Ramon Castro needs to be starting

I had thought that one possible benefit of the managerial change would be more playing time for Ramon Castro. From the day Jerry Manuel took over on June 17 to the All-Star break, it looked like Castro was getting the majority of the starts behind the plate. But today was the first game of the Cincinnati series with him in the lineup card, meaning Jerry must not like seeing his catcher hit two-run bombs.

Brian Schneider is worse than your typical terrible hitting catcher. He's hitting .243/.335/.294 in his 214 ABs, and it's not that off a year for him. Meanwhile, we have this funny looking guy on our bench who was hitting .286/.356/.462 before the homer he just hit. Those are numbers we'd love to get from our left field slot.

If Castro were a Mike Piazza-scale liability behind the plate, it might justify sitting him behind Schneider, but he's not that. He doesn't let the ball get by him much, he doesn't commit many errors, and for his career he's thrown out a very respectable 30% of base-stealers. What more does he have to do?

I'm afraid this is a case of two managerial bad habits converging: 1) giving a guy you acquired in trade (Schneider is the non-brain damaged half of the Lastings Milledge trade) every chance to fail rather than admit he's not a starter; and 2) overvaluing the intangible benefits of grizzled veteran catchers (see: Ausmus, Brad), and wasting untold outs on them.

The toad-man may not be great, but he's much better than Schneider.

David Gregory

America's most pompous TV reporter just said that Maliki "is still speaking the language of the White House on troop withdrawals."

That's just insane. Maliki just explicitly agreed with Obama's 16 month timetable. I was angry that the story has been soft pedaled to the extent it has, but what Gregory's doing here isn't just ignoring but getting the story completely backwards. Basically lying.

Much respect to Matt Drudge, whose frontpaging the headline "MAG: IRAQ LEADER SUPPORTS OBAMA PLAN" makes me seriously wonder whether I wasn't wrong to laugh at the Politico (aka Drudgico) profile suggesting that Drudge has been moving left.

Tom Brokaw sucks badly

I refrained from making any snap judgments when Brokaw was named Timmay's temporary successor. But having seen a few of his interviews now, I'm pretty sure he's awful.

He's just doing a terrible job with Gore. It's not even that he's just trying to adopt the wingnut attacks ("His house is big", "He thinks he's so awesome" etc.), it's that he's not even really doing it well enough to dictate the terms of the interview. So we're just getting Al laying his renewable energy game down. It's fine by me, I'm on board, but who's this guy who keeps interrupting him with stupid questions?

Whew. It's over. Brokaw's final gambit was to hold up the Terrorist Obamas New Yorker cover and ask "Whaddya think of this?" Pathetic.

Motorola accuses Apple of espionage?

That's what Briefing.com is reporting, anyway. They're pretty unreliable (and, I might add, Drudge-esque in their editorial decisions), but that would be quite a story.

The first question that jumps out is "Why?" That'd be like Tiger Woods going to some podunk driving range looking for swing tips. Motorola already tried stealing ideas from Motorola. It was called the RAZR 2, and no one wanted it.

He's gonna nuke GM!

What? That's not what John McCain means when he says all options are on the table?

I mean, it can't be that he's proposing a taxpayer bailout, because he's a principled conservative Republican, and they don't believe in government intervention in the free market. Plus, just this past winter he was telling the good people of Michigan that he opposed such a bailout and that some lost jobs are not coming back. And we all know that he's a man of deep political conviction and integrity. So there's just no way he'd start dropping hints that he'd compromise himself just for one industrial state's electoral votes. The press would never let him get away with it.

I can't believe they won that game

I went to bed early, with the Mets still down by two after squandering an opportunity in the 8th inning. Watching Schoenweis come in and pour gasoline on Heilman's fire was pretty frustrating, and I just didn't want to watch the loss to the lowly Reds go final. Plus Francisco Cordero isn't a bad closer. But David Wright is a golden god, and that trumps.

10 in a row has a certain ring to it. As does "tied for the division lead." Let the Phillies have their precious Joe Blanton!

Phillies acquire Joe Blanton

Last season's collapse must have really taken its toll on my psyche. Gary Cohen just reported on the SNY broadcast that the Phillies acquired Joe Blanton, and instead of thinking "Oh, you mean soft-tossing rotation filler Joe Blanton?" my first thought was "Oh noes! He's much better than Adam Eaton!"

Talk about being scared of your shadow.

Please not Evan Bayh

Yes. He's a horrible choice. Obama's got enough red state appeal to pass over the Iraq War lovingest senator who's still a Democrat. I don't care how popular he is in Indiana.

Brett Favre needs to go away

This is one of two days in the year where there are no major professional sporting events taking place (the other being the day before the All Star Game; it's a good trivia question), so I'm sympathetic to ESPN's need to fill the hours.

But I can't think of anything less enjoyable to watch than Brett Favre having a heart-to-heart with Fox's Greta Van Susteren (or any interviewer) about his future plans and his relationship with the Packers organization.

GVS: Have they offered to have you join the team as a backup?
BF: Yes
GVS: Would that be unacceptable to you?
BF: I think probably, yes.
Me: Who could possibly give a rat's ass?

You missed one, Tim

TAP's Tim Fernholz gamely attempts to peel back the layers of wrongness in each Jamie Kirchick column. But he misses something in this sentence:

Netroots vitriol against Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) is the most latent example of their irrationality.

If you guessed misuse of the word latent, congratulations. You're not as bad a writer as Kirchick.

Relatively solid proof that people are stupid

TPM Election Central: "The new CBS/New York Times poll gives Barack Obama a 45%-39% lead over John McCain among registered voters, a margin unchanged from the 48%-42% lead he had a month ago. Meanwhile, both candidates have come to be viewed as flip-floppers: Barack Obama is seen as having changed his views in order to get elected by 56% of voters, and 51% say the same thing about John McCain."

Those are terrifying numbers. Some of the blame falls on the press, but like Kent Brockman I'm putting the blame squarely on you, the viewer. I don't believe it's the most important criteria for president, but there's just no excuse for a voting population that pays any attention at all to think that Obama has changed his views more than McCain.

Of course poll after poll finds that voters overwhelmingly favor Obama's position on Iraq, but trust McCain more on Iraq, so I guess it shouldn't be surprising.

Blackballing Barry

Brian Cashman is making a point of not denying the possibility that the Yankees might sign Barry Bonds.

What I can't figure out is why no one else has tried. As far as I can tell he hasn't officially retired. It's that no team has offered him much money to play baseball. My impression was that last year he was starting to look washed up, and there was the chronic and ultimately season-ending knee injury, but his half-season numbers were stellar: 28 HR in 340 ABs with a .276/.480/.565 line.

I understand a certain amount of reluctance to bring on the Barry Bonds media circus (taking Pedro Gomez out of cold storage, etc.), and find the guy personally unappealing myself, but for the general manager of any AL team to let him sit there, with his huge arms and head, just getting older and being pissed, while he's still capable of cranking out lots of home runs... well it borders on malpractice.

The problem with the Giants wasn't that they had Barry Bonds and he ruined their chemistry. It was that every other player on the roster was horrible. That wouldn't be the case for the Yankees. Or the Mets for that matter.

All Star Game starting

Watching the introductions, which tend to be the most interesting part of the broadcast, and noticing that there are a whopping eight Cubs on the NL roster. Only one other team (Milwaukee) has even three. They should have just moved the game to Chicago.

Kosuke Fukudome? I'm glad the Japanese are excited about their MLB players and all, but that's one of the least deserving All Stars in recent memory, and that's including the default representatives since they started requiring that every team gets one.

Sheryl Crow just started the national anthem... and there's the stealth bomber.

Chris Wallace is just clueless

I can't get too worked up about Chris Wallace's attacks on MSNBC or his protestations that Karl Rove is capable of speaking as a "straight political analyst."

Ever since he called out the bad-even-for-FNC bunch on "Fox & Friends" for "two hours of Obama-bashing," I've been pretty convinced that the guy really doesn't want to be thought of as a right wing hatchet man, and for all I know he doesn't want to be one. I thought it was visible earlier, too, in the aftermath of his interview with Bill Clinton when he got the Big Dog a little heated when he asked "Why didn't [he] do more" to prevent 9/11. He was quoted by Howie Kurtz:

"I thought it was a fair, balanced and not especially inflammatory question... But he went off. And once he went off, there was no bringing him back. He wanted to talk about it in detail. He wanted to conjure up right-wingers and conservative hit jobs and a theory involving Rupert Murdoch that I still don't understand."

It's one thing to play dumb, but it's an entirely different matter to be befuddled by the idea not only that Fox News is run by right wingers, but that right wingers exist at all, and aren't just mythical beasts that crazy Democrats conjure up. "Why didn't you do more to prevent the deaths of 3,000 Americans?" is not even an inflammatory question? Fox News is impartial while MSNBC is in the tank? Brit Hume is an anchorman to Keith Olbermann's pundit?

These are things you'd expect a conservative commentator to suggest, but not one with much interest in being seen as a remotely credible mainstream reporter. The Obama-bashing incident, along with several other moments of earnest evenhandedness I vaguely recall, suggest that Wallace really does want to be taken seriously.

My theory is that he really just doesn't have any inkling of how illegitimate Fox is as a news organization. Keep in mind he works for a network that was just recently caught doctoring the photos of two New York Times reporters who wrote a critical piece about them, including a rather audacious nose enlargement for Mr. Steinberg.

How can he still not put the pieces together? I think garden-variety stupidity plays a part, but more than that he's a great example of the Upton Sinclair quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it."

Hit jobs? By Fox?

Jon Niese's availability for trade

I haven't been a close follower of Jon Niese's career, but I did read a little bit about him going into this year, after he threw some nice innings in spring training. Baseball Prospectus, in the print version I believe, called him the Mets' best lefty pitching prospect, but added in characteristically smarmy fashion that it said more about the Mets farm system than Niese.

Ed at Mets Fever sees that his most recent outing (a 7 inning shutout) was well attended by scouts, raising the possibility of his inclusion in a trade. But Ed is wary about giving away a pitcher who may be ready for the rotation next year, given the thinness of our pitching staff:

While Bay, Nady, or Holliday would be great, we could have three rotation holes to fill and only one starting pitching prospect almost ready for the majors. Any top level player will cost left handed starter Jon Niese who could be in the rotation next year if he isn't traded.

I'm not even sure how great Bay or especially Nady would be, but Holliday is the kind of guy you don't sweat some B-level prospect over. I hadn't even been aware of the rumor, so I looked it up and, per Dom D, Jerry Manuel expressed an interest in having him (duh) about a week ago, but today Joel Sherman comes along and dashes my hopes. Apparently the Rockies are aware of how good Holliday is and want more than the Mets would be able to part with.

But in general, as much as I love young homegrown talent, I'm not at all convinced Niese is good enough to be considered untouchable. He's 21, and he's been pretty good at Double-A (110.2 IP, 5 HR, 40 BB, 97 K, 3.05 ERA), which is nice, so don't flip him for Xavier Nady. But if he's the lynchpin of a deal for a Matt Holliday-type corner outfielder, Omar needs to do the damn thing.

Bud drinkers betrayed, bewildered

Well the Miller ads haven't started airing yet (think red white and blue bikinis), but we didn't have to wait long for some major handwringing! CNN has the story: "Foreign-owned Bud a wound to Americana":

"I was actually drinking a Bud Light when I heard, and I couldn't even finish it. That's the honest-to-God truth," [St. Louisan and former Bud Light drinker Philip McClary] said Monday.

I believe him!

AP's leadership change explains the hackery

Apparently the AP's recent stretch of shamelessly pro-McCain copy is the handiwork of, or at least due in large part to Ron Fournier. The well known straight news reporter is now in charge of the AP's Washington bureau and openly embracing a new journalistic style that involves "cutting through the clutter."

Michael Calderone has a piece in the Politico that details the editorial change and gets some reactions to it. James Taranto, of the country's nuttiest op-ed board, is quoted arguing that given the abundance of political opinion writing the AP should "should emphasize what they're especially good at, namely impartial reporting."

Presumably it's not the pro-McCain stuff that bothers Taranto as much as the AP's overarching and pervasive liberal bias. (While conservatives tend to believe that literally all mainstream news outlets except Fox are indistinguishable from Daily Kos, they consider the AP an especially bad offender.) But regardless of the reasoning, he's completely right about this. The AP has gone amazingly bad, and Fournier should be sacked as soon as possible.

Of course, he was just recently promoted so that's probably not going to happen. The AP will have brought John McCain so many donuts by the time this thing is over.

Mike Pelfrey

It's getting harder and harder to remain skeptical about Mike Pelfrey. Forget the wins, that's a run support thing. It's that he hasn't walked anybody in his last 16.1 IP, after being a bit of a BB machine prior to that. He's also got his strikeout rate up while remaining a groundball pitcher. If you want to really get your hopes up you could take a look at fellow tall, relatively late-blooming sinkerballer Kevin Brown as a comp.

Last night's win was the Mets' ninth in a row, but I'm actually still able to retain a fair amount of skepticism about the team as a whole. Relying on Nick Evans and Fernando Tatis as starters at the outfield corners, ever, is not a tenable situation.

Anheuser Busch to be owned by European company

I look forward to the Miller ads pointing out to the American beer-drinking public that the Great American Lager is now being brewed by Belgians. Sure, they may know beer in Belgium, but they don't know squat about America!

UPDATE: An astute reader informs me that SAB Miller is a South African company, so they would hardly be in a position.

So much going on

I just seem to have gotten my internet back. The last time I thought it came back was in fact a false positive. It was cruelly stolen from me again from this past Monday until about 10 minutes ago when the cable tech arrived. Fortunately I was out of town this weekend so the pain was lessened.

Anyway I got my TV back first and it appears the New Yorker decided to run a cover of Barack Obama in a turban, terrorist fist-jabbing Michelle, who is wearing camo and carrying an AK-47 (the Communist's weapon of choice), while an American flag burns in the fireplace.

Funny!

Mini-vacation

Regular posting to resume Monday.

NC agriculture official quits rather than honor Jesse Helms

This is a truly heartwarming story. This guy isn't 64. He's 51, and he told his bosses what to do with the job he'd had for 29 years.

"Regardless of any executive proclamation, I do not want the flags at the North Carolina Standards Laboratory flown at half staff to honor Jesse Helms any time this week," Eason wrote just after midnight, according to e-mail messages released in response to a public records request.

L.F. Eason, III, ladies and gentlemen.

via ThinkProgress

Mets are three (3) games above .500

Sure, if you can't beat up on a team that bats Bengie Molina cleanup... but still, it feels pretty good.

I remain concerned about the Phillies, but if Mike Pelfrey really turns out to be a non-busted draft pick, as he seems to be doing, it would make a big difference. The Mets might have the better rotation regardless of whether Pedro returns to form. Hell, Orlando Hernandez is still among the living, and may be back after a few more rehab starts.

I don't have a good sense for what if any deals may be on the horizon. As I understand it from reading my good friend Toby, the elite prospect cupboard is pretty bare except for Fernando Martinez, who I gather is still "untouchable" despite having a pretty mediocre season at Binghamton. (Yeah, he's only 20 and he's at Double-A, but I have this weird thing where I like to see Top Prospects put up monster stat lines everywhere they go.)

C.C. Sabathia or Rich Harden would have been nice gets, but we really need another bat. I know this is probably a minority opinion but I think we could make use of Adam Dunn. We know JP Ricciardi doesn't want him!

How a Terrible Column Went Wrong

Price of Allied Capital (ALD) stock when Wall Street Journal op-ed board member Holman W. Jenkins Jr.'s "How a Short Sale Went Wrong" was published:$18.73

Price of Allied Capital (ALD) stock at today's close: $12.29.

Some highlights:

"Mr. Einhorn's short position since then apparently has failed to pay off, despite his persistently promoted case that the company was engaged in fraudulent overvaluation of its loans and other assets. One likely reason is that the market simply was never naive about Allied's accounting in the first place. If anything, Allied's share price benefited from Mr. Einhorn's badgering of management to improve an opacity that caused Allied's value to be discounted in the market." [The discounting clearly had not yet begun in earnest]

"He perhaps should have been a buyer rather than a seller, then launched his critique of management. Them's the breaks. And yet his intermittently enjoyable book is valuable for several reasons – not least for prompting one to wonder why a slush bucket like the Small Business Administration (a villain in his tale) even exists." [Or the WSJ op-ed page, for that matter]

"Mr. Einhorn laments that the SEC didn't rip Allied to pieces, driving its share price to $3. How would that have been justice for investors?" [Maybe because that's the price that reflects the true value of the shares, and it would save them from throwing more money into the company's gaping maw through their regularly scheduled secondary offerings?]

If you look at the chart, you'll see the short hadn't even gone that wrong at the time he wrote it. It's not like the stock ran up in Einhorn's face. It had just failed to decline very much. So Holman W. Jenkins Jr. wasn't even right about the historical performance of the stock, let alone his theory that the market had already "discounted" the problems Einhorn has been pointing out. Corporate America needs better bootlickers.

Disclosure: I work at a firm with a short position in Allied Capital

"The white male is the Jew of liberal fascism."

The Pantload:

"Though the evidence is as much anecdotal as anything else, I think the book has made a lasting mark on the culture, despite the best efforts of the lefty blogs and the liberal establishment to close ranks in a concerted effort to discredit it and/or me." [emphasis mine]

I don't even know what to say. I guess it's true that if you write a book that's intellectually odious enough, you'll attract enough attention from sympathizers (few) and people who ridicule you (many) to rightfully claim to have made your mark. It doesn't make the book or its author any less appallingly stupid.

Via Thers, who makes the "skidmark" joke that needs to be made.

Sully is shrill

"That Black Man's a Commie"

h/t Ezra Klein

That's our Johnny!

The AP's in-the-tank-itude seemingly knows no bounds.

Scott McClellan spits hot fire on Canadian radio

MCCLELLAN: Certainly you can't discount the large oil reserves inside Iraq and how much that plays into our national security interests and I don't think you can discount how much that plays into the vice president's thinking.

BROWN: Or his portfolio for that matter.

MCCLELLAN: Or his portfolio for that matter, absolutely with that being a former chief executive officer for Halliburton and that certainly played heavily into his thinking more so I think than the idea of transforming the Middle East into a beacon of democracy.

I was under the impression that while McClellan's book certainly had its strongly worded criticisms, it was mostly a sort of namby pamby critique of the Bush administration's "permanent campaign culture" or whatever. This is pure, uncut blood-for-oil speculation. I'm an angry blogger and even I'm reluctant to argue that personal financial gain "played heavily into" their thinking. And this is Bush's not so long ago press secretary? That's some good apostasy.

via ThinkProgress

Mets hang on to win, 10-9

I'm not a superstitious person, but I did experience a little bit of regret that I added the "victory" tag to the mid-game post on R.J. Swindle. It was a nine run lead, fairly late in the game... but I won't be doing that again anytime soon.

R.J. Swindle needs to recognize

The Phillies just brought a lefthander named R.J. Swindle (no apparent relation to McCain campaign flack Orson Swindle) to mop up the disaster that Adam Eaton left, and Gary says he's known for an eephus pitch.

Sure enough, he does, but David Wright was not baffled. He didn't even look slightly confused. He just looked like one of the world's best hitters watching a baseball approach him really, really slowly and hitting it out of the park.

Score one for the scouts.

CNN is sooo stupid

Their frontpage lead headline: "Freed American: FARC 'Terrorists,' Not Revolutionaries"

So that's where the recently freed hostages come down on The FARC Debate. You know, the debate about whether armed leftist Colombian guerrillas are terrorists or misunderstood freedom fighters... What, that debate isn't really taking place? But how else could this be a front page story?

"BREAKING: Saved Hostages Unsympathetic to Captors' Politics, Tactics"

Update: I see CNN has changed the headline. I'm going to go ahead and take credit.

The Hitchens obit

I'm not very familiar with Christopher Hitchens. I know he's supposed to be someone who goes beyond "Slate contributor" to "public intellectual" but I'm not certain as to why. His books have tended towards the slim and one of them was titled "A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq", published in 2003, when the war was still short. Even its cover art (the Saddam statue-toppling) failed to withstand the test of time.

But I give him credit for carving out maybe the coolest niche in journalism: the guy who writes scathingly negative pieces about the recently deceased. Today Jesse Helms got served, and if ever there were an easier mark...

"By this time my lungs were aching for air..."

Oh thank God. I was staring not one, but five (5) solid days without television or internet in my apartment, but somehow I was granted a reprieve while I was at work.

Yesterday was bad enough. I was starting to think about switching to Verizon if they could set me up before the Time Warner tech arrived on Thursday. They have a store in the first floor of my office, too. I toyed with the idea of buying a hideously expensive wireless broadband card, which I would normally have little justification for, just to alleviate the pain.

Yeah, it's that bad. I'm a bit over a week into my first effort to quit smoking after nine years of about a pack a day, and the absence of the internet was a much bigger issue for me yesterday.

Sweet sweet digital content. Don't ever leave me again.

Cable is out

My internet (and TV) are down for the count until July 10. I'm not happy about it. Posts will be intermittent until then.

Bloomberg: Rice Says She's `Proud' of Decision to Invade Iraq

This is the woman who represents the relatively sane wing of the Bush foreign policy team.

Response to reader_iam

At her visually pleasing blog, reader_iam responds to my post on Obama's Iraq statement yesterday, in which I note that Obama "would be able to do whatever he wanted with the troops as president":

"How interesting an observation and acceptance is that, from someone ostensibly so opposed—conceptually and on principle—to any such easy insouciance with regard to the powers of the presidency? One has to wonder if the blogger is so focused on reassuring some that it's the intentions and goals which matter that he's failed to notice the concession. Which makes him different from those he eschews (for careless assumption of an entitlement to power and a smug 'tude toward implementation) and any more worthy of planting his flag on high ground—how, exactly?"

To respond with my characteristic "insouciance": That's Article II for ya! I'm not conceding anything I disagreed with before. I've never argued that Bush is acting outside his power by keeping troops in Iraq indefinitely. It's his assertion that his Article II power authorizes him to violate statutory laws (like FISA) if he deems it necessary for national security, his use of torture, his signing statements that purport to reserve his "right" to break the laws he's signing, and the general lawlessness of his administration that I object to. His Iraq policy per se is awful but not unconstitutional.

I don't have a "smug 'tude" towards implementation. I want our troops withdrawn from Iraq. I didn't think Bush should have invaded, etc. My point was that, unlike on legislative and legal matters, the president doesn't need Congressional approval (or approval from the generals, who answer to him) to withdraw troops, so Obama can make gestures in the direction of being more inclined to leave them there than he really is.

Mets finally beat Cardinals; Wright OK

It was starting to look pretty bleak there, but after losing two in a row to the Cardinals they finally got one back, convincingly. It was already 9-0 after three innings and Mike Pelfrey was better than necessary, putting up a very nice 7 IP, 1 ER, 2 BB, 6 K line.

David Wright was pulled from the game with what was originally reported as a back injury but has been relocated to a groin injury, which he says won't cost him any more time. That's a very good thing. I don't think people realize how bad they'd be without him.

Tonight was nice, but if you can't hit 24 year old non-prospect Mitchell Boggs...

Maybe the biggest benefit of the Willie Randolph firing

I had forgotten that Willie Randolph had prohibited the Mets from growing facial hair, stealing a rule that's both a registered trademark of the Steinbrenner Yankees and stupid on the merits.

Sure, Yankees and wannabe Yankees could grow mustaches like Jason Giambi's current gem, but why say no to the possibility of cool below-the-lip facial hair, like that sported by Billy Koch, Scott Spezio, or late career Jeff Bagwell?

It's good Jerry Manuel doesn't want to live in that kind of drab, soulless world.

North Dakota crowd shot

There's one at this HuffPo article. Obama's standing at an outdoor podium in Fargo, and from the size of the crowd behind him it was nowhere near as well attended as his Portland rally... or your average Applebee's. It's hard to know whether this reflects the state's resistance to Obama's wiles or just the small population.

Making moderate noises

So Obama's talking about listening to the "commanders on the ground," which is a Bush phrase that means leaving the troops in Iraq while abdicating responsibility for the decision.

If I were the raging purity troll I sound like on the FISA stuff, I'd be concerned, but I'm okay with this. For one, as Matt Yglesias points out, Obama has from the beginning left himself plenty of wiggle room on the withdrawal timeline, so there's not the same flat self-contradiction as there was on FISA.

Second, he's not selling core American values down the river. The questions of exactly when and how to withdraw troops from Iraq are practical ones. And even on the issue of Iraq the logistics are much less politically fraught than the judgment questions of "Should we have invaded?" (BO no, JM yes) and "Should we withdraw our troops soon?" (BO yes, JM no).

Given the high awareness and relative popularity of those conflicting positions, Obama might as well try to sucker as many war supporters into voting for him as possible. He's just gotta make it clear that he's no pansy. He's not going to take his army and put it away, like a good little boy after playtime. He's gonna confer with the death dealers and see if any more death needs to be dealt before he slowly, at his leisure, removes the boot from the neck of our adversary. That kind of thing.

At the end of the day, he'd be able to do whatever he wanted with the troops as president, and I don't see any suggestion outside certain corners of winguttia that he's secretly resigned to the idea of keeping a massive troop presence in Iraq for years and years.

Ted Stevens has Chuck Schumer nightmares

It had always been my impression that Ted "Series of Tubes" Stevens was just old, unfamiliar with technology, and crooked as a dog's hind leg. But there's a crazy factor that I think has gone unappreciated:



h/t Kos

How did all these hippies become federal judges?

First Anna Diggs Taylor, now the Bush 41-appointed Vaughn Walker rules that FISA is the exclusive means by which electronic surveillance can be conducted, and the president's Article II powers don't include violating it.I was under the impression that only very unserious people considered warrantless surveillance of Americans illegal.

While it's good to get more confirmation that the Bush administration has been a fundamentally criminal enterprise, I've given up expecting any day of reckoning. Bygones.

Funny

When Democratic candidates turn over campaign staff, it tends to be in response to "infighting", "deep divisions" and "backbiting" over the sorry state of their campaign. When John McCain replaces his campaign manager, the Politico tells us he's giving the new guy "a battlefield promotion to commanding general." Awesome!

Steve Schmidt does appear to have a bit of an Erwin Rommel thing going on.

Dick Vitale loves the Rays

Watching Boston-Tampa Bay, because the Mets are being rain delayed, and it turns out Dick Vitale is an incredibly knowledgeable Rays fan. He was going on and on during his in-seat interview with Erin Andrews about how they should have brought up Longoria last year, and how they could have had Josh Hamilton, too. I guess it shouldn't surprise me that a guy with an encyclopedic knowledge of basketball would be at least conversant in his favorite baseball team's minor league system, but I didn't even know he followed the sport.

The detail that tells me he really cares: he knew when Rocco Baldelli was expected to return. I care so little I've already forgotten in the time it took me to write this. Don't they have B.J. Upton manning center field rather ably?

Anyway Dick Vitale knows the deal, but he wasn't able to elaborate because he had to tell Andrews that she was "a 15" on the proverbial 1-10 scale.

Mirengoff does polling

Paul at Power Line has a post up entitled "A Corrupt Bargain?"

Over at AOL, our question for the day is: What do you think of Barack Obama's private promise to end strict federal oversight of the Teamsters Union? So far, 75 percent believe it's "a corrupt bargain." Only 13 percent are unconcerned. You can vote here.

So I clicked and it turns out these are self-generated polls. AOL just provides the platform and bloggers can poll whatever questions they want. The three options Paul gives the reader are: A) It's a corrupt bargain; B) I don't like it, but that's politics; and C) It's of no concern.

Voters simply don't have the option of responding positively to it. That's not to say I would, even if I were to look into the issue on Paul's say-so, which I won't, but it's funny nonetheless. Almost as funny as the question mark at the end of his post title, as if he's surprised that so many people would use such strong words to condemn Barack Obama. Who knew the rage ran so deep?

Oh good

Sam Israel is in police custody. If only his fake suicide had been as convincing as the pitch for his fake hedge fund.

Could Ann Althouse be any dumber?

Probably not. In her latest edition, she asserts that Obama needs to stick by his endorsement of the FISA cave-in because doing otherwise would make Glenn Greenwald and Kos happy.

Don't let her employment as a law professor fool you. That's really the level she operates on. I'd bet any amount of money she has no idea what's actually in the bill, and that even if she did, she wouldn't care. She's an unusually stupid and incurious hack.

If I didn't know he was such a straight talker

I'd think John McCain does a lot of lying.

McCain: Obama pro-child rapist

Or at least: “It’s a peculiar kind of moral evolution that disregards the democratic process, and inures solely to the benefit of child rapists." Of course, he's referring to the decision that Obama also opposed, which he admits and says is to his opponent's credit. But he's not letting that stop him from laying blame at the feet of the kind of justices that Obama could be expected to nominate.

Child rapists, dude. He's probably against delivering hot bottled water to dehydrated babies, too.

Hillary or Bust

I'll admit to a weird fascination with Hillary dead-enders, which was stoked by this NYT piece on a handful of them supposedly having their Blogger access denied by Google, in (no kidding) a conspiracy to defend Barack Obama from their criticism.

These are not large blogs. These blogs are like this blog, insofar as it's absurd to think that Google gives a goddamn what they contain.

I, however, was curious so I went to hillaryorbust.blogspot.com. It's good stuff. One post is entitled "I Won't Sleep with Obamabots" Noted!

Another one, "An Alternative View on Iraq," reads:

I was opposed to the war in Iraq. But now that we are there, I think it's wrong to blanket promise that we can pull troops out immediately without creating a worse situation in the region. I think Obama and his supporters are naive to think that we can pull troops out at lightning speed without it backfiring. Here's an interesting take on the subject:
Why Iraqis Back McCain

Yes, that's the WSJ op-ed page she's linking to, as if the title didn't narrow down the possibilities substantially. Her last post at the blogspot URL was on Saturday:

While it appears that my "spam" flag has been removed, I cannot take the chance that it will happen again. I have moved this blog to its own domain name.

No, you wouldn't want to take that chance. Google wants you to think you're not being targeted for your anti-Obama views, but they're all Obamabots, and you won't sleep with them.

The current post at the new digs? "We Have Them Running Scared" Awesome.

h/t the Nutty Professor

Stanley Fish is bored

Stanley Fish argues that the general election campaign has been "totally uninteresting." But what does he cite in evidence? He's glad you asked:

"I cite in evidence the desperate efforts of cable-news commentators to fill out an hour or even 15 minutes arguing about whether Bill Clinton’s statement of support for Barack Obama was so brief and pro forma that it amounted to a slap in the face, or about whether Obama (or a staff member) was wise to banish women wearing head scarfs from photo-ops, or whether Michelle Obama came across as a regular – that is, all-American and not angry – person on “The View,” or whether John McCain could or should separate himself from George Bush."

I was ready to be persuaded, but my first reaction to this list was: Why is he naming the big stories? In fact, I'd say all four have been Big Stories and I think a case can be made for each one being a legitimately interesting story.

1) Clinton's statement was obviously so brief as to be a slap in the face. There wasn't really an argument to be had there. And the relationship (rivalry?) of the still extant and vital 42nd president and his party's nominee to be the 44th president is prima facie interesting.

2) This one was embarrassing as an Obama supporter, but it's the kind of story that the NYT is right to always be pushing. How can the campaign deflect the Muslim "smears" without themselves smearing Muslims by failing to make clear that they don't consider that a bad thing, or by telling them BO can't be seen with too many of them? I give them pretty poor marks in this department, personally, but are they just being pragmatists? Discuss (or get bored if you're Stanley Fish)

3) How is the marketing of the first black first lady not interesting?

4) Whether and to what extent McCain distances himself from Bush is sorta a key question. He's shown the capability of doing both (supporting forcefully and running away from), so he remains free to do whichever he deems more advantageous electorally.

I can only wonder what kind of stories Stanley Fish is hoping for. By cable news standards these are gold.

What is the Obama camp thinking?

I think we learned something pretty important about the Obama camp today, but I can't tell if it's that they're petrified of John McCain or they think he doesn't have a chance.

So Wesley Clark said something insufficiently reverential about John McCain's military record: namely that his experiences as a pilot and POW don't hew especially closely to the responsibilities of the presidency.

As could have been expected, both the right wing outrage machine and mainstream press are going bananas. The "Swift Boat" comparison is being made all over the place despite the fact that what Clark said wasn't even really disparaging of John McCain let alone a catalog of blatant lies about him.

What does Team Obama do? It rejects, denounces, and otherwise disassociates himself from those remarks.

First let's dispense with the unfairness to Clark, who must have missed the memo that he was supposed to fawn over Obama's opponent when being interviewed on TV. That's obviously not factoring in one way or th'other.

But why is Obama so unwilling to take even the slightest poke at the balloon of McCain hero worship? I'll stipulate that it would be stupid to try to make the "McCain's not really a war hero" case... even though the Republicans executed the strategy successfully in 2004 (the common argument is that because the strategy worked for Bush, and Bush sucked, it won't work in 2008). But surely he could argue that while McCain served heroically, that doesn't automatically qualify him to be president, right? Well it's too mean for the McCain fluffers like Joe Klein, who clearly wish to partake of his warrior-hood by defending it from any who dare question its significance. But I don't think it's necessarily too mean for the voting public, and would be worth making.

One obvious explanation for their decision not to is that they don't want to make an issue of McCain's war record at all. The problem with this is by denouncing Clark's statement, they're admitting that it was disrespectful of McCain's war record, when it really wasn't at all. This is a perfect example of not taking your own side in a fight.

I see two potential explanations for their decision not to do so:

1. They think that their side of the fight would be doomed. McCain is obviously a living god, and if Obama so much as tries to put his status as a tortured POW in perspective he will lose the election.
   
   
2. They think their side of the fight is so good there's no percentage in having it. People don't need to be given "permission" to vote against John McCain. They're going to do so anyway in huge numbers. In order to win his hoped-for blowout, Obama needs to do it while bowing and scraping before the much beloved but dottering war hero who was unfortunate enough to be caught standing on the electoral train tracks.
   

The press is going to report this as if Option 1 drove the decision, but I think Option 2 is more likely. There remains the issue of fairness to Gen. Clark, but I suppose he's tough and will get over it. He may have moved off the Gang of 500's VP lists, but he moved up several notches on mine.

Eric Savitz calls out CNBC manipulation

Oh wait. False alarm. It seems that the Rediff owner on CNBC was recommending that people buyRediff, sending the stock up 21.1%. And when investors talk their long book and the stock responds dramatically, Eric doesn't get the queasy feeling he gets when they talk their short book.

Keep up the good work, Eric!

Things that are not musical instruments

Ann Althouse tells parody to take a hike:

I love music played on things that are not musical instruments and on toy instruments and instruments made out of nonstandard materials. Here's an old post about that.

That's the genuine article, not the joke site. I guess one could find the childlike sense of wonder endearing...

Mets lose. I get rained on.

Well for the first five innings it was pretty pleasant. Santana pitched well, except for one shaky inning. The persistent drizzle was actually kinda nice in the heat. Got to see Ramon Castro just crush a line drive over the center field fence. I love Ramon Castro. I don't understand why we keep acquiring other catchers to play in front of him. He was better than Paul Lo Duca.

In the 6th inning things took a turn for the thunderstormy, so we headed out thinking it would be a long delay. We missed the Wright home run, but got home in time to see Mariano slam the door in the 9th.

Jose Reyes does seem to have a weird and unfortunate habit of getting picked off second base.

Joe Klein gives relationship advice

In a post entitled "Call Him, Barack", Joe Klein writes that it's on Obama to extend the hand of friendship to Bill Clinton:

Obama has been making a lot of the right moves since nailing down the nomination--and it's probably time to swallow his pride and give the Big Dog a call, perhaps under the guise of asking specific policy advice... and then Obama should casually let slip that he doesn't at all consider Clinton a racist, and never has. Maybe a joke, "I'm looking forward to becoming the second black President..."

My first reaction to this was to imagine Joe hunched over his desk with the little Barack and Bubba dolls, working the whole scene out. But then I think back to the totally chickenshit statement Bill put out the other day, presented in its entirety:

"President Clinton is obviously committed to doing whatever he can and is asked to do to ensure Senator Obama is the next President of the United States."

As Hillary supporter Ed Rendell said, it's time for Bill to get over it. The Clintons ran an incredibly dishonest, nasty campaign, not so much on the race front but on the "we'd be better off with McCain" front, so yeah their image, at least among Democrats, has taken a bit of a hit. Them's the breaks.

The vast majority of Marc Ambinder readers choose a middle way: "Obama should ask Bill Clinton politely [to campaign for him], but if Clinton says no, Obama should ignore him." As opposed to groveling or ignoring him totally.

I guess that's probably reasonable, but I think there's something to be said for letting Bill know that it's not his party anymore, and it's for the best that it isn't. He's been completely useless to the Democratic Party for the last eight years. He was an "elder statesman" (read: quiet as a churchmouse) while Bush was running the country into the ground, and then he suddenly became a petty hatchet man when it was his wife's turn to run.

Sure, he's still powerful enough so that it would be best for Obama not to make an outright enemy of him, but this notion of Klein's that he should call and "casually let slip" that he doesn't think Bill's a racist and make with the jokes seems like a more degrading exercise than is really necessary for him. He's probably going to be president with or without the full-throated support of Bill Clinton.

Vogue

This is outstanding.


by presto change-o, via Avedon

Carlos Delgado goes buckwild on Yankees

He just had 9 RBI in the first game of the Subway doubleheader. That's more like it. I regret anything I may or may not have posted that suggested any loss of faith in him on my part.

This was the Yankee Stadium leg of the twinbill, and the short right field fence is why the Yankees are so keen on lefthanded sluggers like Giambi and Matsui. Sure enough, both of Delgado's home runs and the double were to right, but Gary Cohen said both were legitimate bombs.

Trot Nixon catches the last out. NYM 15 - NYY 5. Sweet.

In defense of Hugh Hewitt

There's been a fair amount of outrage at Hugh Hewitt's remark that he looks forward to enjoying one last Ohio State game because it will be "probably the last football game we'll ever get to see before the United States gets blown up by the Islamists under Obama."

Now I disagree with this, clearly, as an Obama voter who considers himself strongly anti-getting-blown-up. But I don't see how this comment is really beyond the pale. If someone describes "national security" as a key campaign issue, and one which favors John McCain, that's not a controversial statement. But what is national security these days except the matter of which candidate minimizes voters' chances of dying in a fiery terrorist attack?

I think it's worth distinguishing between the real smears (e.g. Obama as a Nazi appeaser, "not anti-war, just on the other side", wants to give Ahmedinejad a foot rub, etc.) and forthright statements of why hawkish McCain voters prefer John McCain. These people really seem to believe that but for the iron codpiece of George W. Bush, we'd all be speaking Farsi by now. They're not kidding.

Plus, I want to be free to list increased risk (or at least continued high risk) of terrorist attacks as one of the top 30 or so reasons John McCain's election would be a bad thing, and I'd hate to be vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy.

Jonathan Martin

You have to keep your expectations reasonable when you're talking about the Politico's lead correspondent on the McCain campaign. As long as you do, you can find those expectations occasionally exceeded. For example, a few weeks ago, he wrote a piece which included McCain's denial of having criticized the media for their treatment of Hillary Clinton, without noting that he definitely did do that and we know because he was on camera at the time. That was frustrating. This was a classic example of John McCain lying, confident that no one would call him on it or care, and being proved correct. So I, presumably along with lots of other rabid partisans, sent Martin an email pointing this out to him... and not only did he correct the error, he did so in a whole separate post, rather than taking the less embarrassing route of appending an update to the old post where fewer people would see it.

But today Bad Jonathan is back with a vengeance, telling his readers that John McCain doesn't often talk about his experience as a POW (being so reluctant to wring political benefit from it). Carpetbagger has what appears to be the comprehensive response.

MLB suspends Runge

Excellent. It's good to see an institution that can enforce its own rules. Jerry Manuel could have totally taken him, too. He didn't want any of that.

Congress is a joke

The video of David Addington's "testimony" in front of the House judiciary committee is pretty gruesome. There was definitely a time when someone who acted so contemptuously of the ruler or ruling body of a large country would have their head put on a spike and publicly displayed. I'm not saying that would be appropriate for Addington, Yoo, former AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre, Bradley Schlozman, Alberto Gonzalez, or any of the dozens of Bush apparatchiks who either refused to answer questions or outright perjured themselves before Congress, but it has a certain appeal... You could space them evenly around 495...

At a minimum, our non-medieval laws provide for those people going to jail. These are prosecutable crimes. But the perpetrators have absolutely no reason to fear any repercussions beyond a sternly worded letter from Patrick Leahy. And if they scoff at that, they'll get another one just like it in a couple months.

It's not purely my opposition to the policies these morons implemented that makes me wish there were (not necessarily beheading-oriented) real disincentives to lie in front of Congress. It's that the president of the United States is scary-powerful enough without being free of any meaningful Congressional oversight whatsoever.

As things stand now, the reason Harriet Miers and Karl Rove got to disregard subpoenas is because President Bush says they don't have to. They're in contempt or something, but Rove's on television every night, and he doesn't look anxious, so I guess everything's cool.

Anyway here's Addington:

Bob Barr on the FISA legislation

In 57 seconds, Bob Barr makes the odds of my voting for him go from 0.00% to 0.05%.

Senseless Einhorn-bashing

This is a couple weeks old, but Whitney Tilson went all line-by-line on the NYT's ass for their idiotic coverage of David Einhorn and his position in Lehman Brothers.

For those who don't know, David Einhorn is a hedge fund manager who has been an outspoken critic of some of the companies whose stocks he is betting against, including Lehman, which is especially controversial given the "run on the bank" collapse of Bear Stearns back in March. Even though most of his $6b fund is invested long (i.e. in stocks) he is known more for his short selling and totally uncouth truth-telling about the shittiness of the companies in question.

Anyway I read his book about Allied Capital ("Fooling Some of the People All the Time") and finished it in two sittings. It's awesome, and the NYT needs to leave David aloooooone!

Right about oil. Spectacularly wrong about the Swift Boat Vets

T. Boone Pickens has reneged on his $1 million reward for anyone who could provide evidence that the Swift Boat Lying Scumbags for Bush were in fact lying scumbags. From the NYT's Caucus blog:

A group of Swift boat veterans sympathetic to Mr. Kerry sent Mr. Pickens a letter last week taking him up on the challenge. In 12 pages, plus a 42-page attachment of military records and other documents, they identified not just one but ten lies in the group's campaign against Mr. Kerry. They offered to meet with him to provide Mr. Kerry's journals and videotapes from Vietnam and a copy of his full military record certified by the Navy – a key demand of Mr. Pickens and veterans who believe Mr. Kerry lied about his service to win his military decorations.

I suspect Pickens' decision to welsh had less to do with the money, which I can assure you is not a problem, than his unwillingness to admit that he and lots of people like him supported a completely bogus misinformation campaign in order to get their boy king reelected.

Personally I take some comfort in the fact that he seems to have tried really hard to get Rudy Giuliani elected in '08. Proof that you can get obscenely rich by having your bullishness on oil be completely vindicated while still being an ignorant clown.

h/t TPM

Big John

John Cornyn, ladies and gentlemen.

Nader

It appears Ralph Nader has fully emerged from the rock he hides under between presidential elections to question Barack Obama's authenticity as a black man.

"I haven't heard him have a strong crackdown on economic exploitation in the ghettos. Payday loans, predatory lending, asbestos, lead. What's keeping him from doing that? Is it because he wants to talk white?"

Now there are stupid statements, there are racist statements, and there are self-righteous statements. But I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone hit the trifecta like this.

More on that Beltran ejection

So the ejection that turned the Mets lineup card into a grab bag of bench players from the late 90s was not entirely Carlos Beltran's fault. Matt Cerrone at MetsBlog has the SNY video. I'd say it shows that while Beltran did some pretty serious muttering about the (bad) called strike, umpires aren't supposed to take off their masks and get in players' grills like that.

My favorite part is the moment at which Jerry Manuel goes from angry to superangry. It happened in a kind of spasm that almost knocked his cap off his head.

Sewage

San Francisco is shrill.

A dramatic rendering of Carlos Delgado's 2008

Why must they lose to the Mariners?

Seriously. This is embarrassing. Oliver Perez getting smacked around by the likes of Kenji Johjima (who is a catcher) and Raul Ibanez (for whom it was his first home run the year off a lefty).

David Wright had the night off, and Carlos Beltran was tossed in the fourth inning for arguing, so the lineup card behind Reyes is pretty grim.

Update:
10-0 now. Awesome.

Talk to'em Russ

Though Russ Feingold's decision to stay out of the presidential race was driven by a clear-eyed appreciation for the fact he almost certainly wasn't going to win, I was pretty disappointed anyway. Obama didn't look like he was going to take this stuff seriously and now I think it's pretty clear he won't. If Russ had stayed in a few primaries he might have been able to raise the issue's profile; maybe enough to entice Barack to join him on the right side of the Constitution. How hard is it to be anti-illegal wiretapping?

Via Kos.

What Digby said

I'd been getting a little sketched out by Digby recently, owing largely to the fact that her estimation of the injustice done to Hillary Clinton in the primaries was much greater than my own.

But when the need arises to kick The Politico in the teeth, which is often, and one of the highest callings a blogger can answer, she does excellent work.

UPDATE:
While the "What Digby said" concept is of course a registered trademark of the Baby Blue Cherub, I actually beat him to the approving link by 13 minutes, and didn't just steal his post wholesale and flesh it out a little. Apparently everybody and their mother (at least those mothers who are aware of the internet) linked to that Digby post. Got memeorandum on lock.

Las Vegas Sands and Tom DeLay

I know, it's hard to believe that a billionaire casino magnate and an unbelievably corrupt Republican congressman could have anything to do with one another, but Connie Bruck of the New Yorker says it's so.

Sheldon Adelson is the CEO and majority shareholder of Las Vegas Sands, which is worth almost $20 billion, which makes him the third richest man in America. The article is primarily about his tireless advocacy for (right-wing views of) Israel, but it also has good backstory on the deal that made his company what it is, namely the first and the biggest casino in Macau. They were not the only casino company willing to build a casino where China goes to gamble, but it appears they got that privilege in part because Adelson and DeLay are friends.

Sands was angling for the casino concession at the same time the Chinese were angling to host the 2008 Olympics. Though his city was considered the favorite, the mayor of Beijing was concerned about a bill being pushed in the House by a Democrat (natch) calling for Congress to oppose the selection of Beijing on account of human rights abuses or some noise.

Here is the account of the president of the company in a sworn deposition:

“About three hours later DeLay calls and he tells Sheldon, ‘You’re in luck,’ ” he continued, “ ‘because we’ve got a military-spending bill. . . . We’re not going to be able to move the bill, so you tell your mayor that he can be assured that this bill will never see the light of day.’ So Sheldon goes and he goes to the mayor and he says, ‘The bill will never see the light of day, Mr. Mayor. Don’t worry about it.’ ”

All else equal, that conversation probably didn't hurt Sheldon's chances of becoming a multi-billionaire.

Eric Savitz is clueless

There's a news item from today that isn't strictly baseball or politics related, but I'm going to write about it anyway because it's interesting and I have pretty broad editorial freedom.

There's a company called Microvision (ticker: MVIS) which makes, or rather is planning to make, little projectors that go into cell phones, allowing them to work like little projection TVs. Cool? Possibly, but that's neither here nor there.

What's interesting is that today someone wrote a post at finance blog aggregator SeekingAlpha which argued that (and I haven't done any fact checking here) Microvision is going to get crushed by a much bigger company (Texas Instruments) which is working on a similar product and is closer than Microvision to having it ready for mass production. Apparently a lot of people found it convincing, because the stock was down almost 12 percent today.

Despite the fact that the author, a Mr. Liam Mulcahy, disclosed at the end of the post that he worked for a hedge fund that is short (i.e. betting against) Microvision, the in-house tech blogger at Barron's, Eric Savitz, decided it was worth having a little hissyfit over.

"[Mulcahy's assertions] may well be true, but the fuzzy ID for Mulcahy - and the willingness of Seeking Alpha to post material of unclear origin - makes me a little queasy."

Anybody with an even passing familiarity with Seeking Alpha knows that the vast majority of the content there is "material of unclear origin." They'll publish just about anybody, and nobody complains until someone makes a short case convincing enough to send the stock down 12 percent.

I have no idea whether the guy is right or wrong, but this is a prime example of the business media's incredible bias against short sellers. If some guy writes something hyping the bejesus out of some crummy stock, no one cares. And if he's convincing enough to move the stock, nobody at Barron's gets all huffy about the author's murky origins. But short sellers are presumed to be so nefarious and all powerful that some shmoe at a hedge fund will probably get investigated by the SEC for market manipulation because he wrote something negative on a website... even though he disclosed his position!

What should make Eric Savitz queasy is that this no-name is providing market-moving analysis for free while Savitz gets paid by the country's most hallowed financial magazine to write blog posts that consist of mostly, and I'm not kidding here: "What's up with [Tech Stock X]? It's down a lot today and I don't see any news!"

When Savitz does track down this evildoer, maybe he can get some research tips.

Makes him look older

Dana Goldstein sees in a NYT interview reasons why Charlie Crist won't be John McCain's VP pick, and they basically boil down to him not being sufficiently socially conservative. There's also the speculation that Gov. Crist is teh gay, which I suppose is the very antithesis of social conservatism (at least in theory).

I happen to agree that Crist is not a real possibility despite his invitation to McCain's veepstakes BBQ (why not make Florida voters happy?), but it has nothing to do with his political views.

It's that deep, deep, orangy tan of his (almost Mozilo-esque). And the white hair makes it worse, because unlike Tim Pawlenty, who is clearly a much younger man than John McCain, Crist looks like an extremely well preserved older man... which makes for a less flattering comparison.

Pelfrey has solid outing at Coors

Despite walking five in 5.2 innings, Mike Pelfrey kept the Rockies off the board and the Mets held on to win and move back to .500 for the season.

Respectable 4.30 ERA aside, it's hard to get excited about Pelfrey with those peripherals. 43 K/37 BB in 81.2 IP is pretty horrible. The secret seems to be allowing extremely few home runs. He's only given up 4 so far, which makes sense given that he's a sinkerball pitcher. Unfortunately, his GB/FB ratio is a decidedly un-Webb-like 1.48, so the home runs could come after all.

But today, he was good.

"Headwinds"

I have a new least favorite pundit tic: that John McCain really should be trailing by at least 10 points due to the "headwinds" of Republican unpopularity, the unpopularity of the war, and the economy. Both John Harwood and Andrea Mitchell used the term this morning on MTP, in the course of explaining why Obama really should have a massive lead because he's got the unfair advantage of being a Democrat.

Now, the economy is a legitimate headwind for a Republican, in that I think the incumbent political party does not deserve to be held accountable for it to the extent they are. But John McCain was an enthusiastic supporter of the Iraq War, and his only criticism of it was that we hadn't committed enough troops. So if the majority of Americans believe it's been a disaster and was a bad idea to boot, as they do, it's not "bad luck" for John McCain. It's a rejection of John McCain's foreign policy.

But he said mean things about Donald Rumsfeld, so he's been "less wrong than most."

Funny

By watertiger, via Thers.

Mets hire Wayne Krivsky as a "special assistant"

Former/sacked Cincinnati general manager Wayne Krivsky has been hired by the Mets to act as a special assistant to Omar Minaya.

When Krivsky was fired back in late April after a 9-12 start, I emailed my Reds fan uncle to inquire as to why. His response:

I think you can explain the Krivsky firing with one word - Mike Stanton. There has been speculation that the owner, Castellini, was really peeved that they had to eat his millions before the season started. And overpaying Patterson, even though he is a Baker guy, probably did not set too well either.

I've got nothing good to say about giving Mike Stanton serious money or (over)paying Corey Patterson, and it was actually made worse by the fact that he's a Baker guy, but the reason Patterson's presence in center was so galling was because of Jay Bruce, and Krivsky was the guy who drafted Bruce. He also knew that current league ERA and strikeout leader Edinson Volquez was someone worth acquiring, even though the purchase price (Josh Hamilton) turned out to be much higher than expected.

Whatever his talents as a baseball executive, it does seem strange that at a time when the Mets seem to be in housecleaning mode, they've brought a guy who was very recently a major league GM into the front office to "assist" Minaya.

Nate Silver has a political blog

Last night I ran across a link to a post at FiveThirtyEight.com, a political blog by Nate Silver. The same Nate Silver who wrote for Baseball Prospectus and designed the industry-leading PECOTA projection system? The same! I'm quite excited. Apparently he blogged anonymously until May 30 of this year, when he unmasked himself as a necessary precursor to getting wider distribution by some big media enterprise or another.

For those who don't know, BP's core product is a quantitatively-oriented baseball analysis, and when you click on one of their player pages you see a lot of charts like the one above.

That's from Milton Bradley's page, and shows the distribution of historical seasons for the players he most closely ressembles, with the y-axis representing playing time (plate appearances) and the x-axis representing quality (in the form of a catch-all offensive statistic they call Equivalent Average).

His political analysis gives the same treatment to polling data. As he put it in the aforementioned post: "What we do over there and what I'm doing over here are really quite similar. Both baseball and politics are data-driven industries." And it's very true, at least if you're just talking about horserace politics. Policy seems to have a way of being less data-driven, but in baseball as in horserace, the key question is Win Expectancy. All subcategories (home runs, steals, white women, hispanic seniors) are all fodder for the overarching question of how likely a given team or candidate is to win.

Having been a BP reader for many years, I have a lot of faith in his quantitative game, and he apparently gives Obama a 76.3% chance of victory. That's slightly higher than I would have guessed, but I don't know how much it fluctuates with new polling data. If it's in there, the new Newsweek poll that has him up by a whopping 15 may be juicing that a little bit.

He's also an Obama supporter, which means to whatever extent there's an editorial slant (and my guess is it will be minimal) it will probably make the blog more enjoyable. So he's in the ol' RSS reader already.

This morning he did a post on yesterday's FISA vote, and found that the 32 House Democrats in districts designated as competitive voted overwhelmingly for capitulation while the rest of the caucus voted 120-82 against. That in itself is not at all surprising. Districts that were competitive in 2006 tend to be pretty darn reddish, and the blue seats tend to be held by Blue Dogs like Shuler, Carney and Ellsworth. The kind of Democrats that electoral pragmatists would have us live with and not challenge from the left.

The more interesting point was relating the votes of this subgroup to Obama's decision to support the bill: "Was he really going to run afoul of the Blue Dogs when they are probably his swing voters in passing some version of national health care legislation?" He also points out that Pelosi herself was very much on board with capitulation, and she's no Blue Dog. So there's the intramural explanation for his position that focuses not on Obama's reluctance to alienate swing voters in November but Congressional swing voters in early 2009, and it gets more appealing as a justification the more you discount November swing voters' awareness of the FISA issue at all.

My problem with it is that it could be used in any circumstance to justify agreement with the right wing of the Democratic party. On any unambiguously liberal legislative effort, the Blue Dogs are going to be the whiny ones who worry about being called Communists. That goes for health care, taxes, Social Security, carbon emissions... you name it. How big a Congressional majority will he need before he'll be comfortable telling the Blue Dog Caucus to get bent? Because that's what it comes down to, for me.

Worse than I expected

Yesterday I wrote that while I hoped Barack Obama would come out against the FISA "compromise" legislation, I didn't think he would do it. Well today he made a statement on the bill's passage in the House and boy did he not do it. It was enough to earn Atrios' "Wanker of the Day", for I believe for the first time ever, and deservedly so.

By way of throwing a bone to his anti-illegal spying base, he acknowledges the obvious:

"There is... little doubt that the Bush Administration, with the cooperation of major telecommunications companies, has abused that authority and undermined the Constitution by intercepting the communications of innocent Americans without their knowledge or the required court orders."

Then he moves on to previous positions he's taken that we agree with:

"That is why last year I opposed the so-called Protect America Act, which expanded the surveillance powers of the government without sufficient independent oversight to protect the privacy and civil liberties of innocent Americans. I have also opposed the granting of retroactive immunity to those who were allegedly complicit in acts of illegal spying in the past."

Operative phrase: "in the past." But if he supports today's bill, it must have some pretty great stuff in it:

"Under this compromise legislation, an important tool in the fight against terrorism will continue, but the President's illegal program of warrantless surveillance will be over. It restores FISA and existing criminal wiretap statutes as the exclusive means to conduct surveillance - making it clear that the President cannot circumvent the law and disregard the civil liberties of the American people."

The thing is, though, that FISA doesn't really need "restoration" as the exclusive means to conduct (electronic) surveillance. It has this thing in it called an "exclusivity provision," so it kind of came pre-restored. And to just about everybody outside the Bush administration, and a goodly number of people in it, including his Attorney General, it was already pretty clear that the president can't "circumvent" it.

It's time to break the news:

"It does, however, grant retroactive immunity, and I will work in the Senate to remove this provision so that we can seek full accountability for past offenses."

Hmmm... Wouldn't a good way of seeking full accountability for past offenses be to oppose any legislation that grants retroactive immunity? I mean that may be a little inside the box, butI think there's something to it.

Anyway as I said I didn't expect him to take a stand against the bill, so I shouldn't act all shocked, but right at the end the statement takes a hard turn from the ineffectual to the pernicious:

"It is not all that I would want. But given the legitimate threats we face, providing effective intelligence collection tools with appropriate safeguards is too important to delay. So I support the compromise..."

Emphasis mine, because it's so awful. The problem, of course, is not that he believes we face legitimate threats. It's that everyone believes we face legitimate threats! After claiming to share the very concerns of the people who oppose the bill, he turns around and depicts the debate over it as being between terrorism believers and terrorism skeptics, with the latter endangering America.

So yeah, wankery indeed. I'm setting pretty modest expectations here, Barack. I sure hope the estimates for political courage don't need to be revised further downward.

Brian Williams to host MTP on Sunday

The LA Times is reporting that NBC anchor Brian Williams will host Meet the Press this Sunday. The president of NBC News says that they are still mulling their options for a permanent successor, and Williams isn't necessarily it.

I really hope it's not. I'm having a hard time putting my finger one really good justification for my dislike of Brian Williams, but the individually insufficient reasons include pomposity, scraping deference to Republicans, overeagerness to ingratiate himself to the audience personally, and make-your-teeth hurt corniness.

Of the frequently talked-about candidates, I have to say Matthews would be my preference. His tendency to say surprisingly sexist and/or racist things is a drawback, to be sure. Still, he's the only other "tough interviewer" in the bunch. Well there's David Gregory, but all the stuff I don't like about Williams applies to him, too, just with slightly less Republican-love and more(!) pomposity. Sometimes I think Joe Scarborough has finally seen the light, but it burns and these days he's too angry to be on camera for very long.

Anyway regardless of the merits Matthews would seem to be the heir apparent and he already does The Chris Matthews show in the slot before MTP. They wouldn't even have to play musical chairs with any other shows.

However it shakes out I hope they give Rachel Maddow a damn show.

"First since Watergate"

So Obama's opting out of public financing. No real surprise here. He had said he wouldn't, but then started raising cash by the truckload and had second thoughts. This is on balance an excellent thing, but it does require giving John McCain a golden opportunity to turn the sanctimony meter to 11.

I doubt that this is going to be a big deal, but it's kind of unfortunate that the AP (no link in solidarity with bloggers everywhere) is running the subhead "First since Watergate" which is prominently featured on Drudge, and which McCain used in his response. It's just bad luck for Obama that the rule happened to have been implemented in the wake of the original "-gate," as what he's doing, even though he said he wouldn't do it, is perfectly legal.

Unlike, say, what John McCain did when he opted into matching funds (to get the money and bypass the signature requirement) and then tried to get out once his campaign was solvent again. His request wasn't granted, but he continued to spend beyond the limit anyway! Sure, Obama didn't do what he said he'd do, and that's bad. But it's absurd that McCain can still play offense on the issue of campaign finance. He may have broken the McCain-Feingold Act.

FISA Capitulation

Well it looks like retroactive immunity for the telcos is locked and loaded, which is great because we really don't want private companies having any qualms about breaking the law if they're asked to do so by the executive branch. We want the rails to be greased the next time an administration decides it wants to completely flout duly enacted laws but needs the private sector's help in doing so.

Greenwald is all over this, as he has been since the warrantless surveillance program was reported by the NYT in 2004, and a lot of people are joining him in calling on Obama to come out and call this the travesty it is. 

I'd love it if he did. I'm betting that he won't. It's completely fucking wrong, and he knows it, but he may not deem it worth spending any capital on. Caring about the preservation of the Constitution has somehow become the province of the lunatic fringe in American politics, as defined as Daily Kos readers and Ron Paul supporters, and Barack's got a general election to win. C'est la guerre.

Mets win?

When I retired for the evening, Oliver Perez had just coughed up the lead and was threatening to put on one of his patented fireworks displays. But lo, it appears that Damion Easley capped a comeback late in the game, and established that Jerry Manuel knows how to win games in a way that Willie Randolph never did... or at least the first part.

I got the happy recap from Amazin' Avenue, which has improved a lot since last time I was posting regularly. I'm a sucker for win expectancy charts.

Menomena: Evil Bee

I discovered this video on pitchfork.tv, a relatively new site which I frequent partly to scout out the fresh idie jams and partly to build up a tolerance for hipster culture, which is becoming a necessity in my neighborhood. A lot of the content they put up is long-form documentaries on bands which are now defunct but, the viewer learns, used to kick 10x more ass than any current bands ever could.

Anyway these guys are good, and it's apparently pronounced "meh-NOM-eh-NUH."

Night of the Long Knives

Well, it's over. The Mets are kind of a dysfunctional organization, as it turns out. They called Willie in for that meeting which they said publicly was largely because of his "they're after me because I'm black" comments. (His most hilarious evidence: Everyone wants Isaiah Thomas fired, too!). They apparently wanted to assure the "white working class" segment of the fanbase that such insolence would not be tolerated, but they also said Willie was staying, even though that was obviously not going to be true if they kept losing on even a semi-regular basis. The headline I saw this morning was "Mets Handle Randolph Firing Like a Bunch of Cowards", which seems right.

Anyway I'm happy about it because I really don't care who the manager is, just as long as I don't have to hear a lot of manager controversy, and I think Willie was kind of a buffoon and not a great tactician.

MN - Sen

TPM has an update. I hadn't realized that Jesse Ventura was thinking of joining Coleman and Franken in a three-way race. If that were to happen, I wouldn't envy Coleman's campaign manager. How do you gameplan for a Senate race against Stuart Smalley and The Body? Talk about uncharted territory.

"Vote for Norm Coleman: No Speedos, No Jokes"

"Coleman: Because Novelty Wears Off"

"Keep Minnesota Norm-al"

So I guess I do envy Coleman's campaign manager. That'd be fun. Of course, he may very well lose. Franken seems to have stubbed his toe pretty badly with this back taxes thing, and yet he's still well within striking distance in a two-man race. Plus, he's a very smart guy, and he can do earnest without seeming like he's really smirking on the inside. So it would be nice if Ventura sat it out, because the race could be pivotal and it wouldn't redound to Al's benefit to have it turn into a full-blown circus.

Wagner and other reasons for despair

Three blown saves in a row? It's not like they were all one run leads, either.

Things are looking pretty bleak. As good as Wright, Santana and Reyes are, this just doesn't look like a team that's woefully underperforming its potential at 31-34. Beltran has spent too much of his career as a Met making outs to think he's a lock to turn things around. Delgado is done. Even with Pedro ostensibly "back," we're relying on Oliver Perez, Mike Pelfrey, and the Brewers' leftovers to fill out our rotation. As for depth at the power positions? We've started Damion Easley at first base, and some guy from Binghamton who I'd never heard of in left field.

And the Phillies are looking pretty good. I'm not saying they can't come back and make the playoffs, but they need vastly improved production from their non-elite players, and I have a hard time seeing it happening.

In short: Booooo!

Robert Byrd endorses Obama

2008: "Barack Obama is a noble-hearted patriot and humble Christian, and he has my full faith and support."

1945: "Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds."

Flip flopper!


(h/t Booman)

Obama's flair

So Obama's decided to start wearing a flag lapel pin. Not crazy about it. He made a point of explaining why he didn't wear one anymore and I was very pleased at the time. Clearly a net negative politically, but consistent with my belief that the flag pins started getting creepy and/or obnoxious in 2003 at the latest. But now he's going to put all that "true patriotism" stuff behind him and do what has to be done to assure the good people of Pennsylvania that he's not a terrorist.

Is it really that bad? Probably not, but it's not as though his campaign is in dire straits. He didn't have to cave, but he did anyway. It's probably not even worth it politically. It makes him look phony, which is something he can ill afford. Plus, should he win, what would he cave on if he were under really significant pressure?