WaPo op-ed page continues strong support for CO2 emissions

If there's one point of view that has gone underrepresented in the opinion pages of the Washington Post, it is not that global warming is a bunch of hooey. A few short months after George Will's brazenly dishonest column to that effect generated so much "buzz", Robert J. Samuelson demands to know: What does Obama have against fossil fuels, anyway?

Considering the brutal recession, you'd expect the Obama administration to be obsessed with creating jobs. And so it is, say the president and his supporters. The trouble is that there's one glaring exception to their claims: the oil and natural gas industries. The administration is biased against them -- a bias that makes no sense on either economic or energy grounds.

What is the evidence that Obama harbors an irrational hatred of oil and gas? Samuelson's case rests on three main points:

1. "Contrary to popular wisdom, the United States still has huge oil and natural gas resources."
2. The oil and gas industry employs many more people than the solar and wind industries.
3. Obama favors raising fuel efficiency standards, and his Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, "canceled 77 leases in Utah because they were too close to national parks."

Taking #3 first, because it's the only one that has anything to do with Obama: It probably sounds like I'm misrepresenting what must be a much longer, more ominous bill of particulars. If you don't want to go see for yourself I can only assure you this is not the case. Samuelson more or less admits himself that there's not much there:

Any one of these [i.e. the Utah lease cancellations or raised fuel efficiency standards] alone might seem a reasonable review of inherited policies, and it's true that Salazar has maintained a regular schedule of oil and gas leases. Still, the anti-oil bias seems unmistakable.

Ah, yes. Even though fuel efficiency standards have been going up for years, and the Interior Department has always existed solely to do things like keep oil & gas companies away from national parks, you should still see such efforts as part of a personal crusade of Obama's.

#2:

Encouraging more U.S. production would also aid economic recovery, because the promise of "green jobs" is wildly exaggerated. Consider: In 2008, the oil and gas industries employed 1.8 million people. Jobs in the solar and wind industries are reckoned (by their trade associations) to be 35,000 and 85,000, respectively. Now do the arithmetic: A 5 percent rise in oil jobs (90,000) approaches a doubling for wind and solar (120,000). Modest movements, up or down, in oil will swamp "green" jobs.

It's true that the oil & gas industry is vastly bigger than the solar and wind industries, but Samuelson's so-called "arithmetic" is shameless sleight of hand. He's trying to take the true fact that the oil & gas industry is bigger and make it look like the inherently more job-creating energy source, with greater sensitivity to "[m]odest movements, up or down." But all he's done is assume a completely fictitious scenario in which the United States has been offered a coupon for a 5% employment increase in the energy industry of our choice. Since no such deal is on the table, all he's proven is that the oil & gas industry currently employs many more people, which was a given.

And getting to his first point last:

"Huge oil and natural gas resources"? No. Our oil and gas reserves are not huge in any meaningful sense. We're #14 in proved reserves with about 22 billion barrels. Samuelson argues that this number is really much larger once you include optimistic projections for our "unconventional" prospects, that might be accessible at some point, if finding and development costs were no object. By sufficiently relaxing the definition of reserves for the U.S. (only), Samuelson takes us from a paltry 22 billion barrels to 800 billion barrels or "triple Saudi Arabia's proven reserves." Not bad for a paragraph's work.

Of course, even assuming we're sitting on much more oil and gas than we realize, the claim that Obama is "undermining" the oil industry's efforts to produce more oil is very hard to square with the fact that oil companies are cutting back on exploration all by themselves:

April 24 (Bloomberg) -- The number of oil and natural gas rigs operating in the U.S. fell to the lowest since March 2003 this week as natural gas prices dropped, according to data published by Baker Hughes Inc.

Rigs exploring for or producing oil or gas declined by 20, or 2.1 percent, to 955, the fewest since March 21, 2003, Baker Hughes said today on its Web site. The rig count has fallen 52 percent from 1,992 on Nov. 7.

To put a fine point on it, oil & gas companies could be drilling and producing at a faster rate than they are today. Because of commodity price declines, they (the companies) are, probably correctly, deeming fewer projects to be economical and canceling or shutting them down accordingly. Yet here is how Samuelson closes:

Improved production techniques (example: drilling in deeper waters) have increased America's recoverable oil and natural gas. The resistance to tapping these resources is mostly political. To many environmentalists, expanding fossil fuel production is a cardinal sin. The Obama administration often echoes this reflexive hostility. The resulting policies aim more to satisfy popular prejudice -- through photo ops and sound bites -- than national needs.

Maybe the most bizarre thing about this piece is that Samuelson never once confronts the issue of global warming head on. Instead, he feigns bafflement at all the "hostility" towards fossil fuel production, as if it could only be motivated by religious ("cardinal sin") rather than scientific dictates. And rather than explicitly denying that there's any reason to replace fossil fuels with "clean" (his quotation marks) fuels, he weasels out by pretending that Obama thinks we burn oil mostly for electricity:

The president is lauded as a great educator; in this case, he provided much miseducation. He implied that there's a choice between promoting renewables and relying on oil. Actually, the two are mostly disconnected. Wind and solar mainly produce electricity. Most of our oil goes for transportation (cars, trucks, planes); almost none -- about 1.5 percent -- generates electricity. Expanding wind and solar won't displace much oil; someday, electric cars may change this.

So there might be electric cars someday? Pretty visionary. But why, Robert? Why would we ever want to stop refining and burning crude oil? We've got plenty of the stuff!

One of the better Mets posts ever

I'm stealing one of the graphics, but if you're a Mets fan you owe it to yourself to read the whole thing.

It's true. That is offensive!

So John Boehner, bless his heart, decides to have whipped up a Bush/Cheney '04 style "Isn't Obama clearly an Islamic terrorist?" video, and I suppose what else is there really for him to do at this point.

But towards the end, after it has delivered the shocking news that Obama doesn't want you to hear and cued the ominous orchestral music, reminiscent of the final scene in "The Usual Suspects," it runs a montage where, in between images of the Hugo Chavez handshake and a burning American flag, is a picture of Obama with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Just sitting with them around a conference table, as if at a meeting of some sort.

Nydia Velazquez, the chairwoman of the CHC and my representative, called the video "a completely inappropriate message for the leader of the minority party to send to the American people." Rep. Raul Grijalva went ahead and called it "racist," which I think is a super-uncontroversial claim.

Boehner's office responded that the criticism was "beyond silly." When I read that, and I hadn't seen the video, I wondered if maybe there was some context that made it less offensive than it sounded. But no. It's really pretty bad:

You talking about my ratings, punk?

Pretty hilarious White House press conference tick-tock from Marc Ambinder:

There's a moment -- usually with about two minutes to go -- where four or five network correspondents, standing feet apart, talk over each other, saying much the same thing. Then you hear the voice of CBS's Mark Knoller, who gives a last minute radio update. Then the same from ABC's Ann Compton.

Ed Henry finished his stand-up early. Only NBC's Chuck Todd and CBS's Chip Reid were left standing.

Chuck groaned. He knew that he and Chip were about to stumble over one another.

Chuck then realized that everyone was looking at him. He informed his producer of this.

Then he joked that someone was going to Twitter the conversation. (I did.)

Chip, who has sworn off Twitter and has never been on Facebook, dryly wondered how many people would read it.

Chuck misheard Chip, thinking that Chip was talking about ratings.

So Chuck struck back, saying something like: "Do we really want to get into a ratings comparison?"

Everyone from the photogs to members of Obama's staff said "Oooooh."

Arlen Specter to switch parties

Everybody seems genuinely astounded by the news that Arlen Specter is going to run for re-election as a Democrat. I'm not sure why. Running as a Republican was not going to be an option for him. Just last Friday, a Rasmussen poll found he was headed for certain doom at the hands of his primary challenger, bona fide wingnut Pat Toomey. Twice in his statement today he acknowledged that this was a contributing factor to his decision:

I have traveled the State, talked to Republican leaders and office-holders and my supporters and I have carefully examined public opinion. [Emphasis added. Not that you have to examine a 51%-30% poll too carefully.]

and later...

I am also disappointed that so many in the Party I have worked for for more than four decades do not want me to be their candidate. It is very painful on both sides. ["You didn't appreciate me anyway, you jackals."]

I thank especially Senators McConnell and Cornyn for their forbearance. ["Sorry you backed the wrong horse, fellas."]

Being a professional politician who doesn't want to retire, Specter was presented a choice of I or D, and the D is very much in style these days. Joe Lieberman wishes he were still a D. And Obama carried Pennsylvania by 10 points.

Meanwhile, his statement makes perfectly clear that he hasn't had a change of heart about any actual issue. He specifies the Employee Free Choice Act as something he's still planning on opposing. This is purely a venue-shopping deal, to ensure that he's still a U.S. Senator, in a position to cast votes one way or the other. So he goes from being a great Republican to a horrendous Democrat... and that's about it.

Super Furry Animals - "Moped Eyes"

Well said

SamT, in response to Jon Heyman's article about "Mets officials" despairing after the first two weeks of the season:

You know those Mets fans who post irrationally [on] forums, calling for Beltran's trade everytime he makes an error? Yea, turns out those people run the Mets.

The bit at the end about how they're all torn up about not signing David Eckstein is especially eye-popping.

LOLNOM

h/t

What do we do when we fall off the horse?

It was almost exactly nine months between Eliot Spitzer's prostitute-related resignation and his debut column in Slate, and now just a few months later, unnamed sources are telling the Post he thinks he can be a contender for Attorney General (again).

First of all, when Post readers start in on a piece about Eliot Spitzer, they don't want to be kept waiting for the single entendres, and Murdoch's wordsmiths don't disappoint. The fourth and seventh words of the piece are "flaccid" and "re-erecting," respectively.

But what of Spitzer, the man? I still say he's a huge scumbag. As an anonymous "longtime observer" said: "The whole idea of returning to Albany is preposterous. You can't go home again. He's a pariah. It wasn't just the prostitutes -- there was also Troopergate."

Or at least, I think the idea of him returning to Albany should be preposterous. In practice, I like his odds. He may have done all he could to squander it, but as personal political brands go "Scourge of Wall Street" is just too hot right now.

Spitzer is beloved by what I think of as the Greenwald/Digby segment of the Democratic electorate. They think the whole prostitute thing was a bad rap, noting that a) nobody really cares and b) when a Republican senator was caught doing the exact same thing he didn't even have to resign. And I agree with them on both those points. I just think Troopergate was that bad, and while his first stint as AG was useful in getting him elected governor, he didn't actually achieve much in the way of convictions or reforms.

I like the idea that sex scandals are becoming like Tommy John surgery (season-ending but not career ending, with the recovery period getting ever shorter as the technique is perfected). I just wish that this particular politician weren't so likely to make it back.

h/t

Hard to satirize, those Powerline guys

Roy Edroso's roundup of wingnut responses to the Somali pirate story, yesterday:

...And [Red State blogger] Huston yelled that "the French... THE FRENCH... use proper military force against these criminal pirates" -- referring to a rescue mission that ended with the death of a hostage.

But getting the hostage killed has got to be the right way to run a rescue, because Obama didn't do it.

Ha ha, right? No, this actually does seem to be the wingnut house view. Powerline last night:

This weekend, while the focus was on the hostage situation involving Captain Phillips, the French military rescued four French hostages, including a three-year-old boy, after President Sarkozy authorized a military attack on a French yacht that pirates had seized in the Gulf of Aden a week earlier. The rescued hostages were all unharmed [Yay!], but another hostage, the skipper of the yacht, was killed... [But you just said... Oh, I see. He doesn't count as a "rescued" hostage.]

Although the French government did negotiate for a while with the priates on the captured yacht last week, President Sarkozy's overall approach to these incidents seems more aggressive and proactive than President Obama's.

After downplaying "hostage survival rate" as an overrated metric in evaluating hostage situation responses (certainly when compared to "perceived machismo quotient"), Mirengoff imagines that the Navy commanders must have been construing Obama's instructions to take out the pirates more broadly than he intended.

Just when you think it can't get any more embarrassing, Hindrocket shows up in an addendum and together they riff on how the French aren't wimps at all but are in fact "cynical cowboys." The French aren't wimps now? I'm almost sorry to see them like this.

Mets drop Citi Field opener

First of all, though I would have liked a ninth-inning comeback even more, I have to confess that I was a little happy that Heath Bell got to fulfill his revenge fantasy of recording the first save in Citi Field history.

I just learned tonight from Gary Cohen that Bell harbored a grudge against the Mets for how they handled him, but it makes sense, since I was furious about it (not so much for his sake as the team's) and it stands to reason he would be even more so. Here's just one of several posts I wrote at the time to the effect that the Mets needed to give him the damn ball and stop demoting him after his first bad inning:

Since his much decried demotion, Heath Bell has saved three games for Norfolk in dominating fashion, striking out 11 and not allowing a single baserunner in 6.2 innings. As has been pointed out before, the Mets need to promote him and have him pitch the crucial innings that are now being entrusted to Manny Aybar and Mike Dejean. I would even submit, for your consideration, that the Tides may currently boast a better closer than the Mets.

That was April 2005, and the incumbent closer in question was Braden Looper, who indeed had about as bad a 28 Save season as one could have (8 blown saves, 3.94 ERA). Bell was no prize that year either, to be sure, but the peripherals were still excellent. After '06, he was sent to San Diego in a trade for... Ben Johnson, a fifth outfielder whose Mets career consisted of a grand total of 27 (wasted) at-bats.

Well now that, sure enough, he was a keeper and everyone knows of Heath Bell as San Diego's dominant setup man-turned-Closer, I can hardly begrudge him his desire to rub the Mets organization's face in it.

It's just one game anyway. The biggest negative from tonight was Mike Pelfrey, but I've already done enough "I told you so" for one post.

The Cardinals' closer situation

There have been years where a team announces that it's going to a "closer by committee" and the media makes a huge deal about it and there's a lot of hand-wringing about how you can't win without a designated closer.

But even with those teams there were really only 2 or 3 guys that really ended up getting saves. LaRussa has taken the Cards one step beyond that, I think. There was supposedly a job battle between Perez, who's now in Triple-A, and Motte, who pitched in the 6th inning of a blowout yesterday. So now there's a completely separate competition going on involving two right-handers (Franklin and McClellan) and a lefty (Reyes). The "favorite" among them is supposedly Franklin, yet he is the only one of the three that hasn't actually recorded a Save yet.

As a baseball fan, it's nice to see LaRussa (implicitly) insist that he's not going to let a stupid accounting system dictate how he uses his pitchers. As a fantasy baseball player, it's a total nightmare. I've gotten sucked into it in both my leagues, having drafted Motte in one and Perez in another. I thought I was being smart when I did that, too.

Sign of the times

Back in the early oughts, when it would have been much more helpful, Joe Klein wasn't especially interested in mocking neoconservative fruitcakes like Charles Krauthammer. But now that he feels comfortable doing so, he's pretty good at it.

And there was--oh. my. God.--the failed North Korean rocket launch. The Gates Defense budget is cutting anti-missile defense systems in Alaska. More Obama wimposity! Except that Gates has decided not to spend tens of billions on an anti-missile system (that doesn't work) to counter a North Korean rockets (that don't work) carrying North Korean atomic bombs (that have, so far, fizzled when tested).

People really don't have an adequate appreciation for just how stupid the National Missile Defense program is. There are a lot of low-frequency, high-severity risks that we could be preparing for but don't. We could put all our country's resources into a system that would deflect an incoming asteroid, because if an asteroid were to hit us, it would be that bad. But one reason why we don't is because the success rate of the system would have to be incredibly high. And there wouldn't be money left over for roads, hospitals, soldiers, tanks, etc.

Then there's the fact that a long-range ballistic missile requires government sponsorship to develop (i.e. can't be launched from a cave in Pakistan), and governments, even evil dictatorships, tend not to pursue the vaporization of their own country by U.S. nuclear subs. Then there's the fact that you could shoot down 100% of incoming missiles and still be extremely vulnerable to a nuclear attack on a major U.S. city (suitcase or container bombs).

Anyway, I'm very happy about this "Gates budget" generally. Less money on F-22s, "Future Combat Systems" (more like Ridiculous Gadget Systems), and the like. More money for the stuff that our actual armed forces actually use.

Rosa Brooks will be working at the Pentagon

Excellent news:

This will be my last column for the L.A. Times. After four years, I'll soon be starting a stint at the Pentagon as an advisor to the undersecretary of Defense for policy.

Rosa Brooks is awesome.

h/t

Seems appropriate given the circumstances

When I saw the headline "Britain's Top Antiterror Officer Resigns Over Slip-Up" I thought it was going to be a story about an exceedingly principled and honor-oriented (ya know, British) functionary who chose to resign over a relatively minor infraction. That seemed like the kind of story the NYT would be drawn to.

But it turns out he was photographed getting out of a vehicle while holding a top secret document out in the open, sans manila envelope or file folder or anything. The document detailed a raid being planned on suspected terrorists. It was apparently legible enough so that the police had to consider the information compromised, and conduct the raid earlier than they wanted to.

So of course he resigned!

Roger Ebert: Stealing from Jimmy Cayne?

Roger Ebert writes a satisfyingly uncivil open letter to Bill O'Reilly in the Chicago Sun Times, which he concludes thusly:

Bill, I am concerned that you have been losing touch with reality recently. Did you really say you are more powerful than any politician?

That reminds me of the famous story about Squeaky the Chicago Mouse. It seems that Squeaky was floating on his back along the Chicago River one day. Approaching the Michigan Avenue lift bridge, he called out: Raise the bridge! I have an erection!

Now, as much as I appreciate the sentiment, I'd wager that this is a self-consciously regionalized version of what former Bear Stearns CEO Jimmy Cayne said of Tim Geithner:

"The audacity of that prick in front of the American people announcing he was deciding whether or not a firm of this stature and this whatever was good enough to get a loan,” [Cayne] said. “Like he was the determining factor, and it’s like a flea on his back, floating down underneath the Golden Gate Bridge, getting a hard-on, saying, ‘Raise the bridge.’ This guy thinks he's got a big dick..."

Ebert probably read that and thought. "Oh that's good. I've gotta stash that one away."

h/t

Andrew Rosenthal is a sleazy hack

The name J. Ezra Merkin didn't mean anything to me until I read he's being sued by Andrew Cuomo for having been a big feeder/marketer for Bernie Madoff.

Presumably, it didn't mean anything to Andrew Rosenthal when he published Daphne Merkin's op-ed just weeks beforehand arguing that Madoff's victims weren't really victims because "no one was holding a gun to their head, saying sign up with Madoff or else."

How did she disclose in said op-ed that her brother had placed roughly $2.4 billion with Madoff?

"I did not know Mr. Madoff nor did I invest with his firm, but have a sibling who did business with him."

Now that Andrew Rosenthal knows the extent of Ms. Merkin's brother's legal liability in the Madoff case, surely he regrets letting her pose as any sort of disinterested observer... or not:

In a brief phone interview, editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal told TPMmuckraker that he had no plans to revisit the issue, even to edit the online version of the now-17-day-old article to offer readers fuller disclosure.

Indeed, Rosenthal appeared dismissive. "I answered this call against my better judgment," he said. "I thought you had something more substantive you wanted to talk about."

Pressed as to whether or not he viewed the issue of disclosure in the Merkin op-ed as substantive, Rosenthal replied: "I'm just not interested in discussing it."

The Pittsburgh shooting

Yesterday I approvingly quoted Charles Blow's op-ed about how the wingnuts are really starting to come loose, but I'm still a little uncomfortable with the use of the 23 year-old skinhead cop killer in Pittsburgh as evidence of that trend.

My objection is not that it's necessarily unseemly to "play politics" with tragedy, and pretty much all shootings seem like good arguments for gun control to me. But the pool of people who actually go on shooting rampages is thankfully too small and too fucked up to extrapolate much from their politics. It may be a cliche ("crazies on both sides"), but it seems that taking it seriously means really not caring which websites a person was posting on before they started shooting at the cops.

The argument about which political ideology is intrinsically brutal and crazy is easily winnable without deploying actual murdering psychopaths as data points.

2009 Preseason Predictions

After the longest spring training I can remember, the regular season starts tonight with ATL @ PHI. Which means it's time to etch my preseason predictions indelibly in the internets, so that after they prove prescient I'll have proof.

NL East

Mets

Braves

Phillies

Marlins

Nationals

NL Central

Cubs

Brewers (Wild Card)

Reds

Cardinals

Pirates

Astros

NL West

Diamondbacks

Dodgers

Giants

Rockies

Padres

AL East

Red Sox

Yankees (Wild Card)

Rays

Blue Jays

Orioles

AL Central

Indians

Tigers

Twins

White Sox

Royals

AL West

Rangers

A's

Angels

Mariners

World Series

Diamondbacks def. Red Sox

MVP

NL - David Wright

AL - Josh Hamilton

Cy Young

NL - Dan Haren

AL - C.C. Sabathia

Rookie of the Year

NL - Jordan Zimmermann

AL - Matt Wieters

All-Underrated Team

C - Chris Iannetta

1B - Joey Votto

2B - Kelly Johnson

SS - J.J. Hardy

3B - Adrian Beltre

OF - Cody Ross

OF - Carlos Beltran (that's right)

OF - Adam Jones

SP - Ricky Nolasco

SP - Javier Vazquez

SP - Clayton Kershaw

RP - Frank Francisco

RP - Carlos Marmol

All-Overrated Team

C - Joe Mauer

1B - Justin Morneau

2B - Mike Aviles

SS - Alexei Ramirez

3B - Evan Longoria

OF - Ichiro

OF - Magglio Ordonez

OF - Nick Markakis

SP - John Lackey

SP - Carlos Zambrano

SP - Chad Billingsley

RP - Kevin Gregg

RP - Francisco Cordero

My kind of opening graf

Charles Blow:

Lately I’ve been consuming as much conservative media as possible (interspersed with shots of Pepto-Bismol) to get a better sense of the mind and mood of the right. My read: They’re apocalyptic. They feel isolated, angry, betrayed and besieged. And some of their “leaders” seem to be trying to mold them into militias.

Nice outing, Mike

Getting a full season from Johan Santana is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the Mets to win the NL East. We need at least one guy behind him who's "good" and no more than one guy behind him who's "awful" (Livan Hernandez being the leading candidate for that role).

Mike Pelfrey is supposed to be good. He's our #2, followed by Maine, Perez, and Livan. So when I see that he's given up 8 earned in 4 innings against the Orioles, raising his spring ERA to a nifty 7.71, I'm not inclined to shrug it off. And Baltimore's best hitters weren't even in the lineup. This is the lineup that put a snowman on our No. 2 (respectable major league hitters in bold):

Andino

Turner

Salazar, O.

Scott

Zaun

Moore

Cabrera, J.

Christian

Moeller

Let's just hope Ollie and Maine keep up their end of the bargain.

Omir Santos: Who is this guy?

It looks like we may have yet another catcher in the organization who's more deserving of the starting role than Brian Schneider, who looks better in those Manhattan Toyota commercials than he does at the plate. All last year, we had Ramon Castro wasting away on the bench, and now we've got a 29 year-old Puerto Rican non-roster invitee who will probably end up getting discarded outright.

There's not much of a pro record on this guy (although he does, rather incredibly, have a wikipedia entry). But I can tell you what he did this afternoon: hit more home runs (2) than Brian Schneider will hit before the All-Star break. Plus I think he can throw.

Qualcomm brings teh funny

Almost unsettlingly high production values in this April Fool's video from Qualcomm:

h/t

Gary Sheffield doesn't know how to react?

When I read that the Tigers released Gary Sheffield, my first thought was to fear for the safety of whichever team representative imparted the news to him. But Sheffield has apparently mellowed because this was his quote:

“I wouldn’t say I’m shocked, but I am surprised,” Sheffield told The Oakland Press of Pontiac. “To do this when somebody is one home run away … I don’t know how to react to it.”

WTF? I mean really, I didn't necessarily expect a tirade about how maybe if he were Latin the management would keep him around longer, but this is weak sauce, Sheff.

And we're listening to him because...

After quoting a Robert L. Rodriguez at length as the bearish counterpoint to the now-bullish Doug Kass, this column rather undermines his credibility here:

The Capital fund that Mr. Rodriguez manages for First Pacific, which is slightly lower for the year and down 42 percent since last March, is now making heavy bets on energy companies.

So on one hand you can listen to Doug Kass, who was considered the most prominent bear going into the collapse, or on the other you can listen to a guy who took it on the chin at least as badly as the S&P over the past year. And if he's down 42% since last March, he's probably down a lot more than that since YE07, given how horrendous the first three months of 2008 were.

This isn't to say that Mr. Rodriguez is especially bad at his job or is wrong that there's a lot more downside left, only that it's not clear why they couldn't find a bear they could quote who had been a little less wrong recently.

h/t Ritholtz

Biting like there ain't no shame in it

Compare and contrast the cover art for Dan Deacon's "Bromst" (2009) and Department of Eagles' "In Ear Park" (2008):

DM Stith - "Pity Dance"

Can you get anything right?

This is pretty funny. BP's John Perrotto apparently reported that Pedro Martinez was about to sign with Houston, and that turned out not to be the case. In his post today entitled "Mea Culpa," he concludes:

I would love to be able to write this off as easily as saying you win some and lose some. That’s not the case, though. As a reporter, you’re [sic] No. 1 responsibility is to get the story right.

I didn’t do that and, to you the readers, I apolozige [sic].

That's the private banking system for you

As Dr. Black explained to Larry Summers in his seminal post "Stop Feeding Me A Shit Sandwich," it's called bankruptcy you idiot.

It's true that the government can't do much to stop AIG from paying out bonuses but this is because Obama listened to Summers and Geithner and decided to pretend that these institutions aren't bankrupt.

Well guess what, if they're not bankrupt then who is he to say that their executives didn't generate tens of millions of dollars worth of "shareholder value"?

You think Apple's playing about its money?

High dudgeon in the tech blogosphere over Apple's putting an "authentication chip" in the headphones/controller of the new ultra-tiny iPod Shuffle. The chip ensures that if you want to buy non-Apple headphones you'll only be able to get them from companies that are paying Apple for the privilege (and passing the cost on to you).

Now I get the argument that making your product a "closed" system like this is counterproductive. If you discourage third parties from making hardware/software that's interoperable with yours, you will eventually get out-innovated by a competing platform that welcomes them.

But in the mobile music player space, Apple doesn't have any competitors on the horizon. That's why they can take their customers' lunch money and leave them clawing their eyes out for more. And even to the extent that someday there's a Zune Shuffle to worry about, the battle is not going to be won or lost over whose players are compatible with the greatest variety of headphones.

So why should they leave money on the table, is my take.

h/t

"It's just an achiness."

Well that was a sweet two months.

Now, I approved of the Tim Redding signing, so I'm not really in a position to criticize here. But Omar's saying that his achy shoulder (also, presumably, his inability to avoid getting shelled by the University of Michigan in a spring training exhibition) is the result of an offseason foot surgery that he had in November and hasn't had adequate time to recover from.

Of course, the Mets signed him in January, so maybe they should have asked for a little more than an MRI to prove he was in pitching shape.

Whether the injury was forseeable or not, I'm going to make like a credit rating agency and downgrade the Redding signing from "prudent addition of rotation filler" to "huge waste of $2 million" after the implosion has already happened.

Fortunately, he's a relief pitcher

Gordon Edes pens a column "Rodriguez Falls Short in Ambassador Role". Apparently after Venezuela beat the U.S. in their WBC game our new closer initially declined to take questions from the media. He was convinced, however, to come back out and by Edes' own estimation "was engaging, answering all inquiries at length." He was angry at some unflattering press the Venezuelan team had gotten after getting trounced by the U.S. in their first matchup.

Now while I tend not to care how much players talk to the press or whether they're good "clubhouse guys," if that's the kind of thing you concern yourself with, fine. But Edes completely loses the plot here:

"K-Rod’s inning of work was not a clean one, a foreshadowing of what Mets fans are advised to expect."

How unclean was it? He walked (former MVP) Jimmy Rollins, and another guy reached on an error before he struck out Kevin Youkilis to end it. Doesn't sound that bad, but Edes notes that Rodriguez walked 10 leadoff batters last year, compared to just one for Jon Papelbon.

Of course, Jon Papelbon is not a point of reference. He's a freak of nature who gave up fewer walks last year (8) than a lot of closers gave up home runs. "He walks more leadoff hitters than Papelbon" is the kind of criticism a moron would make.

So do your hand-wringing about K-Rod's people skills if you must, Edes, but let's not pretend he's likely to have much to apologize for pitching-wise.

Awesome

h/t

Jon Stewart needs to move on

As much as I've enjoyed Jon Stewart's prosecution of Jim Cramer, I'm not sure what he managed to prove except that a lot of his advice turned out to be bad. He did that pretty effectively. I hadn't realized that in addition to the bogus clip that Stewart played first (showing Cramer assuring a caller that his money was safe as a client of Bear Stearns, which it was), there were also clips from about the same time of Cramer recommending Bear stock.

Still, I have no idea what Stewart means when he chides "I understand you want to make finance entertaining. But it's not a fucking game." Besides being maybe the most cringingly unfunny thing he's ever said, what's his fucking point? That if Cramer didn't scream and have sound effects that his mother's 401k would be in better shape? Give me a fucking break.

I think CNBC appeared on Stewart's radar because of the Rick Santelli thing, when he realized, apparently all of a sudden, that the dominant financial news channel was largely staffed by super right-wing cheerleaders of corporate America. And I'm glad that he's gone after CNBC.

But the political bias of the "news" side of CNBC has nothing to do with Cramer. Yes, he has called Obama a "wealth destroyer" and talked about certain stocks being "Obama-proof," but it's somewhat tongue-in-cheek and always in the context of pitching an investment theme. He "liked" the Bush administration because it was "of, by and for the corporation," friendly to mergers, etc. But if he really shared Larry Kudlow's politics I wouldn't be able to watch the show.

Unless you're going to outlaw giving financial advice on television, I'm not sure what Cramer is supposed to do differently except stop making bad calls, which obviously no one can do. If you don't like Cramer, don't watch him! Or take the other side of the trade! I have zero sympathy for people who lost money following his advice. Or at least, no more than I have for anyone who lost money.

Stewart seems to honestly believe that Cramer bears some personal responsibility not just for the advice he's given/his failure to predict the financial collapse but for the financial collapse itself, which is intensely stupid even though it sounds plausible that such a figure would have "contributed to a frenzied environment" or whatever.

Anyway, whether or not Cramer is actually good at giving financial advice I don't think he deserves the accusation that he was recklessly endangering people's money. Stocks really had outperformed every other asset class by a wide margin for a long time, and if you've watched his show for any length of time his advice actually tends to be fairly conservative.

Cramer didn't look good when he got all indignant that a "comedian" would deign to criticize him when he didn't even know what Tier 1 capital was, but Stewart was much more the self-important, uninformed asshole in this little skirmish.

Does Mickey Kaus know about this?

CNN just did a segment on a website called BlueServo.net that lets you monitor the U.S.-Mexico border via webcam. It's sponsored by the Texas Border Sheriff's Coalition (TBSC), and enlists, I'm not making this up, "Virtual Texas Deputies" to report any suspicious activity to the brick-and-mortar border patrol.

This is going to be like the Shiba Inu puppy cam for wingnuts.

Ross Douthat is a joke

Everyone is very excited that Ross Douthat is going to be replacing Bill Kristol as the house conservative of the New York Times op-ed page.

On the one hand, I do think this is a brilliant move by the Times. As conservative pundits go, Douthat is smooth jazz to Kristol's death metal. He's just the kind of conservative that allows liberals to pat themselves on the head for finding common ground with an ideological foe.

But the idea that Ross Douthat represents a new breed of "conservative intellectual" only goes to show what an oxymoron that term really is. His thesis: "Liberals are probably right about supply-side economics being bunk, but do they have to be so mean to pro-lifers like myself?" He's not so much a right winger as he is a young person who manages to whine about the kids these days as you'd think only an old person could.

That's his whole schtick. He's a conservative who often seems like he knows better, but (as you can tell by his grandfatherly Brooks Brothers style) he identifies with things that are Old and Traditional, like the Catholic church. His politics seem fundamentally driven by aesthetic considerations. He opposes reproductive rights not so much because he's a misogynist, but because he fancies himself "old school."

So fine, he's an improvement over Kristol, but spare me the fawning. I'd rather the Times look for a conservative who's actually persuasive instead of one who just knows how to flatter liberals before whining about how intolerant we are of God-fearing traditionalists like himself.

And just for fun, this was his reaction to John McCain's VP pick:

At the moment, I'm probably rooting harder for Sarah Palin to succeed than I have for any politician in recent memory. Just something to keep in mind while you're reading my commentary.

But he's a very serious thinker.

That's a big 16 year-old

via ($)

When white people do it it's "political violence"

I don't think anyone had a problem calling the USS Cole bombing an act of "terrorism," even though it was a military target, so I'm not sure why the New York Times would decline to use the term anywhere in this story.

Sounds plausible

DougJ: "To put it simply, I fear that we are now ruled by incompetent egomaniacs who will never blow the whistle on each other, no matter how bad things get, because to do so would be to admit that none of them is indispensable or brilliant after all."

h/t

Obama Embraces Unitary Executive

I've finally taken the time to read Glenn Greenwald's various indictments of the Obama administration's views on executive power, and he does seem to have the goods. So I'm answering the call and acknowledging that Obama is indeed making some of the absurd, wholly unconstitutional legal claims that the Bush administration made.

As disastrous and unjustified as the Iraq War may have been, there wasn't anything unconstitutional about it. There was no formal declaration of war, but we haven't gone that route in a while, and both houses of Congress passed an Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against Iraq. Whatever else it was, it didn't represent an attempt by Bush to undermine our whole system of government.

The real Constitution-shredding lay in Bush/Cheney/Addington/Yoo's claims that when acting in the interest of national defense (as determined by him, of course) the president doesn't have to obey the law. That was the essence of the FISA controversy, which was staggeringly soft-pedaled by the media. It was the most dangerous, though hardly the bloodiest, legacy of the Bush administration.

So Obama's decision to basically spit on a court order and claim executive powers he doesn't have is really bad news. The "Unitary Executive" theory is completely un-American and we shouldn't be letting Obama trot it out when he finds it convenient. In the best case scenario, he's only doing it to protect Bush administration officials from prosecution (enforcing the law being too "divisive" for his liking). But even that would be a piss-poor justification, and the alternatives are all worse.

Who cares about Opening Day?

The coverage of Johan Santana's elbow has focused overwhelmingly on the question of whether or not he will be able to pitch on Opening Day. I am not agnostic on this question. I have a strong preference for "Yes," and the latest is that it is still possible and that's all to the good. But the focus on Opening Day specifically, as opposed to say Game 4 of the 162 game regular season, seems to miss the point.

I'm worried about Opening Day only to the extent that Santana's inability to make his first scheduled start would bode extremely ill for the total number of starts he makes. I don't care if he misses one, or which one it is, as long as he makes the vast majority of them. The Mets are in Cincinnati for their first series anyway.

It's good to hear that he and the Mets are trying to keep hope alive for Opening Day. And the fact that they have him throwing at all means the medical staff must be supremely confident that nothing is about to explode, but I'm still very worried. And I'll remain worried even if he makes his (all-important) Opening Day start and throws a gem. Something must have really scared Omar Minaya for him to give assurances to the Daily News that he still has minor league chips left to trade (say if the ace of the staff went down for the season).

And that elbow has a lot of miles on it for a guy who hasn't quite turned 30. Every year since he was 25, Santana has tossed at least 219 innings. Last year he threw a career high 234. Of course this is the "damned if you do" paradox of staying so healthy for so long, but you'd have to think that kind of workload eventually catches up even to durable players. And while his out pitch may be his change-up, he's not exactly a finesse pitcher, either.

In any case, the metric that people should be following is not % Chance of Making His Opening Day Start it's the Over/Under on starts for the season (I'd put it at 28 personally). They're related, but the former is only significant to the extent it changes the latter.

Krugman has come around on Obama

Reading Krugman's column today on Obama's budget (synopsis: "Booyah!"), you wouldn't guess how skeptical he's been of Obama since before the primaries.

Not cool

Johan Santana pushed back from scheduled spring training start because of elbow tenderness.

Without Santana, the Mets rotation becomes Pelfrey-Maine-Perez-Garcia-Redding, or to put it another way, it becomes 40% filler and completely devoid of top quintile talent.

Here's hoping it's nothing serious.

David Brooks puts on fireworks display of conservative self-hatred

I had read the transcript, which was good enough, but the video cries out for syndication. The sad little laugh he gives at the end is awesome:

h/t Ezra Klein

First Solar spits the bit

Wow is this ugly. I'm listening to the First Solar (FSLR) call from yesterday after the close, and it's becoming clear why the stock cratered afterhours: doom and gloom! Lack of financing crushing demand? Check. Customer distress starting to eat away at backlog? Check. Intense price competition from module oversupply? You know it.

Maybe the scariest development is the disclosure that the company is starting to take ownership of some of the projects that had been customers. So they are being effectively pulled "downstream" (i.e. towards the actual construction/installation of solar facilities, away from their core business of making the panels) by the absence of financially healthy customers.

On the other hand, they're still profitable and they still have what could be the leading solar panel technology. I think it's got a 20% chance of becoming a $100 billion company, so at a $10 billion valuation I'm not selling. Things could easily get worse before they get better, though.

Disclosure: I own FSLR shares

All those injuries are behind him now

Peter Gammons column, yesterday:

It begins with Vernon Wells, who at 30 is poised for a monster season. He has been limited to 36 homers the past two years because of shoulder and back injuries and a broken wrist, but this winter he hired a trainer from the Athletes Performance Institute in Tempe, Ariz., took the trainer to his home in Dallas, brought him to spring training and will continue to use him all season, for a total investment of between $150,000 and $200,000.

"The workouts have made a big difference in flexibility and strength," says Wells.

ESPN news item, today:

Toronto Blue Jays center fielder Vernon Wells expects to miss two weeks after an MRI showed he re-injured the left hamstring that kept him on the disabled list for a month late last season.

Gammons forgot about the hamstring.

Just let the ball drop!

"The Indians had a scare when outfielders Grady Sizemore and Shin-Shoo Choo collided while chasing a ball in right-center during a drill. Choo was escorted from the field by a trainer and had his right knee examined before returning for batting practice about 30 minutes later. He suffered only a bruise and felt lucky not to be more seriously hurt. "We hit knees. I was really scared," said Choo..."

In football, players have to run into one another, even in preseason. Not so in baseball. I appreciate that it goes strongly against a professional outfielder's instinct to just stop running at the first sight of a teammate approaching his general area. But teams just should not allow for even a remote possibility that their best player, by far, could collide with their maybe 3rd or 4th best player in the course of a drill.

Here's a non-sub version of the story.

Government to convert its preferred into common

This is being seen as another "step towards nationalization," and that's one way to look at it. I think of it as a step towards recognizing what's already taken place: government being on the hook for the losses of the money center banks. They've just been gradually working up the courage to insist a share of the profits when things recover (the preferred equity that the government/we currently hold is more like debt, where you just get your money back with interest).

People talk a lot about whether they "feel bad" for the bank shareholders or if they "deserve" their losses. This is a stupid discussion. These banks are insolvent, which to my mind is synonymous with the shareholders not owning anything. If shareholder equity is negative, and the government is compelled to assume the liabilities to prevent massive debt defaults and a run on the banking system, the shareholders are SOL.

The only way sympathy enters into things is if you propose government cushion the losses of equity investors, just 'cause they're probably nice people or something, which is clearly bonkers.

Anyway, the market is down 3% despite big rallies in the banks. Apparently people are taking this equity conversion as a sign that the government "sees value" in the common. I'm hoping the rationale is to own 40% of the common so that when it eventually has to be wiped out it will only be 60% publicly held.

Update:
In his post "Citigroup's Clever Plan to Screw Taxpayers Again," Henry Blodget makes the key observation that the government can either convert $45 billion of preferred into common equity or it can take only a 40% stake of the common. But doing both requires assigning a wildly above-market value to the common stock in the conversion (i.e. requires the government to give Citigroup free money.) This post wasn't misleading, since I didn't mention the $45 billion figure, just the 40%, but the fact that the story's numbers don't add up is a big deal.

If the government is going to get $45 billion worth of Citigroup common stock and be treated fairly, then the government won't own 40% of the company, it will own well over 90%.

Obama, Jesus, MLK, in that order

"Obama beats out Jesus as America's hero" reads the headline of the Chicago Sun-Times, with just a touch of hometown pride. Yes, it's a real article. I've got a screenshot in case they take it down.

The reason I thought that might be necessary is that I'm thinking some people, and I'm not necessarily one of them, might question the taste of the accompanying portraits. They've got the president and the Reverend on either side of a mid-crucifixion Jim Caviezel from "The Passion of the Christ."

While the individual images themselves might be unobjectionable in a different context, the arrangement of the three vertically, as if in order of finish in an election, is very funny. And very funny gags at Jesus's expense are often controversial.

And there's no way the humor is unintentional. Obama's picture shows him holding up his hand as if to quiet an adoring crowd... it's too well done.

Bobby Jindal and Tommy Carcetti

Ryan Powers has an item on Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal's refusal of federal aid for expanded unemployment benefits (part of Obama's stimulus plan). Other Republican governors, like Mark Sanford of South Carolina, have been making similar noises initially, but for the most part I believe they all soon bowed to political necessity and stopped pretending that they were going to try to turn away much-needed federal dollars for their state. But unlike Mark Sanford, Bobby Jindal might be the Republican presidential candidate in 2012.

In the final season of The Wire, the mayor of Baltimore finds himself in dire need of state assistance to help pay for schools and police. He is ultimately unwilling, however, to "go begging" to the governor in Annapolis. Why turn down free money? Because the mayor is planning to run for governor himself in the next election, and he doesn't want to give his would-be opponent a huge gift by appearing to be dependent on or subservient to him.

Being human, Mayor Carcetti feels badly about his cynical short-changing of the citizens of Baltimore, whom he was elected to represent, but he justifies it by telling himself that, after he does what is politically necessary and thereby becomes governor, he'll be able to help them more than he ever could as mayor.

... or Jindal's opposition could be totally principled, of course.


h/t Yglesias

The Braves: How worried should we be?

Last July when the Braves traded Mark Teixeira to the Angels I wrote:

What major league talent did they get back in the deal? Casey Kotchman? Good luck with that. When you're ready to field a competitive team again, come back without that stupid chant, you goobers.

Now, I stand by the sentiment, but I'm starting to wonder if they don't still have a somewhat competitive team. Here are the key questions as I see it:

1) What and how much do they get from Chipper Jones?

Baseball Prospectus's PECOTA system has Larry Jones projected to have the 5th highest VORP (65.0 runs) of any hitter in 2009. That's better than Ryan Braun, Lance Berkman, or Alex Rodriguez. And remember, VORP is playing time dependent, so he's already getting dinged for his expected DL trip. PECOTA has him hitting .341/.443/.564. Now far be it from me to question science, but I can't help but be skeptical that someone so old and so injury prone stays that good for the vast majority of 2009.

2) Who's their third best hitter?

Behind Jones and McCann, things get questionable fast. Jeff Francoeur would have been the obvious choice, but a funny thing happened on the way to stardom: He hit .239/.294/.359 over a full season. That's some shameful hitting, and it was evenly divided across the two halves of the season (.659 OPS pre-ASB, .645 post). The Braves also feature a first baseman in Kotchman who doesn't exactly hit like a first baseman. Their third best hitter is probably Kelly Johnson, who makes for a very handy leadoff man.

3) Does Javier Vazquez dominate?

PECOTA says yes, absolutely, and I'm inclined to agree. Vazquez gives up a few too many home runs, which keeps his ERA on the hefty side, but he's going to throw about 200 innings, and he's going to strike out about 200 hitters. He's at an age (32) where he's probably not going to suddenly break down. I wish the Mets had gotten him.

4) What do they get from their rookies?

BP's #50 prospect entering the season, Jordan Schafer is reportedly going to compete for the center field job in spring training. He's never played above Double-A before, but he was quite good at that level last year when he was all of 21. Jason Heyward is even more highly touted but is further away. And on the pitching side, Tommy Hanson seems to have some control issues but is a gigantic, overpowering righthander of the sort that tend to make effective relievers.

***

I don't know how all these things work out. My sense is that the Phillies are still the primary concern, but looking at the team in greater depth I'm sure I was too quick to dismiss them last year. Yes, Casey Kotchman kinda sucks, but Jeff Francoeur may not. He may come back. And you don't have to add that much to Jones/McCann/Johnson to have a league-average offense. And their pitching staff has lost Hudson but gained Vazquez and Lowe. Plus another year of seasoning for Jurrjens...

They don't look as bad as I wish they did, let's put it that way.

The 'Let's Surprise the Markets' Strategy

Von at Obsidian Wings has a firm but fair takedown of Matt Yglesias's suggestion that Chris Dodd shouldn't be musing openly about nationalization.

Yglesias on finance is like Shaq at the free throw line: you live with it because he's so good at other things.

Ana Marie Cox has the internet on lockdown

Ana Marie Cox is the white Oprah of new media. You may not have known there was one, but there is, and AMC is she.

Her Twitter feed now has 62,830 followers. More than Stephen Colbert, Tina Fey or The Onion (though fewer than Barack Obama). It's also more people than could be seated at RFK Stadium. And they don't seem to tell you how fast the count has grown but my impression, having been a subscriber for a long time, is very fast.

It seems like a long time ago now that she was the original Wonkette, until she left (sold?) that operation for an ostensibly more prestigious job as a political reporter for Time magazine. Perhaps sensing that posting at Swampland, in between Joe Klein and Karen Tumulty, wasn't exactly the bleeding edge of online content, she started devoting more (like, a lot of) attention to her Twitter feed.

Many people, and by that I mean mostly nerds and some investors, are convinced that Twitter is going to be a really big deal. If they're right, AMC will be in even closer to the ground floor than she was with Wonkette as blogs were gaining popularity.

Techcrunch, which as the 16th most-followed has just over 100,000 followers, will always appeal more or less exclusively to serious geeks, so as the universe of Twitter users expands beyond serious geeks its share of the total audience is sure to shrink. AMC's feed is mostly funny, sometimes very funny political/internet coverage, with generous helpings of pop culture and non-political humor. The addressable market seems for that seems like it should be much bigger.

As a political reporter, she's not my favorite. Whatever the exact opposite of Charlie Savage is, she's in the ballpark. But she takes her comedy very seriously, and she definitely doesn't get enough credit for being consistently at the forefront of online punditry.

See, in the time it took me to write this post, 243 more people started following anamariecox.

Good call, fellas

I didn't realize that Marc Ambinder and Mark Halperin thought at the time that the Terry Schiavo thing was going to be a real political windfall for Republicans. Oops.

via kos

The Chamber of Commerce really hates Tim Geithner

I was shocked at how bad his speech was, but this means Geithner must be doing something right.

Eisinger and Salmon on the financial crisis

Jesse Eisinger (Portfolio) and Felix Salmon talk about the financial crisis and the government response.

It's worth checking out if only because it's nice to hear a relatively optimistic viewpoint from someone (Salmon) who is more interesting than the usual permabulls on CNBC. At the same time, I agree with Eisinger that Salmon is totally underestimating the trouble that the banks are in, by overestimating the extent to which debt is being temporarily "mispriced" because of liquidity constraints. As Eisinger says here:



Eisinger also makes a point I've been meaning to make about the relationship between government policy and the stock market: Bank nationalization could be (and I think probably is) the best route to take for the country, economically. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't have dire implications for financial stocks. A lot of them would go to zero! And that's what should happen because they are at the very bottom of the capital structure (i.e. last in line to get their money back) and there's not enough money to go around. Even debtholders, who are ahead of them in line, will probably lose some of their investment.

Even though most of the damage has already been done (bonus Salmon link), bank nationalization would almost certainly result in "another leg down" in the equity markets. Just mechanically, with index funds and ETFs, you can't literally wipe out a lot of shareholders in one industry without affecting shareholders in a bunch of other industries. It would almost certainly be Bad For Stocks.

But the real economy would survive bank nationalization just fine. Individuals and businesses would still go to the same bank, it would just be owned by the government instead of a bunch of really pissed-off stockholders.

Anyway my guess is Obama really doesn't want to go the "Swedish route" but people should realize that the stock market should absolutely be expected to react poorly to bank nationalization (or an increasing perceived probability of it), and that the declines are in no way evidence that nationalization is a bad idea.

Rick Reilly: Give Bonds' MVP Awards to Pujols!

Rick Reilly sets out to "right some wrongs, one MVP at a time,":

I have a U-Haul of hardware here for Jose Alberto Pujols Alcántara of the St. Louis Cardinals. You already have two MVPs, Albert, and you're about to get three more, since Barry Bonds ripped you off worse than Bernie Madoff to win the award from 2002 to 2004. You hit .335 and averaged 41 bombs those years and yet you finished second behind the clearly creaming Bonds in '02 and '03 and third behind Bonds and Adrian Beltre in '04. We're throwing out Beltre since, while he denies ever using PEDs, he fell off the face of the planet once baseball put in stricter steroid suspensions in 2005. If he wasn't cheating, I'm the Queen Mother. And this is history we're making here. It gives you five MVPs, and nobody else in baseball history now has more than three. Just don't let us down on this thing, Albert. You know what we're talking about.

It's hard to know where to begin with this.

1) You have to be a total sucker not to suspect Albert Pujols of using performance enhancing drugs.

Albert Pujols' long-time strength and conditioning coach, Chris Mihlfeld, was named in the Jason Grimsley report as having referred Grimsley to a source of "amphetamines, anabolic steroids and human growth hormone." Here's a completely non steroids-related story about how Pujols got started training with Mihlfeld:

"[Pujols] was really kind of a pear-shaped kid, heavy from the waist down, and that scared some scouts off," Meyer remembered. "And, like with a lot of Latin players, there were always the inevitable questions about his age."

There were other concerns about his defensive ability and where Pujols would fit on a Major League team.

Consequently, a frustrated Albert Pujols -- after spending a year at Kansas City's Maple Woods Community College, where he met strength and conditioning guru Chris Mihlfeld and started the process of building an Adonis-like upper body-- waited 13 rounds before getting the call from the Cardinals. [Emphasis mine]

2) If you're not going to suspect Albert Pujols of using performance-enhancing drugs, then maybe you should have more evidence against Adrian Beltre than an isolated fluke year before you write "If he wasn't cheating, I'm the Queen Mother." Had Beltre just not discovered steroids before 2004? If you're going to operate on the assumption that abnormal performance requires cheating, then why would you possibly give Pujols the benefit of the doubt?

Which brings me to

3) "Just don't let us down on this thing"??? WTF? Rick, if he used steroids then it's already happened! It would obviously just be a question of whether it will become public or not. See, Reilly's not a sucker at all. He absolutely suspects Pujols. Other than Barry Bonds, nobody has hit like Pujols, ever. As per point 1, you'd have to be a sucker not to suspect.

The only reason Reilly is pretending to believe that Pujols is "clean" is because after touting him as such, and larding him up with 3 MVP awards he didn't win, if he does turn out to have been dirty it will be that much more of a betrayal for him to write about.

Like an expert pool player, Reilly's setting up his next shot. So when someone comes forward a year or so later with a bunch of needles they claim to have injected into Albert Pujols' ass, he'll be able to put on his biggest hissyfit EVAR.

photo courtesy of Fredbird

Mr. Market takes another swig of Haterade

If there is a global conspiracy to make Barack Obama look good, I think it's now safe to say that it does not extend to manipulation of the stock market. Equity prices have tanked on election day, Geithner plan announcement day, and now on the day he signs the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

For the S&P to be down almost 5% in a day is serious business, even by recent standards of volatility.

"You're enjoying one of the best margaritas that there is on the market."

I don't know much about Bob Schaffer, the Colorado Republican who ran for U.S. Senate in 2008. I just saw his thirty minute debate on "Meet the Press" against Mark Udall, but it was enough to form an impression of a very weird and unpleasant person. So it was nice, if unsurprising, to see Udall trounce him in the election.

But for some reason I'm having trouble enjoying this video of him and his wife doing infomercial-style promotion for their own brand of tequila on Denver television. Some things are just too hard to watch. To give you an idea how awkward Schaffer is, here's his answer when the local TV reporter jokingly asks if the genesis of the tequila venture was campaign-related stress relief:

"It would be an awful lot of fun to, uh, go along with you on this. But the reality is that this [gesturing to the tequila] didn't play any role in the campaign."

h/t Josh Green

Update: TPM has the money clip...

How stupid is Michael Goldfarb?

Stupid enough to think that not only does NPR have to let Juan Williams (whom they employ) appear on Fox News, to do things like call Michelle Obama "Stokely Carmichael in a designer dress," they also have to let Fox advertise his NPR affiliation while he does so. Oh, and they can't publicly disavow such statements, either.

Batting order revisited

Sokojoe at Amazin' Avenue has crunched the numbers, and the numbers agree with Jerry Manuel and myself that hitting Luis Castillo leadoff and moving Jose Reyes down to third makes good sense.

The model that he used is a free one whose only inputs are OBP and SLG (blind to baserunning), so it's not as robust as it could be. But Sokojoe fed it two different sets of projections for each player. One from the all-seeing eye of PECOTA, and the other from a system I'd never heard of called CHONE (which, if it's named after Chone Figgins, should be pronounced "Shawn").

No matter which projections he put in, the optimal lineup came out:

Castillo
Beltran
Reyes
Delgado
Wright
Church
Murphy
Schneider

Interestingly, the PECOTA projections recommend this order despite pegging Reyes for a .374 OBP, which is 20 points higher than he's ever had before, and Castillo for a below career-average .347 OBP. So you don't even need to think especially highly of Castillo, or poorly of Reyes, in terms of getting on base. The difference in their respective slugging percentages (.307 to .478) alone is enough to make one guy the table-setter and the other guy the three hitter.

99% chance of Best Picture fail

Nate Silver gives "Slumdog Millionaire" a 99% chance of winning the Oscar for Best Picture.

I hated Slumdog Millionaire. It's just a horribly told story. Given the title and the first fifteen minutes of the movie, you know...

a) that the hero wins on "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?"
b) that he wins because the questions all happen to pertain to things that have personal significance to him.

Again, you know these things in the first fifteen minutes. So why is this a two hour movie? Because of the flashbacks that explain the personal significance. With each question from the squirrelly game show host, asked in biographical order of course, we get more backstory on the hero, his brother, and his true love.

But it's just backstory! Nothing actually happens in any one or any set of flashbacks that constitutes a second plot. I spent most of the flashbacks waiting for them to end so we could get back to see what happens in the main plot, only to remind myself that we already know he wins and that this, the flashbacks, is really what it's all about. At which point I check my watch. The "Three Musketeers" grow older and go their separate ways, but the hero never gives up on them. etc. etc.

So that's how the Best Director of the year stretched out a simple, stupid gimmicky plot that he gives away immediately into two hours of motion picture magic: flashbacks*.

There is only one conceivable reason why a movie this bad is almost certainly going to win multiple Oscars, and it is the fact that the hero of the pointless story is Indian, and he wins on the Indian version of "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?" after being asked India-related questions that are coincidentally relevant to his Indian life experience.

I would have thought by 2008 the idea of India being a real country where people had hopes and dreams and game shows, just like in America, would have lost some if not all of its novelty. But "Slumdog" owes everything to its being-set-in-Indianess (with a director named Boyle it is not an Indian film).

Making matters worse, it seems to acknowledge as much. The film constantly invites the audience to feel more worldly just for having watched it, never more openly than in the tour guide scenes (featuring tourists who are so clueless as to elicit embarrassment and pity from even the least-traveled viewer).

Apparently it worked, because nowhere in all these glowing reviews does anyone mention that the film is stone cold boring. The closest anyone comes is Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle, who acknowledges that it "has a problem in its storytelling," and that it "unfolds in a start-and-stop way that kills suspense, leans heavily on flashbacks and robs the movie of most of its velocity." But even this, the film's harshest review is entitled "'Slumdog Millionaire' Ultimately Pays Off."

No! No it doesn't! That it is a Nate-Silver-Says-99% lock to win the Oscar for Best Picture is only proof that you don't need a good story if you manage to flatter your audience's sense of sophistication.




* Screen time breaks down approximately as follows:
20% - Scenes from a game show whose outcome is known in advance
10% - Post-victory interrogation scenes, setting up flashbacks
70% - Assorted flashbacks

Marc Ambinder sees no evil

In a post entitled "Straw Man," Marc Ambinder calls a foul on Obama for saying the following:

As I said, the one concern I've got on the stimulus package in terms of the debate and listening to some of what's been said in Congress is that there seems to be a set of folks who -- I don't doubt their sincerity -- who just believe that we should do nothing.

Ambinder says this is unfair because "[e]xcept for a Republicans on the fringe, the opposition party did want to do something: they wanted more tax cuts and [less] spending."

Well... okay, I guess. Technically, I suppose cutting taxes in the fashion contemplated by the DeMint amendment, and cutting government spending, qualifies as "doing something." But it would obviously constrict rather than expand the government's ability to prop up aggregate demand. So it would have actually been worse than doing nothing.

But that's not even the worst part of the post. Ambinder then segues into an accusation that David Axelrod has a "persecution complex":

"Indeed, Axelrod has a similar habit of discovering new opponents, a tendency that manifested itself at various points in the presidential campaign. Obama's going through a rough patch; the cable news networks are Availability Biasing the present, turning bumps in the road into insurmountable boulders, reporters are asking normal questions, and - boom - persecution complex . Washington thinks one thing, but Obama thinks another. The smelly denizens of the Beltway are totally out of touch with the American people. The American people know exactly what Obama is doing. Washington's ways are the problem."

In Ambinder's world, reporters were just "asking normal questions." There certainly was no conventional wisdom that congealed around the idea that Republicans were "winning the argument" on the merits, or that the stimulus bill was getting more and more unpopular. Never happened!

After gamely defending the "punditocracy" from such (entirely fair) accusations, Ambinder's final gambit is to deny the very existence of such a group:

"[T]he p-tocracy doesn't exist in the way Axe and Rich believe it does. There are so many different types of pundits, analysts and reporters, all broadcasting to an immensely sophisticated audience that sifts, filters and chooses what to believe."

Translation: We in the political journalism business are a freethinking collection of empiricists; it's the audience that sucks.

Dropping Reyes in the lineup

I like it. My first impression was that Luis Castillo was hardly an OBP monster in his own right, but then I looked it up and he kind of is. His career OBP is actually a rather whopping .367. For context, here are a few players who posted lower marks than that last season:

.361 Derrek Lee (1B)
.361 Adrian Gonzalez (1B)
.349 Jimmy Rollins (SS)

Castillo himself came in at .355 last year, just under his career mark, and that was despite having an uncharacteristically horrible batting average (.245). In years past his OBP was more a function of beating out infield singles than actual plate discipline. If he can keep last year's selectivity and get the average closer to his career .292, he could be more valuable than I was giving him credit for.

It's not that Castillo represents an "upgrade" over Reyes, exactly, no matter what lineup slot you're talking about. But it seems to make sense to put light-hitting OBP guys at the top of the lineup and power-hitting free swingers in the middle. That rule of thumb has Castillo hitting in front of Reyes every time.

The leadoff spot seems like an intuitively good place to hit your best basestealer, and Reyes did steal 56 bases last year, but he also got thrown out 15 times, more than 25% of his attempts (enough to negate most if not all of the runs created with the successful attempts). Luis Castillo stole 17 bases and got caught twice, less than 10% of the time.

So both in terms of getting on base and base-stealing effectiveness, Castillo actually looks like at least Reyes's equal. The third reason this is a good idea is that Reyes has too much power for the leadoff spot.

It's true that his slugging percentage is slightly misleading, because so many of Reyes's extra bases are collected because he's fast enough to take them, not because he's hitting the ball so hard. He managed to actually clear the fence with only 16 home runs last year, in 688 at-bats. But even after discounting his doubles and triples to a certain extent, you're still looking at a player who hits hard line drives very often. He was also, let's not forget, still just 24 last year, which means he's almost certainly becoming a more serious home run threat.

The best argument, as I see it, for leaving Reyes is to have the team's best hitters come to bat as often as possible, which makes, say, Reyes-Beltran-Wright-Delgado more appealing than anything that starts with Castillo. But since Castillo is going to need to fit somewhere on the lineup card every day, even in the best of circumstances, I do think he would work fairly well as a table-setter for the more devastating bats.

This is what I'm talking about

Jayson Stark's latest column is a monument to the inanity of modern sports journalism. I click on a link on ESPN's front page called "C.C.'s First Day," expecting to find, perchance, something about how he has a new training regimen this offseason (which he did) or lost a lot of weight (which he didn't). Maybe a bullpen session that provided some evidence that his massive and arguably overworked body isn't on the verge of finally giving out, just months after signing a nine-figure deal.

But no, Stark isn't interested in the outlook for Sabathia's 2009 season or analysis of whether he (or Roy Halladay) is the really the best pitcher in the division. His readers are instead treated to an entire column about how the A-Rod steroid scandal has made Sabathia's arrival a secondary story. That the only thing reporters are asking the just-arrived Sabathia is how he feels about A-Rod, whom he hasn't actually played with yet, etc. etc.

It would meet the textbook definition of irony if, in the course of bemoaning how big and distracting this A-Rod steroids controversy is, Stark was at the same time making it bigger and more distracting. But Stark doesn't even have the decency to bemoan this state of affairs. He loves the media circus-as-story. He seems to find it more interesting than baseball. I actually did a post flagging this back in 2005, when he was writing about Randy Johnson signing with the Yankees, and making dire warnings that Johnson was "not yet prepared" for the scrutiny he was about to receive.

My theory is that Stark likes the idea that baseball writers are really important people, and believes that where he and his peers happen to focus their attention is a big deal and influences even the players themselves ("How is the fact that we're not writing about you affecting you, C.C.? Do you find it galling?"). I would submit that, while self-importance on the part of sports columnists is always and everywhere annoying, Stark manages to take it one step further by dedicating a whole column to the "issue" of a stupid story preempting an interesting story, without ever bothering to get around to the latter.

Here's how it starts:

He was supposed to be the biggest ring in the 2009 Yankees circus. Well … never mind.

Oh sure, there was a time when the sight of Carsten Charles (CC) Sabathia bursting through the gates of George M. Steinbrenner Field seemed like it might actually be a gigantic event in Yankee Land.

But that was sooooooo last week.

So there was the inimitable CC on Friday, on his very first day of enrollment at Bronx Zoo University, learning an invaluable lesson:

When you're a Yankee, you're never more than a back-page headline away from going from Most Monstrous Story in the Yankees Universe to $161-million subplot in, like, 14 seconds.

Sadly, if you're reading Jayson Stark's column about C.C. Sabathia's first day in Yankee camp, you're always more than 14 seconds away from something interesting about C.C. Sabathia, or the Yankees, or baseball...

"I couldn't be Judd Gregg"

I never had any feeling one way or the other about Judd Gregg until today, but what a moron. It's embarrassing for Obama, too, but probably not in a very damaging way. Personally, I think it's an excellent case study in why 'bipartisanship,' which usually means either doing what Republicans want or, as in this case, expecting Republicans to support a Democratic agenda, is the dumbest virtue going.

There was another good example of this the other day when Roy LaHood, the Illinois Republican Obama picked for Transportation Secretary, proved unwilling to say on television that he would vote for the stimulus bill were he still in Congress. With a PR push like that, it's hard to believe the 'centrist'/preening narcissist caucus managed to do so much damage to the bill.

Still waiting for the proof that the strategy of sucking up to and legitimizing Republicans is a good thing. I am aware that lots of people (e.g. Chris Matthews) are demanding liberals be happy about the stimulus bill, because it's, like, sooo much money. But to paraphrase Chris Rock, that's what the government is supposed to do in a massive recession. Especially a government in which the president and the majority of the legislature aren't insane.

Anyway, I'll be curious to see who's behind Door #3 for Commerce. Larry Kudlow?

Please no more steroids revelations

I am deeply disappointed in Alex Rodriguez, for subjecting baseball fans to another month-long installment of the most stupefyingly boring mega-scandal in sports history. Please make it stop.

ESPN is of course in full self parody mode:

'I Was Stupid'

"In an interview with Peter Gammons, Alex Rodriguez admits to using steroids for three years with the Texas Rangers, saying, 'I needed to perform.'"

"Vote: Forgive Him?"

That's right, ESPN Nation, you get to render your personal judgment on whether to let the healing begin, or whether your feelings are still too raw. The results:

38% say "Yes [Forgive him]"
33% say "No"
29% say "No need to forgive him"

In the words of Caroline Kennedy: Have you guys ever thought about writing for, like, a woman's magazine or something?

Agreed

Tristero: Clearly, the top of the party has learned zip in the past 8 to 10 years or so. I think it's time to work seriously to replace them. This isn't a progressive vs. centrist issue, this is a competence issue. The current crop of Democratic leaders in Congress simply appear incapable of standing up to the malicious wackiness of Republicans. It is more than demoralizing. We live in exceedingly dangerous times and we simply cannot afford to have Republicans' mad ideas continue to be injected into the mainstream discourse without vigorous objection.

This simply has to stop.

Update: I'm not sure who exactly would "work to replace" the leadership, but the underlying point about national Democrats being utterly pathetic advocates for their agenda is sound.

Doesn't look good

Tim Geithner
Position: Treasury Secretary
Unpaid tax liability: $48,000
Nomimation status: Confirmed

Tom Daschle
Position: Secretary of Health & Human Services
Unpaid tax liability: $140,000
Nomination status: Very likely to be confirmed. Still supported by Obama.

Nancy Killefer
Position: Chief Performance Officer
Unpaid tax liability: $948.69
Nomination status: Derailed

Accountability is for women and non-cabinet appointments, apparently.

Late Update: Nevermind! Daschle took himself out, which may be bad for the cause of health care reform but will certainly mean we won't have to see as much of those stupid red glasses.

"Incredulous"

Marc Ambinder talks to Republican officials about Michael Steele's becoming RNC chairman, and finds that social conservatives are worried that he's squishy on gay marriage:

"...I spoke with a committeewoman from a southern state who echoed these concerns. On condition of anonymity, she admitted she still had strong reservations about Steele's conservative credentials and was pledging her support to [Katon] Dawson. She was incredulous when asked if the GOP needed to recalibrate its message after its recent electoral setbacks, citing Republican victories in the Georgia Senate runoff and Louisiana's congressional elections." [Emphasis mine]