No, No, No-No

When I first heard about this Weaver no-hitter that turned into a 1-0 loss, I just assumed that it had been a travesty. But Weaver made the error that allowed that runner to reach base! He deserved that run--it was practically earned. (The error that allowed the runner to get to third was the catcher throwing it into center field on a stealing attempt, which is barely a real error.)

Ill-Informed or Just Kinda Ignorant?

There seems to be a current vogue for giving long-winded scientific and sociological explanations for why voters are so ill-informed, using the particular example of the number of Americans who think that Obama is a Muslim.

Certainly there are a number of people who believe this because of information illiteracy, which is a very real problem for our democracy. But many of the people who believe that Obama is a Muslim may think that because of a more general ignorance about the freedom of religion that may be impossible to overcome.

Typically, the people who believe the Muslim thing have no college experience. This could be related as much to the fact that college is the time when most people become fully aware that they are free to choose beliefs other than those of their parents as it is to education itself. (This worldview without a full awareness of religious freedom may be particularly strong among Catholics and other denominations where religious identity can be related more to family background than it is to the actual practice of religion, because they would impute this family-religion connection to others for whom religion is a matter of personal belief, rather than heritage.) And many people across all education levels are familiar with the fact that Muhammad Ali, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, etc. changed their names when they converted to Islam. A snippet of knowledge like this could cause confusion, especially among the uneducated, about the relationship that names have to Islam.

So, for many people, Obama may be Muslim simply because of his name and his father's background, regardless of where he goes to church, and without a huge amount of misinformation.

But Do They Sell Tickets?

Iran seizes more illicit opiates than any other country, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime said, and it burns tons of confiscated drugs in a ceremony every year.

Punies

The Supreme Court hates punitive damages because of their "unpredictability" for corporate wrongdoers, so it is becoming extremely activist in its attempts to regulate them. But punitive damages are supposed to punish reckless, malicious, and extremely destructive conduct. So the only predictable amount of punitive damages should be zero--an amount that is awarded when you don't recklessly kill people and wildlife by the thousands.

And after all, any of this regulation of damages by judges really violates the 7th Amendment right to a jury trial.

"The seventh amendment must be given a meaning consonant with the political morality that spurred its enactment. The amendment carves out a domain of power for ordinary people, and frustrates efforts by elites to achieve politically cheap changes in the law through the medium of judicial discretion rather than that of explicit statutory or judicial lawmaking. Efforts to transfer discretionary power over punitive damages offend both of these purposes of the seventh amendment." Alan Howard Scheiner, Columbia Law Review, Vol. 91, No. 1 (Jan., 1991), pp. 142-226.

Could Any Bush Scandal Surprise You Now?

I know I wasn't really surprised at the revelation that they tried to ruin the DOJ by giving jobs to barely literate people who received law degrees that came with anti-abortion bubble gum over dedicated Harvard grads.

As so often with the Bush Administration, its leaders pushed too hard, too quickly, and too clumsily to have their way, and they ended up breaking the law in the process. As before, the Administration might have been far more successful in entrenching its values and vision in the federal bureaucracy had it acted within the boundaries of the law.
. . .
No matter who wins the election, there will probably be a strong push in the next Administration to return hiring in the Justice Department (and the civil service generally) to strongly non-partisan merit based policies. And if Obama wins, we may also see a mass exodus of movement conservatives from the Justice Department and other civil service positions when many of them discover that they will not be able to shape law in the way they want. As a result, the Bush Administration's efforts at partisan entrenchment in the Justice Department may not succeed. Moreover, by overplaying its hand, the Bush Administration has sensitized Congress and the public to the issue. People will be watching if the next administration tries something similar.

Fast Food that Haunts Your Dreams

Now that I am once again a car driver, I will now go weeks--rather than years--between visits to fast food restaurants. Hopefully I will make more fast food discoveries like the one below.

I have spoken before about how much I love the Sausage Egg & Cheese McGriddles sandwich. Although I've only had like three of these in my life, it is basically the only thing that can resuscitate my soul when I have a hangover so bad that I want to die.



I had a similar experience with chili cheese fries from Checkers on Sunday evening after getting a flat tire. Like the syrup in the McGriddles, the prescience of Checkers' chili cheese fries is that the fries are seasoned, giving them much more flavor than just cheese and chili. These fries made the feelings about getting a blow out on a car I'd owned a week and having to figure out how to make an incomplete jack work in the dark all go away.

Also, I would like suggestions. What should I try?

Mets Fans Love This Guy

As someone who lives in New York and refuses to root for the Yankees (I respect their players and dislike their fans--sort of like foreigners who hate Bush but like Americans, except the opposite of that), I'm learning to like the Mets. But what is with the Bobby V. fascination? This is about the fifth time I've heard someone suggest that they hire him back in the past day. To me, this would be like if your basketball team's fans really wanted P.J. Carlesimo back. The guy is weird. He has obvious psychological problems. In Japan, he can explain this away as American eccentricity, but here, the players know, and I can't imagine them putting up with it for very long.

Kozinski is that guy

On Thursday, I said that the porn Kozinski is in trouble for is like the stuff in those inappropriate emails you get from one of your friends. Well, it turns out that for some people, the Chief Judge of the 9th Circuit is that friend.

Alex Kozinski, Fighting the Good Fight

"Blawgs" are all over the LA Times story that Judge Kozinski had a private porn site that was actually a public porn site. Well, not porn porn, but more like the pictures in the inappropriate emails that one friend of yours sends to you. A picture of a man fellating himself, naked women painted like cows, and visible hairy vaginas next to a sign saying "Bush for President" ("That is a funny joke," Kozinski still contends.)

This doesn't surprise me a whole lot. Kozinski doesn't seem to care a whole lot for propriety. After all, he's the only federal judge I know of who has used his office to get his video game reviews published. And after he addressed a class I was taking a few years ago, our professor kind of apologized for his verbosity and lack of self-awareness by explaining that he had had a lifetime appointment to the 9th Circuit for twenty years, and he had started it at the age of 35.

What's buried under the porn is the news that he had some mp3's on the site as well. Kozinski hasn't always been a friend to copyrightholders and is sensitive to fair use concerns, so some wonder if the RIAA will try to take him down. Think you've lost faith in government now? Just wait until we have impeachment proceedings against a federal judge for a file sharing conviction.

p.s. This site has the pictures that were on Kozinski's site.

Conservatives Are Not Conservative?

The Corner hems and haws over David Brooks' great* article about our national debt culture. This is probably because, as this blog points out, the debt culture has largely been a product of Republican freemarket deregulation.

So Republicans are in the position of wanting no government involvement in finance, a situation which allows predation, usury, and the creation of dangerously inventive debt products, and thus outrightly undermines conservative financial values as they relate to individuals.

When we talk about financial regulation, I think it's always important to remember that the deregulators predicted doom when the SEC was created.

*Like Yglesias, I think a national sales tax is bullshit.

Name Brand Politics

I love this story about Frank and Fran Powers. Although the "kid" (47) says he's a committed Libertarian, I think he knows that he's simply in a unique position to deliver this seat to the Democrats by creating ballot confusion. He runs an indie rock label, for chrissakes.

This is similar to the reason why Mark Warner has nothing to worry about in his Senate election. He's running for the seat held by John Warner, who is a completely different guy, from the other party, and likeable too. Pollsters have even confused them.

As I've said before, I have a little firsthand experience with this, and it is part of the reason why we have George W. Bush. Part of Bush's original appeal as a Republican nominee in 2000 was that he polled well with women. Well, I was one of the people conducting a poll that asked Republican women about potential nominees and I can assure you that many of those who answered the survey were elderly and thought that they were talking about his father.

If the Democrats really want to get into Rove-style tricks, they should try to get various McCains nominated by the Green, Pacific, Reform, Libertarian, Natural Law, Lyndon LaRouche, Anarchist, and Fascist parties. Not that the Dems can actually support that, but for any McCains out there, this is your chance.

Iraqi Soccer

Does anyone remember this? In 2004 the Iraqi Soccer team finished 4th in the Olympics and Bush used them in his campaign ads.

Although that performance still seems a little, um, unnatural to me, people are talking about the team again and saying that maybe they are actually good. (They apparently won the 2007 Asian Cup.) Too bad they're about 20 years away from having a home game. And they didn't qualify for Beijing, so McCain's folks can't run ads about that.

KSM: Make Me Look Like This

He really likes this picture.

Heart Surgery

These guys get into the question of whether Cheney and Bill Clinton were both turned into crazy old men by heart surgery, which is apparently a legit medical explanation. It sounds good, but it also sounds like a perfect, sympathetic excuse for craziness.

So Freaking Elitist

Interesting stats on electorate educational breakdown--Obama and McCain are roughly even in every category except those with postgrad degrees. But the commenter who points out that, nowadays, this is basically anyone who makes it to middle management has a good point.

The Cheney Method

OK, it's not exactly what Cheney did--after being asked to find a VP, picking himself--but tonight Hillary Clinton made it sound like she might be poised to pick herself for that same job, by threatening to withhold support from Obama and possibly even make a Credentials Committee challenge if she doesn't get it.

If that actually turns out to be true, then I agree with this statement by Chait, which sounds a little silly at first.

"I'd say that anybody on her staff who cares about their party has a moral obligation to publicly quit and endorse Obama."

Hopefully she just decides to do the right thing in a day or two, and tonight's speech won't matter because only people like me watched it.

Everyone Else's Pastime is Watching You Squirm

One of her clients recently confessed that his net worth had decreased to $8 million from more than $20 million, and he thinks that his wife will leave him. He has hidden their fall in fortune by taking on debt to pay for her extravagant clothes and vacations.

“I literally had to sit there and tell him that he had to tell his wife that she had to stop spending,” she said. “He was actually scared she would leave him because their financial situation changed so drastically.”

Can I just point out that these are the same people who claimed moral outrage at Spitzer for visiting a prostitute?

Bill on Bill Action

It's hard to know what to think when something you thought might have been a respectable source of commentary requests opinions from a guy you've known for almost twenty years who used to routinely almost get expelled from school because of his extremely "robust" commitment to free speech. But in his bloggingheads debut, Beutler does much better than most of the conservatives they have on. However, while he exhibits more knowledge of Iran than 99% of conservatives in government, he still can't help but say one or two outlandish things, such as that the press hasn't been in love with McCain since 2000 (do I really need to dig up footage of Wolf Blitzer wiping McCain's homemade bbq sauce out of his beard with a moist toilette, or of the Chris Matthews/Tim Russert/Brian Williams McCain-is-the-reincarnation-of-Winston-Churchill circle jerk?). All in all good though, if you like things as geeky as bloggingheads.

Hail to the Gay Crack-Smoking Muslim Elitist Murderer

I was going to write something even longer than this about Larry Sinclair, who I just became aware of yesterday when he was mentioned here, but this rightwing blog already has a pretty good summary of the incredibility of this nutball who claims to have smoked crack with and given a BJ to Obama in 1999 and also to have special knowledge regarding a man who he says was murdered for similar Obama gay crack sex reasons and who reminds one a little of Jake Byrd from the Jimmy Kimmel show. (A picture of Sinclair can be seen here.)

What's really disturbing here is that some die-hard Clinton supporters' appear to like this guy. (And my guess is that Lanny Davis knew who he was talking to and allowing to snap this photo.) Sinclair certainly offers the sort of perfect storm scandal that Hillary has been waiting around for, but with nowhere near enough credibility to launch it into the mainstream media. Appearing to have no other plays left, some in her campaign may be hoping that Sinclair's allegations catch on nonetheless. But despite the techniques they've been using, one would expect the Clintons to be a little wiser about sex and murder allegations, given their own histories.

Some interesting things I found out about Sinclair, and can't help but share are:

- According to his address in court filings he lives in this assisted living facility. If that's really his home, it's unclear what malady placed him there.

- His attorney, Montgomery Blair Sibley, who represented and was fired by the DC Madam, has been suspended and seems to only be able to continue with Sinclair's seemingly frivolous defamation lawsuit against "TubeSockTedD" and others who posted internet comments critical of Sinclair because he has not yet exhausted his appeals of the suspension.

- If you're trying to retain credibility, why the bake sale?

- Some of Sinclair's attacks against Obama may soon be co-opted by small pro-Obama groups, such as the Brokeback Obama poster on his MySpace page and this video of Obama trying to hide an erection from reporters.





p.s. I refer anyone who now has a question in his or her mind about whether Obama smoked crack and had gay sex (on the DL) to this story, about how he graciously exited his brother-in-law's bachelor party ten years ago because he was uncomfortable seeing a stripper there. This is a guy who knows what he's doing and has known for awhile that someday people might try to throw all sorts of allegations at him.

Update:
This Larry Sinclair parody is kinda funny: