Pitch Counts

"He'll have a strict limit of 65 to 70 pitches his first time out."

Are the Yankees planning on having Chamberlain make relief appearances between starts? Come on, give the guy 80-85. He's a relief pitcher making his first start, he's not trying to pitch through a rare disease.

High Crimes

Suggestion that McClellan's tell-all offers new evidence for impeachment. I don't think it does. Lying to the American public, the world, and Congress is not a crime. It's just a way that one can choose to run a presidency, however bad and destructive it may be.

In writing Article II, Section Four, George Mason had favored impeachment for "maladministration" (incompetence), but James Madison, who favored impeachment only for criminal behavior, carried the issue. [1] Hence, cases of impeachment may be undertaken only for "treason, bribery and other high crimes and misdemeanors."

Update: OK, maybe lying to Congress would be a crime in this instance. But relying on cooked intelligence from an office that was specially set up to cook intelligence is different from lying about intelligence (that's why they created the office to cook the intelligence).

Roger Clemens' Gift to the English Language

Here is yet another example of someone using 'misremember,' apparently without irony. No one knew this word existed until Clemens (seemingly accidentally) used it in his Senate hearing in February. Hillary found it particularly useful when talking about Tuzla. Our society, which really likes to obfuscate the past, is finding 'misremember' to be very handy. Thanks Rocket.

Bridge-Building

Topping a list of things Obama dislikes:

- Mayonnaise
- Salt and vinegar potato chips

I think it speaks to his skills as a communicator that I am willing to look past this divide between us, which I think may be deeper than any racial or ideological divide could be.

On to the General!

The Democratic Primary will end on June 4 or later in the day on June 4.

Thank God. It'll be nice to mostly just have this kind of ineffectual floundering to deal with.

David Lynch

This is great. (It was linked by JJ.) I used to live above a one-armed man named David Lynch in Massachusetts. When the IFC Center offered a deal giving anyone who had seen Inland Empire nine times a free tenth showing, a friend and I joked that anyone trying to take them up on the offer was probably arrested and possibly rendered to an Algerian dungeon. (But judging by this video Lynch fans may be the sort of people who enjoy a little bit of torture . . . but not a lot of it.)

In the Year Two Thousand . . . and Eight

Let's take a step back from Hillary's ridiculous reference to 1968 and Olbermann's angry response, and take ourselves back to a different time, not one of assassination and turmoil but a time when things seemed somewhat more promising, all the way back to . . . 1994.

Newt was leading his revolution against Clinton, whose wife, Hillary, was mired in a mess of a health care plan and a swath of controversies and investigations.

And across the dial, the baseball season was cut short by a strike, leaving the Montreal Expos with the best record, and sportscaster Keith Olbermann took it upon himself to make fun of de facto commissioner Bud Selig and players' union representative Donald Fehr in his trademark not-so-serious-but-still-a-little-serious deadpan fashion as an anchor on Sportscenter (which was still watchable).

Now look where we are. Isn't our reality today just a malaria fever dream of the average guy from 1994?

Allow Me to Brag About My Stats

My line yesterday, pitching against local Williamsburg high schoolers who had never seen a curveball and were not wearing helmets, and spending $18.50.

2 IP, 0R, 3H, 0BB, 5K, 1 egg sandwich, paperback copies of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gravity’s Rainbow, The Floating Opera, and The Tenants, 1 mango, 2 neckties.

Kroger Wins AG, I Wax Legal Theory

So, The Kroge is going to be Oregon's AG. You can probably expect overzealous prosecutions of drug offenders, erosion of the presumption of innocence by giving crime victims control of trials, and to watch a man who doesn't really understand Oregon generally flounder as he tries to apply his experience prosecuting the mafia in figuring out how to deal with thousands of meth addicts. And if Obama wins the presidency, you won't have to worry much about Oregon's DOJ cooperating with unseemly federal tactics, but if it's McCain or Clinton, then watch out.

That said, Toobin's piece in the New Yorker this week reminded me of something very basic about American government that Kroger taught me. When McCain and Scalia say, seemingly innocuously, that the protections for individuals that the Supreme Court has found in the Constitution amount to a legislative power grab, because these protections aren't really (or at all) evident when you read the Constitution, they really are presenting an alternative theory of the Court's role in America. The problem with not allowing the Court to protect individuals, and forcing people to look to Congress for help, is that Congress will usually only do what a majority of people want it to do. If you are in any sort of minority, you can then expect to be subjected to the tyranny of everyone else. The question between these two ideas is then, not about how to read the Constitution, but if the Court's role is to protect people from the majority (outlawing executions of the mentally handicapped, allowing people to have sex without getting arrested, etc.), or is it to sit back and police for legislation so bad it would have even been a violation in the 18th and 19th centuries?

I think that may have been during the same class when he asked us all to write on slips of paper if we wanted to be average, good, or great attorneys, and then told everyone who wrote "good" that they should under no circumstances go into criminal law.

McCain in HD

McCain is apparently the reason we are being forced to abandon analog television next year. This Slate article suggests that the new ubiquity of HDTV may hurt him in the election because of his liver spots, etc. It's an interesting idea, but if he competes at all seriously for the white suburban vote (I'm guessing that these are the only people likely to both own an HDTV and watch political debates), then Obama will already be in real trouble.

If You Want to be Outraged

read the column linked to here and here. It's the type of thing that you might want to keep around to read again in case you ever suffer from dangerously low blood pressure.

Chait pointed out the obvious problem with stoking racist, nativist, and xenophobic sentiments in the Jewish World Review. And of course, one suspects that Parker wouldn't make these same "full-blooded American" arguments if people were trying to get a certain Austrian a legitimate place on a Republican presidential ticket. I'd also like to point out that this basically makes a complete argument against electing any black man, because if Obama's father had been African American, rather than Kenyan, he wouldn't have a shot in hell at the presidency. But I think she should have taken her argument to its logical conclusion, and argued that Obama is also from a state, Hawaii, where no one is really a full-blooded American. Because it has only been a state for about fifty years, Hawaiians don't have much allegiance to us and can't be trusted.

A Quote

about Obama by Steve and Mike Yoshida's dad is broadcast to Britain.

My Roommate Paulie

So, I am looking for an apartment on Long Island. Even though I work on Long Island, I don’t know anyone on Long Island. For this reason, and because I have no money, I have been looking for roommates on Craigslist. Last week, I talked to this guy, Paul, who is also looking for an apartment. He does construction and he had a thick LI accent on the phone, but he sounded like an OK guy, and I was trying not to be judgmental, because effete, elitist beggars cannot be choosers. It’s not always easy to get us effete elitists to admit that we are in a begging position, but an effete elitist looking for a roommate on Long Island may be one of the most obvious, red flag beggars there is. This is because people who rent apartments on Long Island are all from Long Island, and they either do labor-intensive work or they don’t want to move to the five boroughs for exactly the opposite reasons from why everyone in the five boroughs wanted to leave wherever they were from—they are more comfortable living somewhere that is a little trashy and uncultured. But really, you don’t need to be best friends with someone to share a toilet and occasionally watch an episode of South Park together and I don't exactly sit around reading opera scores while smoking a pipe, even if I do read The New Yorker cover-to-cover every week.

So Paulie and I met for a beer yesterday to talk about some apartments that we would look at and to see if our roommate philosophies would mesh. I came from work. He came drunk. This didn’t bother me. I didn’t even notice that he was drunk until he began to ask me the same questions two and three times and repeat his mantra like a Molly Shannon character. It was a live-and-let-live philosophy involving lots of beer and hockey. The hockey didn’t bother me. I don’t know anything about hockey, but playing it seems like something that a no-nonsense, respectful guy might do (probably because I expect even the gruffest Canadians to be excessively polite). Plus, he had lived in the mountain states in his hockey days, and I counted any experience west of Pennsylvania as a plus. It also didn’t really bother me that he admitted, without being asked, to drinking five beers a day. I don’t know how many that actually means, but I have one beer on most weeknights, and I figure that the number is fairly unimportant, except to one’s own liver, so long as one is just trying to pass out in a recliner in front of the TV.

The casual racial slurs didn’t bother me too much either. I have found that those are almost de rigueur for a large percentage of white men on Long Island. (A couple of times in my life, I have found myself in this dip-shit position where I meet someone, don’t confront them about their almost immediate racism, and hate myself shortly thereafter when I have to stop talking to them for some wholly different thing that they have said or done.) It was only when he scarily yelled at the unattractive girls sitting next to us, “Did you watch the Penguins-Flyers game today?!,” yelled at the nearest one for not liking hockey, yelled that he had been a hockey player, and then proceeded to frighten them with some “spongy-area” level sexual come-ons for like fifteen minutes that I realized that I probably couldn’t live with this guy. It was such a showing for a guy meeting a prospective roommate on a Sunday evening that I wondered if he had done it on purpose, as a way of making sure that I wouldn’t want to live with him. However, when I left him a message to tell him the deal was off this morning, he sent me a text telling me not to be a pussy or I’d never make it in New York (whatever that means for a city where many of the guys who "make it" are borderline anorexic and have no problem spending two thousand dollars on a pair of used sneakers). But I think he would have said something like that whether or not he'd acted like an asshole on purpose.

So I'm thinking more seriously about getting my own place now.

Pakistan's Judges

It seems that a lot of journalists who mention Pakistan don't know what's going on there. Not that I do, but I do know this much.

The argument over reinstating the removed Supreme Court judges is not trivial. It is basically synonymous with the question of whether to get rid of Musharraf. Musharraf removed them because they ruled that his hold on power was illegal. And if reinstated, that ruling will probably stand.

Nawaz Sharif is the power player who is most vocal about reinstating them, which is why he has the support of the lawyers' movement. Not coincidentally, Sharif was also the man overthrown by Musharraf's coup in 1999. Sharif's party, the Pakistan Muslim League-N, is also the most Islamist of the three groups with power (the other two are Musharraf and the People's Party).

The more secular and democratic People's Party seems to have tried to play an impossible position in its negotiations over reinstating the judges. They are interested in having a working democracy, so they want the judges reinstated. But they have strong ties to the West and are scared of someone like Sharif trying to take power, so they don't exactly want Musharraf to be forced out. So they argued for something like reinstating the judges, but limiting their power, or also keeping Musharraf's replacement judges. But this wasn't what Sharif was looking for, so he pulled his party out of the ruling coalition.

I also think our press is too quick to be supportive of the Pakistani lawyers, and thus Sharif. They're lawyers, and thus must be pro-Western and democratic, right? Well, although their role is democratic, this might be one of those instances where a government of the people, for the people, and by the people would really want to screw the U.S. Just as there are lawyers in the U.S. with viewpoints representing the whole political spectrum, lawyers in Pakistan are the same. However, the Pakistani equivalent of supporting the right to bear arms is supporting Qaeda. The lawyers cannot be assumed to be more liberal than the rest of the country just because they are lawyers.

Needless to say, it's all just way too complicated.

"Hardworking"

was used by racist Midwestern high school students in the early 1970's to describe Archie Bunker.

It's naive to think that Hillary has not been trying to use coded language.

Obama's "American" Problem

Obama's electoral problem is not with working-class whites, it's with "Americans." Recent censuses have asked people to identify their ethnic/national origins, and 7 percent of people write in "American." These people are all concentrated in Appalachia, which is where Obama has his white people problems.

CNN May Cause Short Term Memory Loss

Last night, as the WV primary results came in, Wolf Blitzer repeatedly asked, 'Can you remember a time when a candidate was being told it's over, was being told to drop out, but still won a state decisively?' He said that he could not remember such a time.

I suppose this is because he cannot remember a couple of months ago, when Mike Huckabee crushed John McCain in Kansas, even though he was losing 680-176 and McCain had already basically been declared the Republican nominee?

Recommended Comedy

Marc Maron, Andy Kindler, and Eugene Merman

May 18
McMenamins Baghdad Theater
www.mcmenamins.com

This is Pretty Stupid

Here. It makes me feel better that most of the comments agree with me.

Think the Democratic endgame is nuts?

"Some U.S. Christians are not reconciled to McCain's candidacy but instead regard the prospective presidency of Barack Obama in the nature of a biblical plague visited upon a sinful people. These militants look at former Baptist preacher Huckabee as "God's candidate" for president in 2012."

If Obama's a plague sent to teach us sinners, that sounds a lot better than a hurricane or earthquake to me. Also, if you think Obama's a black secret Muslim crazy pastor-loving liberal abortion doctor law professor plague and that that's what America deserves, doesn't that mean that you think something like 'God damn America'?

Wherein I Defend Karl Rove

Don't look for this to happen again.

Today's Times story on the fact that Rove is now a talking head singles him and other former and current political insiders out for possibly providing skewed opinions and analysis.

But I don't think that most of them are a problem as compared to the regular bloviators. So far, I've found Rove's analysis to be pretty honest. For instance, in the same column that the article singles out, he says that Obama should "push for a bipartisan issue now before Congress." Subsequently, Barack took a strong bipartisan stance on the gas tax and it has helped him immensely. Rove enjoys sifting through numbers, he enjoys the game of politics, and he is just getting started as a commentator so he is eager to show some objectivity.

On the other hand are many of the career pundits and political has-beens who make up the rest of the punditry scene. Some of them not only very clearly lack objectivity, but they seem to give opinion and analysis not because they believe it to be true, but because they think it will aid their political ideology. Over the past couple of months, Bill Kristol has consistently run amok in the Times' own pages with Obama smears that have often included untrue statements. And a number of right wing commentators on cable seem to give analysis that comes directly from the Rush gameplan, where the objective is to extend the Democratic primary for as long as possible, rather than telling us what they really think. The career pundits and political has-beens seem more prone to this because this is the only political power they've had in the last few years. To Rove, a Newsweek column is nothing. If he wants to sway a political race, he can just make a call to Diebold or whoever.

O'Reilly Loses It

Reminds me a little of Nigel in This is Spinal Tap having a breakdown because he's given an olive that's missing a pimento. (This video contains profanity.)

Good Connections

I kind of think it should be illegal for an American PR firm to work for tyrants.

George Will Tries Humor

After Tuesday's split decisions in Indiana and North Carolina, Clinton, the Yankee Clipperette, can, and hence eventually will, creatively argue that she is really ahead of Barack Obama, or at any rate she is sort of tied, mathematically or morally or something, in popular votes, or delegates, or some combination of the two, as determined by Fermat's Last Theorem, or something, in states whose names begin with vowels, or maybe consonants, or perhaps some mixture of the two as determined by listening to a recording of the Beach Boys' "Help Me, Rhonda" played backward, or whatever other formula is most helpful to her, and counting the votes she received in Michigan, where hers was the only contending name on the ballot (her chief rivals, quaintly obeying their party's rules, boycotted the state, which had violated the party's rules for scheduling primaries), and counting the votes she received in Florida, which, like Michigan, was a scofflaw and where no one campaigned, and dividing Obama's delegate advantage in caucus states by pi multiplied by the square root of Yankee Stadium's Zip code.

Or perhaps she wins if Obama's popular vote total is, well, adjusted by counting each African American vote as only three-fifths of a vote. There is precedent, of sorts, for that arithmetic (see the Constitution, Article I, Section 2, before the 14th Amendment).

I can't say I agree that she that she's going to carry things that far, or with most of the rest of the article. But those are a couple of decent paragraphs.

The Real Culprit?

"The Kingwood teenager's story of decapitating a corpse and using the head to smoke marijuana was so outlandish that at first Houston Police Department senior police officer Jim Adkins did not believe it.
. . .
The three boys, all home-schooled . . ."

Stacking the FEC

So an FEC commissioner was taken out to avoid penalizing McCain for securing a loan to his campaign for the primary with public funds (I think that's what happened?)? Is that really what's going on? And what would the effect be? A report of the nominations, here, utterly confused me.

President Bush May 6 announced his intention to nominate three new members for the Federal Election Commission, a move Republicans said reflects a compromise over the composition of the panel.
Bush said he will nominate Democrat Cynthia Bauerly and Republicans Donald McGahn and Caroline Hunter to serve as commissioners on the FEC, where vacancies and controversies are said to be threatening the panel's ability to enforce election laws this year.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said the announcement reflects an attempt to break a Senate confirmation deadlock. Bush is nominating two new Republicans and one new Democrat to serve on the panel.

The president is resisting calls by Democrats to withdraw the nomination of Hans von Spakovsky, a former Justice Department official who was nominated last year but who had not been able to win votes in the Senate to get confirmed. But Senate aides said the compromise will allow a separate vote on von Spakovsky's nomination, which McConnell has consistently refused to consider previously.

McConnell's office said Bauerly is being nominated for the seat currently held by Robert D. Lenhard, whose nomination is being withdrawn. Meanwhile, McGahn is being nominated for the seat that David Mason has been nominated to hold. Mason's nomination also is being withdrawn.

Hunter is being nominated for the seat that was held by Democrat Michael Toner, McConnell's office said.

The Popular Vote

"A fairer calculation would eliminate the ballots cast in those two states, as well as the votes from caucuses where no statewide tally of the actual vote was compiled."

If this is the closest we can come to a "fair" count of the popular vote, the media should be rejecting a popular vote count as meaning anything, instead of reporting it as being meaningful simply because it is a number that Clinton will use if it helps her.

Note to Self

If you are reading suggestions that McCain should select a 36 year-old Indian-American as his running mate and find that you are taking them seriously, it's time to stop reading stuff like that. Thousands of pages and blogs to fill + nothing real to say = people writing about Jindal running for VP as though it's a possibility.

Another Reason

the terrorists and the rest of America hate us

Kroger

Why hadn't anyone told me about this?

I mean, what the fuck?

I'm going to add a diatribe about this to this post or another post later, but basically, Oregonians, the May 20 primary actually takes place every day between now and May 20, and it's not just a presidential primary. Who you vote for in the other elections often matters too. If you do not vote for Greg Macpherson for Attorney General in this primary, I will never stop yelling at you.

Tom

has started a blog because it's one of the most extreme forms of procrastination. I'm all for his decision to write about whatever the hell he wants.

Constitutional Masturbation

This is basically crazy. A child of two American citizens is a citizen by birth, not by paperwork, and therefore a "natural born citizen," right? Anyone who even bothers to argue about this either has a political interest in it and no sense of humor (Olsen) or is the type of scholar who loves a really detailed dream he once had about troops being forced into private homes by the weather in Alaska, and the resulting 3rd Amendment challenges (Tribe).

I will note, though, that anyone who thinks that Obama gets some sort of special treatment because no one can use his middle name should consider John Sidney McCain, III, a name which is really almost as politically toxic as Hussein.

I'll Admit it, All Librarians are Insane

This is from the resume of a guy who is going to chair a professional group I belong to