually I realized: They envision themselves, a few years down the road, in the same role. After all, half the former members of Congress–half!–are now earning many times their Hill salaries by trying to persuade their ex-colleagues to fund a Bridge to Nowhere or some equivalent measure.

I mostly regard lobbying reform as a pointless sham, since the real issue is at the macro level – the power to hand out special interest favors, power that attracts corruption – and the micro level, the specific cases of corrupted officials. But this is one systemic issue that needs to be addressed. It’s perhaps not as dire as the similar problem of ex-diplomats being systematically bought off by the Saudis, but as long as members of Congress have in mind the possibility of staying in DC as part of the lobbying class, their incentives will be deeply skewed.
*I’ve been disappointed with John McCain’ stance on the NSA intercepts issue, and while I agreed with him on the problem I was distressed by his solution on the treatment of detainees. But this Mark Levin column is typical of the overwrought teeth-gnashing McCain inspires in some quarters of the Right. McCain has many flaws, but being “soft on defense” is not one of them.
*Cathy Seipp ticks off some NY Times reporters by blogging about what they wrote to her (via Matt Welch). Very entertaining stuff. I do think it’s mildly unsporting to write about the fact that a journalist is working on an as-yet-unpublished story, but journalists of all people are fools if they think anything they say is off the record, and expecting sources to keep quiet permanently is absurd.
*Mark Kilmer notes this Washington Post column by the Post’s ombudsman, detailing the campaign of abuse directed at her by lefty blogs over the distinction between direct and indirect contributions made by Jack Abramoff. As I pointed out before in linking to this Jon Henke post (see also here), the distinction is noteworthy but (a) hardly as conclusive as the Democrats would like, and (b) inconsistently applied by the Dems themselves. If you hear Democrats and liberal blog commenters calling people liars for saying Democrats got Abramoff-tainted money, well, they’re just full of it, especially if they’re simultaneously steamed about indirect ties between Abramoff and President Bush or other Republicans. WaPo explains:

Records from the Federal Election Commission and the Center for Public Integrity show that Abramoff’s Indian clients contributed money to 195 Republicans and 88 Democrats between 1999 and 2004. The Post also has copies of lists sent to tribes by Abramoff with his personal directions on which members were to receive what amounts.
Michael Crowley of the New Republic said in his blog that “while for all practical purposes this is indisputably a Republican scandal, the narrow liberal-blogger definition of whether any Democrats took money ‘from Abramoff’ — which neatly excludes contributions he directed his clients to make — amounts to foolish semantics.”

Crowley has it right. Abramoff was a Republican in a Republican-run city, and this is mainly a Republican scandal. But suggesting that a number of Democrats aren’t also associated with Abramoff is just false. And – lest we forget – corrupt ties between Indian gambling interests, campaign contributions and Washington politicians didn’t exactly begin in 2001 (see here and here for details).

Cool link.

Unfortunately, due to the site crashing yesterday and moving to a new server, it looks like a month’s worth of comments, trackbacks and site modifications have been lost. Stay tuned to see if the site stays back up, although the server move is complete and presumably you wouldn’t be reading this if Network Solutions hadn’t successfully redirected the URL to the new server.

The site has had some technical problems and may continue to for the next day or so (I’m moving to a new server). This was posted Thursday morning.
*Chris Lynch compares the Hall of Fame voting process to the UN and the Nobel Prize. Via Ducksnorts.
*Faith and Fear in Flushing asks why Jim Bunning is in the Hall of Fame and Jerry Koosman isn’t. Via Repoz. As I’ve written before, Bunning is a fairly weak Hall of Famer and shouldn’t have been voted in, given the large number of comparable pitchers who are on the outs (I’d take Luis Tiant over Bunning any day of the week, let alone Blyleven). But the real reasons are obvious. First, W-L record: Bunning and Koosman won a nearly identical number of games, 224 to 222, but Koosman lost 25 more games. Second, strikeouts: Koosman’s career high was 200, while Bunning struck out 200 six times and 250 or more three times. Third, the shape of their careers: Bunning won in double figures 11 years in a row, and between 1964 and 1967 his average record was 19-12 with a 2.48 ERA and 248 Ks in 298 innings. Koosman’s best years were more broken up: he had three straight losing records from 1971-73, went 11-35 in 1977-78, and 4-13 in 1981. It’s all somewhat unfair, but the fact is, the Hall has always rewarded players who concentrate their best seasons together.
*Ramesh Ponnuru notes the media’s haste to characterize Judge Alito’s views on executive power based on only the thinnest of evidence, persumably just to fit him into a preconceived storyline about Bush.
*I loved this line from Dahlia Lithwick characterizing the theme of Alito’s opening statement: “My family was too poor to afford a judicial philosophy.”
*The professor who suggested this question for Alito clearly missed the memo on the Democrats’ talking points:

I’d also ask him if he would be willing to sell any shares of stock that might cause him to recuse himself (and instead reinvest them in mutual funds that do not require recusal based on underlying investments).

*Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden need to be reminded that in hearings, unlike in football, time of possession is not a winning metric.
*When you say “Ted,” you put your mind on hold . . .
*Patterico catches the LA Times misleading readers into thinking that Alito is the fifth vote to overturn Roe (a claim repeated yesterday by Dick Durbin). If only.
*Stuart Buck on Alito and presidential signing statements.
*John Miller’s latest NRO analysis has the 2006 Senate races a stalemate other than a likely GOP pickup of an open seat in MN and three “tossups,” those being one Dem-held open seat (NJ), one GOP Senator (Santorum in PA), and one semi-GOP Senator (Chaffee in RI). In other words, if the Dems win all three tossups and the other races stay where Miller has them now, the GOP nets a loss of one seat, and only on the issues where Chaffee votes Republican.
This isn’t great news for the GOP, of course; the map strongly favors Republicans in 2006, and will favor the Dems in 2008 & 2010 (since they won few close races in 2002 & 2004), so this will be the last chance for some time to pick up Senate seats on which the Democrats have a tenuous hold. But it’s also a reminder that the Democrats have a lot of ground to gain if they expect to change the Republican lock on the Senate majority for the remainder of Bush’s term.
*Jon Henke makes an excellent point about how all the money that flowed directly from Jack Abramoff was to Republicans, but Abramoff sent a lot of money indirectly the way of both parties. Typically, the Democrats are making a big deal about the direct/indirect distinction in defending their own, while counting the indirect money as part of what went to the GOP. I agree with Henke that the people who got money directly are in more trouble, but everyone will have some explaining to do. But at the end of the day, there’s no real scandal in taking contributions from the guy – the real scandals are in the personal benefits (trips, etc.) and in ties to favors done for Abramoff clients. After all, there’s no truer example of “everybody does it” than the fact that everybody takes money from favor-seekers.
*There has to be more to this story, doesn’t there? Of course, I could see him joking about this. But it would be utterly typical of Bush national security controversies if there are reasons why Bush can’t publicly disclose his reasons, and the critics get another free shot at him unanswered.
*Harry Belafonte, toady for tyrants. And soon to share a stage with Hillary Clinton. The Democrats should be careful with the whole guilt-by-association business.
*Long Mark Steyn column that pretty well summarizes his theory of why much of Western Europe, Russia and Japan is headed for demographic and cultural suicide.
*Can you bully your way to Oscar glory?
*Hoover and FDR’s secret plan to invade Canada.
*Rachel Corrie’s family abducted by Palestinian terrorists. Oh, the irony.
*Henke again, on real wages. Essential reading.
*I agree 100% with this and this.
*Well imgaine my surprise, Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty. Via Jane Galt. This line from Upton Sinclair well summarizes the benefits of being in the Hollywood and cultural Left in this country:

It is much better copy as a naïve defense of Sacco and Vanzetti because this is what all my foreign readers expect, and they are 90% of my public.

Jay Caruso has given up politics and started a sports/pop culture blog, and he’s giving away a free DVD as part of a contest to pick a name for his blog.
UPDATE: Is my blog now illegal?

Some long-fuse, heavy-research baseball stuff is in the pipeline, but absent some significant baseball news, with the Alito hearings kicking off this week, expect a lot of law & politics blogging and not much baseball between now and Friday.

Maybe you should order a shorter cappuccino at Starbucks: “The short cappuccino has the same amount of espresso as the 12-ounce tall, meaning a bolder coffee taste, and also a better one.” I wonder: does that mean even the really big cappuccinos and cafe lattes don’t have more actual coffee in them, and thus – more importantly – don’t have more caffeine? If that’s the case, the latte – which I have from time to time as a shot in the arm – doesn’t make sense beyond the smallest size.

Elmo goes bad. Via Dave Barry.