InstaKaus worries about U.S. Attorney politicization

Kaus P.S.s:

Will Obama rescue John Edwards by replacing the U.S. Attorney who is investigating him? ... If he does, will Josh Marshall kick up a fuss about it? ... [Thanks to alert reader R.H. ... See also Insta]

When you hold your nose and see also "Insta" you get an excerpt from the same story and the rhetorical question:

If Republicans were doing this, would it be a scandal?

Of course, what's actually being done is... very little. Nothing, in fact. Not only has the U.S. attorney in question not been fired, to protect John Edwards or for any other reason, but the only reason to think he will be soon is because U.S. attorneys are frequently replaced when a new administration takes over. In fact the story notes that by historical standards Obama has been taking his sweet time replacing the Bush-appointed USAs, including this guy Holding who continues to investigate two high profile Democrats.

The News Observer ran with the headline "Democrats fix sights on GOP prosecutor" without any actual evidence that they are doing so (i.e. singling out this particular USA for removal). They mention that junior senator Kay Hagan has been tasked with finding a replacement for Holding, and imply that she has Democratic sympathies, but there's literally nothing connecting any part of the U.S. Attorney process to the investigations of John Edwards or former governor Mike Easley.

Don't get me wrong, if an analogous situation arose in which it became clear that the Obama administration were axing U.S. attorneys for prosecuting Democrats or not prosecuting Republicans, as the Bush administration did, that would be very bad. It's just that as far as we know it hasn't, um, happened yet.

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.

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

Thoughts on the steroid scandal

1. Roger Clemens is the subject of a federal grand jury for lying to Congress about his steroid use.

2. The Clear was legal and not a steroid, which seems to exonerate Barry Bonds of perjury.

3. Bonds will remain a pariah while Clemens's steroid use and subsequent lying will not significantly damage his legacy.

Jennifer Palmieri: Perfect for the Obama administration

So Jennifer Palmieri, the acting CEO of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, for whom Matt Yglesias writes since his departure from the Atlantic, apparently received threats to her loved ones from Democratic advocacy group Third Way. She hasn't said so explicitly, but it's the only plausible explanation for why she decided to commandeer Yglesias's blog at 10:30pm last night to write the following:

This is Jennifer Palmieri, acting CEO of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Most readers know that the views expressed on Matt’s blog are his own and don’t always reflect the views of the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Such is the case with regard to Matt’s comments about Third Way. Our institution has partnered with Third Way on a number of important projects - including a homeland security transition project - and have a great deal of respect for their critical thinking and excellent work product. They are key leaders in the progressive movement and we look forward to working with them in the future.

As Atrios and others have noted, this is insane. The word "creepy" appears frequently in the 538-and-counting comments from outraged readers, and that's putting it lightly. Everybody who reads Yglesias's blog knows (or knew, until Palmieri bigfooted him) that his views are his own. The only "audience" for her Special Note was the delicate flowers at Third Way, whom nobody's heard of or cares about anyway.

But wait, maybe there's a reasonable explanation staring us in the face: Palmieri is apparently being considered for a job in the Obama administration, namely as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, and what better way to angle for such a position than by gratuitously pissing off liberals? Clearly, a president-elect so eager to enrage his biggest supporters that he'd have the Purpose Driven Asshole give the invocation at his inauguration would read this Special Note and wonder who is that fresh-faced go-getter?

More seriously, this Third Way thing doesn't have anything to do with Obama, but it's worrisome that someone as stupid and pliant as Ms. Palmieri seems to be is running the country's most influential liberal advocacy organization. After all, the reason she's the acting CEO is that the regular CEO is running Obama's transition team.

That's not very gangster

Reading ESPN (the worldwide leader in coverage of controversial black athletes), it turns out shooting himself in the leg was a very bad thing for Plaxico Burress to have done. I mean it's obviously something that one should studiously avoid doing but for an NFL wide receiver in particular, it's bad. A short list of the consequences:

- Getting charged with criminal possession of a weapon.
- Possibly getting put on the non-football related injury list, which would mean he couldn't return and wouldn't get paid.
- Badly damaging the repeat chances of a 10-1 Giants team.

And I'm sure there are more. This is on top of what must be the lingering discomfort of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Personally I think injuries sustained in nightclub violence should really be covered by the NFL's workman's comp package.

Jeanne Cummings has, on occasion, shown a weakness for stupidity

It burns.

Short post

Howard Fineman is a moron.

Blaming minorities for the financial crisis

I just want to go on record with a brief post about this, even though it's pretty old news, because when the historians pore over my blog I don't want to have been silent on the subject:

The idea that the primary culprits for the housing crisis are minorities and/or bleeding heart liberal concern for minorities is an idea I'd never have thought could survive in nature. It's the kind of idea I imagine could only be produced after the construction and activation of an $8 billion Large Wingnut Collider. And even then, only for a fraction of a second, before it collapses under the weight of its own wrongness.

But no it's apparently quite hearty. In fact pretty much anywhere you hear or read a conservative opining about the root causes of the financial crisis, you will hear about the Community Reinvestment Act and how poor brown people hoodwinked the mortgage industry. It's not even a fringe view.

Perlstein, Gordon, and Yglesias have the details.

A blast from the past

Ran across a ZDnet article dated October 13, 2000, entitled "Deflating Bandwidth Glut Predictions".

It's a treasure trove of dot-com era craziness. One of the main arguments in support of the idea that there was no oncoming glut of network capacity (which of course there was) was that so many providers were still spending billions to add more capacity as quickly as possible. The very fact that companies like Lucent (still alive but not well) and Global Crossing (went into and out of bankruptcy) were making the investments was presented as evidence that those investments were sound.

As you would expect, the telecom execs quoted in the piece disputed the notion that the network had been overbuilt:

"If you believe the Internet is going to be the dominant force driving bandwidth demand, then you realize that no matter how big a pipe you have, you will fill it," said Jian Li, senior director of emerging technology at Qwest.

That's right, internet demand = infinite demand. If you need harder numbers to be convinced, some guy at Nortel has them in spades:

Based on these factors and other online usage trends, Ramani calculates bandwidth demand will grow to 100 to 200 times today's rate in the next four to five years. At the same time, even if next-generation equipment makers were able to light their total arsenal of fiber in the next five years, capacity would only increase by about 70 times existing levels, he said.

You might be tempted to question the rigor of any calculation that produces a range of "100 to 200 times", but who is the author to say he knows bandwidth demand better than sellers of bandwidth? Finally, a defense that sounds eerily topical:

Ramani said predictions of bandwidth surpluses also fail to acknowledge that the public network is segmented into several regions. "They treat the entire network as if it's one big black box," he said.

This is apparently a common refrain at the tail end of massive asset bubbles, because it's exactly what the National Association of Realtors says today about residential real estate: "Every market's different!"

Epilogue:

January 15, 2002 - More than two dozen North American carriers are in Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Long-haul carriers owe some $75 billion in debt, with some $7 billion of interest required this year alone. According to the Financial Times, some 436,000 jobs have been eliminated from the global telecom industry this year. Bandwidth prices are dropping by as much as 80% annually and long-distance prices in the United States have fallen to as low as 2 cents per minute.

John Edwards admits affair with Hunter

What. An. Asshole.

"Edwards made a point of telling [ABC's Bob] Woodruff that his wife's cancer was in remission when he began the affair with Hunter."

Oh good. As long as your wife's cancer is in remission then by all means, tally ho!

As I've said before, I supported Edwards in the primaries, so there's some money I wish I could have back. What was he thinking pursuing the nomination?

I don't have much to add to this. I'm sure you can get more analysis and crowing vindication on the subject Chez Kaus.

Shocker

Jamie Kirchick, TNR contributor and Marty Peretz's pet monkey, was completely wrong about Straight Flushing fave Robert Wexler's willingness to accept the endorsement of J Street (the recently spawned left-leaning alternative to AIPAC). He guaranteed Wexler wouldn't accept, and yesterday Wexler accepted.

It's nice when people who are so wrong about so much big picture stuff decide to make a small-bore binary prediction that proves wrong in less than a week.

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.

"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.

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.

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.